• • BioShock Infinite Preview: We Could Go Anywhere From Here 
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BioShock  | Comstock, Columbia's president, is the typical Randian villain - compared to Andrew Ryan's belief that man is the ultimate entity, Comstock puts his faith in Heaven, mystics and superstitions to rescue people from their own fecklessness.  

• • Five Best Christmas Games (That Don't Exist) 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Image  | Who is John Galt? Now you and the whole family can find out! Using Wonderbook’s amazing alternate reality pages, Wonderbook: Atlas Shrugged brings Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy to life like never before. Now, kids of all ages can enjoy the tenets of Selfishness, Capitalism and Industrial Utopia in dozens of fun and interactive ways. Just paint a dollar sign using the PlayStation Move controller, and Rand’s words will literally jump off the page. Featuring all 1,168 pages of the original print edition, your kids will be delighted when they see “accept the fact that achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose in life” floating right before their eyes.  

• Psst, Your Amazon Kindle Is Spying On You 
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Paul Ryan  | [I]f you regret searching for that Ayn Rand book back when people were still taking about Paul Ryan, you’re out of luck. Amazon grants you no right to access or delete search and purchase history.   

• • Starbucks, Tax Avoidance and the Eurozone’s Dirty Little Secrets 
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Now it has long been the premise of my blog, Ironies Too [...] that the aim of the EU was to first strip the UK bare of assets and revenues before then turning upon France, which country up to this point had been happily itself amongst this pack of hunters and strippers, or moochers and looters as the perceptive, Ayn Rand, would no doubt have so described them. Now it seems that such an event was indeed about to occur with the Hollande Government [...].  

• • Disruption With a Capital D 
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Forget about innovating an industry because you believe in doing something better and driving the future, these days so many founders are too in love with the cheques to realise they may have lost track. If you haven’t read Carr’s article about Uber’s CEO and the love surrounding Ayn Rand that seems to go on in Silicon Valley, I cannot recommend enough that you do.  

• • BioShock Infinite Preview: Director Ken Levine Tackles the Beast of America 
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BioShock  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  | Levine isn’t interested in taking sides. He wants to give his characters, and the philosophies he picks on a more thorough interrogation: [....] “If you go and look at Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead, Rand can populate her books with these kinds of superheroes of her ideals, who can carry out her ideals to their extremes and never stumble. They’re very convenient for her but they’re not human beings. I try to make these games a more honest look at utopian ideals, but also, they have some commentary on the weakness of games themselves, particularly the illusion of free will in games. So I try to light my house on fire a bit, too.”  

• • AIG CEO Robert Benmosche Says Gov’t Officials Should Thank Him After Bailout 
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Capitalism  | [Benmosche] admits [...] his philosophy is influenced by the libertarian, ultra-capitalist tenets of novelist Ayn Rand.  

• • Rand Paul Endlessly Harps On Disingenuous ‘You Did Build That’ Line In Ayn Randian RNC Diatribe 
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Rand Paul  | Sen. Rand Paul relentlessly pounded his disingenuous "You Did Build That" catchphrase during his Ayn Randian speech at the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla., Wednesday night.  

• • • Ayn Rand: Her Economic Views, Backed By Paul Ryan, Would Result In A US Dystopia 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individual Rights  |Paul Ryan  |Personal life  |Image  | Ayn Rand advocated perhaps the U.S.’s most extreme form of conservatism in the modern era: It’s an economic plan that’s so extreme and cruel, most Americans would be appalled by it -- it is that far from the modern/postmodern American civilization and experience, which is a mixed-capitalist system rooted in democratic values. Rand believed individuals, the private sector, and the free market should not be restrained by the state -- save for the ability of the state to protect individual rights and to enforce contracts. Rand rejected all forms of statism and public policy acts implemented to achieve the common good. She advocated unfettered capitalism to the extreme, with society’s sole guiding force being what she called the morality of rational self-interest. It’s a philosophy that argues, “I got mine, now you get yours, and I don’t have any social -- or moral or legal -- obligation to help you, or anyone else.”  

• '50 Shades Of Grey' Replaces Bible In English Hotel 
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Atlas Shrugged  | "I was thinking originally of putting in a book by Ayn Rand - 'Atlas Shrugged' was my first thought," Denby told NBC News.  

• • • Catholic Bishops Say GOP Budget 'Fails Basic Moral Test,' Points to Food Stamps, Medicaid Cu 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Paul Ryan  | Although [Paul] Ryan, while speaking at the Catholic-affiliated Georgetown University last month, insisted his plan called for a system that would create the economic growth necessary to lift people out of poverty, faculty members penned a letter to Ryan challenging his understanding of Catholic doctrine. “In short, your budget 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,” stated the letter, which was signed by almost 90 of the university’s faculty members. Rand was the creator of the philosophy known as objectivism, which advocates rational self-interest -- the pursuit of one’s individual happiness -- as the moral purpose for life and celebrates individualism over collectivism.  

• GOP Race: So Far, A Lot Of Sound And Fury Signifying Very Little 
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The Tea Party faction would view an innovative idea with liberal values that solves a problem as even worse than the problem itself -- it is that callous, reckless, and irresponsible -- which is why it hasn’t made Gingrich the 2012 nomination front-runner. The faction is scared of him: Space-age, technologically interested Newt might implement counter-coalition policies that solve problems and throw sunlight on long-discredited conservative attitudes, ideas, and beliefs -- to the consternation of the faction, and other Ayn Rand followers.  

