O-Land News Junkie

As many of you are aware, I’ve served for the past three years as editor-in-chief of The New Individualist (TNI), a monthly magazine published by The Atlas Society (TAS). However, as all of us know, circumstances change constantly...Source: http://Bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=795

From a new article in the business section of the LA Times about a school that “now ranks among the finest in Central America”: Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University. For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court. Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations. “The poor are not poor just because others are rich,” said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a feisty octogenarian businessman, staunch anti-communist and founder of the school. “It’s not a zero-sum game.” Welcome to Guatemala’s Libertarian U. Ayau opened the college in 1972, fed up with what he viewed as the “socialist” instruction being imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation’s largest institution of higher learning. He named the new school for a colonial-era priest who worked to liberate native Guatemalans from exploitation by Spanish overlords. From later in the article: Born into a middle-class family in Guatemala, [school founder] Ayau spent much of his youth in the United States, where his mother moved for a time after his father’s death. He attended Catholic high school in Belmont, Calif., then headed to the University of Toronto, where he studied chemical engineering. He dropped out after reading Rand’s “Fountainhead.” The novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, is expelled from architecture school after refusing to conform to its tired standards. “I realized when I read Rand ... that I was starting out my life all wrong,” Ayau said. He said he concluded that “I have to study something that I like, otherwise I’ll never be any good.” See the full article for much more about this school and its fascinating founder. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/765.php

A story in the style section of today’s New York Times begins: STEPHANIE BETIT first read “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead” and Ayn Rand’s essay collection “The Virtue of Selfishness” in 2004. The books changed her life, she said, turning her from a devout Christian into an atheist and a follower of objectivism, Rand’s philosophy of independence and rational self-interest. “From then on, I was looking for a partner who shared my outlook on life,” said Ms. Betit, a 28-year-old teacher working with autistic children in Walpole, N.H. Finding him proved a challenge. Last fall, she met someone while volunteering for the Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul, but the affair was as ill-fated as the campaign itself. By winter she had all but given up on love. Then a friend told her about TheAtlasSphere.com, an online dating site for Rand fans. Ms. Betit posted a profile, which caught the attention of James Hancock, 30, the chief executive of a business software company in Orillia, Ontario. He sent her an e-mail message, and within a few days they graduated to talking on the phone. Three months later, they were engaged. Mr. Hancock had tried mainstream dating sites in the past, but “no one even marginally piqued my interest,” he said. “Women who don’t know or follow Rand tend to just accept what they’ve been told. I can’t be with someone like that in the long-term.” See the full story for more, including a photo of Stephanie and James. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/753.php

Many Objectivists and free market advocates have mixed feelings about patent law and how it is used. If you’re one of them, don’t miss this letter to the lawyers representing Monster Cable. It is hilarious. (Hat tip Instapundit) Here’s one interesting excerpt, just to save you a click: I have seen Monster Cable take untenable IP positions in various different scenarios in the past, and am generally familiar with what seems to be Monster Cable’s modus operandi in these matters. I therefore think that it is important that, before closing, I make you aware of a few points. After graduating from the University of Pennsylvania Law School in 1985, I spent nineteen years in litigation practice, with a focus upon federal litigation involving large damages and complex issues. My first seven years were spent primarily on the defense side, where I developed an intense frustration with insurance carriers who would settle meritless claims for nuisance value when the better long-term view would have been to fight against vexatious litigation as a matter of principle. In plaintiffs’ practice, likewise, I was always a strong advocate of standing upon principle and taking cases all the way to judgment, even when substantial offers of settlement were on the table. I am “uncompromising” in the most literal sense of the word. If Monster Cable proceeds with litigation against me I will pursue the same merits-driven approach; I do not compromise with bullies and I would rather spend fifty thousand dollars on defense than give you a dollar of unmerited settlement funds. As for signing a licensing agreement for intellectual property which I have not infringed: that will not happen, under any circumstances, whether it makes economic sense or not. But read the whole thing. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/750.php

see the link for details.Source: http://Bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=697

