Free Republic

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Ayn Rand. Click puzzle (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle. Ayn Rand was an author best known for her libertarian positions and celebration of individual rights and initiatives. Her best known books are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidental spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the...

Sometimes, life really does imitate art. Recent actions by certain members of the Democratic Party remind me of scenes in Ayn Rand’s most famous novel, “Atlas Shrugged.” Take the impeachment proceedings in the House of Representatives two months ago. It was as blatantly a kangaroo court as Hank Rearden’s trial in “Atlas.” Rearden had zero chance of being found “not guilty.” Same with President Donald Trump. I mean, what chance did he have of not being impeached when the Democrats refused to identify the accuser, denied the accused’s right to have counsel cross-examine prosecution witnesses, and didn’t allow any witnesses...

Neil Peart, the longtime drummer for the Canadian band Rush, died last week of brain cancer, leaving behind a legacy as one of rock's most technically accomplished percussionists and perhaps its most articulate libertarian lyricist. The 67-year-old songwriter regularly championed individualism, choice, and freedom over soul-crushing conformity. Early Rush songs are saturated with such messages. The song "Freewill," released on 1980's Permanent Waves album, puts self-determination at the root of the human experience: "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." In "The Trees," released two years earlier, Peart tells a fable about a forest where...

Ayn Rand nailed journalism, as it has become, 62 years ago. “The reporters who came to the press conference in the office of the John Galt Line were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events. It was their daily duty to serve as audience for some public figure who made utterances about the public good, in phrases carefully chosen to convey no meaning. It was their daily job to sling words together in any combination they pleased, so long as the words did not fall...

In modern America, February 2 is best known as Groundhog Day. But it also marks the birth of one of the most praised and criticized thinkers of the past century – Ayn Rand. Rand sold more than 30 million books. Atlas Shrugged has been ranked behind only the Bible as an influence on readers’ lives. She has also been stridently attacked for issues such as her militant atheism. But perhaps least understood has been her full-bore rejection of altruism. On her birthday, it is worth reconsideration. Altruism has commonly been held up as the standard for moral behavior. But Rand...

Today's Quotefall Puzzle features a quote by Ayn Rand. Click image (or click here) for full size rendition, then use your browser's print command to print puzzle.All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first reply comment below, using filtered font to prevent accidential spoilers. Please refrain from disclosing the full answer in comments to prevent spoilers.To solve the puzzle: Enter the letters in the top half (letter columns) of the puzzle into the white squares on the bottom half (answer grid) belowEach letter must stay in its own column within the gridEach letter must be used exactly...

This is a BONUS Quotefall Puzzle, and features a quote by Ayn Rand. Click image for full size rendition, then use your brower's print command to print puzzle.Note that this is a bonus puzzle, and I'll be posting my normal puzzle by 11:00 AM Eastern from now on. This puzzle is one of my mini-challengers, and may take more than a cup of coffee or two. I've included a few more word hints and a lengthier starting word count, so let me know if I should keep making these. Thanks.All hints, along with the answer, are provided in the first...

This is a topic we’ve covered at length here previously, but in New York State the story is taking an odd twist. The subject is the Fight for 15 and the successful efforts of Democrats to jack up the minimum wage faster than market forces would normally have allowed. It seems to have come as a great shock to almost nobody that this resulted in layoffs, particularly among lower-skill, entry-level workers in the fast food industry. This has some of the newly unemployed understandably upset and they’ve been taking their complaints to their elected representatives. But what are they...

Ayn Rand was born in St. Petersburg on Feb 2, 1905 and received her education in the city. Yaron Brook from the Ayn Rand Institute says he is happy with the reception the author is now receiving in her hometown... “We’re in a crisis in the world right now and people everywhere are looking for better ideas.” By the time her books were translated into Russian in the late 1990s, much of the nation had become disillusioned with the painful transition to capitalism. Rand’s holy grail — the free market — was seen as the primary cause of the decade’s...

The Broward County Medical Examiner’s Office ruled the death was accidental, police said Wednesday. Diaz said no one will be charged in the incident. The male pit bull — 3 or 4 years old — was raised by the family since it was a puppy, police said. Its sibling and mother, both pit bulls, were also family pets. All were removed from the home the day of the attack, but the dog owner has only surrendered Thor,...

Lots of people who study K-12 education end up looking for a metaphor, a parallel, to explain the unnecessary stupidity of our public schools. Don't bother. Ayn Rand has run ahead and done the job. In 1970, Rand published a long [17k words] essay titled "The Comprachicos" (which roughly translates to the child-buyers). It lovingly examines a bit of history mentioned in a Victor Hugo novel. He wrote about vicious exploiters who mutilate and transform children into all sorts of freaks, dwarfs, gymnasts, and novelties. The techniques are analogous to those used by bonsai masters. You cut, twist, break, deprive...

