Category Archives: Ayn Rand

INTRODUCTION: Ayn Rand held that art is a re-creation of reality according to an artist s metaphysical value judgments. By its nature, therefore, a novel (like a statue or a symphony) does not require or tolerate an explanatory preface; it is a self-contained universe, aloof from commentary, beckoning the reader to enter, perceive, respond. Ayn Rand would never have approved of a didactic (or laudatory) introduction to her book, and I have no intention of flouting her wishes. Instead, I am going to give her the floor. I am going to let you in on some of the thinking she did as she was preparing to write Atlas Shrugged. Before starting a novel, Ayn Rand wrote voluminously in her journals about its theme, plot, and characters. She wrote not for any audience, but strictly for herself that is, for the clarity of her own understanding. The journals dealing with Atlas Shrugged are powerful examples of her mind in action, confident even when groping, purposeful even when stymied, luminously eloquent even though wholly unedited. These journals are also a fascinating record of the step-by-step birth of an immortal work of art. In due course, all of Ayn Rand s writings will be published. For this 35th anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged, however, I have selected, as a kind of advance bonus for her fans, four typical journal entries. Let me warn new readers that the passages reveal the plot and will spoil the book for anyone who reads them before knowing the story. As I recall, Atlas Shrugged did not become the novel s title until Miss Rand s husband made the suggestion in 1956. The working title throughout the writing was The Strike. The earliest of Miss Rand s notes for The Strike are dated January 1, 1945, about a year after the publication of The Fountainhead. Naturally enough, the subject on her mind was how to differentiate the present novel from its predecessor. Theme. What happens to the world when the Prime Movers go on strike. This means a picture of the world with its motor cut off. Show: what, how, why. The specific steps and incidents in terms of persons, their spirits, motives, psychology and actions and, secondarily, proceeding from persons, in terms of history, society and the world. The theme requires: to show who are the prime movers and why, how they function. Who are their enemies and why, what are the motives behind the hatred for and the enslavement of the prime movers; the nature of the obstacles placed in their way, and the reasons for it. This last paragraph is contained entirely in The Fountainhead. Roark and Toohey are the complete statement of it. Therefore, this is not the direct theme of The Strike but it is part of the theme and must be kept in mind, stated again (though briefly) to have the theme clear and complete. First question to decide is on whom the emphasis must be placed on the prime movers, the parasites or the world. The answer is: The world. The story must be primarily a picture of the whole. In this sense, The Strike is to be much more a social novel than The Fountainhead. The Fountainhead was about individualism and collectivism within man s soul ; it showed the nature and function of the creator and the second-hander. The primary concern there was with Roark and Toohey showing what they are. The rest of the characters were variations of the theme of the relation of the ego to others mixtures of the two extremes, the two poles: Roark and Toohey. The primary concern of the story was the characters, the people as such their natures. Their relations to each other which is society, men in relation to men were secondary, an unavoidable, direct consequence of Roark set against Toohey. But it was not the theme. Now, it is this relation that must be the theme. Therefore, the personal becomes secondary. That is, the personal is necessary only to the extent needed to make the relationships clear. In The Fountainhead I showed that Roark moves the world that the Keatings feed upon him and hate him for it, while the Tooheys are out consciously to destroy him. But the theme was Roark not Roark s relation to the world. Now it will be the relation. In other words, I must show in what concrete, specific way the world is moved by the creators. Exactly how do the second-handers live on the creators. Both in spiritual matters and (most particularly) in concrete, physical events. (Concentrate on the concrete, physical events but don t forget to keep in mind at all times how the physical proceeds from the spiritual.). However, for the purpose of this story, I do not start by showing how the second-handers live on the prime movers in actual, everyday reality nor do I start by showing a normal world. (That comes in only in necessary retrospect, or flashback, or by implication in the events themselves.) I start with the fantastic premise of the prime movers going on strike. This is the actual heart and center of the novel. A distinction carefully to be observed here: I do not set out to glorify the prime mover ( that was The Fountainhead ). I set out to show how desperately the world needs prime movers, and how viciously it treats them. And I show it on a hypothetical case what happens to the world without them. In The Fountainhead I did not show how desperately the world needed Roark except by implication. I did show how viciously the world treated him, and why. I showed mainly what he is. It was Roark s story. This must be the world s story in relation to its prime movers. (Almost the story of a body in relation to its heart a body dying of anemia.) I don t show directly what the prime movers do that s shown only by implication. I show what happens when they don t do it. (Through that, you see the picture of what they do, their place and their role.) (This is an important guide for the construction of the story.) In order to work out the story, Ayn Rand had to understand fully why the prime movers allowed the second-handers to live on them why the creators had not gone on strike throughout history what errors even the best of them made that kept them in thrall to the worst. Part of the answer is dramatized in the character of Dagny Taggart, the railroad heiress who declares war on the strikers. Here is a note on her psychology, dated April 18, 1946: Her error and the cause of her refusal to join the strike is over-optimism and over-confidence (particularly this last). Over-optimism in that she thinks men are better than they are, she doesn t really understand them and is generous about it. Over-confidence in that she thinks she can do more than an individual actually can. She thinks she can run a railroad (or the world) single-handed, she can make people do what she wants or needs, what is right, by the sheer force of her own talent; not by forcing them, of course, not by enslaving them and giving orders but by the sheer over-abundance of her own energy; she will show them how, she can teach them and persuade them, she is so able that they ll catch it from her. (This is still faith in their rationality, in the omnipotence of reason. The mistake? Reason is not automatic. Those who deny it cannot be conquered by it. Do not count on them. Leave them alone.) On these two points, Dagny is committing an important (but excusable and understandable) error in thinking, the kind of error individualists and creators often make. It is an error proceeding from the best in their nature and from a proper principle, but this principle is misapplied. The error is this: it is proper for a creator to be optimistic, in the deepest, most basic sense, since the creator believes in a benevolent universe and functions on that premise. But it is an error to extend that optimism to other specific men. First, it s not necessary, the creator s life and the nature of the universe do not require it, his life does not depend on others. Second, man is a being with free will; therefore, each man is potentially good or evil, and it s up to him and only to him (through his reasoning mind) to decide which he wants to be. The decision will affect only him; it is not (and cannot and should not be) the primary concern of any other human being. Therefore, while a creator does and must worship Man (which means his own highest potentiality; which is his natural self-reverence), he must not make the mistake of thinking that this means the necessity to worship Mankind (as a collective). These are two entirely different conceptions, with entirely (immensely and diametrically opposed) different consequences. Man, at his highest potentiality, is realized and fulfilled within each creator himself. Whether the creator is alone, or finds only a handful of others like him, or is among the majority of mankind, is of no importance or consequence whatever; numbers have nothing to do with it. He alone or he and a few others like him are mankind, in the proper sense of being the proof of what man actually is, man at his best, the essential man, man at his highest possibility. (The rational being, who acts according to his nature.) It should not matter to a creator whether anyone or a million or all the men around him fall short of the ideal of Man; let him live up to that ideal himself; this is all the optimism about Man that he needs. But this is a hard and subtle thing to realize and it would be natural for Dagny always to make the mistake of believing others are better than they really are (or will become better, or she will teach them to become better or, actually, she so desperately wants them to be better) and to be tied to the world by that hope. It is proper for a creator to have an unlimited confidence in himself and his ability, to feel certain that he can get anything he wishes out of life, that he can accomplish anything he decides to accomplish, and that it s up to him to do it. (He feels it because he is a man of reason. But here is what he must keep clearly in mind: it is true that a creator can accomplish anything he wishes if he functions according to the nature of man, the universe and his own proper morality, that is, if he does not place his wish primarily within others and does not attempt or desire anything that is of a collective nature, anything that concerns others primarily or requires primarily the exercise of the will of others. (This would be an immoral desire or attempt, contrary to his nature as a creator.) If he attempts that, he is out of a creator s province and in that of the collectivist and the second-hander. Therefore, he must never feel confident that he can do anything whatever to, by or through others. (He can t and he shouldn t even wish to try it and the mere attempt is improper.) He must not think that he can. somehow transfer his energy and his intelligence to them and make them fit for his purposes in that way. He must face other men as they are, recognizing them as essentially independent entities, by nature, and beyond his primary influence; [he must] deal with them only on his own, independent terms, deal with such as he judges can fit his purpose or live up to his standards (by themselves and of their own will, independently of him) and expect nothing from the others. Now, in Dagny s case, her desperate desire is to run Taggart Transcontinental. She sees that there are no men suited to her purpose around her, no men of ability, independence and competence. She