I just got Alan Greenspan’s memoir, The Age of Turbulence. A quick check of the index and I find some very nice comments about Ayn Rand and Objectivism. In particular:
“It did not go without notice that Ayn Rand stood beside me as I took the oath of office in the presence of President Ford in the Oval Office. Ayn Rand and I remained close until she died in 1982, and I’m grateful for the influence she had on my life. I was intellectually limited until I met her.”
Category: The Atlasphere
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John Galt and the Writers Guild Strike
Writing at the Huffington Post, Rachel Sklar has a snotty and meandering article comparing the striking Writers Guild of America writers with John Galt and the other strikers in Atlas Shrugged.
True to form for the Huffington, she has little good to say about Ayn Rand’s novels except, I guess, that the writers’ strike made her think of them — at some length.
Along the way, though, she makes some interesting points about the writers and their productive place in the universe.
Bidinotto: Ron Paul's "Noninterventionism" Fraud
New Individualist editor Robert Bidinotto has written a lengthy and trenchant critique of Ron Paul’s candidacy for President.
'Defense of Corporation' Help Requested
From Atlasphere member Nigel Richards:
Australian Objectivists are urgently seeking financial assistance to advertise ‘In Defence of the Corporation’, a one-day conference for CEOs to be held in May 2008 in Sydney.
Conference speakers include:
· Two Ayn Rand Institute speakers: Dr Edwin Locke, author of Prime Movers, Traits of the Great Wealth Creators; and Dr Andrew Bernstein, author of The Capitalist Manifesto;
· Mr Ron Manners, former chairman of Croesus Mining, De Grey Mining, and the Australian Mining Hall of Fame, and founder of the Mannkal Institute;
· Dr Alex Robson, lecturer in economics at the ANU.
These are the conference topics:
· The moral right of corporations and their shareholders to maximise their profits, and the importance of speaking out for this right.
· The enormous contributions that corporations make to our standard of living.
· Why CEOs do deserve multi-million dollar compensation packages.
· The heroic qualities of great business leaders.
· The types of attacks: the media, NGOs, existing and impending legislation.
· The source of the attacks: the anti-capitalist mentality, environmentalism, traditional morality.
· A contrasting code of morality: one that sees capitalism as the only moral social system and money-making as a noble endeavour.
· A strategy for resisting these attacks.
Supporters have so far contributed $1,150. We need to raise $1,980 by Thursday the 29th November for a quarter-page display on p.5 of The Wentworth Courier, a suburban weekly with a readership of 99,000 in Sydney’s affluent eastern suburbs.
Following is the proposed text of The Wentworth Courier ad, which is designed to attract wealthy Ayn Rand fans willing to sponsor the conference.
AYN RAND conference for CEOs
Sydney May 2008.
In Defence of the Corporation
Dear CEO,
The time has come to take a stand.
You are under attack from all sides. You – who through your daring imagination and risk taking, have built products or services that enrich us all – endure constant criticism from the greens, from the media, from the unions, from the social welfare lobby. Instead of gratitude for your inspiring achievements – which continue to raise our standard of living – you face threats from politicians to shackle you even further.
The time has come to take a stand. The time has come to sharpen your intellectual spears. The time has come to look your attackers proudly in the eye, convinced of your own moral stature. The time has come to mount effective arguments against the moral premises of your critics. The time has come to speak out for a moral code of rational self-interest.
Intellectual ammunition will be provided at a one-day conference in Sydney in May 2008.
[Speaker list to follow]
This conference cannot proceed without your financial support/sponsorship.
For more information: contact Nigel Richards by email at info (at) enterpriseethics.com.au or on 0417 065 047.
In Favor of Polite and Respectful Dissent
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.
Ayn 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.
Rand-inspired Non-mathematician Discovers Hypercomplex Numbers, with Possible Implications for Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science
I haven’t the foggiest idea whether this would bear scientific scrutiny, but he certainly deserves an A for creative self-promotion.
From a new press release which appears to have been authored by Atlasphere member Rodney Rawlings:
(PRLEAP.COM) A Toronto, Ontario, writer and editor has arrived at a system of creating hypercomplex numbersâ??numbers that extend the complex number system to more dimensionsâ??using only high school algebra, as viewed through the lens of Ayn Randâ??s philosophy of Objectivism. He contends that this has implications for mathematics and the philosophy of science.
Rodney Rawlings calls his multidimensional numbers â??RADN numbersâ?â??for â??rotating any-dimensional numbers,â? because they have a property of rotation exactly analogous to that of the complex numbers. They are also commutative and distributive like them.
He says that he arrived at this result by asking himself what exactly numbers are, how they arise in the human mind, and what their relationship to reality is. But these questions were only so fruitful because he used a correct philosophy, he claimsâ??Ayn Randâ??s. Any other philosophy, such as the currently influential one of Karl Popper, he says, would not have led to such a result. â??This has two implications: first, that Randâ??s philosophy has a strong element of truth, at least in the area of epistemology; and second, that the type of numbers I discovered must have a special significance, seeing as how they are intimately related to the basic nature of numbers.â?
Continue reading “Rand-inspired Non-mathematician Discovers Hypercomplex Numbers, with Possible Implications for Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science”
Mike Shapiro: The Alleged Adventures of Blenderman
Los Angeles-based composer and screenwriter (and sometimes Atlasphere columnist) Mike Shapiro tells us that, in addition to launching a brand new MikeMusic.com web site, he’s also got a ten-minute musical, “The Alleged Adventures of Blenderman,” being performed this weekend in Los Angeles.
“Though it may not be a concretization of life as it can and should be,” he writes, “it is sort of cute.”
Fair enough. If you’re in the Los Angeles area and looking for some diversion this weekend, consider sending a little ticket-love in Mike’s direction.
I’ve gotten more than a few chuckles reading Mike’s blog over the years, so it’s bound to be pretty funny.
Michelle Fram Cohen Publishes "My Atlasphere Collection"
Have you enjoyed Michelle Fram Cohen’s articles at the Atlasphere — such as her recently-republished “Crosspoints: A Chance at Self-Redemption”?
If so, you may be interested in her new anthology, My Atlasphere Collection, now available as an eBook from MobiPocket.
Maggie Gallagher: Three Cheers for Ayn Rand!
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.
Myanmar: Right out of Atlas Shrugged?
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 militaryâ??s hands.
The salient difference, says Sean Turnell, an expert on the Burmese economy at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, is that Thailandâ??s leaders have allowed businesses to thrive.
During 45 years of misrule, Myanmarâ??s generals have almost entirely dismantled the economy, he said. There are no effective property rights, and contract enforcement is nonexistent.
â??If in other countries ruling regimes behave occasionally as Mafioso in skimming a cut from prosperous business, then Burmaâ??s is more like a looter â?? destroying what it can neither create nor understand,â? Mr. Turnell said.
(Emphasis added)
See the full article, “Across the River: 2 Divergent Paths in Southeast Asia,” for more background.