• • Is There Any ‘Reasoned’ Defense of the Atlas Shrugged Guy? 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | [I]t's time for a couple of "reasoned" defenses. First, someone speaking up for the Guy himself: “Your latest installment of Atlas Shrugged Guy detractors was overwhelmingly a slew of those crying hypocrisy on the part of our Randian in question. After reading through five or six of them espousing essentially the same argument - that this man is profiting from the very institution he denigrates - I thought it high time for me to finally get involved in your Atlas saga.”  

• • • Let's Get Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy 
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Altruism  |Atlas Shrugged  |We The Living  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  |Personal life  |Image  | Quasi-defense: “ [....] As someone who has collected and read most all that Ayn Rand wrote and published, and as someone who believes in her philosophy’s core principles of Realism, Rationalism, Individualism/Egoism and Capitalism, and has followed them all his life, I completely agree with the second poster and those who supported him. Call me an Ayn Rand liberal. [....]”  

• • Atlas Shrugged Watch, California Division 
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Atlas Shrugged  | Yesterday, while still in a relatively balmy part of Alaska, I posted two quasi-defenses of the original "Atlas Shrugged Guy." [....] [H]ere is a set of responses to the longer of the two Atlas quasi-defenses.  

• • Getting Back to the Atlas Shrugged Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Egoism  |Image  | 1. In today’s dispatch, I quote two sort-of-supportive comments about the Atlas Shrugged Guy, though both of these readers are criticizing-ASG-critics rather than actually supporting him. 2. As soon as I can manage, and I hope later today, I’ll give a sampling of the several thousand anti-Atlas Shrugged Guy messages that have come in.  

• • Here we go: One Last Immersion in the World of the ‘Atlas Shrugged’ Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  |Image  | The “Atlas Shrugged Guy” made his first appearance in this item. In it, I quoted two self-identified small-business owners, one a tech-world person whom I actually knew, the other someone who wrote in over the transom, on what would happen if Barack Obama were re-elected.  

• Placeholder on Atlas Shrugged Guy: Uncle! 
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Atlas Shrugged  | I have arrived in New York, during a welcoming blizzard, to find the mailbag blowing apart at the seams with responses to the Atlas Shrugged Guy.  

• • The Election-Night Thoughts of the 'Atlas Shrugged' Guy 
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Atlas Shrugged  | It’s too late at night for me to plug in the links to the preceding items about the “Atlas Shrugged Guy,” who has promised to close down his business and its $500,000 annual payroll if the election went the wrong way.  

• An NPR host’s other job: Stay-at-home dad 
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I will do everything I can in the coming days to experiment with search engine optimization by mentioning the terms vaccines, autism, Mustafa Kemal Attaturk (or, in case of alternate spellings, Ataturk), and Ayn Rand and quite possibly may post some original video of my very cute cats wrestling.  

• Bringing pilots and patients together 
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Individualism  | The cooperative genius of American society is often overlooked. In light of its frequent social eructations of hyper-individualism -- Tea Parties, Ayn Rand fêtes, and the like -- that isn’t too surprising.  

• In defense of the self-pitying wealthy poor 
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In response to this recent item, plus this and similar previous posts, two readers empathize, sort of, with the put-upon University of Chicago law professor. [....] “The skyrocketing costs of education -- and the stratification of private education, are driving upper-middle professional families broke. And type-A Ivy League types might be the worse off as a result of the expenses. Does that justify whining: no. Does it let some Randian idiot at UoC off the hook: no. But it should give everyone pause that this depression is driving some very successful people into the hole.”  

• Sad news from Shanghai: Gary Heyne 
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Atlas Shrugged  | [Gary] was sure he had a “book in him,” and was in a nonstop effort to enlist someone as co-author of his Iraq memoir, which as he imagined it would have the combined virtues of Catch-22, War and Peace, The Best and the Brightest, Atlas Shrugged, etc.