• • Where are the Real Entrepreneurs? 
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Capitalism  | Even supporters of the market economy often think of taxes and regulations only as something that government does to business, and they miss the deeper problem of the things government does for business. The result of this sort of thinking is that people adopt the mistaken idea (propounded by writers such as Ayn Rand) that businessmen are a persecuted minority, when in fact certain groups of businessmen are the very people agitating against new entrepreneurial endeavors.  

• • lululemon Responds to reddit Racism Accusation: We Do Not Select Models Based ... 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | More recently, lululemon got customers and pedestrians scratching their heads when the retailer unveiled shopping bags bearing the message, “Who is John Galt?” John Galt is the protagonist of Ayn Rand’s objectivist novel “Atlas Shrugged,” which promoted unregulated capitalism and radically reduced government. “You might be wondering why a company that makes yoga clothing has chosen a legendary literary character’s name to adorn the side of our bags,” a lululemon employee wrote on the company blog. “lululemon’s founder, Chip Wilson, first read this book when he was eighteen years old working away from home. Only later, looking back, did he realize the impact the book’s ideology had on his quest to elevate the world from mediocrity to greatness (it is not coincidental that this is lululemon’s company vision).”  

• • Tea Party Nation Blogger: US Small Businesses Should Not Hire, In Order to ... 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Melissa Brookstone, a blogger for the Tea Party Nation, gained notoriety this week after a post titled “Call For a Strike of American Small Businesses Against The Movement For Global Socialism” went viral, earning the scorn of liberal commentators and even landing her on commentator Keith Olbermann’s “Worst Person in the World” list on his “Current TV’ show. [....] However, in an interview with the International Business Times, Brookstone emphasized that her directive was never meant to be taken as a way to improve the economy. Instead, she said it was inspired by the premise of the Ayn Rand novel “Atlas Shrugged” and its main character, John Galt’s, decision to abandon his progressive socialist society and create his own community among people who Brookstone said “still appreciated productive achievement, which the greater society no longer did.”  

• • Tea Party Group Says Small Businesses Should Stop Hiring to Hurt Obama 

In a letter titled “Call For a Strike of American Small Businesses Against The Movement For Global Socialism,” on the Tea Party Nation Web site -- one of the largest Tea Party groups in the nation -- that was subsequently e-mailed to its members, contributor Melissa Brookstone urges small businesses owners to cease hiring new employees in order to protest the “progressive socialist” policies of the Obama administration. Brookstone, who writes in a subsequent post that she is not a conservative, but Libertarian-turned-Objectivist (the philosophy touted by author/novelist Ayn Rand), claims that Obama and the Democratic Party-controlled Senate are participating in a “globalist socialist agenda of redistribution of wealth, and the waging of class warfare against our constitutional republic’s heritage of individual rights, free market capitalism, and indeed our Constitution itself, with the ultimate goal of collapsing the U.S. economy and globalizing us into socialism.”  

• • An Architect in 140 characters or less 
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The Fountainhead  | I’m an Architect, like Howard Roark from the Fountainhead, only fatter, and underemployed.  

• ‘Death of 4th Amendment’ Judge Blames GPS, Cellphones, Users 
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Atlas Shrugged  | “With so little left private,” Kozinski [says Chief Justice for the 9th Circuit US Court of Appeals Alex], “the Fourth Amendment is all but obsolete. Where police officers once needed a warrant to search your bookshelf for ‘Atlas Shrugged,’ they can now simply ask Amazon.com if you bought it.”  

• • Gabrielle Giffords shooting case: Killer Jared Lee Loughner mentally unfit to stand trial 
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Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  | [Mark] Potok says inferences can be made about [Loughner’s] intellectual leanings from his reading list that includes books that run a theme of "individual versus the totalitarian state". Some of his favorites were Ayn Rand’s 'We the Living' and 'Atlas Shrugged' and George Orwell’s '1984' and 'Animal Farm' as well as Hitler's 'Mein Kampf.'  

• • FX Trading - All together now: GLO-BAL-IS-M 
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Capitalism  |Egoism  | Rather than further complicate the responsibility of the IMF and formal interconnectedness of national economies, just do away with the whole idea. Let all economies operate with their own interests in mind. And if you think that’s a recipe for chaos, consider this from Ayn Rand: “When a man trades with others, he is counting -- explicitly or implicitly -- on their rationality, that is: on their ability to recognize the objective value of his work. (A trade based on any other premise is a con game or a fraud.) Thus, when a rational man pursues a goal in a free society, he does not place himself at the mercy of whims, the favors or the prejudices of others; he depends on nothing but his own effort: directly, by doing objectively valuable work -- indirectly, through the objective evaluation of his own work by others.” If only wishing could make it so! It seems this mindset would help to flush away the complexities - restrictions, corruption, waste, risk, etc. - of a tightly-coupled global economic system; but it won’t happen in the real world. Instead we are stuck with a whole lot of messiness of self-interests defined by those who don’t have the market’s best interests in mind.