If you’re not familiar with Joss Whedon’s Firefly yet, well, get with the program.

I’ve heard certain Ayn Rand fans call it “probably the best television show” they’ve ever seen. I would tend to agree. It’s also one of those programs you can re-watch every year, and not get tired of it.

The Atlas Society, the center for Objectivism, along with the Cato Institute, Institute for Human Studies, and Students for Liberty, will sponsor “An Evening Discussion about Ayn Rand and Objectivism.”

The event will be held on Wednesday, July 30, 6:00 pm - 8:00 pm at Cato. The address is 1000 Massachusetts Ave N.W., Washington, D.C., 20001. Refreshments will be served.

David Kelley, founder and senior scholar of The Atlas Society, and William Thomas, director of programs, will be speaking in the F.A. Hayek auditorium to Koch Fellows and other interns who are in Washington for the summer. But our friends and supporters in the D.C. area or any who happen to be in town that day are welcome to attend as well.

If you’d like to register – we’d like to get a count for the refreshment order! – you can call us at 202-AYN-RAND (296-7263) or email us at tas@atlassociety.org.

The program will be:

David Kelley, Moral Individualism

Individualism is the belief in the primacy of the individual rather than the group. It is the morality of independence, autonomy, and the pursuit of happiness-as against the collectivist demand for conformity and sacrifice. Kelley will discuss Ayn Rand’s innovative analysis and defense of moral individualism.

William Thomas, Objectivism for Liberty

Libertarianism is a political coalition based in the political defense of individual rights and the economics of laisser-faire. But politics and economics depend on more foundational issues in ethics and epistemology. How can you respond economically to environmentalists deeply committed to the intrinsic value of untrammeled nature? How can you respond politically to police-state advocates who hold that the President’s judgment on matters of national security is authoritative? Thomas will argue that the core ethical and epistemological ideas of Objectivism (reason and rational-self-interest) need to take solid root in the culture if we are to win the battle for individual liberty.

TAS Executive Director Ed Hudgins will moderate and the presentations will be followed by a question and answer session.

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr of Georgia, now running for president on the Libertarian ticket, told a Portland crowd today he got into the race to offer an option for those who want less government intrusion in their lives.

“There is absolutely no reason for them to feel bound to the artificial constraints of the two-party system,” Barr said. “Those are their only two choices: big government and really big government.”

Barr, who served four terms in Congress as a Republican, switched parties after becoming disenchanted with what he called the high-spending ways and increasingly Big Brother policies of the Bush administration.

He spoke to about 150 at an annual conference of The Atlas Society, a Washington, D.C.-based group that promotes Ayn Rand’s libertarian principles.

Rand, the author of “The Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged,” founded a philosophical movement called objectivism, which focuses on individual rights and achievements as the cornerstone of a great society. Barr said he agrees entirely with that outlook.

Read the rest of the article.

Second only to The Bible (with 25 votes) were the works of Ayn Rand (with 23 votes) — starting with The Fountainhead, followed by Atlas Shrugged and Anthem.

Now Ed Hudgins confirms that the same is true of Teller:

[The Atlas Society] had a display table at the “I, Skeptic” meeting in Las Vegas, put on by the James Randi Educational Foundation, June 19-22. Penn and Teller were on the program. Teller stopped by the Atlas Society table, said he was a Rand fan and took a copy of my new book, An Objectivist Secular Reader. In the Q&A session with P&T, Penn was asked whether, as a critical thinker, there were blind spots he had to watch out for in himself. He said that he is a strong libertarian and mentioned Atlas Shrugged and Ayn Rand and that tries to keep a critical perspective on his ideas or words to that effect.

And check out the amusing shirt Penn wore when Hudgins met him.

Thanks to Atlasphere member Stuart Hayashi for the tip.

From an interview with MTV:

Regarding the long in development project “Atlas Shrugged,” which has been in some form of creative flux for over 35 years, Jolie didn’t hesitate to call it a “once in a lifetime” project. And this is coming from a woman who has won one Oscar, and probably should have been nominated for at least one more. To put it more simply, she makes good films.

