The Most Influential Woman of the Last and Next Century
From the Sydney Morning Herald. Also, her most influential book is coming to the big screen. Part one of the trilogy hits theaters April 15. See the trailer below. (Best review of the movie so far? “Both Rand lovers and haters will enjoy this.”)
Woman of real influence who wanted to be judged only on her merits
Ross Cameron
March 10, 2011
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged is the best-selling novel of the 20th century never to appear on film. That changes on April 15 with the release of the first of an Atlas Shrugged trilogy – the YouTube trailers are closing in on a million hits. This calls for an overview of the life of one of the most loved and loathed thinkers of the modern era.
If the 20th century could be reduced to a single sentence it might read: “a struggle between free markets and communism in which free markets prevailed”.
Many thinkers contributed to the final victory with economists such as Milton Friedman and F.A. Hayek arguing persuasively that capitalism is superior because it works. Ayn Rand went for the jugular, arguing that capitalism is morally good.
Rand was born into a secular Jewish family of pharmacists in St Petersburg. She was one of the first women admitted to Petrograd University as the horror of the Bolshevik Revolution was unleashed. An anti-communist student council was elected, and immediately crushed, and several of her activist colleagues disappeared.Rand procured some early Hollywood film reels and was utterly transfixed. When her mother mentioned relatives in Chicago, Rand pleaded, ”Write to them, mother. Write and tell them. I have to go to America. Ask them to help. Do it today. Do it now.” In 1926 she escaped near starvation in the USSR recalling ”tears of splendour” as her ship approached the Manhattan skyline.
She went to Hollywood as a prospective screenwriter, marching into Paramount Pictures to explain: “I want to write movies.” Quickly brushed aside she headed for the gates when Cecil B. DeMille drove by and stopped his car to ask, ”Why are you staring at me?” In her thick accent she replied, ”I’ve just arrived from Russia and I am very happy to meet you.” ”Get in,” DeMille replied, and proceeded to arrange jobs, first as an extra in King of Kings then as a script reviewer. Rand now had the modest income she needed to write.
Her tone from the outset was purist, rationalist, atheist and anti-communist. In 1944, after 12 rejections, she found a publisher for The Fountainhead. Without powerful advocates or a marketing budget, the book sold slowly but it kept selling, in a classic slow burn, by word of mouth…
Here’s the trailer.
For more about the movie and where to see it, go here.
“I’ll talk your ears deaf about how much leftists suck.”
There’s nothing I could add that could make this better.
My Only Goal Is To Make Money
Hits theaters April 15. Appropriately enough.
How Dallas Won the Cold War
Remember the prime-time soap opera from the 1980s about a wealthy Texas family in the oil business? “Dallas” has been off the air for 20 years but it’s still considered one of the most successful television shows in history. Studio 360 listener Laura Detre nominated “Dallas” on our American Icons website, and we liked her idea so much, we sent Julia Barton to Southfork Ranch (and beyond) to understand how Dallas changed the way the world sees America.
“We wanted to believe that people live in skyscrapers and have beautiful cars and everything is shiny and glamorous.” — director Jaak Kilmi, on watching “Dallas” in Soviet Estonia
But I Don’t Want to Be A Pirate ‘Patriotic’
(Headline hint: Seinfeld, puffy shirt)
It’s A Wonderful Internet: If the FCC Had Regulated from the Start
The FCC immediately determines that the lack of interoperability among the online systems harms consumers and orders that each company submit a technical framework by January 1994 under which all online companies will unify to one shared technology in the near future. The precedent for this are the technical standards that the FCC has been setting for decades for AM and FM, and for television. The online services threaten legal action again, and again Congress passes new legislation authorizing the FCC to do as it wishes. The online companies hustle to submit a technical framework. Microsoft wants in on the game, so it persuades the FCC to extend the framework deadline to July 1995. …
In late 1993, AOL and Delphi become the first online services to offer the Internet. The FCC orders both to drop the feature until the FCC’s labs approve it.
“We can’t have the online industry pushing out beta software on unsuspecting customers willy-nilly. Such software could compromise the users’ computers, interfere with other users’ computers, or crash the whole online world,” the FCC chairman says. …
In September 1996, Microsoft, whose biggest individual stockholders are Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and Steve Ballmer, who are raising millions for the Clinton-Gore re-election campaign, wins the FCC’s online design shootout.
Microsoft calls its online-unifier “Bob.”
“This award is made purely on the technical merits,” the FCC chairman remarks.
The FCC is particularly enamored of the “back door” that Microsoft has built into Bob, making it easier for police to monitor communications in real time. The commission also applauds Microsoft’s forward thinking because it has incorporated a virtual “V-chip” in Bob. The censoring software is analogous to the V-chip the FCC wants TV manufacturers to build into their sets to block violent and mature TV programming from being viewed by children.
The regulators also love Bob because it has created more “Channels” for police, fire, libraries, city councils, legislatures, courts, and public service messages than the other proposed systems. Bob testers complain that these channels leave little space for the data, information, and communications they expect to find on an online system. One compares Bob to a government designed version of the Yellow Pages, only duller. Another pines for the Wild West days of the unregulated online world when you didn’t have to pay virtual “parking” to your local municipality before you went shopping inside the online mall.
