• • Lululemon's Recall Of See-Through Pants Could Be A Big Sales Opportunity 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Lululemon] certainly have experience digging out from what some saw as a “toxic” mix of ideology and commerce when then CEO Chip Wilson began to push totebags with a phrase associated with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.  

• • Women Don’t Like Libertarianism Because They Don’t Like Libertarianism 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | There’s some truth the idea that a reason women shy away from libertarianism is because they don’t feel welcomed into it. You don’t have to look far to find the mansplainers in the bunch. But women’s hesitance to join the Atlas Shrugged reading club likely goes much deeper than that. [....] Libertarianism has a hard time reconciling most of women’s lived experiences with its core tenets.  

• • Is Capitalism Dying? 
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Capitalism  | If you believe capitalism is the system elaborated in the collective workings of Ayn Rand or equate Europe with socialism in the manner of a recent presidential candidate, then of course your capitalism isn’t dying because it’s never existed except as fiction or faith. Sorry for wasting your time. The rest of us can, I hope, agree that modern capitalism is a more complicated beast requiring some degree of regulation and calibration to people’s non-financial preferences (clean air and such.)  

• • The Battle Of The Narrative: How Ordinary Americans Can Fight ObamaCare 
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Objectivist author  | The writer Ayn Rand once said, “You can never tell when your words will reach the right mind at the right time. You will see no immediate results — but it is of such activities that public opinion is made.” The electoral battle of 2012 is over, but the battle of the narrative is just beginning. Whichever side wins that battle will determine the future of American health care.  

• Tesla And SpaceX Founder Musk Buys $17 Million Bel Air Mansion 
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Notable among the effects [at Elon Musk’s Bel Air mansion] are a deep, dark wine cellar, a two-story stark white library complete with rolling ladder (books by Ayn Rand and Norman Mailer) and – the spot where he spends the most time – a home theater set up with a massive screen ideal for playing apocalyptic video games.  

• • In Their Own Words: Leadership Lessons From Lay, Kozlowski, Ebbers 
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Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Individualism  | [Lessons From The Top is] a reminder that often, the most visionary, and hyped, leaders turn out to be completely filled with crap. There’s [Dennis Kozlowski] Kozlowski, who became the poster boy for 90s-era greed and excess. Convicted in 2005 for swiping millions from Tyco International and was sentenced to 8 to 25 years in state prison. Here he’s talking up Ayn Rand as the basis for his success. [....] “In college, I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and then I read them again in my late twenties. Those books had an influence on me. They really focus on the contribution that the individual can make. Individuals do make a difference.”  

• Inside The Koch Empire: How The Brothers Plan To Reshape America 
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Capitalism  |Paul Ryan  | It’s a measure of [Charles] Koch’s success that 40 years after Richard Nixon was stumping for national health insurance, Paul Ryan’s Ayn Rand-tinged economics are just a little right of center.  

• • 'BioShock Infinite' Preview: Devil In The Flying City 
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Atheism  |BioShock  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | Both Andrew Ryan, the Ayn Rand-inspired objectivist villain from the first BioShock, and Zachary Comstock share one thing in common: an obsession with power. While Ryan was an atheist and a strident capitalist in the vein of John Galt, Comstock is a religious figure and an ultra-nationalist.  

• • A Tax Both Ayn Rand And Ralph Nader Could Love 
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Individualism  |Image  | Here is a puzzler worth pondering as Congress scrambles to find enough tax revenue to feed its insatiable appetite for spending. Can you come up with a tax that both uber-communitarian Ralph Nader and uber-individualist Ayn Rand could support – a tax both progressives and libertarians could get behind? In order to meet Rand’s criteria for justice, a tax must be voluntary, that is, collected without coercion. In order to meet Nader’s criteria for “fairness” it must be progressive, that is, the rich must pay the most while the poor pay little or nothing.  

• • • Book Review: Ayn Rand’s “Free Market Revolution” by Yaron Brook and Don Watkins 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Don Watkins  |Egoism  |Yaron Brook  |Image  | Beginning in 2007, the sales of a novel more than 50 years old, Atlas Shrugged, began to soar. To those lucky enough to have read it, the reasons were plainly obvious. Ayn Rand predicted the modern United States. [....] Fast forward to the present, and readers can now access a companion book to Rand’s essential novel. Yaron Brook is the president of the Ayn Rand Institute where co-author Don Watkins is a fellow, and they’ve recently published Free Market Revolution: How Ayn Rand’s Ideas Can End Big Government. Their very good and very informative book offers a way out from our government-inflicted economic crack-up; their solutions crafted through the eyes of their philosophical guiding light in Rand.  

• • • President Obama Duels With Ayn Rand Over What Makes America Great 
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Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  |Objectivist author  | What is Barack Obama’s vision for America? Here’s one telling clue. In a new interview with Rolling Stone, the president declares that the individualist credo of novelist-philosopher Ayn Rand misses “what’s best in America.” Really?  