“[’Atlas Shrugged’] is one of those, I think, once-in-a-lifetime films that you feel, ‘If I only do a few more in my lifetime, that has to be one of them,’” she insisted.

See the relevant post at MTV’s movies blog for more.

Here’s a choice quote from mid-way through the introduction:

The philosophy that appealed to Mr Wales was Objectivism, a strand of thinking associated with the author Ayn Rand. “It colours everything I do and think,” he says. In her cult novels “Fountainhead” and “Atlas Shrugged” and other works, Rand described rugged and unbending individualists who embodied a raw brand of capitalism and a metaphysical conviction that reality was fixed and objectively knowable. Through his interest in Objectivism, Mr Wales met, in the early 1990s, a philosopher named Larry Sanger.

Mr Wales was moderating an online discussion about Rand, and Mr Sanger joined in as a sceptic, freely displaying his “contempt for Objectivists because they pretend to be independent-minded and yet they follow in lockstep behind Ayn Rand,” as he puts it. Then Mr Sanger started moderating his own philosophy discussion, and Mr Wales joined in. Mr Wales called him up to contest every single point, and when the two met offline to carry on the jousting, they hit it off famously and became friends.

By the late 1990s, Mr Wales was investing in a website called Bomis, a sort of search engine or web directory where “99% of the searches had to do with naked babes,” as Mr Foote, who was Bomis’s advertising director, puts it. Bomis did barely well enough to support its four employees, he says, but it enabled Mr Wales to fund his bigger fascination: an online encyclopedia. He invited Mr Sanger to be its editor, and in 2000 they started Nupedia. Experts were invited to write articles on various subjects, and the idea was that Nupedia would sell advertising and make profits.

See the full article for much more.

On the upside, the new site seems screamin’ fast from where we stand. Hopefully you’ll find the same!

If you run into any remaining bugs, please let us know. Yesterday was a particularly buggy day (login problems, etc.) and I apologize to those of you who were temporarily inconvenienced.

We’re still hoping to launch a complete overhaul of the site, perhaps later this year, using the Ruby on Rails platform. In the meantime, this current upgrade was strictly for performance and reliability purposes.

Leftist ideology may be gaining ground in Latin America. But it will never set foot on the manicured lawns of Francisco Marroquin University.

For nearly 40 years, this private college has been a citadel of laissez-faire economics. Here, banners quoting “The Wealth of Nations” author Adam Smith — he of the powdered wig and invisible hand — flutter over the campus food court.

Every undergraduate, regardless of major, must study market economics and the philosophy of individual rights embraced by the U.S. founding fathers, including “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

A sculpture commemorating Ayn Rand’s “Atlas Shrugged” is affixed to the school of business. Students celebrated the novel’s 50th anniversary last year with an essay contest. The $200 cash prize reinforced the book’s message that society should reward capitalist go-getters who create wealth and jobs, not punish them with taxes and regulations.

“The poor are not poor just because others are rich,” said Manuel Francisco Ayau Cordon, a feisty octogenarian businessman, staunch anti-communist and founder of the school. “It’s not a zero-sum game.”

Welcome to Guatemala’s Libertarian U. Ayau opened the college in 1972, fed up with what he viewed as the “socialist” instruction being imparted at San Carlos University of Guatemala, the nation’s largest institution of higher learning. He named the new school for a colonial-era priest who worked to liberate native Guatemalans from exploitation by Spanish overlords.

From later in the article:

Born into a middle-class family in Guatemala, [school founder] Ayau spent much of his youth in the United States, where his mother moved for a time after his father’s death. He attended Catholic high school in Belmont, Calif., then headed to the University of Toronto, where he studied chemical engineering.

He dropped out after reading Rand’s “Fountainhead.” The novel’s protagonist, Howard Roark, is expelled from architecture school after refusing to conform to its tired standards.

“I realized when I read Rand ... that I was starting out my life all wrong,” Ayau said. He said he concluded that “I have to study something that I like, otherwise I’ll never be any good.”

See the full article for much more about this school and its fascinating founder.