Category: Culture

About $6,500, apparently. This from the Chicago Tribune:

A box of old books donated to the Batavia Public Library contained a gem–a rare, first-edition copy of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
The Friends of the Batavia Public Library must now decide how to spend the $6,500 that the autographed copy brought at an online auction.
Bidding started at $3,500 and was over in about 45 seconds, said Jo Ann Smith, a volunteer with the library group who watched the Web auction Thursday. PBA Galleries, a San Francisco auction house, handled the sale and will keep 15 percent of the sale price.
The group will take a few months to decide how to spend the proceeds, Smith said.
“We don’t have any immediate plans, but we would like to take this nice, big chunk of money and buy one big thing,” she said.
Two years ago, the group began setting aside donated books that looked valuable. One member came across the book by Rand, a Russian-born author, in an anonymous box of donations.

Atlasphere member and long-time Objectivist Jimmy “Jimbo” Wales is profiled in this month’s issue of Wired Magazine, in an article titled “The Book Stops Here.”
The article discusses the origins and success of the Wikipedia project, of which Jimmy is the founder.
Some of you may also remember Jimmy as the founder and owner of the Moderated Discussion of Objectivist Philosophy (MDOP), which was the largest Objectivist discussion forum of its time and the predecessor to what became the We the Living project.
Our congratulations to Jimmy and the Wikipedia team on their high-profile coverage in Wired magazine!

If you can wade through a vitriolic dislike for Ayn Rand and a cynical misrepresentation of her philosophy, the article “Tax Evader as Super Hero” is rather interesting. It begins with the following story:

Today?s Capitalism Gone Mad story in the general press goes beyond Marx, Engels, Jonathan Swift, Mel Brooks, even the late great Ernie Kovacs. It concerns a man of mystery named Walter Anderson whom a New York Times story calls the greatest tax evader in U.S. history. Since the U.S. has the lowest rate of effective taxation on corporations and wealthy individuals in the developed world, that is quite an achievement. But the fellow, Walter Anderson, appears to be quite a character, to say the least.
First of all he has a penchant, some might say a fetish, for changing his name, which apparently started early, since his mother informed government agents that he had been born Walter Anderson Crump. He apparently developed a series of other aliases to hide his assets, dressed exclusively in Black, and somewhat like the great Chicago utilities swindler of the 1920s and 1930s, Samuel Insull, established so confusing a set of corporate entities even the prosecutors couldn?t figure them out.
But that is only the beginning. Anderson started 15 years ago with MCI, formed his own long-distance phone company, profited apparently from the deregulation and entered the business that really interested him ? space travel. The downfall of the Soviet Union enabled him to buy the rights to the Mir space station for $31 million. He then founded Rotary Rocket, a space travel business that didn?t quite work out, and then continued his telecommunications businesses, setting up “offshore entities” in the British Virgin Islands and Panama to transfer his assets.
Meanwhile, according to the U.S. government, he transferred at least $450 million out of the U.S. between 1995 and 1999. In 1998 for example, he paid only $494 total in federal taxes.

Anybody who makes over $100 million per year by privatizing space travel, while managing to pay less than $500 in taxes, deserves some consideration in our book.
See the full story for more information.

A new play, Dream Theatre’s The Cage, opens this weekend by a Rand-influenced author and actor Jeremy Menekseoglu.
From their web site:

For 23 years Ibrahim has lived in a cage locked in darkness within
the palace walls. When the door suddenly opens, Ibrahim is thrust
not only into a terrifyingly beautiful world he’s never known, but also
onto the throne of the most powerful empire in the world. But Ibrahim
was not the only one kept inside a cage: there is something terrible
within the walls?something that is about to escape. Directed by
Sarah Mostad and Mia Kuziko. Each performance will be followed
by a post-show discussion with the cast

Visit their web site for more information and tickets.
(Thanks to Marsha Enright at NIF for the tip.)

Writing for ITbusiness.ca, Shane Schick has written a prominent editorial (“IT’s up to you“) analyzing the balance that IT companies have to strike between incentivizing team vs. individual performance, and makes an analogy between the Atlases of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Atlases of the IT industry. See the full article for details.