• • • Is that you, John Galt? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Video  | Rick Cureton, president of the Whitesell Construction Co. in Delran, picked me up at the Florence River Line Station on Wednesday and gave me a tour of the Haines Industrial Center. [....] “Now, over here is HD Supply,” Cureton said. “It’s a spinoff of Home Depot, but they supply to contractors. We’re looking at it from the backside of 1100 John Galt Way.”

John Galt Way? As in Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” John Galt? The objectivist icon for Americans who divide the country into two factions — “makers” and “takers.” That John Galt?

“The same,” Cureton said.  

• • • Jumping off the cliff better than being pushed 
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Atlas Shrugged  | My favorite book is "Atlas Shrugged." It is a novel about a dystopian future where the Mouchers and Intelligentsia have taken over. In it the Producers, those who work to make the money the Mouchers and Intelligentsia want to redistribute, quit and leave the Mouchers and Intelligentsia to their own devices.  

• The Third World right next door 
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Just in case there are any social Darwinist, survival of the fittest, Ayn Rand Republicans reading this, I want it on the record that no sense of guilt or a “bleeding heart” motivated my small act of generosity. It was anger.  

• • ‘Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2’ holds top spot 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  | The top DVD/Blu-ray Disc rental and sales offerings are: [....] 10. “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1” (PG); Grade: NP; with Taylor Schilling in a drama based on Ayn Rand’s novel about an executive trying to keep her business alive.  

• • • Betraying our collective moral character 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  | Objectivism works well if all citizens are more or less equal in intellect, health, and drive. Objectivism views altruism as a weakness, a false justification to “take” from the well-to-do and distribute it to the least fortunate. In fact “selfishness” is considered a virtue.  

• • • Jefferson’s America is gone, destroyed: How to get it back 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individual Rights  | Rand’s seminal novel is “Atlas Shrugged.” Atlas is fiction but the characters follow Rand’s real world philosophy — objectivism. The radical right hates objectivism because it locates the basis of morality in this world. Liberals hate Rand because she connects liberty with capitalism and socialism with evil. Rand’s philosophy is opposed to the philosophy of Plato. It’s based on reality and reason. Objectivism is summarized but not obviously, in “The Galt Speech” in “Atlas Shrugged.” [....] Rousseau was brilliant; Kant diabolical; Marx massively wrong. Rand corrected them and shifted Western philosophy toward Aristotle, Jefferson, liberty, individualism and America.  

• • Are we too extreme? 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  | When I was a college freshman, we carried J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye” with us at all times; but when I first started teaching at BCCC, students were carrying Ayn Rand’s books. By the time I left teaching, they carried no books — not even textbooks in their backpacks — only texting cellphones. Has our recent extreme form of capitalism, based on Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman, made us shallow and inhumane with skewed priorities?  

• Cool t-shirts for book fiends 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Out of Print Clothing has soft and comfy-looking tees that take their look from books such as "Slaughterhouse Five," "Catch 22," "Of Mice and Men," “Atlas Shrugged” and more.  

• • The corruption of the American Dream 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | Many college students were no longer carrying copies of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye or Hesse’s Steppenwolf; they had Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged in their bookbags instead. This was the era of the rise of the yuppies and the latter book with its glorification of the individual entrepreneur and justification of extreme self-interest attempted to rationalize “greed is good” and “what’s worth doing, is worth doing for money.”  

• Clinging to the Communist boogeyman and other fallacies 
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[Columnist Larry] Breeden's flirtation with obsolescence doesn't end with McCarthyism. He clings to another, even older, fallacy. He writes that he is a “free-market capitalist.” His adoption of Ayn Rand's motto, “each according to his ability” seems to imply support for the antiquated vision of laissez-faire capitalism and its attendant “every man for himself” world-view. The truth of the matter is that we are social animals, with a very real connection to generations past and future.  

•DA says man tried to steal law school test 
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[Kevin] Siangchin asked [a Law School Admissions Council] employee to contact him via e-mail. A detective, posing as the employee, contacted him and he laid out his request. Siangchin, an engineer, used the name John Galt on the e-mail. John Galt is a character in the Ayn Rand novel “Atlas Shrugged,” about an engineer who designed a revolutionary new motor powered by ambient static electricity with the potential to change the world.