Don’t miss the Atlasphere’s interview with Free State Project founder Jason Sorens!
Congratulations to Andrew Schwartz on yet another stellar interview.
Author: s1e2t3u4p5
India's First Woman Astronaut
Kalpana Chawla was on the space shuttle Columbia during its fatal re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere on February 1, 2003.
An inspiration to millions of Indians, she is now the subject of her own biography, Dilip M Salwi’s Kalpana Chawla: India’s First Woman Astronaut.
In an extended excerpt published on rediff.com, we learn that Ayn Rand was one of her favorite authors:
In college, Kalpana showed total dedication to her subject because she enjoyed what she was doing. In fact, she was always dissatisfied with her performance and felt she could have done better. Always dressed in trousers, she used to come to college on a bicycle. As there was no girl’s hostel, initially she stayed in Mata Gujri Hall in the Punjab University campus. In fact, she changed several hostels as she found the hostel environment very noisy and distracting for studies. Later, she lived alone in one room above a garage in a bungalow.
Kalpana had a few select friends and would restrict herself to them and her studies. She learnt karate and became a black belt. She was mentally prepared to fight if any man tried to act smart with her. She also had an aesthetic sense in clothes, was fond of eating simple food and collecting precious stones. She loved a quiet environment and reading books. During those days, her favourite writers were Ayn Rand, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Salman Rushdie, Richard Bach and Oriana Fallaci. She would even persuade other friends to read these writers. Besides helping her friends in studies, she regularly paid the fees of one poor batch mate out of her pocket money without the girl’s knowledge. Although she believed herself to be no less than any boy and could do any task that they could, she disliked the more aggressive women’s liberation movement of the West.
Ayn Rand’s novels are quite popular in India. In fact, the Atlasphere currently contains 71 profiles from India [update 10/14/04: now more than 250 profiles from India] ? more than any other country but the United States.
Christina Ricci on The Fountainhead
In an interview with Movieline Magazine from 2001, Christina Ricci mentions that she’s an admirer of The Fountainhead and would like to remake the movie:
Q: What’s your favorite novel? A: The Fountainhead because the writing is so beautiful.
Q: What about The Catcher in the Rye? A: I hate The Catcher in the Rye. It’s so whiny and incredibly self-involved. The fact that it was supposed to represent what we were going through in our teen years – I was just like, fuck you. I can take responsibility for my emotions and actions. […]
Q: If you could have three wishes connected to the movies, what would they be? A: I’d want to remake The Fountainhead. I’d like to run a studio. I want to have the capacity and ability to make films – I don’t have it right now.
Q: Would you say you have a large ego? A: Yes.
Check out the full interview.
PS. In case you didn’t notice, that’s a copy of The Fountainhead she’s holding, in this poster. It looks as if she was approached about participating in a pro-reading poster campaign, and she chose The Fountainhead as the theme for her poster. Copies of this poster are available for purchase online. -Editor
TOC Spring Conference in Nevada
The Objectivist Center has announced its Spring Conference, to be held on April 17, 2004 in Las Vegas, Nevada. From the announcement:
Join the Objectivist Center for a weekend in Las Vegas to experience the wild side of Capitalism and explore the values that achievement and business require. In addition to social and entertainment opportunities, the program highlights include:
- Attorney and former law professor Bruce Dalcher assessing the PATRIOT act
- Barbara Lehman, chief marketing strategist with HMI Advertising,
explaining the art of entrepreneurial living- TOC Washington Director Ed Hudgins diagnosing the Republicans’ betrayal of small government
- TOC Director of Programs William Thomas weighing the ethical state of corporate America
The conference brochure and registration materials will be available soon.
World Socialists Onto Greenspan's Tactics
In a recent editorial, the World Socialists Web Site predicts a deepening U.S. fiscal crisis ? which is nothing particularly new.
It is a kick, however, to see them grouse so loudly about Alan Greenspan’s admiration for Ayn Rand’s ideas:
As chairman of the Federal Reserve, Greenspan has to at least give the impression of political neutrality, claiming to base himself on the findings of economic analysis. But, as his history shows, he is flesh of one with some of the most aggressive defenders of the ?free market? and private property and wealth within the American ruling class.
These views were clearly set out in an article published in 1966 defending the gold standard as the real basis of all finance, and subsequently reprinted in the book Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal by extreme right-wing philosopher Ayn Rand. According to Greenspan, ?chronic deficit spending? was the hallmark of the welfare state, while the welfare state itself was ?nothing more than a mechanism by which governments confiscate the wealth of the productive members of society to support a wide variety of welfare schemes.?
Asked in 1993 if he still agreed with the conclusions of his article, Greenspan replied: ?Absolutely.? That basic agreement seems to have been underlined once again by his insistence that the answer to the growing fiscal crisis in the US is to make permanent the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing domestic government spending.
Keep reading, if you’re not scared of scare quotes.
John Stossel Credits Ayn Rand
The Atlas Society reports that the Daily Princetonian ? the Princeton University student newspaper ? carries an interview with John Stossel, the famous investigative reporter for ABC News. From the inteview:
When I struggling with these ideas, I was reading the liberal press, which was in love with the welfare state, and it didn’t really make sense to me. And the conservative press seemed to want to bring police into our bedrooms.
