Daily Archives: May 30, 2017

There's very few things I can add to all that have been said about "Atlas Shrugged" that haven't been said before. Ayn Rand wrote a timeless masterpiece who put her name across the most influential writers of the english language. The story by itself is an Ode to the Human Mind and the best within us. This book change the lives of those who enter in contact with it and, most of the time, for the better.

The production of this audiobook is perfect. There's no background noise and the sound is as crisp as it could be. Only on the technical standpoint, the recording is as perfect as the state of the technology allows it to be.

So, why I gave it only 3 stars? Because of the casting of Mr. Brick. I have no quarrel with him. He's a talented artist who, I am sure, would give an outstanding reading of "Pride and Prejudice". He's, sadly, a poor choice for "Atlas Shrugged". His voice is unable to carry the certainty of John Galt, Dagny Taggart seems to be a moment away to sobbing, Francisco d'Anconia got a mundane voice while Jim Taggart sounds perfectly sane(!). This mostly ruined my enjoyment of this recording. "Atlas Shrugged" is a righteous book and his voice is too mellow to sound right.

In summary, may I suggest to those who really want to enjoy this story that they acquire the Christopher Hurt's rendition of it? The quality is less than stellar but the reading is perfect. In fact, I listened to the later right after I listened Mr. Brick's recording, just to forget the poor experience I lived.

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Atlas Shrugged Audiobook | Audible.com

Buster Posey didn't move.

The Nationals' Bryce Harper charged the mound Monday after getting hit by Giants reliever Hunter Strickland, and Posey stood motionless behind the plate rather than defend his pitcher, jogging toward the melee only after Harper threw his helmet and punches started to fly.

My initial thought was that Posey, the Giants' catcher, was the sanest man on the field. But I knew that some players might see it differently, believing that teammates should always stand up for each other. And when I texted one Giants player afterward to ask his opinion of Posey's evident indifference, he summed up his conflicting emotions perfectly.

I don't know, he said. I really don't know.

Strickland acted foolishly with his seeming retaliation for the two home runs that Harper hit off him in the 2014 Division Series. Harper, who was hit on the hip, not anywhere near the head, could have laughed at Strickland on his way to first basethough that is easy for a casual observer to say; it's different, always different, in the heat of the moment.

Posey's failure to attempt to restrain Harper, though, is the greatest curiosity, one that is likely to spur debate about the Giants' franchise player and one of the game's great role models.

The former MVP's seeming disavowal of Strickland evoked the recent memory of Dustin Pedroia's it wasn't me response to Manny Machado after the Red Sox's Matt Barnes threw at Machado's head. Each of these on-field incidents, though, is different. The Pedroia-Machado exchange happened after the fact. Posey's Atlas Shrugged moment occurred in real time.

Brian Gorman, the plate umpire, reached the mound much quicker than Posey, who stood at his position for a good five seconds before finally moving. Posey's body language suggested that he was exasperated with Strickland. He had every right to be exasperated with Strickland. And he told reporters afterward that his recent concussions were not the reason for his inaction.

Many fans, reporters and even some in the game believe that all of this needs to stop, that pitchers need to stop throwing at hitters, that the risk of injury either from the ball that is thrown or any subsequent brawlis simply too great. But a good number of players, perhaps even a majority, would oppose a ban on such conduct, believing that they need an outlet to police themselves.

It's easy to say those players are wrong, just as it's easy to say that some were wrong to oppose new rules that were designed to enhance safety at home plate and at second base. Major League Baseball needs to be sensitive to player concerns, understand that the game cannot be completely legislated from Park Avenue. But as I've written before, if players are going to apply unwritten rules, then at least execute them properly or maybe lose the privilege, once and for all.

Strickland aimed his pitch at the right part of Harper's body; the problem was, he had no good reason to hit Harper in the first place, and put Posey in jeopardy if the Nationals decide to retaliate in kind. So the reliever's act, too, was a distortion of the unwritten rules. And Strickland, even after triggering the ugliness, would not calm down. It took three Giants Hunter Pence, George Kontos and Mac Williamson to drag the pitcher into the dugout.

The Giants, winners of three World Series between 2010 and '14, are in unfamiliar territorynine games under .500, 11 games out of first place. Posey twice has been caught on camera expressing his frustration with first baseman Brandon Belt. And perhaps Monday's madness was, in some ways, another sign of the team's overall frustration, though Strickland probably does not deserve such a sympathetic view.

Posey was in an uncomfortable position in the moment. He is in an uncomfortable position in the aftermath. What that means for Strickland's future with the cluband the rest of the Giants' seasonremains to be seen.

