Via Selfish Soup.

Via Ratak Monodosico.

Ayn Rand laughing and smoking in Valhalla.

Ayn Rand would be 110 years old this month. Her birthday was February 2nd.

Mallory Ortberg (who keeps everyone at Galt’s Gulch in stitches every summer) imagines a Harry Potter novel as written by Auntie Ayn:

“Don’t you see?” Dumbledore said. “Voldemort himself created his worst enemy, just as tyrants everywhere do! Have you any idea how much tyrants fear the people they oppress? All of them realize that, one day, amongst their many victims, there is sure to be one that rises against them and strikes back!”

“Of course,” Harry said calmly. “Tyranny is any political system (whether absolute monarchy or fascism or communism) that does not recognize individual rights (which necessarily include property rights). The overthrow of a political system by force is justified only when it is directed against tyranny: it is an act of self-defense against those who rule by force.”

Harry took up his wand. “First I’m going to kill Snape,” he said evenly, “and then I’m going to dissolve the estate tax.”

“But why -” Dumbledore began.

“Wealth must be earned, not kept,” Harry said. “A man who inherits wealth he does not deserve will lose it in a generations’ time. He has no inherent right to keep it if he cannot earn it, but it does not then stand that the government has a stronger right to it. It is his, to keep or to lose, as long as he is living.”

Read the whole thing.

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Meanwhile, Jim Dowd contends that Ayn didn’t really die in Manhattan in 1982, but has been living on, all these years until quite recently, secretly in Massachusetts.

110 year old philosopher and novelist Ayn Rand perished in a snowstorm that covered much of the Northeast this week. Thought to have died in 1982, it was revealed she simply faked her own death to avoid paying debts on the successful treatment of her lung cancer which ran into the hundreds of thousands of dollars, her being philisopically opposed to Medicare.

Having escaped to East Gloucester to live under an assumed name, she was known for loudly rejecting help from neighbors. “Do not condescend to me with charity,” she shouted at Bob D’Palazola who just recently tried to remove snow from her driveway with his snowblower as he had for many elderly neighbors on the street.

“I thought she was nuts,” said the plumber and good Samaritan, “Considering how much she smokes there is no way she should be out there shoveling herself. I tried to get her reconsider but she started yelling about how indebtedness corrupting the fiber of the soul of man and I’m like screw it, Ill just go do my brother-in-laws house.”

Other neighbors were shunned by the centenarian objectivist when they attempted to bring gifts of fresh baked cinnamon buns and hot cocoa during a “senior wellness check” organized by residents. Mary Ellen Katzen, a local volunteer, claimed to have been berated at Rand’s door. “She started yelling about how the strong owe nothing to the weak and I was just like, ‘have some cinnamon buns’ but she batted them away told me to blow them into brass coins and spread them at the winds for the poor of spirit. What does that even mean?”

Read the whole thing.

Smoosh

Hat tip to Walter Olson.

photo: Josh Rainey

Josh Rainey:

A couple of weeks ago I had the incredible opportunity to photograph Stevie and Brady’s engagement photos on a family property along the Siletz River. They had a great idea for a photo so we set it up and got the shot we were all thinking. Long story short, the image was shared on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation page and gained a ton of exposure! 100,000 likes and 9,000 shares in the first 24 hours!

Photo: Ginni Beard, forwarded by Niall Hannity.

Kait Wraith, Dagny Taggart

Mallory Ortberg imagines Dagny Taggart texting:

Francisco
Francisco are you awake?
Francisco?
what is it
Francisco, I can’t sleep
I’m sorry
I had a bad dream
the one about the Communists?
I don’t want to talk about it
tell me about the root of money again, Francisco
what time is it?
Come on, Francisco
tell me
I’ll help get you started
“Money is a root of exchange…”
Dag, please
I have to work in the morning
“Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist…”
you don’t even need me to tell you what money is
I like the way that you tell it best
all right
all right, I’ll tell you about the root of money
do that voice you do for the looters, ok
do your looters voice
I’ll do my looters voice
k

They forced P.J. O’Rourke to write about “Girls” and Lena Dunham.

I had my 14-year-old daughter, Poppet, instruct me in how to watch an episode of Girls on my computer. (Turns out “content” is not completely “free.”)

Two seconds into the opening credits I was trying to get my daughter out of the room by any means possible. “Poppet! Look in the yard! The puppy’s on fire! Quick! Quick! Run outside and roll him in the snow!”

It turns out Girls is a serialized horror movie—more gruesome, frightening, grim, dark, and disturbing than anything that’s ever occurred to Stephen King.

I have two daughters, Poppet and her 17-year-old sister Muffin. “Girls” is about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters. These young people, portrayed as being representative of typical young people, reside in a dumpy, grubby, woeful part of New York called Brooklyn, where Ms. Dunham should put her clothes back on.

I lived in New York for fifteen years. No one had been to Brooklyn since the Dodgers left in 1957.

The young people in Girls are miserable, peevish, depressed, hate their bodies, themselves, their life, and each other. They occupy apartments with the size and charm of the janitor’s closet, shared by The Abominable Roommate. They dress in clothing from the flophouse lost-and-found and are groomed with a hacksaw and gravel rake. They are tattooed all over with things that don’t even look like things the way a anchor or a mermaid or a heart inscribed “Mom” does, and they’re only a few years older than my daughters.

The characters in Girls take drugs. They “hook up” in a manner that makes the casual sex of the 1960s seem like an arranged marriage in Oman. And they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit and they drink and they vomit.

It’s every parent’s nightmare. I had to have a lot to drink before I could get to sleep after watching this show about young people who are only a few years older than my daughters.

Read the whole thing.

“A St. Louis news station reconsiders its morning programming in light of the Ferguson riots.” Not actually aired by SNL, allegedly because it was too long. Right.

Via Vanderleun.

Hat tip to Glenn Reynolds.

And here’s a compilation of European Jokes.

Example: Swedish Finn joke: “The difference between a Finnish wedding and a Finnish funeral is that at a funeral there’s one person not having vodka.”