The Comet uncoiled from the siding into a thin, straight line, and went on into the mountains, with the beam of the headlight like an extended arm pointing the way, and the lighted glass curve of the observation lounge ending it off. Some of the passengers aboard the Comet were awake. As the train started its coiling ascent; they saw the small cluster of Winston’s lights at the bottom of the darkness beyond their windows, then the same darkness, but with red and green lights by the hole of a tunnel on the upper edge of the windowpanes. The lights...

For over 30 years, I've been reading and re-reading Ayn Rand's books, both fiction and non-fiction, and I don't recall anything that suggests she was in favor of open borders. Furthermore, Ayn Rand died in 1982 – she never witnessed the collapse of the Twin Towers on 9/11, the steady stream of terrorist massacres throughout the great, historical cities of Europe and on American soil, or the large-scale invasion of so-called "refugees" into Europe. Islam and immigration were not cultural or political issues during her lifetime. So why am I even asking if Ayn Rand would have been for open...

It is time to admit it; modern conservatism is almost a complete and utter failure. Today’s conservative movement seems to employ a lot of folks in pretty cushy jobs, prints some magazines, hosts some websites, publishes various books, and puts on conferences until the cows come home – for those who don’t know, conferences and seminars can be big time money makers. Sadly, its primary purpose seems to have become a self-propagating jobs program for those lucky, skilled, or connected enough to rise to the top.

Her novel The Fountainhead is one of the few works of fiction that Donald Trump likes and she has long been the darling of the US right. But only now do her devotees hold sway around the world As they plough through their GCSE revision, UK students planning to take politics A-level in the autumn can comfort themselves with this thought: come September, they will be studying one thinker who does not belong in the dusty archives of ancient political theory but is achingly on trend. For the curriculum includes a new addition: the work of Ayn Rand. It is...

The evolving foreign policy of Donald Trump is an unintended reincarnation of Ayn Rand. When he says “America First,” he is effectively saying that the United States should act in what Rand would call its “rational self-interest.” Young Americans for Freedom (YAF) was founded forty-one years before the 9/11 attack on America, that is, on September 11, 1960 at the Buckley estate, Great Elm. Its founding document ended: “That American foreign policy must be judged by this criterion: does it serve the just interests of the United States?” Not the United Nations or the Third World, but only the U.S....

When President Elect Donald Trump named Ayn Rand as his favorite writer, and The Fountainhead as his favorite book, last spring, few Objectivists took notice. With his inauguration as the 45th President of the United States tomorrow, perhaps it’s time we should. Others -- critics of Rand and Trump -- aren’t shying away from the topic. “Ayn Rand acolyte-Donald Trump stacks his cabinet with fellow objectivists,” wrote Washington Post National Political Correspondent James Hohmann in a piece last month. At the same time, one prominent Objectivist, Onkar Ghate, called Trump’s election “One Small Step for Dictatorship.” Both positions are exaggerated....

Ray Dalio, the founder of Bridgewater Associates, the world's biggest hedge fund firm, says people should expect a major shift under President-elect Donald Trump. "Regarding economics, if you haven’t read Ayn Rand lately, I suggest that you do as her books pretty well capture the mindset," he wrote in a LinkedIn post on Monday. "This new administration hates weak, unproductive, socialist people and policies, and it admires strong, can-do, profit makers." The post continued: "It wants to, and probably will, shift the environment from one that makes profit makers villains with limited power to one that makes them heroes with...

Cynics, skeptics, and fiction-peddlers are frowned upon by the Obama administration (and the mainstream media) when it comes to our glorious leader's economic miracle. So we thought a simple litmus test might be useful to judge just how 'doomed' the nation really is... "When you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing;  when you see that money is flowing to those who deal not in goods, but in favors;  when you see that men get rich more easily by graft than by work; and your laws no longer protect you against...

There are lots of famous Jewish atheists from Sigmund Freud to Ayn Rand to Isaac Asimov to Woody Allen. How do you think the Jewish community would have reacted if what follows had happened? A Jewish couple, atheists, artists, puts on an exhibit in which they critique five major religions with artworks and commentary. At the end of the first day the gallery owner comes up to them and says, you are attacking Islam and that means you favor the Jews in "Palestine." This is "racism." They try to explain that they are critiquing five major religions equally, did not...