In an interview with ReelzChannel, Vadim Perelman says of his Atlas Shrugged script: “I was really true to the book and they said that I solved it, finally. Not my words. I didn’t feel I did, but they really liked it a lot.” Perelman doesn’t say who “they” are, but one would assume (and hope) that at least one of the “they” is David Kelley, founder and senior fellow of The Atlas Society, who has been working with Perelman, The Baldwin Entertainment Group, and Lionsgate to insure philosophical fidelity to the novel. There isn’t a whole lot more in the interview, but the rest of it is here. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/746.php

Could Hammie be an Ayn Rand fan? http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/744.php

New York Times writer Rachel Donadio explores the “It’s not you, it’s yours books” problem in romantic love — a problem very familiar to many admirers of Ayn Rand’s novels. From her perspective, though, it’s the like (rather than dislike) for Rand’s novels that indicates middlebrow tastes: Pity the would-be Romeo who earnestly confesses middlebrow tastes: sometimes, it’s the Howard Roark problem as much as the Pushkin one. “I did have to break up with one guy because he was very keen on Ayn Rand,” said Laura Miller, a book critic for Salon. “He was sweet and incredibly decent despite all the grandiosely heartless ‘philosophy’ he espoused, but it wasn’t even the ideology that did it. I just thought Rand was a hilariously bad writer, and past a certain point I couldn’t hide my amusement.” (Members of theatlasphere.com, a dating and fan site for devotees of “Atlas Shrugged” and “The Fountainhead,” might disagree.) Indeed. Sounds like they both dodged a bullet. Two cheers for being unable to hide your own literary tastes! And I’ll second Donadio’s suggestion to fall in love with someone who shares your taste in art. It makes a lot of other things go more smoothly. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/742.php

Q: What do the web sites for (a) The Atlasphere, (B) Ayn Rand protégé and novelist Erika Holzer, © the American adaptation of the Italian We the Living movie, (d) Ayn Rand biographer Barbara Branden, and (e) Objectivist philosopher Stephen Hicks’s Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship all have in common? A: They were all created by Zoom Strategies. I’m one of the founders of Zoom. We just launched our new web site with our updated portfolio and testimonials from many of our happy clients. Please check it out if you or someone you know might be in the market for a top-notch web site! http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/738.php

I haven't been here much lately because I've been on an editing and writing tear with the April and May issues of The New Individualist. The May copy is due tomorrow a.m., after which I will unwind and catch up on some things I've wanted to...Source: http://Bidinotto.journalspace.com/?entryid=679

This announcement from The Atlas Society: On Tuesday, March 18, Atlas Society founder and senior fellow David Kelley will debate Mustafa Akyol, editor of Turkish Daily News, on the question “Is Islam compatible with capitalism?” The event will be hosted by The Donald and Paula Smith Family Foundation, one of a series it has sponsored since 2001. The debate will be at 6:30 p.m., at the Donnell Public Library, 20 West 53rd St., in New York City. Attendance is free. For more information and to register, go to http://w ww.thesmithfamilyfoundation.org/. For Kelley’s related articles and lectures, hyperlinked below, see: The Assault on Civilization The War against Modernity The Ideas That Promote Terrorism Islamic Philosophy: The Good, the Bad, and the Dangerous, on MP3. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/734.php

From Atlasphere member Stuart Hayashi: Lately the famous humorous magician Penn Jillette, from “Penn & Teller,” has been lauding Ayn Rand quite a bit. He positively alluded to Atlas Shrugged on his Showtime series Bullshit!, for instance. The allusion was humorous, but still sounded sincere. But most impressive, he says at the end of his interview with Glenn Beck that he thinks he believes in Objectivism. His remarks begin at the 01:28 mark. He says, “You can go into that Ayn Rand stuff, that Objectivist stuff, and believe in it completely, and I think I do...” Thanks for the heads-up! http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/731.php

