Robert Tracinski was a senior writer for the Ayn Rand Institute from 2000 to 2004. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.
Mr. Tracinski is editor and publisher of The Intellectual Activist and TIADaily, which offer daily news and analysis from a pro-reason, pro-individualist perspective. To receive a free 30-day trial of the TIA Daily and a FREE pdf issue of the Intellectual Activist please go to TIADaily.com and enter your email address.
First the good news: The new administration’s officials in the Department of Justice have decided not to murder the Microsoft Corporation and carve up its corpse. Now the bad news: They have chosen the more humane option of slow torture. The Justice...
The UN World Conference Against Racism has met and taken up its primary agenda: the praise and protection of racists. The tone was set on the first day of the conference, when that paragon of progressive politics, Yasser Arafat, took the podium to condemn Israel as a...
Imagine that you are suffering from an incurable disease, which slowly wastes away your body and leads inevitably to death. One day, a scientist working with a pharmaceutical company discovers a drug that vastly increases your chance of survival. Do you: A) offer him...
Last month, the capital of an oppressive dictatorship has just been selected as the host city of a symbol of peace and civilization: the Olympic games. If you want to know how this happened, remember that it was done, not over the objections of civilized governments,...
For 10 months, Yasser Arafat and his legions of rioters and terrorists have been waging a war against Israel. Now it looks as if Israel will finally choose to fight that war. Faced with a new wave of terror attacks, Israel is now weighing whether to invade the West...
The president’s recent decision on embryonic stem cell research has been described in most reports as a compromise that balances the views of scientists, who want to move forward unrestrictedly, against the views of the religious right, who call for a total ban...
The leaders of the world’s most advanced nations, plus Russia, met recently at the G8 summit in Genoa, Italy, to discuss ways to increase trade and international cooperation — about the most peaceful and civilized thing that the world’s leaders could...
Colorado congressman Scott McInnis revealed last week that four firefighters who burned to death in July while tackling a forest fire in Washington state died because bureaucrats took 10 hours to approve a water drop. Taking water from the local river, it seems, is...
Gao Zhan has seen the cruelty of the Chinese dictatorship firsthand and up close, as a native of China and through the last five and a half months of captivity under trumped-up accusations of spying. But she has emerged unbowed. Here are her words upon returning to...
The clones are coming! Lock your doors, hide your wives and children — or, better yet, hold congressional hearings and pass a law. Angry villagers in academia and on Capitol Hill are crusading for a ban on human cloning — a ban potentially so sweeping that...
On Friday (June 29, 2001), ABC news correspondent John Stossel aired a hard-hitting report challenging the environmentalist movement and suggesting that “tampering with nature” makes human life better — that such “unnatural” phenomena as...
Imagine that you have invited a contractor to inspect your home and check for needed repairs. He tells you that, in theory, there might be a disastrous problem with the foundation. He can’t actually prove that there is a problem, he says, and there are a lot of...
Ten days ago, we saw the headlines: “Panel Tells Bush Global Warming is Getting Worse.” According to dozens of press accounts, a panel of distinguished climatologists from the National Academy of Sciences had provided new confirmation that “global...
On Friday, Secretary-General Kofi Annan met with congressional leaders to assuage their anger at America’s ejection from the UN’s Human Rights Commission. The meeting seems to have been a success; it looks as if Republicans in Congress will give up their...
President Bush’s newly released national energy plan offers us more of what already threatens this country. No, I am not talking about the president’s plans to allow oil drilling in Alaska, or to build more gas pipelines, or to license more nuclear power...
Last week, a quarter of a million Californians had their power cut in a new wave of rolling blackouts. As one official admitted, “This is the situation everyone feared. Here it is May 7, and we already have rolling outages.” This is only a warm-up for the...
“Danger lies not in what we don’t know, but in what we think we know that just ain’t so.” So reads the e-mail signature of Greg Holloway, a scientist with the Institute of Ocean Sciences in British Columbia. The quote, from Mark Twain, is...
Every year, at about this time, I make my personal protest against environmentalism by going out and enjoying nature. How, you might ask, can enjoying nature be considered an act of defiance against environmentalism? Consider how — and why — I enjoy it. I...
On April 22, thousands will gather across the country to celebrate Earth Day, a holiday that has risen in the past decade from obscurity to the status of a mainstream, uncontroversial event. After all, who could be against clean air, clean water, and a healthy...
America faces the threat of a widespread, corrosive prejudice. I am not talking about racial prejudice — though racial politics has something to do with it. The prejudice I am talking about is aimed at something much broader, much more important than any racial...
For the past week, commentators have decried the return of “dangerous Cold War thinking.” But the crisis with China is just the opposite. It is not a return to the past, but rather the outcome of America’s eager courtship, over the last decade, of...
It is time to put the John McCain myth to rest. For years, the national media and a gullible grass-roots following have glorified McCain as a man of integrity who deals in “straight talk.” They have promoted his image as a hero who fought bravely for his...
Is it possible to take a moral inventory of our culture — to see, in a single event, what, if anything, the most influential parts of our culture hold as the good? There is an important forum in which we take such an inventory every year at this time — and...
Former President Clinton has just received another fitting addition to his legacy. Two years ago, he sent U.S. troops to Kosovo to protect ethnic Albanians against attacks by Serbia. Now our troops are stuck trying to protect Macedonia against attacks by these very...
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