I listen to the book nearly monthly to help keep me positive and forward looking. I have the book on Audible. Easy to listen to while working or driving, especially on the way to the shrug job.

I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine. $$$

Just make it a drinking game. Everytime reality checks one of Rand’s plot points....take a drink. I’m going through Glengoolie pretty quickly.

Nowadays it feels like CNN is playing a Shrugathon.

You may be listening to the Atlas shrugged Movies....but we are all living them! Or maybe the prequal to the "Gulag Archipelago"

I watch the trilogy a couple of times a year. The last time I started the series, the opening of Part 1 struck me as particularly timely.

The book is more detailed, but it takes a long time to get through. I go back and re-read occasionally too.

I will never forget that a student intern gave me a copy of Atlas Shrugged after working for me one summer. As I was reading it I was also following the failure of the New York Central-Penn Central railway merger in the daily news. When I saw the fiction was published in 1957 and it was coming true in 1970 it was chilling. Today it is like the rest is playing out before our eyes.

"The Basics Of Making" sounds good. Can you give us an idea of what's going to be in it?

I put us 5 years from Directive 10-289.
I intend to be self employed by that time so.....not sure how they’re going to handle that in my case.

Any was not the only prognosticator. Thomas Jefferson said “If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around (these banks) will deprive the people of all property until their children wake up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered."1

Jefferson was not the only President to speak out against the private central bankers. There were seven others:

• Andrew Jackson, stating directly to President John Quincy Adams, “You are a den of vipers and thieves.”

• Ulysses S. Grant was put in power to defeat the forces trying to put in a central bank after the US Civil War.

• Abraham Lincoln, “The government should create, issue, and circulate all the currency and credit need to satisfy the spending power of the government and the buying power of the consumers.”

• Andrew Johnson, who opposed EUROPEAN FORCES attempting to implement a central bank.

• James A. Garfield, “Whoever controls the money of a nation, controls that nation and is absolute master of all industry and commerce.”

• William McKinley who, with his Secretary of State John Sherman, brought the war to the European bankers through a law, the “Sherman Antitrust Act”. After McKinley’s assassination, his Vice President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt took power and dropped the lawsuits against the Northern Trust (the Rothschild supported Morgan financial empire at the time).

• John F. Kennedy, who was assassinated about five months after issuing Executive Order 11110 which allowed the Secretary of the Treasury to buy silver and issue silver certificates.

In addition to the eight Presidents openly trying to thwart the imposition of a private central bank, we observed President Trump’s mastery during 2020. In the middle of one of the greatest market declines in history, Trump temporarily rolled the operations of the Federal Reserve into the Treasury and averted a major pandemic driven financial collapse. While the other Presidents tried to tell the People, Trump showed the People the power of a nation in control of its finances.

Beside Presidents, there were many others who opposed the future Federal Reserve. There were also wealthy and powerful bankers and industrialists who opposed it. John Jacob Astor IV, the man who invested in Tesla, opposed the plan, as did Benjamin Guggenheim and Macy’s owner Isidor Straus. They were the wealthiest men of the day, and unfortunately all met their end in the fateful sinking of the Titanic in 1912. It’s the stuff of conspiracy theories, but find comfort in the fact-checkers who have spent an awful amount of time reassuring us it is simply a coincidence – albeit a huge one.

I just keep reminding myself: it's a work of fiction, from the 1950's.
Seems to help. A little.

You feel competent, young, sexy, capable in a world that is corrupt, broken, soulless, and clueless?

Good for you! :-)

I have read the book maybe 15 times over the past 50 years. But I was not very enthused by the movie. I thought it did not begin to do justice to the book. If another version is eventually done (for instance, after it passes into public domain), I hope it will express more the ideas of the book. (Of course, the idea of its going into public domain is kind of horrifying, considering the travesties that might be made of the book.)

The first movie was great. They deteriorated as I got to #2 and #3 unfortunately. The cast changed and it was obvious budgets were cut. I do my part to be like dagny and hank rearden, but its getting harder and I wish Galt woudl take me to Galts Gulth....

They are "more enjoyable" now...if that makes sense. Haha...

You have some of Atlas Shrugged plot occurring due to the Biden administration's strangulation of the energy industry, in the novel, it's the slow strangulation and government takeover of all major industries. The methodology is slightly different through a presidential order and insurmountable government regulation.
I have seen many more Teslas on the road, tourists and locals who maybe be good little Democrats.