Editor’s Note: Members and friends of The Atlas Society provide us with a wealth of wisdom. Atlas Society supporter Jennifer Bukowsky is an award-winning trial and appellate criminal defense attorney in Columbia, Missouri. She and her husband Brant have two young sons—Blake and Gus Bukowsky. Her second home is on Twitter @esqonfire. Jennifer also shares her views on news, politics, current events & pop culture on her weekly radio and TV show, called, you guessed it, the “Jennifer Bukowsky Show.”
MM: You are an Ayn Rand fan. How did you first hear of Rand?
I read Anthem as part of a book club, and afterward I immediately downloaded Atlas Shrugged. It really blew my mind.
I have Ayn Rand on my list of suspected time travelers, and I just loved, loved, loved that book. I’m married to an entrepreneur, and my husband actually got in touch with the producers of the movie Atlas Shrugged Part 2, and helped them with their online advertising in exchange for getting me tickets to the premiere, which fell on my birthday, so we got to attend that in DC.
MM: Oh, that’s great! So you were an adult when you first read Rand. That’s kind of a separate little club.
JB: Yes, I felt like I was a late bloomer. I went around the room at one of these dinners and everyone's like, “I read her when I was 14” or “I read her when I was 16.”
MM: I was well into adulthood before I read Ayn Rand for the first time. I’d always heard that...
Read Article : Rand Rising: A Member Spotlight with Jennifer Bukowsky
Donald Trump’s recent pardon of Michael Milken, the so-called junk bond king, has brought out the usual suspects to denounce Milken. John Carroll, one of the federal prosecutors that secured Milken’s guilty plea (more on Carroll later) declared in the Washington Post that Trump’s action “outraged” him and claimed that the pardon is proof that American “justice” is unjust:
What outrages me, and what I think should outrage others, is the process that brought about the pardon. In as guileless an admission as I have ever seen of rich man’s justice, the White House bolstered its decision by listing a murderer’s row of Republican donors and billionaires who provided “widespread and long-standing” support for Milken’s pardon.
In fact, what makes this pardon worse, according to Carroll, is that wealthy people—and even Rudy Giuliani himself, the man who led Milken’s prosecution—asked Trump to pardon him. In other words, some of those who have stood up for Milken are wealthy beyond a reasonable doubt, and if their names aren’t George Soros or Kennedy, they should just shut up and count their money.
Indeed, I, too, am outraged by Trump’s pardoning Michael Milken, but the cause of my outrage is that Milken should have needed a pardon at all. That he was coerced into a guilty plea—for “crimes” that federal judges later would say were not criminal...
Read Article : Why Wall Street Bankers and Federal Lawyers Hate Michael Milken
Try again. Fail again. Try better. – Samuel Beckett
We all love to announce publicly our most glorious moments and accomplishments. However, a life best lived is a hero’s journey, a journey in which we must overcome great obstacles and challenges, none greater than our failures. It is overcoming these failures that make the hero.
This being the year 2020, the opening onto a new decade serves as an invitation for me to reflect on the past and to consider the full story behind my success.
Here are just three of my many, many failures. By sharing them, I hope to pass on one simple message: aim high and have the courage to fail greatly.
#1: I failed at becoming a comic book artist
Sometimes we have no clue about what we really want, or what our purpose is. The one and only reason I went to art school was to become a comic book artist and tell a story of American Industry. More precisely, I wanted to adapt a certain rather famous book into a graphic novel.
I picked illustration as my major and jumped in with great enthusiasm. I was convinced this was my calling, but after much struggle, in less than two years, I realized that I didn’t like making comic books at all. I was too slow at drawing, I hated calculating perspective, and I didn’t want to sit 10+ hours daily staring at the computer screen (somehow I had missed the fact that illustration was moving to digital, forget pencil and ink).
A panel from my unfinished graphic novel, a labor of love which took me to art...
Read Article : THE LAST DECADE: My Glorious Failures
Editor's Note: The following is a transcript of Jennifer Grossman's remarks at the Libertarian Party California Convention on February 16, 2020 in Culver City, California.
Thank you so very much for inviting me. I know the relationship between Objectivists and Libertarians hasn’t always been smooth. Ayn Rand famously called libertarians “the hippies of the right.” When I first heard that I thought, that doesn’t sound so bad? After all, I grew up in the generation that watched Hair, which kind of glamorized hippies, so to me it sounded like a compliment.
But if my view of hippies is more out of Hair, Ayn Rand’s view of hippies was more out of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, where the hippies looked like Greta Thunberg. To be precise, Ayn Rand said: “The hippies are the living demonstration of what it means to give up reason, and to rely on one's primeval instincts, urges, intuitions, and whims…” That’s a hippie? Sounds a lot more like President Trump.
And I say that as a Malibu resident who does not actually hate the president. Or maybe I should say, THE Malibu resident who doesn’t hate the President. I just got myself checked for various viruses because I was traveling abroad, and I tested negative for TDS. Which is kind of amazing, because honestly before I left the country I felt like I was a touch coming down with it. Just a teeny tiny touch. Two weeks out...
Read Article : Make America Grateful Again: An Antidote to Envy and Entitlement
Editor’s Note: Alfred Kentigern Siewers is associate professor of English at Bucknell University and 2018–2019 William E. Simon visiting fellow in religion and public life at the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University. His scholarly work and teaching focus on the cultural history of nature from the Middle Ages to the present, its implications for ideas of freedom and justice, and modern literary resistance to totalitarianism. A former journalist for the Chicago Sun-Times and the Christian Science Monitor, he currently also serves as a member of the lesser clergy of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia.
MM: You edited, along with Alexander Riley, the 2019 book The Totalitarian Legacy of the Bolshevik Revolution, which is based on a symposium that took place at Bucknell University in 2017. Was this sort of retrospective happening on college campuses nationwide? Were academics saying, “Phew, dodged a bullet there! Thank goodness that’s over!”
AS: There were, surprisingly, relatively few of these kinds of observances that I'm aware of. The one other academic observance of the centennial that was brought to my attention was one that seemed...
Read Article : The Legacy of Totalitarianism: An Interview with Alfred Kentigern Siewers
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