Category Archives: Atlas Shrugged

In Ayn Rands Atlas Shrugged, characters go Galt by disappearing into a valley, Galts Gulch, when society proves incompatible with living and working according to the principles of a free economy. Today, with every attack on the faithfulfrom challenges against bakers in courtrooms, to the mob that stripped Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich of his job, to the transgender school mandate the Obama administration enacted before leaving officeits clear there is a cultural tide working against people of faith in our country. Rands characters go Galt for economic reasons. Readers of a new book by Rod Dreher, The Benedict Option, may decide to go Benedict, dropping out of society in some fashion, for religious and moral reasons.

Drehers subtitle is A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation. A fascinating component of the book, however, is the overlap between what Dreher proposes and what already exists within the Orthodox Jewish community, in North America and across the world. The communal makeup of the Orthodox Jewish community was built not in response to cultural upheaval, but from a desire to maintain the continuity of the Jewish people. (A recent Pew Forum report on rates of intermarriage in American Judaism indicates the success of the Orthodox community in this regard.) Yet the Orthodox Jewish experience provides an exact blueprint for what Dreher is proposing American Christians undertake.

How should Americans go about going Benedict? Does it entail building a bunker and only eating food you catch or grow? Dreher explains how one can build a Benedictine society without totally withdrawing from the wider world:

Once weekly on the Sabbath, which lasts from Friday night at sundown to an hour after sundown on Saturday night, Orthodox Jewish families turn off televisions and smartphones, and spend the day playing old-fashioned games and sharing in meals together. It is forbidden to travel, spend money, or cook; thus, there is a strong emphasis on making the day one for familial bonding.

Thanks to the need for homes to be within walking distance of the communitys synagogue, Orthodox Jewish families often live in close proximity to one anotheranother recommendation Dreher makes in The Benedict Option. He acknowledges: Geography is one secret to the strength and resilience of the Orthodox Jewish communities. Christians dont have the geographical requirement that Orthodox Jews do, but many of those who choose to live in proximity have found it a blessing. Why be close? Because the church cant just be the place you go on Sundaysit must become the center of your life.

Most pivotally, Dreher addresses how parents should educate their children, in terms of both schooling and the at-home atmosphere. How do Orthodox Jewish parents raise their children? Almost every child attends a private Jewish school, often at great expense to parents and the community at large. The cost of a secondary school system outside of the public school system is so great that the Jewish community constantly tries to ameliorate the financial pressure on families arising from the day school crisis. Schools rely on donations from philanthropists and alumni, in addition to tapping into resources available to public school students (e.g., technology budgets, security, and busing). While the system entails sacrifices, it is held to be a foremost obligation of almost all Orthodox families to educate students within a Jewish framework; once-a-week Sunday school classes arent enough.

This is not to say that the Orthodox community has it all figured out. Several of the problems plaguing the Christian community are an issue within Orthodox Jewish circles as well. The quality of secular education, especially in more religious schools, leaves much to be desired for many parents, and as schools lean more modern or less right-wing religiously, the cost goes up. As the cost increases, so too does another problem Dreher notes, which is not exclusive to Christian schools. He explains: Years ago a Christian friend in Dallas refused to consider sending her children to a couple of the most elite Christian schools in the city. As a newcomer to the city, I assumed that the high tuition cost was the reason. Not at all, she said; she did not want her kids absorbing the materialistic, status-conscious culture within the schools. When tuition at a modern Orthodox school is over $15,000 per child per year, a keeping up with the Joneses mentality tends to take over.

Though Dreher wrote his book primarily as a guide for Christians in a post-Christian world, Christians and Jews have a great deal of common ground. In a conversation with me, Dreher remarked:

On issues surrounding school choice, the disappearance of modesty and decency in the public square, and religious liberty concerns, Christians and Jews should work together in order to protect their mutual best interests. The Jewish community has a great deal more experience than the Christian community at operating independently of many of societys boundaries. What it lacks is the Christian communitys organizational strength. While the Rabbinical Council for America (RCA), the main rabbinic body in America, issues press releases about gay marriage and religious liberty, it has considerably less bite behind its bark than its Christian counterparts do.

While Dreher largely discusses working interdenominationally between Christians in order to build a viable Benedict Option, if Christians hope to build an enclave for themselvesand if Jews wish to buttress theirsthe two communities have much to gain from cooperating with each other, rather than walling themselves off from each other and the wider world. Many of Drehers proposals for individuals who wish to become involved in their communities can also apply to Christians and Jews who wish to make inroads with each other. How can individuals in either community build a bridge to the other? Work with one another on projects relating to school choice and community improvement; play each others school groups at team sports; share in meals together; and invite one another to participate on projects of mutual interest, from river cleanup days to government lobbying efforts.

With every passing year it becomes clear that the culture war is a lost cause for religious conservatives. By going Benedict, we may not stop the tides working against families of faithbut we can create a refuge for those who might otherwise be swept out to sea.

Bethany Mandel is a stay-at-home mother and writer on politics and culture.

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Going Benedict, Orthodox Jewish-style - First Things

The greatest thinking and inquiries into human nature and society can come from the pages of a book. In between two covers, writers can present truths not always seen by the naked eye and challenge the status quo of society and power structures.

Some of the most powerful conservative thinking has come from the written word.

Through novels, artists have helped to define the meaning of individualism and to give power to the ideas of conservatism and free-thought philosophies.

Related: 10 Movies Every Conservative Needs to See

Here is a list of five novels every conservative should read, whether to deepen ones understanding of liberty principles, to challenge societal views of power or to just have a fine read.

Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand (1957) This novel of 60 years ago seems to ring truer every year. The story is both a celebration of individual accomplishment and an indictment of groupthink and the thuggery of bureaucracies.

