• • Kardashians to take Miami ... slums 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  | Not that the left-leaning lame-stream media would ever report such a thing, but Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged Part II” came out Friday. You might remember the first film, which was released last year and was roundly lambasted as a low-budget, “comically tasteless” piece of crap by that freedom-hating cabal known as professional movie reviewers. This time, the folks behind “Shrugged II” aren’t going to let the critics tinkle in their popcorn.  

• • Esben and the Witch’s Rachel Davies is one witchy woman 
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The Fountainhead  | Davies started out as a dedicated teenage diarist, filling her journals with thoughts, then poetry and eventually lyrics as she learned guitar. At the same time, she devoured literary classics like Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” J.G. Ballard’s “High Rise,” and Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead.” “Rand’s whole idea of pure artistic integrity was very influential for me,” she says. “As was Ballard’s concept of how social conditions, architecture and arnarchy meet.”  

• • AIG chief invokes Ayn Rand while defending his bailout 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Robert Benmosche, chief executive of American International Group (AIG), feels so vindicated by his company's turnaround from bailout-recipient to a company with actual value that he told the Wall Street Journal he was wondering whether he was going to get phone calls saying he was right: [....] "But as I learned in [Ayn Rand's book] 'Atlas Shrugged,' find your Thank Yous from within.” When did Benmosche read “Atlas Shrugged”? After his company received a $182.3 billion bailout from taxpayers, where Uncle Sam became chief shareholder, owning 92 percent of his company?  

• • Rand Paul victory in Kentucky could be best outcome for GOP 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  |Rand Paul  | Tea party activists who back the younger Paul often carry signs like “Ayn Rand Was Right.” Given father Ron’s libertarian convictions, people often assume that Rand Paul is named after the self-styled “radical for capitalism” who wrote “Atlas Shrugged.” Actually, “Rand” is short for “Randall.”  

• • Meg & Dia are smart singing sisters 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  | “I don’t enjoy reading modern books at all,” [Meg Frampton] says. “For education, I’ve relied on classics by Fitzgerald, Salinger, because I’m really interested in the way they saw things.” That’s how the exotic Korean-American beauty [...] stumbled across her most crucial text: Ayn Rand’s 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” which details Objectivism, the author’s controversial philosophy of pursuing one’s own self-interest. “That’s the book that really got me going,” she says. “When I read it, it was the absolute truth, and that was how I was going to live my life. There’s a bad connotation to the word ‘selfish,’ but there shouldn’t be — it means that you look out for yourself, not walk all over people to get what you want. And if you’re doing it the way Rand says, you actually help others along the way.”  

•Bookish girl in ‘A Fine Frenzy’ 
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Profile of Alison Sudol of the band A Fine Frenzy.
[Sudol] dove into her grade school’s creative writing program, and had moved on to George Orwell and Ayn Rand by the time she graduated her gifted-students high school, at 16.  

• •Striving for individualism 
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Facing New York has had plenty of opportunities to make more money. While music-industry people have offered lucrative deals in exchange for control over their work, the band members passed, wanting to remain true to themselves. Howard Roark, a character in Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead” (an inspiration for the group’s name) dealt with a similar struggle. Members of the group shared and admired Roark’s control of creative decisions even at the expense of money, says guitarist, keyboardist and lead singer Eric Frederic. “It’s a powerful thing we wanted to go with,” he says “We have a declaration to be the best live band in America.”