The Ayn Rand Institute is now accepting volunteers.
From the institute’s website:
If you are unable to make monetary contributions or just want to do a little extra to help ARI, we invite you to become a volunteer!
ARI relies on volunteers to assist us with various departmental projects and with the running of special events. While we have a wonderful and very capable staff, we can always use additional help at peak times.
If the irony of this doesn’t slap you upside the head, you must not know who Ayn Rand is.
Ayn Rand is most well known for her novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. She is a champion of rational egoism: an action is rational only if it maximizes self-interest. …
I’m excited to announce a new local group that I’ve helped found in Muncie along with Brandon Coppernoll and BJ McKay – LeadershipBoard.org. Last week we appeared at our first public event – Converge 2011 at the Horizon Convention Center. Today, I’m doing a three-part series on LeadershipBoard.org.
To kick the day off and to bring you up to speed on what we’re about, I simply cut and pasted our About page below. ( I wrote it, so why not!) I’d love for you to check out the site, if you’re a resident of Muncie we’ll find a way to put your feet on the ground and start making connections and a difference. If you’re…
Since I’ve started to think about and research TOMS my stance has been best summed up as such: the problem isn’t shoelessness; it’s poverty.
At the best TOMS is addressing a symptom of poverty, not poverty itself. At the worst, TOMS is exploiting those living in poverty to sell shoes and hindering the local shoe business of their giving locations by giving away free shoes.
The author of the piece, Patrick McDonald, even gave me the last word on TOMS in the piece:
“You see the impact of how a job can change lives,” says Timmerman, “of how it can give a person dignity.”
On Monday I had my photo taken at least a thousand times by no less than 20 different photographers. It was one of those psuedo-famous moments where I felt like I was someone else, maybe even Lady Gaga. (Note: My butt cheeks weren’t hanging out.)
I was addressing high school students participating in Ball State’s summer journalism workshop. Photogs circled around the stage, in front and in back. At the top of the auditorium they stood on seats and tried to get an angle that no one else had imagined. I was less of a pseudo-celebrity and more of a bowl of fruit.
The title of my talk was “Confessions of an Untraditional Journalist.” You can…
I’m not sure if I’ve shared this yet, but four schools in the great state of Texas are using “Where Am I Wearing?” as a common reader this fall. This means that every single freshmen will get a copy of the book and be expected to read it. How awesome is that?!?
West Texas A&M University located just south of Amarillo is one of those schools. Here’s what they had to say in a recent press release about selecting WAIW in:
“We always try to select books with global issues for the Readership WT program and to have students consider what kind of impact they can have on our local and global communities,” Kendra Campbell, director of First Year Experience, said. “With…
Your boss is hounding you to produce more t-shirts faster, but he’s not willing to give you more money to hire new employees. You have two choices: don’t meet his unrealistic expectations or higher children at 1/3 of the price of an adult worker?
These are the decisions you face in the new online game Sweatshop.
Sweatshop is a light-hearted game, but it’s based upon very present realities that many workers around the world contend with each day.
Littleloud and Channel 4 worked with experts on sweatshops to integrate some of these realities into the game design.
In addition, there are numerous facts and figures spread throughout the game, highlighting the plight…
If I had to narrow the goal of my writing to one thing, it would be empathy. I try to make my readers feel what I feel or feel what it’s like to be in my subjects’ shoes. That’s why I’m such a huge fan of this video and of Jeremy Rifkin’s book, The Empathic Civilization.
Rifkin traces humans from our early day’s, trying not to be eaten on the African savannas, to modern day, and how we have divided the world into Us and Them. First it was blood, then tribes, then religions, then nations, and so on. Our Us continues to expand. It’s with…
“Hello,” the heavily-accented voice on the line said, “this is T-Rex. How can I be of service to you today?”
I was calling about a credit card or maybe my website. I can’t remember for sure, but I needed help and had to place the dreaded call to customer service.
“T-Rex? Your name is T-Rex?”
“Yes, sir, like the dinosaur in Jurassic Park!”
I’m glad he clarified that because I might have thought he was referring to the British band and that would just be weird.
I’ve been to some of the most poverty-stricken places on earth, including shanty towns, villages made up of mud huts, dumps where mothers and fathers scavenge alongside their children, and urban slums. What often strikes me the most isn’t what they don’t have, but what they do have: a strong sense of community, much stronger than our sense of community in Muncie, Indiana. Their communities live in abject poverty. We have a poverty of community.
My buddy Alex here is pictured standing in front of a 7-foot and $350 box of artillery. Yes there’s not much more American than these bombs of patriotism, made in China.
