• • Emery calls B.C.'s leaders 'uninspiring' 
Jon Ferry, The Province (Vancouver) Capitalism  | Emery absolutely loves libertarian U.S. Republican candidate Ron Paul, who also calls the so-called war on drugs a total failure. “What a great man! I’ve known of him since 1980 when I read about him in Reason magazine a year after I read Ayn Rand and became a convert to rational capitalism,” he noted. “But I’ve been promoting him for president since 2006.”   Published: 2012-04-29

• Alden Daybré‘s double life: HS honor student, GOP campaigner 
Krista Kano, Medfield Press (MA) Atlas Shrugged  | Invigorated by [his] experience at Boys State and further inspired by the book “Atlas Shrugged” by Ayn Rand, Daybré decided to email Medfield Republican town coordinator, James Wakely, whose email he found online.   Published: 2012-04-30

• • Ayn Rand fans not good for nation 
Reyes Ponce, Herald Courier (Bristol, VA) (Objectivist Harry Binswanger replies in the comments.)I find it odd that you would choose to quote Ayn Rand at the top of the opinion page on Saturday. A vehement anti-Christian whose “philosophy” does not stand up to even the slightest intellectual scrutiny, Rand’s destructive moral vision underlies much of what is dysfunctional in America today. That we have an increasing number of Rand devotees in the Congress does not bode well for the country.   Published: 2012-04-29

• • • AYN RAND: The question 
Gavin Aung Than, Zen Pencils Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Personal life  |Image  | Ayn Rand (1905-1982) was a Russian-American writer and philiosopher. She’s famous for her two novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, and creating a new system of philosophy called Objectivism. I didn’t know anything about her before adapting this quote but she seems to have lived a very interesting life. Rand grew up in Russia during the Russian Revolution and later moved to America where she worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood before gaining fame with her first novel, The Fountainhead. After success as a novelist she focused on philosophy and formed a new system called Objectivism, a way of thinking that places reason above everything else. Rand was a strong, out-spoken woman who definitely lived by the words in this quote.   Published: 2012-04-26

• • Ryan’s Rise From Follower to G.O.P. Trailblazer 
Jonathan Weisman, New York Times Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Paul Ryan  | [Paul] Ryan likes to dispel two “urban legends” around him. First, he said, he is not a disciple of Rand, the strident libertarian. Second, he never drove the Oscar Mayer Wienermobile. In fact, there is some truth to both. In a 2009 Facebook video, Mr. Ryan said the “kind of thinking” in the Rand epics “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” was “sorely needed right now.” As for the Wienermobile, one summer as he was pressing Oscar Mayer Lunchables and turkey bacon on meat buyers in rural Minnesota, two “very nice young ladies” who were driving the hotdog-shaped vehicle did let him “take it for a spin,” he confessed.   Published: 2012-04-30

• • Exposing the small government fallacy 
Charles D. Hayes, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman (Wasilla, AK) Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | To her credit, novelist Ayn Rand warned against government complicity with big business. Too bad she didn’t know enough about human nature to realize that her virtuous fictional character John Galt is a creature that does not exist in the real world of business. All John Galt pretenders are causalities to vice or corruption of one kind or another. That’s why we need a government that’s accountable to the people and has enough muscle to deal with giants without being intimidated or stomped into submission.   Published: 2012-04-29

• • Open letter to Anna Hazare: Pune activists have shown you the way 
R Vijayaraghavan, Moneylife I begin with two quotations. The first is from Swami Vivekananda: “Awake, arise, the Motherland is in danger”. The second is from Ayn Rand, an American novelist: “When you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods but in favours, when you see that men get rich more easily by graft rather than by work, and your laws no longer protect you against them but protect them against you, you know that your society is doomed.   Published: 2012-04-30

• The Aston Villa of Alex McLeish: Down Amongst the Dead? 
Andrew McGowan, A Football Report The Aston Villa of Alex McLeish - a man whose football is so nihilistic, his programme notes could be ghosted by Ayn Rand - were constructing their last attacks of a desperate night, an exhausted heavyweight’s sweat-blinded haymakers when he’s down on all the scorecards.   Published: 2012-04-30

• • "The Hunger Games" and freedom 
Michael Hicks, Star Press (Muncie, IN) Egoism  | Throughout [The Hunger Games] I wondered if I was reading something Ayn Rand might have written if she were a better writer. It is a scathing depiction of big government (and big Hollywood). More importantly the book offers a moral dimension about love, sacrifice and loyalty that is absent in the missives of Libertarianism. The protagonists in The Hunger Games would not recognize the unbridled caricature of self-interest that animates Rand’s philosophy. The Hunger Games celebrates humanity under the most difficult of circumstances. It is powerful stuff.   Published: 2012-04-29