For the latest scoop on the Atlas Shrugged movie, see Susan Paris’s interview with Aglialoro in our new column “John Aglialoro on the Atlas Shrugged Movie.” Tasty excerpt: SP: When will filming begin? Aglialoro: Fourth quarter of 2008 or 1st quarter of 2009. SP: When would it open in theaters? Aglialoro: You got to figure an editing process of at least six months. Probably you’re talking about the Fall of 2009. SP: Do you think the final script will adequately convey the message of Rand’s book? Aglialoro: The essence of the message will be there. We can’t include every detail from the book. We want people to be driven to the book by the movie. In fact, when we do the DVD we want to include something on the disc to promote the book. I expect to include a feature on the making of the movie. See the full article for more. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/727.php

Fans of Joss Whedon’s excellent but short-lived TV series Firefly can now enjoy a novel with the same characters. Per Dave Itzkoff: ...the world of Joss Whedon’s space opera “Firefly,” which lasted just 14 episodes in the 2002-3 television season (and spawned the 2005 feature film “Serenity”), lives again in Steven Brust’s novel “My Own Kind of Freedom.” According to the fan Web site Whedonesque.com, Brust, the Nebula-award nominated novelist and short-story author, originally wrote “Freedom” on spec in 2005 for a proposed line of “Firefly”/“Serenity” tie-in books; various economic realities prevented that from happening at the time. But now, Brust has made the novel available for free at his home page, The Dream Café. And if you’ve not yet seen Firefly, you’re missing out big time. For an introduction, check out Monica White’s review at the Atlasphere. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/725.php

Kotaku Managing Editor Brian Crecente has written a lengthy and interesting article — “No Gods or Kings: Objectivism in BioShock” — on the intersections between the new BioShock game and its Ayn Rand-inspired themes. Ayn Rand Institute President Yaron Brook is quoted several times in the article. The article begins: The sunken city of Rapture, a world of art deco aesthetics, neon sales pitches and looming architecture, is home to more than just murderous splicers and lumbering Big Daddys, it’s also a surprising breeding ground for introspection. BioShock may have been conceived as a study in nuance, a place for gamers to discover and explore at their own pace, but its dip into the ethical morass of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophies has brought her beliefs back into the mainstream spotlight and even piqued the interest of the Ayn Rand Institute’s president, Yaron Brook. Brook, a former member of the Israeli Army military intelligence and award-winning finance professor at Santa Clara University, first took notice of the game when he discovered his 18-year-old son playing it. It’s a fact that didn’t bother Brook despite his son’s objectivist beliefs and the game’s not so positive take on the philosophy. “My son has to find his own way in life,” he said. “There are certain games I wouldn’t want him to play, like Grand Theft Auto, games that celebrate criminality. But a game that might lead him to think and have him challenge his ideas, I’m fine with. “Luckily for me he doesn’t agree with the game, he still seems to believe in objectivism” Objectivism as a central theme in BioShock was actually the result of a confluence of ideas and happenstance. The heart of the game started, as do most of Ken Levine’s games, as the answer to a problem. “How do we make an environment that feels really complete?” Levine said. “That’s where we came up with a space ship for System Shock. In BioShock we said what can we do similarly and simulate fully as we could a space ship.” The answer was an underwater city, but that simply formed the game’s outline, the walls that kept a player from remembering they were in a confined space. Levine wondered what sorts of people might live in an underwater city, what would drive someone from the rest of the world. “I started thinking about utopian civilizations,” he said. “You have these traditional utopian notions. I’ve always been a fan of utopian and dystopian literature. “The more I started thinking about making a compelling place and compelling villain, someone who had a real concrete set of beliefs made sense.” Enter Objectivism. Levine said he had been reading Ayn Rand’s books over the past few years and was fascinated with her “intensity and purity of belief.” “The surety she has in her beliefs was fascinating,” he said. “She almost spoke like a super villain, like Dr Doom.” And her characters, Levine believed, projected that same intensity. “I started to wonder, what happens when you stop questioning yourself? It becomes a set of accepted truths, instead of something you’re constantly using in the lab of reality.” Keep reading for much more, including Yaron Brook’s explanation of why the game’s characters are unnecessarily flawed. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/723.php