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Buster Posey draws unwanted attention after failure to step in during brawl - FOXSports.com

Poor ol Paul Ryan. For a few brief hourson 27 January, a week after the inauguration of Donald Trump, the Wikipedia entry for invertebrates which defines them as animals that neither possess nor develop a vertebral column(commonly known as a backbone or spine) was amended to include a smiling picture of the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives.

The online prank reflected a growing consensus among critics of Ryan: confronted by a boorish and authoritarian president plagued by multiple conflicts of interest, the House Speaker has behaved in a craven and spineless manner. Ryan, goes the conventional wisdom, is a coward.

Yet as is so often the case, the conventional wisdom is wrong. Ryans deafening silence over Trumps egregious excesses has little to do with pusillanimity. Its much worse than that. The House Speaker is not acoward; he is a shameless opportunist. Hisrefusal to condemn Trump is not caused by terror or fear; rather, it is a cynical,self-serving tactic.

Long before Trump arrived on the scene with his wacky birther conspiracies, Ryan was the undisputed star of the GOP; the earnest, number-crunching wunderkind of the right. He was elected to Congress in 1998, aged 28; by 2011, he was head of the House budget committee; by 2012, he was Mitt Romneys running mate; by 2015, he was Speaker of the House and third in line for the presidency at the grand old age of 45.

The Wisconsin congressman has been hailed in the conservative media as the man with a plan, the intellectual leader of the Republican Party, the conscience of the GOP. Yet, again and again, in recent years, he has been singularly unsuccessful in enacting his legislative agenda.

And what kind of agenda might that be? Why, an Ayn Rand-inspired agenda, of course. You know Rand, right? The hero ofmodern-day libertarians, self-described radical for capitalism and author of the dystopian novel Atlas Shrugged. As one of her acolytes wrote to her: You have the courage to tell the masses what no politician told them: you are inferior and all the improvements in your condition which yousimply take for granted you owe to the effort of men who are better than you.

Ryan is an ideologue who insists on giving copies of Atlas Shrugged to interns in his congressional office. In 2005 he told a gathering of Rand fans, called the Atlas Society, that the reason I got involved in public service, by and large, if I had to credit one thinker, one person, it would be Ayn Rand.

Rolling back the evil state while balancing the budget on the backs of the feckless poor, in true Randian fashion, has always been Ryans primary goal. Even Newt Gingrich, who served as Republican House Speaker for five years in the 1990s, once decried Ryans proposals to privatise Medicare the popular federal health insurance programme that covers people over the age of 65 as right-wing social engineering.

These days, Ryan has a useful idiot in the White House to help him pull off the right-wing social engineering that he couldnt pull off on his own. Trump, who doesnt do detail or policy, is content, perhaps even keen, to outsource his domestic agenda to the policy wonk from Wisconsin.

The Speaker has made his deal with the devil: a reckless and racist demagogue, possibly in cahoots with Russia, can trample over the law, erode US democratic norms and embarrass the country, and the party, at home and abroad. And in return? Ryan gets top-rate tax cuts. To hell with theconstitution.

Trump, lest we forget, ran as an insurgent against the Republican establishment during the primaries, loudly breaking with hard-right GOP orthodoxy on issues such as infrastructure spending (Trump promised more), health-care reform (Trump promised coverage for all) and Medicaid (Trump promised no cuts). It was all a charade, a con. And Ryan knew it. The Speaker may have been slow to endorse Trump but when he did so, last June, he made it clear that on the issues that make up our agenda, we have more common ground thandisagreement.

A year later, Ryan has been vindicated: free trade deals aside, Trump is governing as a pretty conventional, hard-right conservative. Consider the first important budget proposal from the Trump administration, published on 23 May. For Ryan, its a Randian dream come true: $800bn slashed from Medicaid, which provides health care to low-income Americans, plus swingeing cuts to Snap (the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Programme, aka food stamps), Chip (the Childrens Health Insurance Programme) and SSDI (disability insurance).

In Trump, Ryan and his fellow anti-government hardliners in Congress have found the perfect frontman to enact their reverse-Robin Hood economic agenda: a self-declared, rhetorical champion of white, working-class voters whose actual Ryan-esque policies on tax cuts, health care, Wall Street regulation and the rest bolster only the billionaire class at their expense.

Dont be distracted by all thescandals: the president has been busy using his tiny hands to sign a wide array of bills, executive orders and judicial appointments that have warmed the cold hearts of the Republican hard right.

