• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged’: A strike for freedom 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  | “I won’t be a slave.” Those are the words of Dagny Taggart, the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s classic dystopian novel “Atlas Shrugged,” and now Part 2 of the serial film adaptation. The way you interpret Taggart’s words will probably determine whether you agree with the critics (who almost universally hated this movie) or with the average moviegoers who gave the film an 80 percent positive review on the Rotten Tomatoes website.  

• Angry at coal? Then turn off your lights 
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Capitalism  | The willingness of Americans to be persuaded to do things against their own interests seems to have no limits, which must give great encouragement to our enemies.The latest evidence of that came a little south of Kalispell in the People’s Republic of Missoula (hat tip to Ayn Rand) where the local Revolutionary Council; (oops, I mean City Council!) last week passed a resolution to investigate the “environmental impact” of coal trains passing through the city.  

• • Don’t just shrug away this mess 

Atlas Shrugged  | The federal government wants to make business decisions in a major industry and turn a job-creating plant into an almost certain business failure as the company loses contracts to an overseas competitor that is allowed to make business decisions based on business needs. Sound like something out of “Atlas Shrugged”? You bet it does, but unfortunately this isn’t a chapter in a novel; it’s the latest wrinkle in the increasing effort of the federal government to control every inch of our lives. Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is many things to many people, but mostly it is a warning of just how bad things can become when people allow the government to micro-manage the economy in the name of social justice.  

• • America in good hands with Mama Grizzlies 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Clearly, [Jean] Walterskirchen’s fears more than 50 years ago about where the country was headed were not unfounded. Nor would I consider the timing of Walterskirchen’s warning within one year of the 1957 publication of Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” to be entirely coincidental. Both women were tireless warriors, who like the Greek goddess Athena came equipped with not just wisdom but the torch of liberty — and their words still burn bright with the thunderbolt of truth today.  

• • • Why you should see—and then read—‘Atlas Shrugged’ 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Individualism  |Personal life  | Whatever the artistic faults of “Atlas Shrugged,” the book is eminently readable — exactly because of what it is — a book full of ideas. Ideas about right and wrong. Ideas about the individual’s responsibility to himself and about society’s repression of the individual. Indeed, like Solzhenitsyn’s “Gulag Archipelago,” it is essentially an underground roadmap to revolution — but whereas Solzenitsyn wrote of the oppression of the individual in Marxist Soviet Russia, Rand took on the much more complicated task of unveiling the oppression of the individual in the so-called free democratic capitalistic republic of the United States.  

• • Partisans? Or patriots? 
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I have taken inspiration from the symbol of Athena and have found proud women warriors for truth, justice and the American way in both some contemporary leaders such as Sarah Palin and some historical figures such as Ayn Rand. It is probably not coincidental that both women have been the subject of vicious attacks — not because they are women but because they are right, and ferociously so, unyieldingly so.  

• • • Don’t fear the women warriors! They are here to help 
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Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individual Rights  | One person who should scare anyone who is afraid of strong women is Ayn Rand. Coincidentally, the long-awaited film version of her most famous novel “Atlas Shrugged” has just hit the movie theaters. That novel too features a woman warrior — by the name of Dagny Taggart — who rebels against a United States government that has grown fat and feral — a dangerous combination that threatens to crush private entrepreneurship, individual creativity and the American dream. Taggart would make a better candidate for president than either Palin or Donald Trump, and certainly much better than the usual timid Tims and unmitigated Mitts who seek the GOP nod.  

• • Buying the lie: ‘Something for nothing’ 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Personal life  | Ayn Rand, the philosopher and author who lived under the strictures of communism in her early years, somehow managed to predict the decline of America into the thralldom of socialism even when we were at the height of our economic power as an engine of capitalism. Her descriptions of the faltering, dying gasps of American enterprise in the 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged” are so accurate that it should bring a tear to your eye. We have really made a mess of things, as we bought into the notion that work was no longer a suitable gauge of value. The words of a former worker who is now an unemployed tramp, in the latter part of “Atlas Shrugged,” sum up the horror of creeping socialism brilliantly.  

• • • ‘Atlas Shrugged’: Ayn Rand laughs; the rest of us weep 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Critics were merciless in mocking Rand's magnus opus when it appeared in 1957, but 50 years later, as her worst fears are realized, it appears to be a bet certain that Ayn Rand will get the last laugh.