In an incisive column at TownHall.com, George Will points out that the alliance between religious conservatives and economic conservatives seems ready to crumble. Like Job after losing his camels and acquiring boils, the conservative movement is in distress. Mike Huckabee shreds the compact that has held the movement's two tendencies in sometimes uneasy equipoise. Social conservatives, many of whom share Huckabee's desire to "take back this nation for Christ," have collaborated with limited-government, market-oriented, capitalism-defending conservatives who want to take back the nation for James Madison. Under the doctrine that conservatives call "fusion," each faction has respected the other's agenda. Huckabee aggressively repudiates the Madisonians. He and John Edwards, flaunting their histrionic humility in order to promote their curdled populism, hawked strikingly similar messages in Iowa, encouraging self-pity and economic hypochondria. Edwards and Huckabee lament a shrinking middle class. Well. Economist Stephen Rose, defining the middle class as households with annual incomes between $30,000 and $100,000, says a smaller percentage of Americans are in that category than in 1979 — because the percentage of Americans earning more than $100,000 has doubled from 12 to 24, while the percentage earning less than $30,000 is unchanged. "So," Rose says, "the entire 'decline' of the middle class came from people moving up the income ladder." Even as housing values declined in 2007, the net worth of households increased. Read the whole article. Provides further evidence for Ayn Rand's claim that altruism provides a lousy philosophical basis for capitalism. Thanks to novelist (and Rand protege) Erika Holzer for the tip. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/716.php

The 2008 elections are coming into full swing, and prominent Objectivists are beginning to weigh in with their perspectives. The Intellectual Activist Editor Robert Tracinski has formally endorsed Rudy Giuliani. I could not find the text of this endorsement on his web site to link to, so I’m pasting below the message I was forwarded. TIA Daily — January 3, 2008 Vote for Rudy Support the Defense of Freedom over Religious Politics by Robert Tracinski With the opening of the primary season — tonight’s Iowa caucus isn’t a real primary, but it is the first test of candidates’ support among grass-roots activists, and thus it will have an impact on the primaries to come — now is the time to give TIA’s official endorsement for the Republican primary. I say that this is my official endorsement, because it has been clear where I’ve been leaning, unofficially, for most of the past year: I support Rudy Giuliani as by far the best candidate for the Republican nomination. He is the only candidate who will promote the influence of what I call the “secular right”: support for free markets, a strong national defense, and strict separation of church and state. Giuliani is famous for his stand on the War on Terrorism and for his firm and dignified performance as mayor of New York City following the September 11 attacks. But perhaps the best example of his virtues on this issue is more recent: his response to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. While Mike Huckabee embarrassed himself by offering empty pabulum about appreciating the peaceful transition of power in America — indicating that Huckaabee was unprepared to say anything important about what is going on in the rest of the world — Giuliani replied: “Her death is a reminder that terrorism anywhere — whether in New York, London, Tel-Aviv, or Rawalpiindi — is an enemy of freedom. We must redouble our efforts to win the Terrorists’ War on Us.” Last August, I wrote an extensive analysis (which I have just put up on our website) of Giuliani’s foreign policy, and it is not as assertive as we might hope. But we can still count on Giuliani to keep his eye on the threat of radical Islam and to regard it as his top priority as president. Giuliani does not have an established record as a staunch pro-free-marketer. In fact, he first made a national name for himself as a US attorney prosecuting mobsters — and prosecuting Wall Street financiers as if they were mobsters. (I mean this literally: Giuliani pioneered the use of vague laws against “racketeering,” originally designed to fight organized crime, as a tool for persecuting businessmen.) And yet Giuliani has campaigned as a free-marketer, not only in vague rhetoric but in some intellectual depth. A few months ago, the Washington Post carried an important article about a series of seminars organized for the candidate by Giuliani’s long-time friend and advisor Bill Simon. Dubbed “Simon University” by Rudy’s campaign staff, they amount to a course in the principles of free-market economics. Most crucially, Giuliani has been excellent on a topic that is likely to be central to the 2008 campaign: socialized medicine. All of the Democratic candidates are proposing, and will campaign on, some form of nationalized health care — while Giuliani has come out in favor of a free-market >proposal based on tax credits that will make it easier for individuals to purchase private health insurance. At the same time, Giuliani offers a break from the intrusion of religion into politics. It is not merely that Giuliani supports a woman’s right to an abortion, and that he has refused to alter his convictions on this issue to fit the needs of his campaign. More broadly, Guiliani has asserted that his religious views are private and a matter to be left between him and the priests. In short, if you support a secular-right outlook, then Giuliani is clearly the top candidate. But supporting Giuliani has become far more urgent in the past few months. Searching for an alternative to Giuliani, many on the religious right have settled on Mike Huckabee, who is Giuliani’s exact antipode. Huckabee has succeeded partly because he has a winning personality: down-to-earth and genuine, with a quick and easy sense of humor. But in terms of ideological substance, his only appeal is as a Baptist minister and “Christian Leader,” as he has touted himself in his ads. On economics, he is a soft welfare-state “compassionate conservative,” and on foreign policy he has nothing to offer. Thus, sensing that Huckabee isn’t the right choice, Republicans have begun searching around for other options. The result is that the national polls results have flattened out, transforming the primary into a wide open race, with roughly equal support for four or five candidates: Rudy Giuliani, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Fred Thompson. (See the latest poll averages at RealClearPolitics.) Why has the Republican primary become a five-man race? Because a two-man race would force the right to make a stark decision on the role of religion in the party — and many Republicans want to avoid such a decision. The Reepublican Party has been famously sustained by an ideological coalition of free-marketers, national-defense “hawks,” and the religious right. A Giuliani-Huckabee contest would force Republicans to make a clear choice about the importance of the religious wing of that coalition. If the religious wing is supreme — if Republican voters’ top priority is a candidate’s religious belief and loyalty to a religious agenda, while the war and economic freedom are dispensable issues — then Huckabee is the clear first choice. If fighting terrorism and defending the free market are the top issues, while religious fervor is dispensable — then Giuliiani is the clear first choice. But the potential of downgrading the role of religion in the conservative coalition is terrifying to many conservatives — National Review Online ddevotes two pieces to analyzing what is, for the publication that championed ideological “fusionism,” a nightmare scenario. Thus, many on the right have tried to avoid such a decision by backing one of the other three candidates. It is a futile attempt. Mitt Romney’s candidacy is an attempt to solve the basic fissures within the conservative coalition by hiding them. It requires believing that a candidate who pushed a government-controlled health-care scheme in Massachusetts will fight for small government, and that a candidate who has already twice altered his views on abortion can be regarded as sincere on any issue. It requires that one forget about the ideas and policies at stake and focus only on the candidate’s glossy charisma. Fred Thompson’s campaign is an attempt to avoid the big issues by focusing on the candidate’s rough-hewn charisma — a charisma that turns out to bbe so low-key, low-energy, and surprisingly un-telegenic (given Thompson’s career as an actor) that it has failed to mobilize voters and left Thompson well behind the other major candidates. John McCain’s candidacy is an attempt to avoid the big issues by focusing, not on the candidate’s charisma, but on his character, as reflected in his record of stoic endurance as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam. Yet this also requires that Republican voters forget a great deal, including his attempts to control political speech under the guise of “campaign finance reform” and his active promotion of the global warming hysteria. For many Republican voters, McCain’s war record alone is enough — and that’s the poinnt: they are putting his biography above the actual policies for which he stands. But it is impossible to avoid the big issue of this primary, because the role of the religious right in the Republican coalition creates a contradiction that the right is going to have to face sooner or later. The other aspects of the conservative coalition can be integrated under a single over-arching principle: freedom. Free markets protect our economic liberty at home, while a strong national defense protects our liberty from foreign threats. But the religious right then requires Republicans to say, in effect: we’re in favor of liberty in the world and in economic affairs — but not in your peersonal life, where we will empower the government to enforce God’s will. If you think I’m exaggerating, consider Huckabee’s statement on abortion in the first Republican debate. Responding to Giuliani’s explanation that he thought abortion was morally wrong, but that the government couldn’t outlaw it because “we want to keep government out of people’s personal lives,” Huckabee replied: “if something is morally wrong, let’s oppose it.” As I remarked at the time, “Does this mean that government should outlaw everything that these moralists find to be reprehensible? And where are the limits of this moral police work?” Most important, what if the demands of coerced religious morality extend beyond sex and “family values” — and into economics and foreign policy? It is the religious wing of the conservative coalition that is driving the coalition apart, because the "compassionate" religionists are beginning to turn against the free market and the war -- a trend driven by their commiitment to a religious creed of altruistic self-abnegation and cheek-turning. Voting for Rudy will help check this trend. A victory for Giuliani in the primaries won't make the religious right disappear. Immediate electoral politics are too concrete for that; voters vote for candidates, not for abstractions. But the selection of Rudy Giuliani as the Republican candidate for president will help straighten out Republican priorities, sending the message that the enforcement of religious morality is not the party's top priority -- while a commitment to freedom is. For anyone who agrees with this goal, it is now imperative to vote for Rudy and to fight for his candidacy in the Republican primaries. <script type="text/javascript"> addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlasphere.com%2Fmetablog%2F715.php'; addthis_title = 'TIA+Editor+Robert+Tracinski+Endorses+Rudy+Giuliani'; addthis_pub = ''; <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" > http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/715.php

Toddler fools the art world into buying his tomato ketchup paintings. <script type="text/javascript"> addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fwww.theatlasphere.com%2Fmetablog%2F707.php'; addthis_title = 'And+Postmodern+Art+Takes+It+in+the+Nose'; addthis_pub = ''; <script type="text/javascript" src="http://s7.addthis.com/js/addthis_widget.php?v=12" > http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/707.php

New Individualist editor Robert Bidinotto has written a lengthy and trenchant critique of Ron Paul’s candidacy for President. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/702.php

Soon we’ll be publishing Debi Ghate’s new tribute to the (selfish) meaning of Thanksgiving. With that in mind, a new column by David Hawpe in the Louisville Courier-Journal, titled “Atlas shrugged, but thousands of volunteers boost Every1Reads,” caught my attention. Hawpe writes partly in response to Ghate’s op-ed, which — like all of ARI’s op-eds — was distributed to media outlets throughout the country. Rand has many dissenters, and I’ve developed an interest in the way that people disagree with her. Some dismiss her outright. Some are rude. Others, though, respectfully acknowledge her position — while respectfully disagreeing. Hawpe’s column is an example of the latter, and I tip my hat to him for that. Happy Thanksgiving, everyone. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/700.php

Writing for Yahoo News, former National Review editor Maggie Gallagher has penned a rousing and insightful defense of Atlas Shrugged. She rightly chastizes Terry Teachout for his silly assertion in National Review that Rand writes a pretty good potboiler, a plot “complete with sex scenes and a shoot-’em-up finale. No wonder that it has sold like soap for half a century.” As Gallagher puts it: “Novels, even page-turning potboilers with lots of sex and gunplay, do not typically sell like soap, year-in and year-out, for half a century.” Atlas Shrugged, she points out, is currently the #1 selling book on Amazon in the category of “literature and fiction-classics.” So why, then, does the novel continue to sell so well? Gallagher presents her own theory — and it’s a good one: The key to Ayn Rand is that she pictured America largely from early films from Hollywood. As a young girl growing up in the grim world of communist Russia, she saw America as we dreamed ourselves to be, and she longed her whole life with a child’s intensity to make this vision real, to live in it. We respond to her novels because they offer us one deep strand of American self-identity — as individualists, yes, but individualists who together dream big dreams, conquer wild frontiers, invent the future, remake our very selves. She understood, the way so many pampered Hollywood artists don’t, that much of the romance of America is in business — in our dreams of making it, by making big new things, things no man has ever made before. Rand is virtually alone in seeing businessmen as fellow artists: makers, creators, inventors. In her novels, the greatness of the artist was matched by the greatness of the architect, the scientist, the entrepreneur and the railroad executive. The Homer of our era, she sang the song by which so many Americans live our lives. Well said. Read her full article for more. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/696.php