• • • Movie Review: Why Atlas Shrugged, Part II Is a Must See Film 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Image  | For those lucky enough to have read Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, they know well that it has a timeless quality to it. Most readers feel, and with good reason, that a book from the 1950s was actually written at the time and place in which they’re reading it. A college friend from Semester at Sea sent me his worn copy in 1994, and very quickly I felt Rand was writing about what I was witnessing.  

• Promoting Libertarianism, John Ramsey Plays The Long Game 
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Meeting John at the Back Bay train station I was pleasantly surprised by the firm handshake of a soft-spoken, lanky, Southern gentleman – mature beyond his years with a sparkle of intelligence and a voracious appetite for self-education. This is not your father’s George Bush! Rand, Hayek, Bastiat, Friedman, Rothbard – John had studied his corpus.  

• • • Atlas Shrugged Part II: Ideas That Tower Above Any Movie 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Individualism  | This movie, released a mere three weeks before the election, deserves your support. Vote for it with your movie dollars, if nothing else but to protest the statist madness engulfing us. Perhaps it will force some rational dialogue. Rest assured, the movie will be savaged by the leftist press, mocked by the cultural intelligentsia, and derided by the political operatives and crony capitalists that Ayn Rand so well portrayed in the characters of Wesley Mouch, Bertram Scudder, Kip Chalmers, Owen Boyle, Floyd Ferris, and many others.  

• • • Best-Selling Novels The Critics Hated 

Atlas Shrugged  |Paul Ryan  |Image  | Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand. Published: 1957. Critical Reception: Like much of Rand’s writing, Atlas Shrugged was underappreciated upon publishing and was generally disliked. In the National Review, Whittaker Chambers called Atlas Shrugged “sophomoric” and “remarkably silly”, and said it “can be called a novel only by devaluing the term.” [....] Commercial Success: Debuted on The New York Times Bestseller List at #13 three days after its publication and was on the list for 22 consecutive weeks.  

• • • Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan And Ayn Rand: Now That’s the Ticket 
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Altruism  |Atheism  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  |Image  |Objectivist author  | Last March a group called Catholics United questioned “why Ryan, as a self-professed Catholic, would put the teachings of ultra-capitalist Ayn Rand, of whom he has spoken glowingly, before the teachings of Jesus and the Church.” Well, might the reason be that those teachings are so anti-capitalist, or for the same reason millions of “cafeteria Catholics,” in order to live and enjoy rational lives, must pick and choose from those teachings, making sure to jettison the (mostly) inane ones? No, says this group: the problem is that Rand rejects “self-sacrifice” (she does), a “core tenet of Christianity” (it is), and believes self-interest “should take the place of a higher power” (yes, it should). Last week, after Romney’s pick, the group issued a press release declaring that “Paul Ryan’s Priorities Reflect Teachings of Ayn Rand, Not Jesus Christ.” Well, they don’t, really, not perfectly (unfortunately), but the fact that this group is so bothered by Ryan speaks well of him.  

• Active Conversation 

Matt Herper’s profile of computing entrepreneur Neal ­Patterson, who became a billionaire thanks to the government’s backing of health information technology and stands to ­become even richer thanks to changes wrought by ObamaCare, sparked off a passionate discussion over the role of computers in medicine and whether Cerner and rival Epic, run by Judy Faulkner, another billionaire, were really delivering on their promises. “Wonderfully informative,” wrote serranoslim. “Fascinating that an Ayn Rand-style Republican gets the possibilities that health care reform, a.k.a. ObamaCare, can bring. Exactly the kinds of different perspectives that combine throughout the IT industry to open doors to innovation.”  

• Could Computers Replace Health Insurers? 
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Neal Patterson, the chief executive of health care IT firm Cerner, [....] is a Republican, and a believer in the philosophies of Ayn Rand who says both political parties “frustrate” him on health care policy. He says that he believes a pure single payer health care system would make America’s innovation engine go stagnant.  

• High School Sports: Settling Class Warfare by Adding More Classes 
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In a time when merely proposing that maybe the rich should give a little can get you branded a socialist, high school associations by that measure are flaming pinko commies as they try to make competition more even. And the Ohio State High School Athletic Association is so Communistic, it makes Leon Trotsky look like Ayn Rand.  

• • Are Apps The Future of Book Publishing? 
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Atlas Shrugged  | One of the things about the e-book market right now is that there are a variety of experiences. Perhaps the type of e-book app that will seem most familiar to people would be something along the lines of Penguin’s Amplified Edition of Ayn Rand’s novel Atlas Shrugged. This edition, which is purchased as an iPad app, features things like actual manuscript pages, the ability to share quotes on social media, and audio clips of Ayn Rand on various topics.