thinks she can run it with others, with the incompetent and the parasites, either by training them or merely by treating them as robots who will take her orders and function without personal initiative or responsibility; with herself, in effect, being the spark of initiative, the bearer of responsibility for a whole collective. This can t be done. This is her crucial error. This is where she fails. Ayn Rand s basic purpose as a novelist was to present not villains or even heroes with errors, but the ideal man the consistent, the fully integrated, the perfect. In Atlas Shrugged, this is John Galt, the towering figure who moves the world and the novel, yet does not appear onstage until Part III. By his nature (and that of the story) Galt is necessarily central to the lives of all the characters. In one note, Galt s relation to the others, dated June 27, 1946, Miss Rand defines succinctly what Galt represents to each of them: For Dagny the ideal. The answer to her two quests: the man of genius and the man she loves. The first quest is expressed in her search for the inventor of the engine. The second her growing conviction that she will never be in love For Rearden the friend. The kind of understanding and appreciation he has always wanted and did not know he wanted (or he thought he had it he tried to find it in those around him, to get it from his wife, his mother, brother and sister). For Francisco d Anconia the aristocrat. The only man who represents a challenge and a stimulant almost the proper kind of audience, worthy of stunning for the sheer joy and color of life. For Danneskjld the anchor. The only man who represents land and roots to a restless, reckless wanderer, like the goal of a struggle, the port at the end of a fierce sea-voyage the only man he can respect. For the Composer the inspiration and the perfect audience. For the Philosopher the embodiment of his abstractions. For Father Amadeus the source of his conflict. The uneasy realization that Galt is the end of his endeavors, the man of virtue, the perfect man and that his means do not fit this end (and that he is destroying this, his ideal, for the sake of those who are evil). To James Taggart the eternal threat. The secret dread. The reproach. The guilt (his own guilt). He has no specific tie-in with Galt but he has that constant, causeless, unnamed, hysterical fear. And he recognizes it when he hears Galt s broadcast and when he sees Galt in person for the first time. To the Professor his conscience. The reproach and reminder. The ghost that haunts him through everything he does, without a moment s peace. The thing that says: No to his whole life. Some notes on the above: Rearden s sister, Stacy, was a minor character later cut from the novel. Francisco was spelled Francesco in these early years, while Danneskld s first name at this point was Ivar, presumably after Ivar Kreuger, the Swedish match king, who was the real-life model of Bjorn Faulkner in Night of January 16th. Father Amadeus was Taggart s priest, to whom he confessed his sins. The priest was supposed to be a positive character, honestly devoted to the good but practicing consistently the morality of mercy. Miss Rand dropped him, she told me, when she found that it was impossible to make such a character convincing. The Professor is Robert Stadler. This brings me to a final excerpt. Because of her passion for ideas, Miss Rand was often asked whether she was primarily a philosopher or a novelist. In later years, she was impatient with this question, but she gave her own answer, to and for herself, in a note dated May 4, 1946. The broader context was a discussion of the nature of creativity. I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer. But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the means to the last; the absolutely necessary means, but only the means; the fiction story is the end. Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle, I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the principle interests me only as the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose; and my life purpose is the creation of the kind of world (people and events) that I like that is, that represents human perfection. Philosophical knowledge is necessary in order to define human perfection. But I do not care to stop at the definition. I want to use it, to apply it in my work (in my personal life, too but the core, center and purpose of my personal life, of my whole life, is my work). This is why, I think, the idea of writing a philosophical nonfiction book bored me. In such a book, the purpose would actually be to teach others, to present my idea to them. In a book of fiction the purpose is to create, for myself, the kind of world I want and to live in it while I am creating it; then, as a secondary consequence, to let others enjoy this world, if, and to the extent that they can. It may be said that the first purpose of a philosophical book is the clarification or statement of your new knowledge to and for yourself; and then, as a secondary step, the offering of your knowledge to others. But here is the difference, as far as I am concerned: I have to acquire and state to myself the new philosophical knowledge or principle I used in order to write a fiction story as its embodiment and illustration; I do not care to write a story on a theme or thesis of old knowledge, knowledge stated or discovered by someone else, that is, someone else s philosophy (because those philosophies are wrong). To this extent, I am an abstract philosopher (I want to present the perfect man and his perfect life and I must also discover my own philosophical statement and definition of this perfection). But when and if I have discovered such new knowledge, I am not interested in stating it in its abstract, general form, that is, as knowledge. I am interested in using it, in applying it that is, in stating it in the concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story. This last is my final purpose, my end; the philosophical knowledge or discovery is only the means to it. For my purpose, the non-fiction form of abstract knowledge doesn t interest me; the final, applied form of fiction, of story, does. (I state the knowledge to myself, anyway; but I choose the final form of it, the expression, in the completed cycle that leads back to man.) I wonder to what extent I represent a peculiar phenomenon in this respect. I think I represent the proper integration of a complete human being. Anyway, this should be my lead for the character of John Galt. He, too , is a combination of an abstract philosopher and a practical inventor; the thinker and the man of action together In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want the concrete to be. It has helped us to create to reshape the world as we wish it to be for our purposes. I cannot resist quoting one further paragraph. It comes a few pages later in the same discussion. Incidentally, as a sideline observation: if creative fiction writing is a process of translating an abstraction into the concrete, there are three possible grades of such writing: translating an old (known) abstraction (theme or thesis) through the medium of old fiction means (that is, characters, events or situations used before for that same purpose, that same translation) this is most of the popular trash; translating an old abstraction through new, original fiction means this is most of the good literature; creating a new, original abstraction and translating it through new, original means. This, as far as I know, is only me my kind of fiction writing. May God forgive me (Metaphor!) if this is mistaken conceit! As near as I can now see it, it isn t. (A fourth possibility translating a new abstraction through old means is impossible, by definition: if the abstraction is new, there can be no means used by anybody else before to translate it.) Is her conclusion mistaken conceit ? It is now forty-five years since she wrote this note, and you are holding Ayn Rand s master-work in your hands. You decide. Leonard Peikoff September 1991. Chapter 1: THE THEME Who is John Galt? The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum s face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him. Why did you say that? asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense. The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky. Why does it bother you? he asked. It doesn t, snapped Eddie Willers. He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum s particular despair. Go get your cup of coffee, he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face. Thank you, sir, said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there s nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason. Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn t; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It s the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight. The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop. No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked. He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster. He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar suspended in the sky. It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets below. In the rusty light of this evening s sunset, the rectangle said: September 2. Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality. He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2. Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he felt reassured and then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above. When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see the display of goods, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty. He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate. He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father and grandfather. The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot on the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak tree s presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was his greatest symbol of strength. One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long ago; there was nothing inside just a thin gray dust that was being dispersed by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it left had not been able to stand without it. Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since. Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark. He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment s glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence. He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, Whatever is right, and added, You ought to do something great. I mean, the two of us together. What? she asked. He said, I don t know. That s what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains. What for? she asked. He said, The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us? I don t know. We ll have to find out. She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track. Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, Whatever is right, twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren t. He knew that they weren t. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental. The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers. Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters,

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Atlas Shrugged: Ayn Rand: 9780451191144: Amazon.com: Books

The actor and pop singer Laurence Fox achieved peak Laurence Fox this month after explaining racism to a black female academic, photographing carrots sarcastically, doubting the existence of some Sikhs, fraternising with the Cumming-trumpets of the Today programme, and warning women under 35 of all races that he would withhold the bounty of his coveted white penis from their hungry vaginas unless they held their disagreeable tongues, even if they got on their knees and begged.

Fox has been described, often unfairly, as many things in the past two weeks: a brave freedom fighter, a musician, a privileged white male, an actor, a denier of Sikhs, and a teller of uncomfortable truths to a world where the light has been turned down on the age of reason, though admittedly by Fox himself. But Fox may be about to be best known to millions in his new role as the Earthman warrior-poet Fox Gardener, the Minstrel of Gor.

In 2012, I wrote a piece for the Quietus, reappraising the sword and sorcery pulps of the 30s, such as RE Howards enduring Conan the Barbarian, CL Moores forgotten feminist Jirel the Swordswoman, and PG Wodehouses prophetic Jolyon the Beastslayer, about a wealthy London lawyer who is transported to feudal Japan, where he must wear a kimono and club oriental mammals to death with his 20th-century sport bat.

Consequently, I am now lazy producers go-to writer for doomed cinematic reboots of fictional barbarians, their rights available via drunken neglect or legal intimidation. Is your client familiar with John Normans Minstrel of Gor?, my baffled agent was asked.

During a three-day brainstorming session with the producers in a Soho hotel room earlier this week, I explained that Normans 35-volume series of Gor novels debuted in 1966 with Tarnsman of Gor, and follows the adventures of displaced British professor Tarl Cabot, on the distant planet of Gor. The streets of its capital, Ars, are arranged around a foul-smelling tree trunk with oracular properties, The Telling Pole, and fruits and vegetables are satirised.

Gor differs from the world of Edgar Rice Burroughss 1912 A Princess of Mars, which inspired it, as all Gors women are pliant sex slaves who accept their role as the silent Play-Doh of men. Author John Norman, a philosophy professor who wrung the soiled underwear of his fiction though a Nietzschean knicker-mangle, lost his contract with DAW Books at the turn of the century, perhaps at the hands of the one foe even Tarl Cabot could not defeat the so-called politically correct brigade.

Earlier attempts to film Normans politically in-correct fantasies failed. 1987s Gor featured Playmate of the Month Rebecca Ferratti in a shrew-skin bikini, and Oliver Reed as Sarm, an evil epicure so jaded the endless cavorting of the slave girls of Gor could not tear him from his mead goblet, Reed perhaps remembering better times when he made an elephant walk to Innsbruck.

The unpublished Minstrel of Gor should have been the series 10th instalment, falling between 1975s Castrati of Gor and 1976s Charcutiers of Gor, but was withdrawn due to the rage of Canadian progressive rock band Rush. Lyricist Neil Peart accused Norman of plagiarising their similarly Ayn Rand-inspired 2112 album, in graffiti sprayed on to the writers pet capybara, Friedrich, written in fictional Gorean runes, painstakingly invented by vocalist Geddy Lee out of his own head.

In Minstrel of Gor, Fox Gardener, a former hippy songwriter who has become disillusioned with the insipid Canyon Grove scene and its innate liberal hypocrisy, finds himself transported to Gor. Here his anti-trade union power ballads become tools in the culture war between the desert-dwelling Goreans and the snowflake-worshipping Observers of the High Ground, who tolerate womens voices.

My potential employers had originally wanted to adapt 1977s Slave Girl of Gor, in which an attractive 70s campus feminist poet, Judy Thornbush, wakes up chained to a rock on Gor and begins the brutal process of learning her place, at the hands of unfeeling barbarians for whom Shulamith Firestones seminal The Dialectic of Sex : The Case for Feminist Revolution isnt really a thing. But the rights for Minstrel of Gor were available at half the price and all the books are basically the same anyway.

All through our three-day session, the producers checked and rechecked their Facebook updates and Twitter feeds, trying to game the zeitgeist, and the haunting omnipresence of Laurence Fox filled the room like a cloud of yellow steam rising from a hot urinal trough. But with a mans laughing face.

Foxs media saturation proved the politically correct concerns that had forced Norman to tinkle his later Gor novels into the toilet of e-publishing were undeniably in retreat. The time had come to find an actor to embody Normans once-unmarketable philosophy of compassion-free power and the privilege of birthright.

Norman himself had imagined Minstrel of Gors titular hero as the hard rocker Ted Nugent, and had compared Gardener to him in the novel (Gardener came out of the rectangular door. He looked quite like Ted Nugent from music. Minstrel of Gor, page 56). But Nugent was now 71 and the sentiments of his best song, Jailbait, while chiming with the Gorean worldview, spooked investors. Who was our Minstrel of Gor? Newsfeeds fizzed and Twitter twatted. The answer was staring us in the face.

Furious online snowflakes predicted Foxs Sikh-denying ejaculations would end his acting career. But Minstrel of Gor might yet make Fox, who may yet agree to star, an unlikely action hero of the calibre of Rick Hill, Eric Allan Kramer, or Manis from Every Which Way But Loose. My employers drank wine over dinner, and spoke of Pawe Pawlikowskis Cold War and the Macedonian beekeeping drama Honeyland. But they saw dollars floating on the turning tide. We are, as someone once said, beyond good and evil.

Stewart Lees Snowflake: Tornado is at Londons South Bank Centre in June and July, and tours nationally from 28 January

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Laurence Fox is the hero we deserve and I have just the role for him - The Guardian

The City of St. Paul is constantly raising taxes, which can result in taxing people (especially elderly) out of their homes.

When our winter season begins and the city declares snow emergencies, they threaten to tag and tow cars. The city only seems to ticket and tow cars in downtown, around Grand Avenue and Highland Park.

If they would stand firm on their stance of towing and ticketing illegally parked vehicles from all over the city would make more money AND create safer streets.

If theyre not going to tag and tow cars all over, why bother doing it at all? Its a joke!

Jacqueline Heintz, St. Paul

Gregg Mensings letter published Sunday, Jan. 19, The Obama Economy, cannot go unanswered. He notes, our economy collapsed under President Bush, a collapse caused by the banking industry.

That banking industry was solely responsible for the 2007 economic collapse is fantasy, an incorrect recollection of economic history. Most recessions and economic collapses are the product of bad government policy. The one in 2007 was no different.

In the run-up to that recession congressman Barney Frank and U.S. Sen. Chris Dodd manufactured reckless, high-risk government housing policies in an effort to generate home ownership. Sen. Dodd, as I recall, was bought and paid for by the housing industry, having refinanced two of his properties via Countrywide Financial at exceptionally low interest rates via his personal relationship with Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozilo.

At the same time, an ideological Fed Chairman a disciple of Ayn Rand was force-feeding money into financial markets with excessive expansionary money-supply policy that continued for years. Housing economist Ed Gramlich internally warned his colleague Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan that excessive money was creating a housing bubble. The Wall Street Journal, nearly every day for months and years, warned way too much money was in the system for way too long.

Excess money had to go somewhere. It went into speculation in housing markets and commodities. It unleashed animal spirits in housing loan industry.

As Secretary of the Treasury Henry Paulson stated at testimony on Capitol Hill at the time, There is plenty of blame to go around here.

Lawrence Sagstetter, Shoreview

This is in response to a letter with the title Implications in the Jan. 12 paper.

I too was 17 when Roe v. Wade was passed, but my fathers bravery in having an Abortion is Murder bumper sticker did influence my reaction, one of complete shock. I continue to be shocked by the very sad fact that babies are being killed.

I know personally many people who waited a long time in order to adopt.

As a woman, a mother and a grandmother, I feel this way: A baby is not just tissue in a womans body, a baby is SOMEBODY.

Tons of love is being discarded in the interest of a woman wanting to discontinue her pregnancy. It breaks my heart to think of how many wonderful people were prevented life by abortion. Hopefully hearts will be turned around to see the preciousness of each and every baby. The implications of reversing Roe v Wade would surely help in that regard.

Kathryn Lindner, Circle Pines

A sincere thanks to the St. Paul Pioneer Press for including Mitch Alboms Los Angeles Times column, Helping one child at a time in Haiti, in Mondays paper.

On New Years Day, I read Mitchs book Finding Chika. It brought tears to my eyes. I read about Mitch and his wife who were taking care of Chika. I learned that Mitch was involved in helping the children in Haiti for many years.

The column Helping one child at a time in Haiti brought even more information about the terrible situation going on there. It warms my heart, so to speak, to know that Mitch is trying so hard to help the children of Haiti. In my opinion, Mitch Albom is a hero in todays world.

