Even though this “Month of Ayn Rand” I declared saw me reading a Rand speech at Yale and mentioning her frequently (though not in as much depth as I’d planned) on this blog, it’s worth mentioning again that I’m not an Objectivist. Indeed, as I noted last month, in this clip, at the four-minute mark, [...]
Today, with a Tea Party occurring at 11am in front of New York City Hall, I’m reminded that fat statist bastard Mike Huckabee said one reason he skipped the CPAC event this year is that the libertarians are taking it over, and they’re not real Republicans. He says he prefers the Tea Parties. [...]
Tomorrow, Saturday, Feb. 27 — one year after the small first New York City Tea Party protest at City Hall that led to a gigantic, underreported Tea Party protest there a month or so later (both of which I attended) — there will be an 11am Tea Party anniversary rally, once more at City Hall. [...]
It’s disappointing that a movie of Atlas Shrugged with Angelina Jolie didn’t quite happen — and that we’ll never see the ad campaign that likely would have resulted, with Jolie accompanied by the question “WHO IS JOHN GALT?” In what may be just an odd coincidence, Jolie is now being seen in ads for her [...]
Ayn Rand’s novel about a collapsing, overregulated economy, Atlas Shrugged, sold over a half-million copies in 2009 alone — and that was over twice the previous one-year record, set in 2008, according to the Ayn Rand Institute. This suggests that the narrative of our economic woes being caused by unregulated capitalist greed has not fully [...]
Our recent (Feb. 3) Debate at Lolita Bar pitted two former members of the Misfits, Bobby Steele and Michale Graves, against each other on the question “Is the Music Business Bad for Music as an Art Form?” Remember the event with us now, with photos by Monty Leman (showing, from left to right, me, Graves, [...]
I’m sure to many people it seems like too disturbing a topic to broach, but I must not be the only one over the past few days who’s been thinking, “Even if you find the assassination of a Hamas commander in Dubai troubling, isn’t it sort of nice to hear that it may have been [...]
I’m attending a fundraising event tonight (at which one of my neighbors is singing) for a group that gives gifts to kids with brain cancer, which, since I’m a compassionate guy, reminded me of two other brain-problem-related stories that struck me recently, one from the news, one from my own experience.
•First, I inadvertently found myself [...]
With my Italian libertarian economist friend, I rewatched the very libertarian Italian movie We the Living, adapted in 1942 without Rand’s authorization (but with her retroactive approval decades later) from her early novel about a young woman in Rand’s native Soviet Union dreaming of escape and torn between two lovers, one anti-communist but driven to [...]
Just one more example of rampant weasel language in the public presentation of science (to go on about it too much would be to steal material from my job): A tragedy now occurring in public health is the widespread condemnation and/or banning by all the purportedly most-responsible health authorities of “e-cigarettes,” which are (almost certainly) [...]
Having learned nothing from the deluge of negative letters they got three years ago (including one from me that got printed) — which caused Skeptical Inquirer magazine to instantly downsize the second half of their planned two-issue, alarmist global warming coverage — the magazine now (in its March/April 2010 issue) unleashes three very short, very [...]
Like some of the likely listeners at my Yale rendition of Rand’s “Faith and Force” speech tonight at Harkness Hall, Room 119 (6pm), my fellow conservative Gerard Perry does not share my complete skepticism about religion — and asks how I feel about Mother Teresa being honored with a U.S. Post Office stamp. I [...]
Here’s something with political ramifications we can discuss tonight at Manhattan Project (6:30 at Merchants NY East) or tomorrow after my Rand speech at Yale (6pm at Harkness Hall, Room 119): nerd-beloved director Kevin Smith was ousted from a Southwest Airlines flight for being too fat. A side effect of creeping health-nannyism, or exactly [...]
ToddSeavey.com Book Selection of the Month (February 2010): Philosophy: Who Needs It by Ayn Rand (featuring the 1960 speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World”)
A fine anthology of philosophical essays and fiction snippets for the newcomer to Rand’s thinking, this collection contains in particular the aptly-titled speech “Faith and Force: Destroyers of the [...]
Examining Ayn Rand’s novels with fresh eyes all these years after reading them in college, I can’t help but be struck by how pervasive and obvious the (at least superficially unlibertarian) ethos of the “bdsm community” (fans of bondage, domination, and sexual sadism and masochism) is in her work. It’s an accusation routinely leveled [...]