“She was a dangerous woman.” That was the impression Rodrigo Hernández Mijares had about Ayn Rand in college. “It was as if she was on a list of banned books,” he recalls. Teachers also dismissed Adam Smith as a crazy, old, white man. Instead, his professors pushed him towards Karl Marx (along with Theodor Adorno, Erich Fromm, and others), naturally leading him to believe that the government was the best solution to society’s problems.  But it was the real-life school of hard knocks -- and the closure of two successful businesses due to burdensome regulation and heavy taxation -- that made him rethink his earlier embrace of government intervention. “Having to close my businesses because of taxes and regulations helped me realize that government was not as good as I thought it was,” he says. “The government made it very hard for me to compete and gave me a lot of headaches.”  After closing a bar and a brewery, Rodrigo began teaching economic classes at the public college, Autonomous University of Baja California before lecturing at CETYS.  At Autonomos University of Baja California, the student population at the school was largely apathetic, and the school had few opportunities for students to create a community. Rodrigo was determined to change that. He wanted to help students to form clubs, to find common interests, and to learn from each other outside of the classroom. He reached out to business and organizations; he scoured the Internet in search of...
Why watch COVID press conferences and briefings by politicians? They are just upsetting. These people seem to have no clue about why the virus is ignoring them. They keep issuing strange and arbitrary rules that they make up, change by the day, all enforced by intimidation and compulsion. They posture in this silly way as if their edicts have this virus under control when they clearly do not.  Even worse, and what chills me to the bone, is the strange absence of normal human emotion in their public performances. With day-to-day human communication in the presence of uncertainty, there would be some admission of the possibility of being wrong, of mistakes made, of the difficulty of knowing, of the limits of information to make informed decisions, of the pain wrought through such disruptive governance.  You don’t see any of this in these governor’s announcements. Despite all evidence, they act as if they have got this under control. They don’t admit error. They don’t admit ignorance. They stare straight at the cameras and issue edicts, without even an apology for all the lives they have ruined and continue to ruin. They talk down to us. Condescension in every word.  You are welcome to watch a typical case here, but no need since you know exactly what I’m talking about.  We don’t talk this way to each other. Instead we share stories of how our lives have been affected. We share pain with each other,...
Parenting is a difficult enterprise, more so when current events throw curveballs in our efforts to foster a benevolent sense of life and the view that the universe is rational and predictable. Here are ten tips to help children cope with their emotional reactions when the world around them is in turmoil. 1. Be open. Children can sense when we are upset, and certainly it would be difficult to conceal our own reactions to televised violence and accounts of the health crisis. Like it or not, your children watch how you handle your feelings and look to you for direction on how to handle their feelings. If you choose to deal with your distress by ignoring it, they are apt to think that you want them to suppress their feelings. If they sense that you do not want to hear anything negative, their bad feelings will not go away. They will merely go underground, where they do more damage and are less accessible to parents' reassurances. It is far better to let children know that you recognize your feelings and their feelings and that you regard them as normal and understandable.We want children to know that when bad things happen, it is normal and healthy to react with strong negative feelings and to freely express these feelings. The best way to teach a healthy approach to difficult feelings is to demonstrate it through our own behavior. 2. Be composed. Parents often wonder how much of their own uncertainty and anxiety they should reveal to children. It is best to strike a balance between...
We are deeply sad to learn that Frank Bond died July 26, age 86, at his home. Frank was a long-time, generous supporter of The Atlas Society.  Frank entered the fitness business early on, founding U. S. Health, which operated the Holiday Health Spa chain; it grew to 120 clubs when he sold it to Bally’s in 1988. He won many awards in the industry for his innovations, and was inducted into the Club Industry Hall of Fame. One innovation in particular he told me about with great pride: he realized that women were as interested in fitness as men, and he worked to overcome the male locker-room ethos of gyms to make them more accommodating to women, who were less interested in pumping iron than in getting fit and trim. After selling his business to Bally’s, he started the Foundation Group, whose real estate developments won further awards.  Frank was a strong advocate of Objectivism long before I met him in the 1990s. He had been a representative for the Nathaniel Branden Institute in the 1960s and had a statue of Atlas on the roof of his first club. By the time I met him, Frank was involved with many libertarian organizations, including the Cato Institute and the Reason Foundation among others. He seemed to know everyone in the movement—and was connected with everyone in the fitness or business worlds, from Arnold Schwarzenegger to Michael Milken (who provided funding). He graciously took us on as another group to support. He was a trustee from 1995 to 2009 and chairman...
Recent legislators, activists, and education reformers have promised to lead us into a new world of equity. No longer will some groups have a different lifestyle from others. No longer will some groups have a different education from others. There will be reform or else, Hawk Newsome warns, “we will burn down this system and replace it.”For a preview of these glories, we have only to open Ayn Rand’s Anthem. In this dystopian novella, collectivists achieve their ideal by burning cities and books, then implementing central planning. Now everyone is equal: equally poor, equally housed, equally limited in what they can say and do and think.If, as Jen Maffessanti observes, dystopian fiction helps us understand the dangers we face, then none is more relevant to this moment than Rand’s...

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