Dithyramb

The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism

I Just bought The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism by George Reisman. It is a collection of some of George Reismans essays on capitalism that has just recently been released for the Kindle. The 11 Essays consists of the following: The Benevolent Nature of Capitalism, Freedom, Capitalism the Cure for Racism, Education and the Racist Road to Barbarism, Where Would General Motors be without the Automobile Workers Union?, General Motors, RIP,  How the 1 % Provides the Standard of Living for the 99%, Free Speech and Occupy Wall Street, the Toxicity of Environmentalism and Gun Control: Controlling the Government's Guns.

Why people lie...

...an exceedingly interesting question. This topic is covered by the well-renown professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University, Dan Ariely in an article in  WSJ - Why we lie

I'm currently reading his fascinating, highly original and thought-provoking book Predicably Irrational. His WSJ article on lying covers some of the themes of his new book, which I'm also looking forward to reading, entitled The Honest Truth about Dishonesty: How we lie to everyone - especially ourselves

Anthem the graphic novel

I just finished reading Ayn Rands Anthem: The Graphic Novel

Overall, I quite liked the rendition and found it true to the original story.

The drawings are nicely stylized and heroic. This a work that will appeal to the very young and the completists who want to have everything of quality that is related to Ayn Rand.

All in all quite enjoyable.

 

BBCs list of top 100 must read books

In answer to the meme going around.

The BBC reckons that people have normally only read 6 of these books.

Put in bold those works that you have read. Italicize those that you have started. and then tag other nerds to do the same...

Well here's my list.

1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series –
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses – James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchel
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo

Not too bad I reckon...plenty of childrens books to add to my score :-)

 

Markets Don't Fail

I have just started reading the very time-appropriate Markets don't fail by Brian P.Simpson.

The complete text of Facets of Ayn Rand...

is now available online!

The Ayn Rand Lexicon...

...is now available in an online search-able edition.

I prefer listening to lectures on my Ipod...

From Allen's Image Adjusment via The Primacy of Awesome

"A few weeks ago, Nick Provenzo posted about the bookstore's distribution strategy, especially the fact that even the free lectures must be heard from one's computer and cannot be downloaded to a portable audio player. I would like to see ARI offer a subscription service for the bookstore similar to what Urge and Napster, etc. are doing. For example, if someone is giving ten bucks a month to ARI they could download lectures an hour or under in length to either an itunes player or Windows Media player AND a portable player such as a Zen or Ipod. If they are giving twenty bucks perhaps they can listen to the longer lectures, etc, etc. I know the Institute strives for more ways to create consistent monthly income. I think this would be a great way to do just that."

Great Idea. I second this motion!

Ayn Rand Bookstore Sale

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Ayn Rand Bookstore
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DAVID HARRIMAN AUDIOCASSETTE SALE

Discounts starting at 50% on David Harriman audiocassette titles!
 
Sale prices available through September 16, 2007

Ayn Rand Bookstore Sale

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Ayn Rand Bookstore
==================

CLEARANCE SALE

Discounts starting at 50% on John Ridpath audiocassette titles!

Sale prices available through September 2, 2007

Christopher Hitchens - God is not Great

I just bought Christopher Hitchens' God is not Great. I have read the first chapter and my initial reaction is: This is going to be classic work in the genre of religious criticism.

Harry Potter & the deathly hallows reimagined

Via Noodlefood:
What would Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows have looked like if written by another author than J.K. Rowling.

J.K. Rowling answers questions...

on the Deathly Hallows

Remember, Remember...

...the fifth of November
(From The Times Literary Supplement)

"The Gunpowder Plot officially revealed on November 5, 1605, was certainly the greatest single act of terrorism ever planned against the English State, and arguably the most dramatic in world history. Had it succeeded, it would have killed most of the royal family and the aristocracy, and hundreds of the leading men of most counties and major towns: effectively the majority of the political nation of the time. It would also have completely destroyed the Palace of Westminster, Westminster Hall, Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s, and many more people would probably have perished in the fire that would have raged through the district after the explosion. These consequences are not the broad suppositions of historians’ but precise ballistic tabulations made by the Centre for Explosion Studies at Aberystwyth in 2003. Such a scale of destruction had been meted out to polities before, for example when the Mongols annihilated the states of Central Asia and Iran. The difference in this case was one of technology: that what had formerly required the resources of a huge army, and months of slaughter and demolition, would have been accomplished on this occasion by the striking of a single match. The plot represented the application of a new and horrific kind of weapon to traditional political aims. In that sense the appropriate modern parallel is not with September 11, but with Hiroshima."

 

 

Remember remember the fifth of November
              Gunpowder, treason and plot.
  I see no reason why gunpowder, treason
              Should ever be forgot...

The Capitalist Manifesto

Capitalism Magazine has printed a small excerpt from Dr. Andrew Bernstein's latest book The Capitalist Manifesto.

Victor Davis Hanson on Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

The historian Victor Davis Hanson has written an absolutely devestating review of Jared Diamond's Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.

Excerpt:
"The main problem, however, with this book is that Diamond’s well-meaning, environmentally correct storytelling cannot impart any coherent lesson of why in fact societies fail. Environmental degradation, climate change, hostilities, political and cultural failures, and trade are cited as the roots of collapse, but are used so interchangeably that we never learn to what degree mismanagement of nature or of people brings on doom. As a result, when Diamond ventures into systematic analysis of historical questions that he knows nothing about, he has a predictable propensity to say things that are not simply wrong but hilarious."

William Bouguerau L'elegie

Ayn Rand and Song of Russia

Tore Bøckmann has written a review of Robert Mayhews new book Ayn Rand and Song of Russia.

Jihad in Europe

A 103 page report entitled Jihad in Europe - a Survey of the Motivations for Sunni Islamist Terrorism in Post-millenial Europe by Petter Nesser is now available.

Once again I got this from reading Secular Blasphemy

I haven't read the report yet. But it looks interesting.

Bat Ye'or - Eurabia

The preface of Bat Ye'or's much awaited book Eurabia can be read here!