Impeachment, therefore, remains a liberal fantasy despite everything were discovering about Russia, Michael Flynn, James Comey and the rest. Does anyone seriously expect this Republican-dominated House of Representatives to bring articles of impeachment against Trump? With Paul Ryan in charge of it? Dont. Be. Silly.

Mehdi Hasan is a broadcaster and New Statesman contributing editor. He is based inWashington, DC

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How Emmanuel Macron's sensitive masculinity turned him into politics' Modern Man - New Statesman

Over the last decade, many influential people have wondered whether Big Tech and democracy can coexist. They have included Stanford legal scholar Nathaniel Persily, distinguished journalist Thomas Edsall, and Robert Reich, who served as secretary of labor under President Clinton.

The latest take on the issue is an engaging book by Jonathan Taplin, former director of the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California and, in earlier manifestations, tour manager for Bob Dylan and a film producer for Martin Scorsese. The subtitle conveys a quick overview: How Facebook, Google, and Amazon Cornered Culture and Undermined Democracy.

Move fast and break things Taplins title was, at least until 2014, the corporate philosophy of Facebooks Mark Zuckerberg. Taplin interprets that philosophy liberally and applies it to several Big Tech moguls, especially PayPal co-founder Peter Thiel; Google co-founder Larry Page; Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In its original use, the phrase described the rapid deployment of innovative software projects. But to Taplin, it means something much darker: to replace all the failing systems of society with technological systems controlled by benevolent billionaires.

He reports, accurately, that Google now dominates five of the six billion-user online markets browsers, video, mobile, search and maps and that Facebook dominates the only other such market social media. He also asserts that some of the Big Tech execs have megalomaniacal ideas about the duty they have to save the world while becoming even more obscenely rich, much like the supermen they admire in Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged.

But Taplin seems unaware of the immense powers these new supermen are actually wielding. Since 2013, my research team and I have been studying new forms of influence the Internet has made possible that are unprecedented in human history. We have not been studying fake news, which is a very visible and old form of influence that mainly serves to confirm the beliefs people already have. And no, we have not been studying how negative messages can spread like wildfire through social interactions also a very old and visible form of influence.

The impact of such mechanisms is trivial compared with the new techniques, such as the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME), which Taplin mentions. Ronald Robertson and I discovered SEME in 2013, showing that biased search results can invisibly shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by between 20 and 80 percent. But SEME is only one of four powerful new forms of influence my colleagues and I have discovered in recent years, and Im sure there are others, with new ones coming soon. New forms of influence like SEME are now affecting the decisions of billions of people every day without their knowledge.

The Big Tech oligarchs are well aware of their new powers. As Googles Eric Schmidt said onstage a few days after the November 2016 election, How people get their information, what they believe, what they dont, is, I think, the project for the next decade (click here for the video). And evidence is mounting that they are actually using these tools.

As we recently reported, in 2016, Robertson and I recruited a Nielsen-type network of field agents who allowed us to track their election-related searches for nearly six months before Election Day. Based on the 13,207 searches and 98,044 web pages we captured using this new monitoring system, we found that Googles search results were biased toward Hillary ClintonHillary Rodham ClintonWhy do both Democrats and Republicans suffer from misogyny? Katy Perry following Ivanka Trump, Ann Coulter on Twitter Chelsea Clinton: We all have a responsibility to not stay silent now MORE in all ten of the top search results over most of this period enough, perhaps, to have invisibly shifted more than two million votes.

Im now working with colleagues from Princeton, Stanford and elsewhere to expand the monitoring system so the manipulative shenanigans of Big Tech companies can be continuously monitored on a large scale. Exposing online manipulations might finally force Big Tech companies to be accountable to the public and might even save democracy.

This brings me to my one gripe about Taplins book. Toward the end of this disturbing tale of greedy billionaires, he finally gets to his solutions: Facebook and Google, he says, must alter their business model, although he has no idea how to make this happen. Anyway, he says, maybe we can build a parallel structure of nonprofit distribution cooperatives that will once again allow creative artists to earn a decent living.

Seriously. Thats it. Thats how this illuminating book ends. Whatever happened to saving democracy?

To Mr. Taplin I say: How about joining my colleagues and me in building a worldwide monitoring system that will force Big Tech companies, now and in the future, to behave responsibly?

Robert Epstein (@DrREpstein) is senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology in Vista, California. He holds a PhD from Harvard University, and has published fifteen books on artificial intelligence and other topics. He is also the former editor-in-chief of Psychology Today.

The views expressed by contributors are their own and are not the views of The Hill.

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Is it still possible to stop 'Big Tech' from killing democracy? - The Hill (blog)