Ohio Teen Wins $2,000!

IRVINE, Calif, August 11, 2009–High school sophomore Hillary Purcell, from Terrace Park, Ohio, is the winner of the Ayn Rand Institute’s annual Anthem essay contest, for which she received a prize of $2,000. Ms. Purcell is a student at Mariemont High School in Cincinnati.

First published in 1938, Anthem depicts a collectivist dictatorship in a future in which the word “I” has vanished, and how a lone dissident discovers the lost word’s true meaning.

ARI also awarded 5 second prizes ($500), 10 third prizes ($200), 45 finalist ($50) and 175 semifinalist ($30) prizes. A complete list of winners and information about next year’s competition can be found here.

Open to 8th, 9th and 10th graders, the Anthem essay contest requires contestants to write on one of several topics dealing with the characters and themes in the novel. The contest is designed to promote critical thinking and writing skills. Essays are judged on both style and content.

Since 1985 more than 226,000 students from around the world have entered ARI’s essay contests. This year, more than 16,000 students submitted their essays to the Anthem contest, an all-time record.

Each year ARI offers three separate contests (Anthem, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged) and awards more than $81,250 in prizes. ARI has given away more than $838,000 to contest winners during the past 20 years.

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Atlas Shrugged Selling in Record Numbers

Irvine, CA, July 13, 2009–Penguin USA, publisher of the four American editions of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, has reported that in the first half of 2009 it shipped well over 300,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged to distributors, bookstores, bookstore chains, online resellers, libraries, businesses and other institutions.

As Dr. Yaron Brook, executive director of the Ayn Rand Institute, noted, “Considering that in the first half of 2008 Penguin shipped about 85,000 copies, the spectacular jump to 300,000 copies in the first half of 2009 represents an increase of almost 250 percent in gross sales of Atlas Shrugged!

Reports from industry sources indicate that more copies of Atlas Shrugged were sold in book stores and by online resellers in the first half of 2009 than in all of 2008, when a new all-time annual record was established with more than 200,000 copies of the novel sold in the United States.

“The spike in sales of Atlas Shrugged more than a half century after its initial publication is truly remarkable,” Dr. Brook pointed out. “Annual sales of Atlas Shrugged have been increasing for decades to a level not seen even in Ayn Rand’s lifetime. Sales of the U.S. paperback editions averaged around 70,000 copies a year in the 1980s, and doubled to about 140,000 copies a year in the current decade. And the pace of sales has been accelerating recently, reaching an all-time high during the novel’s 50th anniversary in 2007, surpassing this mark in 2008, and on course to set another record in 2009.”

Almost 7,000,000 copies of Atlas Shrugged have been sold since it was first published in 1957.

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Sink has ordered her office to conduct a thorough and immediate review into whether she misused the state plane to pick up and drop off family members. Sink reimbursed the state for the cost of those flights before questions were raised. But the lawmakers say the review might not be good enough. In this letter, they cite a story in which Sink reacts to a Miami Herald investigation of financier Allen Stanford, who struck a deal with state regulators to sell investments and move vast amounts of money offshore without government oversight.

Sink said the Office of Regulation should not investigate itself and the lawmakers are asking Sink to apply the same criteria to her office. If its good for the goose, it should be good for the gander, Dorworth said in an interview.
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Four House Republicans ask for investigation into Sink’s use of state planes

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NYU economist Nouriel Roubini, widely credited for predicting the current crisis, says government aid to banks isn’t enough to hide the fact that they’ve failed.

“Even with the $2 trillion of government support, most of these financial institutions are insolvent,” he writes on Forbes.com.

“Delinquency and charge-off rates are now rising at a rate – given the macro outlook – that means expected losses for U.S. financial firms will peak at $3.6 trillion.”
Bottom line, Roubini says: “In simple words, the U.S. financial system is effectively insolvent.”
He says the debate on bank nationalization is crazy.

The U.S. government already has committed, between guarantees, investment, recapitalization and liquidity provision, about $9 trillion to the financial system. And it already has spent $2 trillion of that total.

“Thus, the U.S. financial system is de facto nationalized, as the Federal Reserve has become the lender of first and only resort… and the U.S. Treasury is the spender and guarantor of first and only resort,” Roubini writes.

“The only issue is whether banks and financial institutions should also be nationalized de jure.”

For example, at Citigroup, the government already has a huge ownership stake, the largest of any shareholder. It could end up with 40 percent.

“Citi is already effectively partially nationalized; the only issue is whether it should be fully nationalized,” Roubini says.

Investor Jim Rogers, too, says the banks as insolvent.

“They’re ruining the U.S. economy, they’re ruining the U.S. government, they’re ruining the U.S. central bank,” Rogers told CNBC.

“It’s an injustice when a private airline is penalized for exercising its rights as an owner,” said Thomas Bowden, an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights. “Property owners are entitled to set standards for conduct, including dress codes, that their customers must observe when using company property. If a potential customer finds those standards unreasonable, he is free to take his business elsewhere.

“Here, JetBlue should have been legally entitled to forbid Mr. Jarrar from frightening other passengers aboard its privately owned jetliner. In deciding the matter, JetBlue had a right to consider that Mr. Jarrar’s behavioral and physical profile resembled that of terrorists who have left a trail of blood and bone across the globe, both before and after destroying the World Trade Center with hijacked airliners in 2001.

“Now, however, Mr. Jarrar is a quarter-million dollars richer because our anti-discrimination laws forbid businesses to use their own judgment in these matters.”

As environmentalism continues to grow in prominence, more and more of us are trying to live a “greener” lifestyle. But the more “eco-friendly” you try to become, likely the more you find yourself confused and frustrated by the green message.

