[DruulEmpire]

I hereby boost this thread as a desperate reminder than something generated by an actual rules-abiding BEA member can indeed occupy the top page of the Off-Topic section, and as a blow against the hideous unregulated hucksterism of the vile Paclatii.

[DruulEmpire]

On August 5 last year I recounted here how Project X got demonstrated and how there were some speakers gassing off before Dr. Robert Stadler was then obliged to speak.  In the immediate aftermath of so much parallel-thermonuclear destruction, it was easy to overlook those speakers.

Would Rand approve of BE?  I suppose some with a very specific take on Rand might assume so, thinking of her as little more than some swingin' near-anarchistic libertarian champion of the absolute and total spectrum of human freedom and its expression.  And yet ... and yet, I think back to this book, and how its Ubermenschen always resemble Greek gods hewn from marble or bronze (or both, for all I can tell), and how a woman like Dagny is always very classy and a personification of reason, of balanced and proportionate engineering, of no particular passions ever holding sway or galloping out of control, and I have to wonder.

It has been asked: is there any boobage in this book?  At first I was content with the "pendulous breasts" of the savage (and presumably not-to-be-envied) woman mentioned in passing in John Galt's ultimate harangue, but here, speaking in clearly deluded support of the horrible, terrible, just plain awful Project X, is this woman:

     "A fat, jellied woman, with an inadequate brassiere under a dark, perspiration-stained dress, was saying into the microphone -- Dr. Stadler could not believe it at first -- that the new invention was to be greeted with particular gratitude by the mothers of the country."

Rand describes a woman with an inadequate brassiere and sees Hell on Earth.  Some of us here may be more inclined to see Nirvana.

[DruulEmpire]

An interesting development today.  I had a ritual breakfast with my parents, who had out on the table the latest New Yorker with its article on Representative Paul Ryan, he of the so-called Ryan budgetary plan and a vaguely possible pick for Mitt's veep.  In times past I've only gotten a very precursory and superficial sense from them that they ever tried to plumb "Atlas Shrugged."  I loaned it to Mom once and she had very little to say, and Dad has never said much about it.  This time, however, we noted how Ryan has stunningly little non-political advice in his resume, how his brief stint in business was largely because he was one of three powerful families in a small town, and how my own sister easily has much more "real world" experience than he does.  We then moved on to Ryan's claim that he was inspired by "Shrugged" (see, I'm telling you, I'm not making this up, this is a running gag out there in the real world) and my parents had a rather astonishing amount to say about the particulars of the book.  Dad summed up the book with a word even I had avoided -- "fascist" -- and the beauty is that when Dad uses that word I know he is using a very narrow and precise definition.  Such a word has gotten sloppy for the rest of us, as we assume pointless things like "Hey, we're not rounding people up in concentration camps, so we can't possibly be fascist."  Anyhow, I suddenly felt much less alone in my tackling of this.  I guess owning up to intimate knowledge of this book can actually be embarrassing -- but then you wake up and realize that America's next Vice-President, and possible even President, is an "Atlas" fan, and suddenly you find the nerve to talk about it in great depth. 

[number3fac]

Had to dig in a bit to find this thread...
I recently discovered the blog Better Book Titles, which (as might be surmised) posits more-appropriate/descriptive titles for books.  There's a lot of amusing entries there, though I won't link it because there are some for youth-oriented literature.  However, here's what's been posted for Atlas Shrugged:

[rtpoe]

In his review of the movie Snowpiercer, Scott "El Santo" Ashlin summarizes Atlas Shrugged in four sentences:

"A genius entrepreneurial übermensch invents a magic engine, but he doesn’t want to pay his taxes, so instead of building the thing, he goes and pouts in a secret clubhouse. Two more genius entrepreneurial übermenschen want to use the magic engine to power a magic train, but they don’t want to pay their taxes either, so they go and pout in the secret clubhouse, too. Soon all the genius entrepreneurial übermenschen in the land are pouting in the secret clubhouse instead of building their inventions or running their business empires. Civilization collapses, and all the moochers and parasites become very sorry that the Bolsheviks weren’t nicer to Ayn Rand’s daddy - but it’s too late for that to help the moochers and parasites now, because the spiteful selfishness of vindictive children is the only legitimate basis for a moral and rational social order."