DeAnne Cherry, Woodbury

See the original post here:

Letters: St. Paul should stand firm on snow emergency tagging and towing - St. Paul Pioneer Press

On Tuesday, we saw modest declines in the stock market that were driven by fears of an economic fallout from the rapidly spreading Wuhan coronavirus. As of this writing, there have been 17 confirmed deaths and some 540 cases of infection, and that number is bound to soar in the days and weeks to come.

Undoubtedly, the sensationalism in the media over the possible threat of a global pandemic will spike, because there is no more eyeball-grabbing headline than the threat of Armageddon. So, considering the situation remains in the nascent stages, I wanted to assuage any fears you might have about this situation. And because this publication is committed to peeling off the top layers of the onion skin on any issue, Im also going to provide you with some ways that you, as an investor, can make money buying the Wuhan virus.

To do that, I enlisted the expert help of my friend, macro analyst extraordinaire, and contributor to myIntelligence ReportandSuccessful Investingnewsletters, Tom Essaye, founder and editor of the highly recommendedSevens Report.

The following is a conversation I had with Tom last night regarding the Wuhan virus and its market implications.

Jim Woods (JW): Based on my reading, the Wuhan coronavirus is a strain of the more common coronavirus that gives us mild upper respiratory infections. That sounds very similar to the SARS virus that became a big threat in 2003, and the MERS virus that caused a scare in 2012.

Tom Essaye (TE): It sounds like a case of viral dj vu to me. The only reason its called the Wuhan coronavirus is because it originated in Wuhan, China, and all the cases in other countries have been traced back to people who visited Wuhan recently. Scientists think the virus was alive in an animal (probably a fish) and made the jump to people there.

JW: Thats scary, but thats also nature.

TE: Yes, it is. It also scared markets, because the spread of the virus and the implication that it might be transmitted through human contact is what hit stocks on Tuesday. That fear is compounded by the fact that the Chinese New Year is on Saturday, and travel within China around the New Year is similar to the week of Thanksgiving here in the United States, so there is the possibility this virus could spread rapidly.

JW: From an economic standpoint, fears of an epidemic are definitely not good. I think thats likely the reason stocks were down on this news.

TE: The concern here is that people in China might sit out the New Year for fear of getting sick, which will hurt the Chinese economy and make a global economic rebound (which is priced into stocks) less likely.

JW: Well, if the virus does spread globally, that would make the negative economic impact much larger and, as you mentioned, given that a global economic rebound is priced into stocks, that would obviously be a headwind for markets.

TE: I agree. Yet you know me, Im always looking for a silver lining in any situation, and a way for investors to seize the opportunity.

JW: Yes, I know, and thats why I love you.

TE: (Laughs). In all seriousness, since this disease is closely related to SARS, I think the market reaction to the SARS outbreak gives us a good template to follow. Thats why I went back and looked at market returns during the SARS scare, which I dated roughly from December 2002 through April 2003. I then looked at cross asset returns to see what fared the best.

JW: I remember that period well. I was freelancing as a writer/book editor then, and I was happy that I didnt have to do any overseas travel. I was also happy that I was trading gold during that time, as it was one of the few asset classes that held up to the scare.

TE: Thats exactly right. In fact, gold gained nearly 6% over that time frame and rallied nearly 20% at the highs on a general risk-off move in markets. Moreover, during that five-month period anything related to discretionary spending or the emerging markets/China underperformed, which is exactly what wed expect. Global consumer discretionary stocks fell nearly 5%, while emerging markets and global stocks fell 2.5%. The S&P 500 and Nasdaq both saw smaller declines, but its important to note that the lows over that period were substantially worse than the final result, as all of those indices (S&P 500, Nasdaq, ACWI, Emerging Markets, Global Consumer Discretionary) each fell more than 10%. So, there was volatility over that time period.

JW: So, besides gold, where do you see the opportunities for investors if the Wuhan virus does turn out to be a SARS-like event?

TE: Im glad you asked that, because I also took a look at the same basket of indices and sector performance over the ensuing 12 months (May 2003 through May 2004), and emerging markets were the clear winner. While all the major indices rebounded, the MSCI Emerging Markets index returned more than 49% over the next year and traded as high as 60% over the following year.

JW: Thats very interesting, particularly because the current risk/reward in emerging markets is very positive. Ive already mentioned this to my readers, but I currently see a bullish confluence of factors when considering emerging markets, e.g. low valuations, Chinese fiscal stimulus, the phase one trade deal between the U.S. and China and the resulting expectation of a global growth rebound. Together, I think these factors support the bullish case for emerging market equities such as those in theiShares MSCI Emerging Markets ETF (EEM).

TE: I agree. And notably, EEM fell 2.5% on Tuesday due to Wuhan virus fears. To me, that pullback is likely to represent a very good opportunity for investors to begin to leg into an emerging market position over the next few days/weeks on any extended EEM weakness. And though Wuhan does look scary, looking through my lens it just looks a lot like SARS. And as I just told you, emerging markets were the contrarian play out of the SARS scare back in 2003/2004, and that could definitely be the case again.

JW: Thanks, Tom. Whenever I need a smart opinion, its comforting to know that I can chat you up.

TE: Anytime, Jim. Now stop thinking about markets and go feed your horses.

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Reminiscences of Intellectual Activism with a Fellow Idea Warrior

When two friends whove known each other for more than three decades get together to reminisce about their mutual passion for ideas, literature, career and living the Renaissance Man ethos, you know youre in for an auditory treat.

And thats exactly what you get in this episode of theWay of the Renaissance Man podcast, as I speak with my good friend, writer, filmmaker and intellectual activist Stewart Margolis.

During this discussion, youll learn how Stewart and I began our adventures in idea advocacy while students at UCLA, and how weve continued to promote those ideas throughout the decades.

Youll also learn about Stewarts years living the life of a financier in Bermuda; his various film and screenwriting projects, and his work with the Ayn Rand Institute.

If youve ever wanted to eavesdrop on two friends ruminating on their mutual love of reason, passion and staying in the moment, thenthis episode was made for you.

******************************************************************

Hold the Restless Dreams of Youth

Any escape might help to smoothThe unattractive truthBut the suburbs hold no charms to sootheThe restless dreams of youth

RUSH, Subdivisions

I could draw from Neil Pearts prodigious body of work for years, but I promise I will be judicious in my use of The Professors wisdom. Yet because the wound of his passing remains raw in my heart, I thought Id give you an excerpt from one more lyrical passage that helped shape my mind as a young man.

Upon hearing the bands brilliant critique of social conformity in the song Subdivisions, I knew that I had to go out and explore what the world had to offer me. Perhaps thats why Ive tried my whole life to be aRenaissance Man, and to do many different things as well as I can. And though I am middle aged now, my restless dreams of youth continue to fuel my passion for life. May that spirit also animate you on your lifes journey.

Wisdom about money, investing and life can be found anywhere. If you have a good quote that youd like me to share with your fellow readers, send it to me, along with any comments, questions and suggestions you have about my newsletters, seminars or anything else.Click hereto ask Jim.

In the name of the best within us,

Jim Woods

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Buying the Wuhan Virus - Stock Investor

ANALYSIS/OPINION:

The beginning of a new year is a time to take stock in ourselves, to revise our goals and plans for the future, and to hope against hope the coming year will be better than the last. Frankly, there are lots of reasons for optimism. The economy is humming. The United States is as close to full employment as it is ever likely to get and, now that Federal Reserve Chairman Jay Powell has concluded things arent overheating and theres no need for a hike in interest rates to cool things off, growth and expansion should continue.

The beginning of a new decade, as this also is, presents an opportunity to take stock in the kind of nation we are and want to be in the future. Thats healthy, even as the rhetoric flies, reckless, hot, fast and furious out of our televisions and across our computer screens and smartphones. Theres a lot at stake. America is still, as Lincoln put it succinctly in his 1862 State of the Union message, the last, best hope of earth. We have to decide, all 300 million-plus of us, what kind of nation we want to be.

In that regard, there are warning signs many of us want to break significantly with the past. America was established as a place where the right of conscience was not only respected but protected, and not just in some ambiguous, amorphous way derived from traditions going back centuries as in England. Here, the founders took steps to ensure the right of conscience was enshrined in written law so that no man or woman could be forced to think as the government dictated.