Have you tried giving up your bright and cheery incandescent light bulbs to save energy–only to learn that their gloomy-but-efficient compact fluorescent replacements contain mercury? Perhaps you’ve tried to free up space in landfills by foregoing the ease and convenience of disposable diapers–only to be criticized for the huge quantities of energy and water consumed in laundering those nasty cloth diapers. Even voicing support for renewable energy no longer seems to be green enough, as angry environmentalists protest the development of “pristine lands” for wind farms and solar power plants.
Why is it that no matter what sacrifices you make to try to reduce your “environmental footprint,” it never seems to be enough? Well, consider why it is that you have an “environmental footprint” in the first place.

Everything we do to sustain our lives has an impact on nature. Every value we create to advance our well-being–every ounce of food we grow, every structure we build, every iPhone we manufacture–is produced by extracting raw materials and reshaping them to serve our needs. Every good thing in our lives comes from altering nature for our own benefit.

From the perspective of human life and happiness, a big “environmental footprint” is an enormous positive. This is why people in India and China are striving to increase theirs: to build better roads, more cars and computers, new factories and power plants and hospitals.

But for environmentalism, the size of your “footprint” is the measure of your guilt. Nature, according to green philosophy, is something to be left alone–to be preserved untouched by human activity. Their notion of an “environmental footprint” is intended as a measure of how much you “disturb” nature, with disturbing nature viewed as a sin requiring atonement. Just as the Christian concept of original sin conveys the message that human beings are stained with evil simply for having been born, the green concept of an “environmental footprint” implies that you should feel guilty for your very existence.

It should hardly be any surprise, then, that nothing you do to try to lighten your “footprint” will ever be deemed satisfactory. So long as you are still pursuing life-sustaining activities, whatever you do to reduce your impact on nature in one respect (e.g., cloth diapers) will simply lead to other impacts in other respects (e.g., water use)–like some perverse game of green whack-a-mole–and will be attacked and condemned by greens outraged at whatever “footprint” remains. So long as you still have some “footprint,” further penance is required; so long as you are still alive, no degree of sacrifice can erase your guilt.

The only way to leave no “footprint” would be to die–a conclusion that is not lost on many green ideologues. Consider the premise of the nonfiction bestseller titled “The World Without Us,” which fantasizes about how the earth would “recover” if all humanity suddenly became extinct. Or consider the chilling, anti-human conclusion of an op-ed discussing cloth versus disposable diapers: “From the earth’s point of view, it’s not all that important which kind of diapers you use. The important decision was having the baby.”

The next time you trustingly adopt a “green solution” like fluorescent lights, cloth diapers or wind farms, only to be puzzled when met with still further condemnation and calls for even more sacrifices, remember what counts as a final solution for these ideologues.

The only rational response to such a philosophy is to challenge it at its core. We must acknowledge that it is the essence of human survival to reshape nature for our own benefit, and that far from being a sin, it is our highest virtue. Don’t be fooled by the cries that industrial civilization is “unsustainable.” This cry dates to at least the 19th century, but is belied by the facts. Since the Industrial Revolution, population and life expectancy, to say nothing of the enjoyment of life, have steadily grown.

It is time to recognize environmentalism as a philosophy of guilt and sacrifice–and to reject it in favor of a philosophy that proudly upholds the value of human life.

Two years later, in the midst of a long-shot bid against Rep. Mark Souder (R-Ind.) in a deeply conservative northeast Indiana district, the 27-year-old attorney could find himself swept into Congress if a sizable Democratic wave hits on Tuesday.
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A council of mullahs acting under court authority had originally decreed capital punishment for Kambakhsh, a 24-year-old journalism student charged with possessing anti-Islamic books, starting un-Islamic debates in class, and downloading and distributing Internet articles saying that Muhammad ignored women’s rights. That death sentence, which was endorsed by Afghanistan’s upper house of parliament, has now been overturned on appeal.

“In 2006, mobs of clerics were clamoring for the death of Abdul Rahman, an Afghan whose ‘crime’ was converting to Christianity,” Bowden said. “And now, Sayad Kambakhsh faces two decades in jail unless an international outcry embarrasses Afghanistan’s government into lifting the sentence.

“Criminal punishment of blasphemy is fundamentally unjust and outrageous, and ad hoc protests offer no long-term solution. If Islam’s stranglehold on Afghanistan’s government is to end, that nation must adopt an American-style constitution protecting individual rights, including freedom of speech and religion. The strict separation of church and state erects an institutional barrier to religious persecution, as American history shows.

“But a nation that exalts mystical dogma and tribal allegiances cannot be expected to think in such terms. ‘The guy should be hanged,’ said an 18-year-old student at the American University in Kabul, at the time of Kambakhsh’s death sentence. Added a Muslim cleric: ‘He should be punished so that others can learn from him.’ For such people, freedom is an intolerable obstacle to the overriding goal of enforcing Islam.

“When the Bush administration invaded Afghanistan, its stated policy was to promote ‘democracy.’ That policy has now achieved its exact aim. The Afghan government reflects the democratic will of the people. The people want to punish blasphemers, and their constitution allows them to do so lawfully.

“Bush’s policy was based on his delusional belief that Afghans are as freedom-loving as Americans. But what they truly value is religion. Sayad Kambakhsh is living–at least for now–proof that religion injected into government is hostile to freedom.”

Mr. Bowden is an analyst at the Ayn Rand Center for Individual Rights, focusing on legal issues. A former lawyer and law school instructor, who practiced for twenty years in Baltimore, Maryland, his op-eds have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Philadelphia Inquirer, Miami Herald, Los Angeles Daily News, and many other newspapers. Mr. Bowden has given dozens of radio interviews and has appeared on FOX News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes.