• • • Books reflect today’s reality 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |Capitalism  | If you haven’t read the 1957 classic “Atlas Shrugged,” or seen the movie, now is the time. The brilliant author, Ayn Rand, emigrated from Russia in 1926 at the age of 21. In this novel, she explores a dysfunctional United States where society’s productive citizens are suffering from crushing government regulations and increasing taxation. She describes a world in which a bloated government asserts more and more control over individuals and industry, leading to the collapse of society.  

• Education is a right, not a privilege 
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Rather than quote Ayn Rand, a fiction writer, I prefer to quote JFK who in 1961 stated, “If a free society cannot help the many who are poor in it, it cannot save the few who are rich.”  

• • A hand-up can be inspiring 
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Ayn Rand Institute  |Inaccurate  | Ayn Rand’s Objectivist philosophy, which rejects the concept of our brother’s keeper and states that the weaker of us do not deserve love, influences a certain element of the Republi-can Party and, according to the Ayn Rand Institute’s website, is having a growing impact on American culture. More than any phenomena that has occurred in American ethos, this one troubles me the most.  

• • • ‘Atlas’ film version hardly worth the wait 
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Atlas Shrugged movie  |Atlas Shrugged  |The Fountainhead  |Capitalism  |Egoism  |Individualism  | Unfortunately, the film version of “Atlas Shrugged” is flawed. The main characters labor under the weight, as Atlas did carrying the world on his back, in representing Rand’s philosophy. The first half of the film focuses on character development to build audience interest and empathy. But only succeeds in creating unsympathetic, one-dimensional characters with all of the substance of an episode of “Dynasty.”  

• De facto death panels already in place 
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Columnist Cal Thomas believes Sarah Palin deserves an apology for declaring that our revised health-care system will lead to “death panels,” which Thomas describes as “bureaucrats deciding who is ‘fit’ to live and who is not.” Apart from possibly violating the copyright of one or more Ayn Rand novels, Thomas both ignores the fact that offering consumers choice in America is one of the current capitalist excuses for most every excess, he also ignores the fact that not ensuring every American has health insurance has created de facto death panels; the rich and the lucky receive preventative care, the poor and misfortunate do not; the rich and the lucky receive life-saving treatment, the poor and misfortunate die.  

• Charming pit bull mix makes life fun 
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The Fountainhead  | Almost a month ago, my husband, Adam, and I adopted a small, 7-month-old pit bull mix from the Larimer Humane Society. We changed his name to Roark (after Howard Roark in the novel "The Fountainhead," our favorite book).