That concept grew beyond the government to become a dominant theme in our common culture. As a nation, we are rightfully proud of what some call our free speech culture in which ordinary people can, as it was popularly put not all that long ago, speak truth to power without fear or reprisal.

That appears to be changing. The concept of victimization as embraced by the American left as a political organizing tool and path to power is an inherent assault on our individual right of conscience. All ideas are still said to be equal, as George Orwell might observe if he were writing today, but some ideas have become more equal than others. At Americas colleges and universities, there are countless examples of groupthink where debates over political, moral, and social issues have run freedom of expressed thought to ground, in many cases with the active assistance of university leaders.

Some might call that tyranny and, if it indeed is, be warned that it is spreading to all aspects of American life. Where no less a person than Hillary Rodham Clinton asserted during her husbands presidency that dissent was patriotic, thoughts deviating from so-called cultural norms expressed by the major and social media are now considered dangerous.

It is fair to ask now as we begin the decade in which the sester- or semiquincentennial of the American experiment will be celebrated what kind of a nation we want to be in the future. Do we still want the right of conscience to occupy its position of prominence atop the list of enumerated rights we enjoy? Do we expect or even want free men and women to still be able to think for themselves? Or are those intent on remaking the American system have it in mind to impose some kind of official or quasi-official standard against which the acceptability of thoughts expressed shall be measured? There are hints abundant that they do.

These questions matter as we debate seemingly mundane things like the responsibility of social media platforms for user-posted content and the requirement of non-for-profit groups engaged in issue advocacy to disclose their funding sources to the government. For most of its history, America has been a place where we have many times accepted that people have an intrinsic right to be wrong. There are a few notable exceptions none of us should forget that add fire to the arguments of those who would disagree with that premise. Yet we know from experience the government cannot make people virtuous. As people as varied as Hannah Arendt and Ayn Rand have observed, a government powerful enough to make people believe something is one with enough power to force people to believe, contrary to their personal knowledge and better judgment, that A is B.

We saw plenty of that in the last century. It always ended badly. Let us now, as we move into the future, be boundless in our optimism and continue to respect our traditions of decent respect for the various opinions of man and womankind. The right to be wrong may someday turn out to be the most important right we have.

Read more:

EDITORIAL: What next? - Washington Times

I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the tireless ex-Muslim cartoonist and author Bosch Fawstin. If youre unfamiliar with Boschs work, this is a great place to start, but be sure to check out my 2015 TOS interview with him, Joshua Lipanas review of the first chapter of his graphic novel, The Infidel, featuring Pigman, and Nicholas Provenzos review of his latest book. If youd like to support Boschs efforts to educate people about the true nature of Islam and to defend free speech, consider becoming a patron of his work through Patreon. Craig Biddle

Craig Biddle: Great to chat with you again, Bosch. Its been a while since we last spoke, and I look forward to catching up and hearing about your recent work and future projects.

To begin, because some of our readers may not know much about you, say a few words about yourself and your work. Who is Bosch Fawstin? What does he do? And why does he do it?

Bosch Fawstin: Thanks for reaching out again, Craig. I always enjoy speaking with you.

Im a cartoonist. I write and draw single cartoons, comic books, and graphic novels. I also write essays to accompany my cartoons on topics such as free speech, Islam, jihad, and the left.

Im the winner of the first Mohammad cartoon contest, and I was announced as the winner at a Mohammad art exhibition in Garland, Texas. Two jihadists who came to murder the attendees got their heads blown off by a cop, as a security guard there put it, and my life has not been the same since.

Although I have no regrets, and I will defend free speech to the death, the path Ive chosen comes with loss, in a number of ways, and it has made my life more difficult. But I cant imagine doing anything else.

Biddle: I know I speak for many people when I say: Thank you for being such a stalwart defender of free speech. You are the only person who does what you do. Your work comes with death threats and murder attempts. It also helps to defend everyone else against such mayhem by addressing and discrediting the mysticism that underlies and gives rise to it.

Tell me about your view of Islam, your history in the religion, and why and how you got out of it.

Fawstin: I really appreciate you putting it that way. Its a far cry from how Im usually described, and not just by my enemies but even by those who should know better.

Islam is an evil ideology, a political religion that has retarded the humanity of everyone under its thrall. Just look at the countries who live by its ethics and youll understand that it should be in the dustbin of history. Yet it persists. And it destroys human lives. It destroys the lives of those who try to live by it. And, by motivating some of them to commit atrocities, it results in the destruction of many more lives.

If you want to see Islam in practice on a day-to-day basis, I direct you to the website TheReligionOfPeace.com, which posts about the deaths and injuries caused by Islams true believers every single day. When I post a screenshot of the websites weekly and monthly tallies, I get a good number of shocked emojis in response. And these reactions come from people who follow my work and are thus familiar with the horrors caused by Islam. Even they are shocked to see the relentless carnage. Most Western media ignore these events.

I just checked the site today, and from the week of November 2 through 8 [2019], 151 people were murdered and 167 injured in 26 attacks in 13 countries. But the media dont report this, nor do they ever identify the true nature of Islam, and so the vast majority of people remain ignorant of it all.

As for my history with Islam, I was born to Albanian Muslim parents in the Bronx, New York, and I was raised Muslim. Ive said this before, but its worth repeating: Although many people today would describe my parents and my larger Muslim family as moderate Muslims, there was nothing moderate about the hatred for Jews or the abuse of women in my family. In Islam, Jews are regarded as descendants of apes and pigs and fit to be slaughtered, and women are considered a necessary evil, to be used for sex and to bring male Muslim heirs into the world.

The thing that made me question it all was the sharp contrast between my life at home and my life at school and with my friends. After learning about the Holocaust in school, I began to recoil every time a relative praised Hitler, whom I now refer to as Islams favorite infidel. And seeing my friends treat all people as people made me challenge the Islamic view that some are not. So in my mid-teens I quietly left Islam. There was no hard break, no one thing that did it, just the fact that it was ugly and that people involved in it lied about so much. That led me to see there was nothing there for me, nothing good.

In time, I came to love superhero comic books and to understand that fighting evil, including evil ideas, is important, and that only the good can fight evil. The only place I saw this happening was in superhero stories and, later, in novels. A few years later, I discovered Ayn Rands work, which I loved. I saw her fiction as the peak of the heroic fiction genre, her nonfiction as clearly correct, and both as powerfully uplifting. Nothing has come close since.

Biddle: Id say that when you speak of Islam, you know of what you speak. And you are in a tiny minority of people who have left Islam in search of rational ideas and a good lifeand then found and adopted Ayn Rands philosophy. Tell me more about how Rands ideas have affected your thinkingboth in general and with regard to your understanding of the nature of religion as such and of Islam in particular.

Fawstin: Youre right, I am rare in leaving Islam and adopting Ayn Rands philosophy of Objectivism. Its worth noting that the ex-Muslims I know are atheists or humanists or Christians. Come to think of it, I dont know of any ex-Muslims whove become Jews, which I guess just goes to show that Islam has so thoroughly poisoned the well on Jews and Judaism that even ex-Muslims think that adopting Judaism is a bridge too far.

Rands ideas have affected my thinking in countless ways. I was a smart kid, and I was honest, but I didnt have a life-serving system of philosophy to guide my choices and my growth. Rands work challenged me to think, to rethink, to see things in a new way, to see things as they are. Im not one of those people who says that Rand merely wrote what I always thought. She did far more than that. She created a revolutionary philosophya monumental feat by an extraordinary mind.

I love the truth, and here was a woman who wrote the truth and nothing but the truth, in a way that no one else ever has. I found her deeply philosophical fiction and heroes exhilarating. There are fictional heroes, there are superheroes, and then there are Ayn Rands heroes, who make nearly all others pale by comparison. Here was a thinker who took ideas seriouslydeadly seriouslyand wrote as if her life depended on it.

As for how her philosophy affected my thinking regarding Islam, I would say that my concern for truth led me out of Islam, my continued pursuit of truth led me to Objectivism, and Objectivism has enhanced my ability to understand and champion truth and to identify and reject its antitheses. Islam is squarely in that latter category.

