• • The New Republican Vine Ad Attacking Colbert Busch Is Very 'Blade Runner' 
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The GOP wanted to embrace the future. Success. It's just too bad it was a future in which America has slipped into an anarchic, every-man-for-himself battle against robots. Very Ayn Rand.  

• • People Are Still Watching 'The Voice' 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | Oh brother. We're getting a third Atlas Shrugged movie. Are we sure about this? I guess the first two were just so good that a third should have felt inevitable. This final part of the trilogy concerns, "a dystopian U.S. where government regulation and high taxes have stifled the economy." Rich people are being blamed for society's problems, so they go on strike. Yay. They deserve it. Can't wait to see this one! [The Hollywood Reporter]  

• • David Brooks Loves to Capitalize Nouns 
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Here's a year in David Brooks's Arbitrarily Capitalized Nouns. [....] Ayn Randian Superman. August 3, 2012. "In your 20s, for example, you should regard yourself as an Ayn Randian Superman who is the architect of the wonder that is you."  

• • Michael Bloomberg Is Coming for Your Coffee Cup 
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Before you go slipping into Randian rhetoric about overzealous government, know that the ban makes great sense. Aside from the money it will save from keeping this crap out of our landfills — Grynbaum says the ban will save millions — getting rid of foam plastic will do all kinds of good for the environment. While plastic foam does not necessarily mean Styrofoam, the trademarked material made by 3M, it does tend to include lots of very bad things. The toxic chemicals in polystyrene, one of the building blocks for this type of material, is known to cause a number of health problems for the people who handle it. Some types of plastic foam also produce  HFCs, or hydrofluorocarbons which is known to deplete the ozone layer. Plastic foam also a petroleum product which is never a good sign. It is, however, cheap which is part of the reason why it's stuck around so long.  

• Jon Stewart’s Not Ready to Move to Glenn Beck’s Imaginary Freedom City 
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Atlas Shrugged  | A few weeks ago, the television personality Glenn Beck revealed a master plan for a "city-theme park hybrid" known as Independence, USA. Inspired in equal portions by Walt Disney World and the community known as Galt's Gulch in the novel Atlas Shrugged, Independence (according to Beck's vision) would provide entertainment, housing, and neighborly friendliness to Americans enthralled by Beck's doomsday depictions of America.  

• Jon Stewart Unravels Paul Ryan's 'Makers vs. Takers' Theory 
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Paul Ryan  | Congressman Paul Ryan, the failed vice-presidential candidate and known Ayn Rand admirer, did not appreciate President Obama's inaugural speech. He told radio host Laura Ingraham that the President willfully misrepresented his long-held belief that American society is increasingly fractured between those who work hard and contribute to society and those who, via safety-net programs, leech off the toil of others. "No one is suggesting that what we call our earned entitlements — entitlements you pay for, you know, like payroll taxes for Medicare and Social Security — are ... putting you in a 'taker' category," he said on Ingraham's show yesterday.  

• Dating Lessons from the New York Post 
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What if the New York Post is semi-secretly presenting us with a map of the kind of date — or even boyfriend — that very paper might itself be? Let's say he's a he, just because, you know, "Romeos" and "Rupert Murdoch." Here are a few nuggets of information about him gleaned from recent stories: [....] He wouldn't dare proclaim himself a fan of Ayn Rand.  

• • 'Girls' Season Two: Different But the Same 
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The Fountainhead  | Marnie shows up at Charlie's house, asking if she can sleep next to him, promising not to mess stuff up with his girlfriend, and he says yes. Hannah shows up at Sandy's house, asks if she can borrow The Fountainhead, takes off her dress, and gets in his bed. Relationships. They are consistently messy.  

• Pride and Prejudice and Pundits: Was Jane Austen Conservative? 
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Should Jane Austen join Ayn Rand among conservatives' favorite writers? A National Review Online article has opened up a debate that touches the literary and political worlds, making us wonder: Can anyone really claim Austen as an ideological heroine?   

• • • Audio Surfaces of Paul Ryan’s Effusive Love of Ayn Rand 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Why do lefties keep accusing Rep. Paul Ryan of making Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged required reading for his staff? Maybe because he said, “It’s inspired me so much that it’s required reading in my office for all my interns and my staff,” and now we can hear him say it. Last week, when Ryan called it an “urban legend” that he was a Ayn Rand devotee -- “I reject her philosophy,” he told the National Review -- it seemed like part of an effort to take Ryan more mainstream, now that he’s a potential running mate for Mitt Romney. [....] But The Atlas Society, the group devoted to Rand that hosted Paul’s talk, is making the mainstreaming more difficult by posting the audio of his address.  