God, I love Jack Shafer.
Robin Hood: Not a Socialist, You Know
I never understood why anyone thought Robin Hood was some kind of socialist. He robbed from the tax collectors and gave the money back to the people who earned it. But Cathy Young goes even further, saying the Ridley Scott libertarian Robin Hood is the closest thing to the original legend we’ve seen.
The Ridley Scott film Robin Hood has drawn some critics’ political ire. In The Village Voice, Karina Longworth laments that “instead of robbing from the rich to give to the poor, this Robin Hood preaches about ‘liberty’ and the rights of the individual” and battles against “government greed.” New York Times critic A.O. Scott strikes a similar note, mocking the movie as a “medieval tea party” and declaring: “You may have heard that Robin Hood stole from the rich and gave to the poor, but that was just liberal media propaganda. This Robin is…a manly libertarian rebel striking out against high taxes and a big government scheme to trample the ancient liberties of property owners and provincial nobles.”
Whatever you may think of Scott’s newest incarnation of the Robin Hood legend, it is more than a little troubling to see alleged liberals speaking of liberty and individual rights in a tone of sarcastic dismissal. This is especially ironic since the Robin Hood of myth and folklore probably has much more in common with the “libertarian rebel” played by Russell Crowe than the medieval socialist of the “rob from the rich, give to the poor” cliché. At heart, the noble-outlaw legend that has captured the human imagination for centuries is about freedom, not redistribution, a fact that is reflected in many previous screen versions of the Robin Hood story.
The earliest Robin Hood ballads, which date back to the 13th or 14th century, contain no mention of robbing the rich to give to the poor. The one person Robin assists financially is a knight who is about to lose his lands to the machinations of greedy and unscrupulous monks at an abbey. (Corrupt clerics using the political power of the Church are among Robin Hood’s frequent targets in the ballads.) The Sheriff of Nottingham is Robin’s chief opponent; at the time, it was the sheriffs’ role as tax collectors in particular that made them objects of popular loathing. Robin Hood is also frequently shown helping men who face barbaric punishments for hunting in the royal forests, a pursuit that was permitted to English nobles but strictly forbidden to the lower classes. In other words, he opposes privilege bestowed by political power rather than earned wealth.
Econ 101 Epic Fail
The New York Times has an illustrious history of employing some of the worst columnists ever to put fingers to keyboard. Frank Rich, Tom Friedman, ad nauseum. With every new column they reach new heights of cluelessness. These columnists serve to protect the readership of the New York Times from the real world, and provide talking points for people with little intelligence and less imagination.
Bob Herbert is only remarkable because he’s so forgettable. Everything he writes is mundane, shallow, paint-by-numbers liberalism. He’s the left wing, print version of the Fox & Friends morning hosts.
But today, with a straight face, Herbert serves up a most classic example of how the left is wholly ignorant of economics.
The collapse of the economy in the Great Recession gave us the starkest, most painful evidence imaginable of the failure of laissez-faire economics and the destructive force of the alliance of big business and government against the interests of ordinary Americans.
Bob, it’s not laissez-faire economics if government works in alliance with business. The two things are mutually exclusive.
John Jay Myers Sets Fundraising Record
Here’s the release. If you want balanced coverage of the other candidates, go buy a newspaper or something.
John Jay Myers Breaks Libertarian Fundraising Record in the 32nd Congressional District
Dallas, TX – John Jay Myers, a small business owner and Libertarian candidate for the 32nd U.S. Congressional district of Texas, has reached the $5000 FEC reporting threshold for congressional candidates. This makes John Jay Myers the first Libertarian candidate to do so in the 32nd district. Mr. Myers expressed his gratitude to contributors:
“I am inspired to see so many people stand up for less government, and I am glad that they look to me as a spokesman for it. Thank you to everyone who has donated or volunteered. Your dedication will help to prove that Americans are seeing beyond left versus right, and more at right versus wrong. Despite the odds, it is important that our voices are heard, and believe me, we will be heard.”
To his family, Myers added, “I love you all dearly, and I am very thankful for your support.”
John Jay Myers faces a 14-year incumbent whose chance to prove himself as a fiscally responsible proponent of free markets has come and gone. Ballooning national debt, a tumultuous economy, and costly undeclared wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have all happened on Sessions’ watch. On his opponent, John Jay Myers stated:
“Government bailouts destroy free markets, government pork drains our economy, government wars risk our safety, and government security programs threaten our freedoms. Clearly, we can no longer afford the illusion that our current representative is a small government conservative.”
The John Jay Myers for Congress campaign has already produced flyers, t-shirts, banners, a website, and online videos, and Mr. Myers has attended numerous events including the Mardi Gras parade, the Castle Hills Tea Party, the NORML march, and the first National Government Sucks Day.
Anyone wishing to contact John Jay Myers, learn more about the campaign, or donate, can visit www.johnjaymyers.com for more information.