Objectivism helped me to see that all religions are irrational; all require faith from their adherents, and all religious prophets are liars. But the particularly violent nature of Mohammad, as compared to the other prophets, is an important difference to take note of, especially during this era of global jihad. The fact that Mohammadwho is regarded by Muslims as the perfect model of a manspread Islam by the sword explains why Muslims are more violent than other religionists. And this violence is demanded by the religionnot by any perversion of the religion, but by the clear meaning of its scriptures. The problem is Islamnot Islamism or extremist Islam or some hijacked version of the religion. Just Islam.

By the way, I wrote an essay in 2010 dealing with this dangerous name game were playing with Islam, titled Calling Islam Islam, which I recommend to anyone who is under the impression that Islam is not the ideology of jihadists.

Many people conflate religion with morality and so argue that because Islam advocates immoral acts, it is not a religion. I wrote another essay recently, published in my second volume of My Mohammad Cartoons, which deals with this claim. I discuss why Islam is a religion, and why denying this is self-defeating and only helps the Islamic enemy.

At the top of my cartoon accompanying that essay, I wrote: If this war comes down to Islam versus Christianity, then Kill the infidels wherever you find them versus Love thy Enemy/Turn the other cheek is a war between a homicidal religion and a suicidal religiona war that guarantees the Wests defeat. The essay delves into post-9/11 politics. Leftists and conservatives are essentially indistinguishable in their appeasing, altruistic foreign policies, and their defense of Islam (i.e., the religion of peace) is absolute whereas their defense of America is conditional and tepid at best. These policies give our enemies hope that they can win. Its not Islam that makes the enemy believe they can win, its our weakness, our refusal even to name Islam as the essence of the problemnever mind attack it.

Biddle: What are your top three recommendations for people who want to help fight Islam, expose its true nature, and get adherents to drop it?

Fawstin: The first thing is to study Islam before discussing it, so you wont confuse yourself or others about exactly what it is were dealing with. The reason we have yet to respond to the Islamic enemy in a rational way in this war, and why it remains undefeated, is because many fail to acknowledge or face the actual nature of the Islamic threat.

The second thing is to tell the truth, by whatever means you can, in whatever medium you can. Say what this thing is. That is the single most powerful way to put a crack of doubt in peoples minds and get them to question their beliefs about Islam. So many in the West, especially intellectuals and journalists, have been lying to Muslims, saying that their religion is fine and that its only the so-called extremists who are the problem. Thats dangerous nonsense. When I hear this, I remember my own experience as a young Muslim, doubting its moral standing. I can only imagine how confusing it is for Muslims who grasp that something is wrong with their religion, with their way of life, but who hear it praised by outsiders as a religion of peace and the like.

Muslims need to confront Islams true nature and what it calls for. Many who attain more than a superficial understanding of the Koran end up abandoning Islam. So one of the most effective things advocates of reason can do is get a clear, firsthand understanding of the nature of Islam, and then communicate that far and wide.

The third most important thing is to repeat the truth, again and again and again. Resistance to the truth surrounding this issue is huge and is fed by leftist intellectuals, co-religionists (Christians and Jews), and the media. Ive learned during these past dozen years that Ive been active in writing and drawing against Islam and jihad that I constantly have to restate the truth as if I have never spoken it or written it before. Breaking through the resistance requires repeating the truth in various ways and from various angles until people get it. Some never will. Some are closed to the truth. But even those who are open to it often need to hear it over and over to break through the resistance to moral absolutism and moral judgment that Western culture has fostered for so long.

Biddle: Know the truth, speak the truth, repeat the truth. Amen. I sure would like to see more of thaton this subject and so many others.

Reading and sharing your books are effective means toward those ends, so please say a few words about the books youve written or illustrated as well as any current or future projects you can mention.

Fawstin: I released my first book in 2004, which was a graphic novel titled Table for One, a story that takes place in one night in an Italian restaurant. It was nominated for an Eisner Award, which are commonly called the Oscars of Comics.

I then began working on my second graphic novel, The Infidel, featuring Pigman, which takes on Islam, Jihad, and political correctness. As I worked on the story, I created images of the main characters in it for my blog, which I then ended up collecting in my second book, ProPiganda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad, published in 2009, along with a number of essays Id written on the Islamic threat. I then released the first chapter of The Infidel in 2011 in comic book form. It will end up being about seven chapters. Once theyre finished, I intend to compile all of the volumes in a pigskin-leather bound hardcover book.

In April 2018, I released my third book, My Mohammad Cartoons Vol. 1, and My Mohammad Cartoons Vol. 2 followed in April 2019. All of my collections include essays Ive written on related topics, such as free speech and particular aspects of the Islamic threat.

In early 2019, I released the first volume of my series Peaceful Death Threats, and Ill release volume two soon. I have enough death threats for at least four volumes, and these are only the best death threats of the thousands that Ive gotten. I title them Peaceful Death Threats because a good number of the Muslims who threaten me with death over my Mohammad cartoons also feel the need to mention how peaceful they and Islam are, which is as Islamic as it gets. I think publishing the actual death threats, along with the names and faces of the Muslims making the threats, is a good way to show that the problem is Islamic culture at large, not just the so-called extremists. And because I received the threats for publishing Mohammad cartoons, I thought it was only fitting to create new Mohammad cartoons to publish alongside the threats in these books.

Im currently working on three other books. Islam Bitches is about Islamophiles. I draw politicians and celebrities dressed in Islamic garb along with their particularly dishonest quotes about Islam. To further show these Islamophiles the kind of respect they deserve, I have Mohammad dressed as their pimp, introducing each of them by name.

Theres also Illustwriter: The Art of Bosch Fawstin, my biggest book yet, which collects thousands of pieces spanning a dozen years, including cartoons, book covers, and unpublished art.

Finallyand I think this might be the first time that Ive ever discussed this publiclyIm illustrating a childrens Koran. Im told by the writer, Kre Bluitgen, that the title will likely be The Shady Garden, and that it will be about two hundred pages.

Kre Bluitgen is the Danish writer who had been searching for an artist to illustrate his book since at least 2005. Flemming Rose attempted to help him find Danish artists who were willing to draw Mohammad, which led to the Mohammad cartoon crisis. I learned recently that Bluitgen was still searching for an artist, so I contacted him, and Im doing it.

The truth about Islam condemns Islam, and I think this book is a good way to show that truth in visual form, where I draw Mohammad, his child bride Aisha, Allah, Islamic hell, and so forth, in ways not seen beforeall of which is considered blasphemous in Islam. I dont know exactly when it will be released, but I will be providing updates on my blog.

Its come full circle for me. I never set out to draw Mohammad until the Danish Mohammad cartoonists were threatened with death for doing so. Then I drew Mohammad in support of them and of free speech. Then I drew Mohammad after Molly Norris went into hiding, after announcing her Everybody Draw Mohammad Day, and again after Charlie Hebdos offices were firebombed in 2011, and again after the Charlie Hebdo massacre. All told, Ive drawn Mohammad over three hundred times. And Ill continue doing so.

If you want to fully understand why I do this and why I think others should as well, I recommend reading what has been described by a reader as my manifesto: The Draw Mohammad Challenge.

Biddle: Thanks, well link to all of these items in the online version of this article. Where can people follow your work and support your efforts?

Fawstin: I have a blog, Bosch Fawstin, IllustWriter, and a store, The Bosch Fawstin Store. Im now down to one social media platform, Facebook. In addition to my comic books and books, I also sell t-shirts, Mohammad trading cards and playing cards, prints, and my original art. Anyone interested in helping me continue my work can become a patron at Patreon.

Biddle: Thank you for your time and for all that you do, Bosch. Freedom of speech is the last leg of a free society, and you are on the front lineliterally putting your life on the lineto defend it. My hat is off to you.

Fawstin: I really appreciate you giving me the opportunity to share my thoughts and to promote my work with your audience. You are a rare breed of publisher today. If only we had more like you in the world. Thanks again, Craig.

See the article here:

Bosch Fawstin on Combating the Evil of Islam - The Objective Standard

This years original reviews provide unique insight into the literary world through a distinctly progressive lens, including two National Arts & Entertainment Journalism award-winning pieces by Truthdig contributor Allen Barra and Foreign Editor Natasha Hakimi Zapata. Read the full reviews by clicking on the hyperlinked titles below.