• • • How to Tell Paul Ryan Wants to Be Veep: He’s Rejected His Former Idol Ayn Rand 
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Alan Greenspan  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Rep. Paul Ryan, looking to undercut his image as a hard-hearted Objectivist, has told the National Review of one of his favorite authors, Ayn Rand, “I reject her philosophy... It’s an atheist philosophy. It reduces human interactions down to mere contracts and it is antithetical to my worldview.” It’s a surprising statement, given that Ryan said nearly the complete opposite in 2005: “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.” And she didn’t drive him into politics because he couldn’t stand her philosophy, either. Ryan made those comments at a dinner in Washington, D.C. honoring Ayn Rand’s birthday -- hosted by The Atlas Society, a group that takes its name from Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged and is dedicated to promoting her ideas.  

• • Ayn Rand Was Meaner Than You Think 
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Image  | Nearly 50 years ago, a sixteen-year-old high school student named Bruce McAllister sent out a thoughtful questionnaire about symbolism to 150 famous authors, and the replies he received offer a handy way to compare the writers’ personalities. [....] Ayn Rand makes herself and her attitude about this silly questionnaire very clear in her reply: [This is not a “definition,” it is not true—and, therefore, your questions do not make sense.]  

• • Christiane Amanpour: What I Read 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Christiane Amanpour:] [There was] a great NPR report on Ayn Rand the other day. She’s the author of Atlas Shrugged and the current spiritual adviser of many conservatives about the role or lack of role of government. It was fascinating, absolutely fascinating to hear her background to hear her biography and to listen to her interview with Mike Wallace from back in the 1950s.  

• Peter Thiel Stutters, Wants to Live Forever 
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Thiel [...] invested in the development of anarchic off-shore colonies — “sea-steading” — through a nonprofit slash Randian fantasy founded by Milton Friedman’s grandson.  

• Who Is Meryl Streep’s Margaret Thatcher For, Exactly? 
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For those obsessed with the Oscar race, like Academy members, the politics of the film don’t really matter all that much. Sure liberal politics don’t hurt -- look at all the nominations that Brokeback Mountain got (if you can call a movie that depicts a deep, tragic love with dignity “liberal,” which you depressingly can these days) -- but really, in this movie’s case especially, if there’s a powerhouse like Meryl Streep involved and there are British accents and big speeches and all that, whether or not Margaret Thatcher was some kind of Ayn Randian bootstrapper doesn’t really matter.  

• • The Makers of the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ DVD Should Probably Reread the Book 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Image  | Atlas Productions LLC is recalling over 100,000 covers for its DVD version of ‘Atlas Shrugged’ because it mistakenly describes the work, saying “AYN RAND’s timeless novel of courage and self-sacrifice comes to life...” As anyone who has read the book can tell you, Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is not about self-sacrifice so much as it’s a defense of self-interest. In fact, the novel is penned by a woman who once wrote, “The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing.”  

• Clint Eastwood Doesn’t Care About Your Politics 
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The Fountainhead  | New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael was the first to insist on politicizing Eastwood when she called Dirty Harry a “hardhat The Fountainhead” and warned readers the character was full of “fascist medievalism” because Harry killed a hippie and ripped off his peace chain.  

• Dartmouth Student and Bridgewater Clash on Recruiting 
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[Andrew] Lohse’s allusions to Bridgewater’s conformity and manufactured ideals echo the sentiments from a New York profile on the hedge fund and its founder Ray Dalio written in April. The article described the excerpts in Principles, the corporate manual or “gospel” for Bridgewater, as “written in a digressive, self-serious style that reads as if Ayn Rand and Deepak Chopra had collaborated on a line of fortune cookies,” and likened Dalio to a cult leader.  

• • Ron Paul’s First TV Ad is a Movie Trailer 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Video  | Unfortunately, the campaign picked the same generic, “urgent” background music featured in every low-budget action film trailer--including theAtlas Shrugged adaptation that no one watched earlier this spring.  

• What Facebook Can Learn from Microsoft Circa 1998 
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All this talk about innovation and principles reminds me of another grueling Senate grilling of a tech company. In 1998, Bill Gates sat sweating in the hearing room lights for the first time to answer questions from the Senate Judiciary Committee about whether or not Microsoft wanted to monopolize the computer industry. [....] The chairman of Microsoft competitor, Sun Microsystems, sounded like it came out of an Ayn Rand novel: “We think, left unchecked, Microsoft has a monopoly position that they could use to leverage their way into banking, newspapers, cable, and broadcasting, Internet service providers, applications, data bases browsers. You name it.”