Then I discovered something called Reason Magazine, based out of Los Angeles, which just made sense. Suddenly there were these people who grappled with these ideas before me who understood them better than I did and had a real intellectual foundation for it. My favorite writer there was the editor ? a woman named Virginia Postrel ? who I assumed was some 60 year old lady writing brilliant stuff. But she turned out to be about 10 years behind me at Princeton … Ayn Rand and a book by Charles Murray called In Pursuit of Happiness and Good Government have also influenced me.
Stossel?s hard-hitting TV specials and reports on the show ?20/20? are grounded explicitly in a libertarian philosophy. And among those whom he acknowledges in his new bestseller, Give Me a Break, is The Objectivist Center Executive Director David Kelley.
Hudgins on George Washington's Legacy
Ed Hudgins, TOC Washington Director, writes in his latest Report from the Front on the first U.S. President’s political and moral legacy:
Washington?s achievements reflected his outstanding moral character. He set for himself the highest standards in everything he did and thus became exemplar for his associates and his fellow countrymen. Indeed, when he presided over the Constitutional Convention, he spoke little. It was his example — the fact that the other delegates were in the presence of Washington — that kept those delegates on their best behavior and inspired them to look to the good of the country.
But Washington was not some ever-frowning moralist; he enjoyed life, whether at a dance or dinner party or just riding through his beloved Mt. Vernon estate.
Read the full article…
Ridpath on George Washington's Virtues
ARI op-ed columnist John Ridpath has written a moving tribute to the first of American presidents, titled “America Needs a Leader Like George Washington.”
On Presidents’ Day, Americans have an opportunity to reflect on its Presidents?past and present?and particularly on those who have been great leaders. History is replete with examples of charismatic power-lusting “leaders” directing mindless and obedient legions on campaigns of suppression and destruction. But America’s great leaders have been different.
America has often been blessed, in times of crisis, with principled, moral leaders, directing this nation against history’s tyrants and in pursuit of freedom and the rights of man.
Now, once again facing a crisis, America searches for great leadership. Awash in a morass of moral compromise, poll-taking, and hesitation to offend world opinion, Americans desperately seize on any hint of strength, of moral certainty, of a refusal to swim with others in the swamp of compromise, empty rhetoric and threats that now passes for “leadership” in Washington, D.C.
Where can Americans turn, to witness the spectacle of great leadership?
On Presidents’ Day, this country should look, for inspiration and conviction, to America’s greatest leader, George Washington.
Washington, in company with the other Founding Fathers of America, was a son of the 18th century Enlightenment. His vision of America was one of responsible, independent, free, and hard-working citizens, prospering in a system of political and economic freedom. He believed that America would become a beacon of liberty and justice to men everywhere.
Read the full article….
Environmentalists Prove Ayn Rand Right
In an article for Australia’s The Age, Sixties environmental activist Patrick Moore discusses the changes that have come over the environmental movement in the past forty years. He begins:
I was raised in the tiny fishing and logging village of Winter Harbour on the north-west tip of Vancouver Island, where salmon spawned in the streams of the adjoining Pacific rainforest.
In school, I discovered ecology, and realised that through science I could gain insight into the natural beauties I had known as a child. In the late 1960s I was transformed into a radical environmental activist.
A ragtag group of activists and I sailed a leaky old halibut boat across the North Pacific to block the last US hydrogen bomb tests under President Richard Nixon. In the process I co-founded Greenpeace.
Ayn Rand and Peter Schwartz make a cameo:
At the beginning of the modern environmental movement, Ayn Rand published Return of the Primitive, which contained an essay by Peter Schwartz “The Anti-Industrial Revolution.” In it, he warned that the new movement’s agenda was anti-science, anti-technology, and anti-human.
At the time, he didn’t get a lot of attention from the mainstream media or the public.
Environmentalists were often able to produce arguments that sounded reasonable, while doing good deeds like saving whales and making the air and water cleaner.
But now the chickens have come home to roost. The environmentalists’ campaign against biotechnology in general, and genetic engineering in particular, has exposed their intellectual and moral bankruptcy.
By adopting a zero-tolerance policy towards a technology with so many potential benefits for humankind and the environment, they have lived up to Schwartz’s predictions.
They have alienated themselves from scientists, intellectuals and internationalists.
It seems inevitable that the media and the public will, in time, see the insanity of their position.
Read the whole article for more interesting stories from a former environmental activist.
UPDATE: Michelle Fram-Cohen points out an historical inaccuracy in Moore’s account of Rand’s book:
The facts are that in 1971 Rand published a collection of her essays under the title The New Left: The Anti Industrial Revolution. This was also the title of one essay in the book. Return of the Primitive was published in 1999, and is an expanded edition of The New Left, edited with an introduction by Peter Schwartz. It includes Schwartz?s essay “The Return of the Primitive,” which he used for the title of the new edition.
TOC Summer Seminar Update
Program information and secure, online registration are now available for TOC’s 15th annual Summer Seminar.
This year’s seminar is titled “Objectivism in Theory and Practice” and will be held July 3-10, 2004 at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
The week-long program is filled with many well-known names in Objectivism: David Kelley, Nathaniel Branden, Robert Bidinotto, Lindsay Perigo, Tibor Machan, Ed Hudgins, Douglas Rasmussen, Robert Poole, Stephen Hicks, Eric Mack, Mimi Gladstein, Michael Newberry, and many, many more.