The Trickster King and the Erudite LiteralistBy ALLEN BARRA

Approaching Vladimir Nabokovs 120th birthday, Truthdig looks at his friendship and falling-out with another literary giant, Edmund Wilson.

When the Voiceless SpeakByALEXIS CAMINS

Filipino American author Alex Tizon spent his life raising up the lives of those rendered invisible by society.

Putting Trump to Shame Without Ever Saying His Name

By NATASHA HAKIMI ZAPATA

Written after the 45th president was inaugurated, Terrance Hayes sonnets have an urgency that will leave readers heads spinning.

The Future of MeatBy CARYN HARTGLASSAs people become aware of the effects of eating animals on climate change and human health, a new book asks whether we will see an end to it.

Reclaiming DifferenceByPAUL VON BLUMA new anthology shines light on differently abled artists, including Sandie Yi, born with two digits on each hand and foot, whose art forces viewers to reconsider beauty.

Country, Smoothed Over

By TIM RILEY

Ken Burns documentary Country Music and its book tie-in present country music with a naive affection that misses key American tensions.

Who Is Ayn Rand?

By LOUISE RUBACKY

A new book argues weakly for the influence of Ayn Rand on our cultureafter all, the dominant classes in America were greedy and selfish from the get-go.

The Madness Driving Climate CatastropheByH. PATRICIA HYNES

A new book examines how corporate capitalism, through fossil fuel-based technology, has led the world to the point of destruction.

Civilizing Perpetual ForeignersBy ELAINE MARGOLIN

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The world you desire can be won. It exists it is real it is possible it is yours! (Ayn Rand).

Last week, our mindfulness class celebrated the end of the semester by making vision boards.

If you stumbled in, it may not have looked like anything special, but there was a distinct knowingness in the air as we discovered new things about each other something very relaxing about being in the hum of individual purpose and mutual intention at the intersection of what is real and what has yet to become!

This inescapable reality was the crux of our semester. We were investigating ourselves learning how to navigate the inter-relational, creative cooperative called being human flexing the process that responds to the question:

We did this by training our attentional lens to identify and adapt to the patterns of the universal laws of attraction, relativity and causality testing out the power of clarity in theright here right now experiencesofour lives. Time and time again, our findings returned with the same results:

Attention expands what we believe, and what we believe we become!

So, we sifted through magazines snipping away any doubt or fear or need of any certainty trusting the vibe of a playlist that spanned over 50 years, plugged into some shared but infinitely shifting heart song!

A quiet, simple hymn emerges when intention meets attention: time and space conspire!

Heart and mind intersect and cause our voices to be heard, our hands to create, our vision to emerge to snip and tear and write and point!

In one fell swoop, we relax we let go of the content of who we believe we are, and like a raindrop returning to the ocean, we expand into the bigness of who we are infinitely becoming!

No struggle, no angst, no suffering. No junky, negative-back-talk-identity from old wounds or cloudy memories.

When attention is lit, we see clearly we recognize purpose knocking at the door. And, the positive action of choosing the images and words that extend our vision, empowers desire to open that door from the inside to extend, to effect, to wake up. We realign our trajectory and rediscover a shared destiny!

His is a story of spiritual awakening. As a man, he couldnt escape the causality of a conditioned world. Only when he let go ofthe belief that this time identity (the mind/body content that defined his idea of forsaken) was who he was completely, could he be freed from suffering.

He had to trace his way back home: in order to tap into the infinite possibility of spirit, he had to recognize the power of belief, and to recognize the power of belief he had to experience suffering through belief.

A contemporary existential crisis would look no different!

Suffering is knocking on the door from the inside. (Rumi) Acceptance is open door! Awareness is no door!

Take the polarized state of our nation. The system/process that funnels our collective energy is faulty inefficiently distributing currency (door infinitely open), and/or with bias (door infinitely closed). The defect/effect responds both ways. Open or closed, the belief that a door exists between us rather than for us, stresses the system which causes spiritual disequilibrium indifference, isolation, disconnection and a general lack of purpose.

The action of mutual responsibility of architect and resident is what allows the door to open freely, and how we can use it make a better world!

When we are standing in right or wrong, were way too close to the door; we cant see our beliefs have created a very real world thats keeping us apart.

Fear arrives to conquer attention and reactivity divides intention.

When equal opportunity to access that idea is not equally shared, we feel betrayed crucified in a state of moral crisis. This is the discomfort the constriction the visceral injustice as we move farther away from our shared Father our homeland our center-point.

Apart, its easy to become discontent, to feel at the mercy of some idea. Reaction causes us to miss opportunities to respond in ways that speak to a shared inter-dependence; and fear disallows us the inner-wisdom to own our sh*t to claim the answer to the longing,How do we move forward?through the question,How did we get here?

Only the qualities of humility, courage and a sincere desire to see clearly bring about the correction atonement and relief; and, only through a longing to be whole holy forgiven can we find our way home.

Being human is a deeply visceral experience! Theres absolutely a part of me that wants to be seen enjoys being seen knows that I am expressed when I am seen!

Indeed!This life shines brightest through and with this body, this mind, this heart and this consciousness!

This human being is more!

Its not a belief that i am more, that would be another belief disguised as more. Rather, its a clarity and an honesty that supports the spirit of this idea of I am to contribute to our shared potential our response, our work, our purpose and whatever meaningfully supports the vision of a safe world!

Now is the time to be alive to imagine the world that you desire .. to tear, snip, paste!

Its the reason you are here who you have always been: expansive and sacred at the intersection of time and space.

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Alive at the Intersection of Time and Space - Thrive Global

Who Was Ayn Rand?

Born in Russia in 1905, Ayn Rand moved to the United States in 1926 and tried to establish herself in Hollywood. Her first novel, We the Living (1936), championed her rejection of collectivist values in favor of individual self interest, a belief that became more explicit with her subsequent novels The Fountainhead (1943) and Atlas Shrugged (1957). Following the immense success of the latter, Rand promoted her philosophy of Objectivism through courses, lectures and literature. She died in New York City on March 6, 1982.

Ayn Rand was born Alissa Zinovievna Rosenbaum on February 2, 1905, in St. Petersburg, Russia. The oldest daughter of Jewish parents (and eventually an avowed atheist), she spent her early years in comfort thanks to her dad's success as a pharmacist, proving a brilliant student.

In 1917, her father's shop was suddenly seized by Bolshevik soldiers, forcing the family to resume life in poverty in the Crimea. The situation profoundly impacted young Alissa, who developed strong feelings toward government intrusion into individual livelihood. She returned to her city of birth to attend the University of Petrograd, graduating in 1924, and then enrolled at the State Institute for Cinema Arts to study screenwriting.

Granted a visa to visit relatives in Chicago, Alissa left for the United States in early 1926, never to look back. She took on her soon-to-be-famous pen name and, after a few months in Chicago, moved to Hollywood to become a screenwriter.

Following a chance encounter with Hollywood titan Cecil B. DeMille, Rand became an extra on the set of his 1927 film The King of Kings, where she met actor Frank O'Connor. They married in 1929, and she became an American citizen in 1931.

Rand landed a job as a clerk at RKO Pictures, eventually rising to head of the wardrobe department, and continued developing her craft as a writer. In 1932, she sold her screenplay Red Pawn, a Soviet romantic thriller, to Universal Studios. She soon completed a courtroom drama called Penthouse Legend, which featured the gimmick of audience members serving as the jury. In late 1934, Rand and her husband moved to New York City for its production, now renamed Night of January 16th.

Around this time, Rand also completed her first novel, We the Living. Published in 1936 after several rejections, We the Living championed the moral authority of the individual through its heroine's battles with a Soviet totalitarian state. Rand followed with the novella Anthem (1938), about a future collectivist dystopia in which "I" has been stamped out of the language.

In 1937, Rand began researching a new novel by working for New York architect Ely Jacques Kahn. The result, after years of writing and more rejections, was The Fountainhead. Underscoring Rands individualistic underpinnings, the books hero, architect Howard Roark, refuses to adhere to conventions, going so far as to blowing up one of his own creations. While not an immediate success, The Fountainhead eventually achieved strong sales, and at the end of the decade became a feature film, with Gary Cooper in the role of Roark.