Don Hauptman points out a passage from an article in Thursday’s New York Times that sounds, well, straight out of Atlas Shrugged: In Thailand and Myanmar, the military has been deeply involved in politics in recent decades. Thailand has had more than a dozen coups since the 1930s and, after the overthrow last year of a democratically elected government, power remains in the military’s hands. The salient difference, says Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is that Thailand’s leaders have allowed businesses to thrive. During 45 years of misrule, Myanmar’s generals have almost entirely dismantled the economy, he said. There are no effective property rights, and contract enforcement is nonexistent. “If in other countries ruling regimes behave occasionally as Mafioso in skimming a cut from prosperous business, then Burma’s is more like a looter — destroying what it can neither create nor understand,” Mr. Turnell said. (Emphasis added) See the full article, “Across the River: 2 Divergent Paths in Southeast Asia,” for more background. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/695.php

Last week I watched the DVD of Atlas Shrugged movie director Vadim Perelman’s House of Sand and Fog. Since he’s going to be the proverbial “god” of the new Atlas Shrugged movie, I figured it would be worth witnessing his previous cinematic work first-hand. This is a dark movie, no question about it. I can easily imagine some Ayn Rand fans liking the movie, and others actively disliking it. The writing, acting, and directing are excellent — but it would be hard, and an act of questionable integrity, to squeeze a feel-good movie out of such a tragic novel. So instead you’re left with a gorgeously filmed and produced adaptation of a sad and disturbing story. Personally I would recommend the movie highly — but only to someone with a fair tolerance for psychologically dark films. If you do rent the DVD, I highly recommend watching it again, a second time, with the “commentary” feature turned on. I’m not normally a big fan of watching the commentary for a movie — but, in this case, it was very well done and I found my appreciation for the movie deepening even more. The commentary is by Perelman, Kingsley, and the author of the original book — who was positively beaming about Perelman’s adaptation, for whatever that’s worth. ...And it’s probably worth a lot, because it speaks to Perelman’s ability to remain true to a novelist’s vision, while still making a credible and compelling screen adaptation of his work. I hope to write a fuller review of this movie for the Atlasphere one week soon. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/688.php

Thanks to Jerry Johnson for the heads-up about this new article in Telegraph India — titled “Take a bow, Ayn” — covering the events in India that Jerry helped organize in celebration of Atlas Shrugged’s 50th Anniversary. It begins: Govind Malkani is in his nineties, with failing eyesight that cannot cope with the regular update of literature on Ayn Rand that is mailed to him in Mumbai from all over the world. He has outlived his wife Tara with whom he used to run a well-known Ayn Rand readers’ club in Mumbai in the 1970s. Jerry Johnson, 25, has never met Malkani but he knows him as a fellow traveller. “Malkani possibly owns the largest collection of Rand material in the country — books, videos, audio cassettes,” says Johnson, who has kept pace with Malkani in spreading the R-word. Both are ardent Objectivists, the strain of philosophy that the Russian émigré in America created over half a century ago. On October 12, in their own individual ways, they and other Rand fans celebrated a half-century milestone, the publishing of Atlas Shrugged, her best-selling seminal novel. See the full article for more. Jerry points out some errors in the article he’s trying to get fixed — such as prominent Indian movie star (and Rand fan) Shammi Kapoor’s statement that “money is the root of all evil.” Oops. http://www.theatlasphere.com/metablog/686.php