• The Difference Between You and Me,’ ‘Radiant Days,’ ‘The Miseducation of Cam 
Chelsey Philpot, Boston Globe Madeleine George’s “The Difference Between You and Me” takes on a lot (homosexuality, cancer and loss, family, corporate business vs. small towns), but at its core it’s a funny and warm book about a romance between a 15-year-old who accepts who she is and her classmate who has let others’ expectations define her. [....] George sometimes defies character clichés (e.g., Wyatt, Jesse’s gay best friend, worships Ayn Rand instead of Judy Garland), but other times, embraces them: Emily is a pretty girl with problems, and her friends are mean clones.   Published: 2012-04-29

• • Why Your Doctor Secretly Hates Obamacare 
Katie Kieffer, Townhall.com Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Dagny Taggart is the heroine of Ayn Rand’s novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” At one point, Dagny asks a renowned medical doctor named Dr. Hendricks why he left the medical practice. He says: “I quit when medicine was placed under State control … Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquiring that skill [performing brain surgery]? …I would not let them [politicians] dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. … Let them discover the kind of doctors that their system will now produce. Let them discover, in their operating rooms and hospital wards, that it is not safe to place their lives in the hands of a man whose life they have throttled. It is not safe, if he is the sort of man who resents it—and still less safe, if he is the sort who doesn’t.”   Published: 2012-04-29

• • Liberating Education (Part Two): How Home-Instruction Can Elevate Income, Competence, and Social Har 
John Harris, Intellectual Conservative Capitalism  | Only a neo-pagan, crypto-Nietzschean misanthrope like Ayn Rand could believe that the common man would instantly revert to a helpless ape without an elite body of Supermen to give him employment and instruction.   Published: 2012-04-28

• • The 7 internet political principles 
Tristan Louis, Business Insider Atlas Shrugged  | [T]he more libertarian strain of internet philosophy has people looking to move more of the economy under internet sovereignty and away from traditional jurisdictions. In a sense, we may look to those individuals as trying to reject some of the ways in which developed countries operate and create their own virtual version of Galt’s Gulch, after the fictional place in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.   Published: 2012-04-28

• • Paul Ryan walks back support of Ayn Rand 
Brett Brownell, Up With Chris Hayes (MSNBC) Atheism  |Paul Ryan  |Video  | Earlier this week Republican budget author Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) walked back his support for author and atheist Ayn Rand, saying “I reject her philosophy... It’s an atheist philosophy.” For many years however, Mr. Ryan had praised her. In fact, he said “The reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.”   Published: 2012-04-28

• • Paul Ryan’s faith-based lesson 
Dana Milbank, Washington Post Egoism  |Syndicated  | Your budget,” a group of Jesuit scholars and other Georgetown University faculty members wrote to Ryan last week, “appears to reflect the values of your favorite philosopher, Ayn Rand, rather than the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Her call to selfishness and her antagonism toward religion are antithetical to the Gospel values of compassion and love.”   Published: 2012-04-28

• • • Like oil and water, Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand just don’t mix 
Robert Sobel, The Examiner Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Image  | While Rand was correct in her theory that reason was the only true way of gaining knowledge as opposed to faith and religion, Rand took her ideas into the political realm and went off track. Supporting laissez faire capitalism, Rand led the charge of an “everyone person for themselves” society. A type of society where if you can’t make it all on your own, you are destined to fail. Any Rand’s political form of natural selection goes against the morals of human nature and the greatest emotion of them all, compassion.   Published: 2012-04-28

• • Paul Ryan: “Ayn who?” 
David Gibson, Commonweal - dotCommonweal Atheism  |Paul Ryan  | [T]his whole saga gave Rep. Ryan a chance to debunk that noxious myth that he is a disciple of the goddess of all things libertarian and irreligious, Ayn Rand. As he told National Review this week, it’s an “urban legend”   Published: 2012-04-27

• 1984 comes knocking in Laguna Beach 
Jeff Bradley, Orange County Register How troubling it is to read that Laguna Beach blatantly trampled the property rights of the homeowner who went through every procedure, from purchasing the property to obtaining permits and did everything correctly until the “few” on the City Council decided to “change the rules.” [....] Yes, there are some big names behind the history of the Halliburton house: William Levy, Frank Lloyd Wright, Ayn Rand. But George Orwell and his novel “1984” come to mind with these events.   Published: 2012-04-27

• Aging stylishly, online and in the streets 
Emanuella Grinberg, CNN "I'm amazed at how in this late stage I'm getting all this attention," 92-year-old Ilona Royce-Smithkin said. Royce-Smithkin was interesting before she met [street style photographer Ari Seth] Cohen on the street two years ago. She spent most of the 20th century as an acclaimed painter with illustrious subjects such as Tennessee Williams and Ayn Rand. But it wasn't until the last five years that she truly came into her own and became comfortable with herself, she says.   Published: 2012-04-27

• The Saturday Quiz 
Simon O'Hagan, The Independent (London) King George V, Franklin Roosevelt, Ayn Rand, and Freddie Mercury (right) were all enthusiastic collectors of what?   Published: 2012-04-27