Rand's ideas became even more explicit with the 1957 publication of Atlas Shrugged. A massive work of more than 1,000 pages, Atlas Shrugged portrays a future in which leading industrialists drop out of a collectivist society that exploits their talents, culminating with a notoriously lengthy speech by protagonist John Galt. The novel drew some harsh reviews, but became an immediate best seller.

Around 1950, Rand met with a college student named Nathan Blumenthal, who changed his name to Nathaniel Braden and became the author's designated heir. Along with his wife, Barbara, Braden formed a group that met at Rand's apartment to engage in intellectual discussions. The group, which included future Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan, called itself the Collective, or the Class of '43 (the publication year of The Fountainhead).

Rand soon honed her philosophy of what she termed "Objectivism": a belief in a concrete reality, from which individuals can discern existing truths, and the ultimate moral value of the pursuit of self interest. The development of this system essentially ended her career as a novelist: In 1958, the Nathaniel Branden Institute formed to spread her message through lectures, courses and literature, and in 1962, the author and her top disciple launched The Objectivist Newsletter. Her books during this period, including For the New Intellectual (1961) and Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal (1966), were primarily comprised of previously published essays and other works.

Following a public split with Braden, the author published The Romantic Manifesto (1969), a series of essays on the cultural importance of art, and repackaged her newsletter as The Ayn Rand Letter. She continued traveling to give lectures, though she was slowed by an operation for lung cancer. In 1979, she published a collection of articles in Introduction to Objectivist Epistemology, which included an essay from protg Leonard Peikoff.

Rand was working on a television adaptation of Atlas Shrugged when she died of heart failure at her home in New York City on March 6, 1982.

Although she weathered criticism for her perceived literary shortcomings and philosophical arguments, Rand undeniably left her mark on the Western culture she embraced. In 1985, Peikoff founded the Ayn Rand Institute to continue her teachings. The following year, Braden's ex-wife, Barbara, published a tell-all memoir, The Passion of Ayn Rand, which later was made into a movie starring Helen Mirren.

Interest in Rand's works resurfaced alongside the rise of the Tea Party movement during President Barack Obama's administration, with leading political proponents like Rand Paul and Ted Cruz proclaiming their admiration for the author. In 2010, the Ayn Rand Institute announced that more than 500,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged had been sold the previous year.

In 2017,Tony-winning director Ivo van Hove reintroduced The Fountainhead to the American public with a production at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Having originated at Toneelgroep Amsterdam in the Netherlands, van Hove's version featured his performers speaking in Dutch, with their words projected onto a screen in English.

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Ayn Rand - - Biography

Looking for inspirational Ayn Rand quotes? Enjoy!

1. A creative man is motivated by the desire to achieve, not by the desire to beat others. Ayn Rand

2. Achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life, and that happiness, not pain or mindless self-indulgence, is the proof of your moral integrity, since it is the proof and the result of your loyalty to the achievement of your values. Ayn Rand

3. Money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. Ayn Rand

4. Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). Ayn Rand

5. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there arent enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Ayn Rand

6. The question isnt who is going to let me; its who is going to stop me. Ayn Rand

7. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark in the hopeless swamps of the not-quite, the not-yet, and the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish in lonely frustration for the life you deserved and have never been able to reach. The world you desire can be won. It exists.. it is real.. it is possible.. its yours. Ayn Rand

8. To sell your soul is the easiest thing in the world. Thats what everybody does every hour of his life. If I asked you to keep your soul would you understand why thats much harder?If its worth doing, its worth overdoing. Ayn Rand

9. Joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved, and the act of treason is to let its vision drown in the swamp of the moments torture. Ayn Rand

10. I hope you will understand my hesitation in writing to one whom I admire as the greatest representative of a philosophy to which I want to dedicate my whole life. Ayn Rand

11. Free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. Ayn Rand

12. What is greatness? I will answer: it is the capacity to live by the three fundamental values of John Galt: reason, purpose, self-esteem. Ayn Rand

13. Guilt is a rope that wears thin. Ayn Rand

14. Learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness. Ayn Rand

15. Thanksgiving is a typically American holidayThe lavish meal is a symbol of the fact that abundant consumption is the result and reward of production. Ayn Rand

16. The upper classes are a nations past; the middle class is its future. Ayn Rand

17. I need no warrant for being, and no word of sanction upon my being. I am the warrant and the sanction. Ayn Rand

18. I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. Ayn Rand

19. Freedom (n.): To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing. Ayn Rand

20. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. Ayn Rand

21. You can avoid reality, but you cannot avoid the consequences of avoiding reality. Ayn Rand

22. Learn to value yourself, which means: fight for your happiness. Ayn Rand

23. The truth is not for all men but only for those who seek it. Ayn Rand

24. I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows. Ayn Rand

25. Why is it immoral for you to desire, but moral for others to do so? Why is it immoral to produce a value and keep it, but moral to give it away? And if it is not moral for you to keep a value, why is it moral for others to accept it? If you are selfless and virtuous when you give it, are they not selfish and vicious when they take it? Ayn Rand

26. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. When I disagree with a rational man, I let reality be our final arbiter; if I am right, he will learn; if I am wrong, I will; one of us will win, but both will profit. Ayn Rand

27. The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction [that] you give it. Ayn Rand

28. The most depraved type of human being . . . (is) the man without a purpose. Ayn Rand

29. Theres nothing of any importance except how well you do your work. Ayn Rand

30. Man is an end in himself. Romantic lovethe profound, exalted, lifelong passion that unites his mind and body in the sexual actis the living testimony to that principle. Ayn Rand

31. To love is to value. Only a rationally selfish man, a man of self-esteem, is capable of lovebecause he is the only man capable of holding firm, consistent, uncompromising, unbetrayed values. The man who does not value himself, cannot value anything or anyone. Ayn Rand

32. To say I love you one must know first how to say the I. Ayn Rand

33. Dont help me or serve me, but let me see it once, because I need it. Dont work for my happiness, my brothers show me yours show me that it is possible show me your achievement and the knowledge will give me the courage for mine. Ayn Rand

34. Love is the expression of ones values, the greatest reward you can earn for the moral qualities you have achieved in your character and person, the emotional price paid by one man for the joy he receives from the virtues of another. Ayn Rand

35. There is no conflict of interests among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desiresif they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from the view of the practical. There is no conflict, and no call for sacrifice, and no man is a threat to the aims of anotherif men understand that reality is an absolute not to be faked, that lies do not work, that the unearned can not be had, that the undeserved cannot be given, that the destruction of a value which is, will not bring value to that which isnt. Ayn Rand

36. The concept of free competition enforced by law is a grotesque contradiction in terms. Ayn Rand

37. The smallest minority on earth is the individual. Those who deny individual rights cannot claim to be defenders of minorities. Ayn Rand

38. Life is the reward of virtue. And happiness is the goal and reward of life Ayn Rand

39. You must be the kind of man who can get things done. But to get things done, you must love the doing, not the secondary consequences. Ayn Rand

40. Anything may be betrayed, anyone may be forgiven, but not those who lack the courage of their own greatness. Ayn Rand

41. You were not born to be a second-hander. Ayn Rand

42. I would step in the way of a bullet if it were aimed at my husband. It is not self-sacrifice to die protecting that which you value: If the value is great enough, you do not care to exist without it. Ayn Rand

43. I dont make comparisons. I never think of myself in relation to anyone else. I just refuse to measure myself as part of anything. Im an utter egotist. Ayn Rand

44. No ones happiness but my own is in my power to achieve or to destroy Ayn Rand

45. Contradictions do not exist. Whenever you think you are facing a contradiction, check your premises. You will find that one of them is wrong. Ayn Rand

46. The ladder of success is the best climbed by stepping on the rungs of opportunity Ayn Rand

47. A desire presupposes the possibility of action to achieve it; action presupposes a goal which is worth achieving. Ayn Rand

48. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to mens stupidity, but your talent to their reason. Ayn Rand

49. Statism needs war; a free country does not. Statism survives by looting; a free country survives by producing. Ayn Rand

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Inspirational Ayn Rand quotes On Life and Capitalism (2019)