A fast-paced novel that is also a capitalist manifesto; it celebrates the entrepreneurs who build and make new things, wrote conservative filmmaker Dinesh DSouza (Hillarys America) on his official website.

The story turned capitalists and entrepreneurs into its heroes. Dagny Taggart and Hank Rearden fight an increasingly powerful government that is shaming individualism and accomplishment and holding back societys thinkers and innovators. When the worlds leading influencers and successes begin to disappear, the characters begin a search for a mysterious figure named John Galt who may be behind the mystery.

President Reagan called himself an admirer of Ayn Rand in a published letter he once wrote. Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky also cited Rand as an influence of his at a speech at Dartmouth College in 2007.

Reportedly the second highest-selling book behind The Bible, Atlas Shrugged has influenced conservatives, libertarians, Republicans, and individualists everywhere. Rand managed to create an exciting novel with larger-than-life characters that used a love of capitalism as its driving force, and it was brilliant.

"It's much more than a story," said former Congressman Ron Paul (R-Texas) in a video for the "Atlas Shrugged" movie trilogy YouTube page. "It's influenced millions of people already and because of its greatness, it's going to continue to influence a lot of people." Paul added that the novel challenged the "conventional wisdom" of government and made him a stronger person and conservative.

"Hidden Order" by Brad Thor (2013) Thor once received death threats from Islamist extremists for his novel, "The Last Patriot." Never afraid to take on a controversial subject deemed politically incorrect, this writer brought attention to an issue libertarians and conservatives have been leading the charge on for years with "Hidden Order" the Federal Reserve.

Following Thor's fan-favorite character, Scot Harvath, as he investigates the murders of thecandidates who were in line totake over the Federal Reserve, the novel brought a lot about the secretive and inflation-loving government organization to light through sharp, intelligent, and thrilling writing.

While Thor always enjoyed a healthy audience of conservatives, 2013's "Hidden Order" won him new and bigger praise. "A great, great thriller," radio host Rush Limbaugh said of "Order." Fox News host Bill O'Reilly also recommended the novel on his show.

"I'm a big believer in less government is better government and we don't have less government now, and so my big push is transparency. I would talk to friends who had no idea what the Fed was," said Brad Thor to Reason TV last year of his novel also saying his goal was to inform readers while giving them an entertaining "beach read."

"Empire of Lies" by Andrew Klavan (2008) If readers didn't know novelist Klavan was a conservative before "Empire of Lies," they certainly knew afterward. Klavan's novel follows a conservative Christian named Jason Harrow who discovers the media and left-wing groups may be concealing the details to an Islamist terrorist plot.

The novel certainly didn't earn Klavan many friends in the mainstream media. "Klavan occupies the portion of the political spectrum commonly known as right-wing crackpot," said the Associated Press of Klavan's novel. "Through Harrow he tells us, among other things, that the entire media is a left-wing conspiracy, that taxes steal from the rich to give to the poor, that America is in a holy war with Islam, that the truth about darned near everything in the United States is obscured by a blizzard of politically correct lies and that anyone who disagrees with him is deluded."

Klavan's thriller was peppered with conservative messages and clicked with readers it became a best-seller. It's a wonderful read and the type of thriller every conservative should own, as it hits on truths about the media, the government, and political correctness that unfortunately still ring true today.

"Point of Impact" by Stephen Hunter(1993) The Washington Post is not exactly known as a conservative-friendly newspaper, but it did once employ Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Stephen Hunter.

Hunter not only reviewed movies for the publication, he also often wrote pro-Second Amendment stories, the type of well-constructed, intelligent pieces from someone who'd actually held a gun the type of pieces that are typically nowhere to be found in the mainstream media.

Hunter's respect for the right to bear arms and the inner workings of weapons fed into his successful novel career. His breakout hit, 1993's "Impact," was turned into a movie and a television series both called "Shooter."

The novel is a thriller about an assassination conspiracy, with Vietnam veteran Bob Lee Swagger as the government's scapegoat. Through Swagger, Hunter helped to culturally redefine people who own and use guns and Vietnam veterans two crowds that often co-mingle and are too often given not-so-nice or inaccurate treatment in the media and in film and storytelling.

It's an exciting read about how one individual goes up against a corrupt government that conservatives will love. Its open embrace of gun culture and Vietnam vets are two major bonuses. Readers have embraced Hunter's Swagger: The character has been in a total of nine books, with a 10th on the way this summer called "G-Man."

Related: Police Officers As You've Never Seen Them Before

"Animal Farm" by George Orwell (1945) "A parable about the totalitarian temptation embodied in socialism," wrote D'Souza on his website about "Animal Farm."

"Farm" was Orwell's direct criticism of the authoritarianism of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Stalinism in Moscow.

Brilliantly and simply told through farm animals, "Farm" examines the philosophies of aggression, individualism, and groupthink as animals on a farm plot a rebellion to be free of their farming masters.

It's not just a novel conservatives should read and re-read it's also one they should passing along to their children.

Excerpt from:

Five Novels Every Conservative Needs to Read | LifeZette - LifeZette

The writer Raj Patel once suggested that there are two novels that can transform a bookish 14-year-old kids life The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged and that one would produce an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, while the other is a book about orcs.

If thatquote is to be believed, then the ranks of the emotionally stunted and socially crippled must include such Rand devotees as Senator Ted Cruz, who quoted extensively from Rands novel Atlas Shrugged during a filibuster.

This is the same Ted Cruz, by the way, who very consciously announced his 2016 presidential campaign at Jerry Falwells Liberty University and constantly endorsed a return to Judeo-Christian values.

President Donald Trump, whose blatantly insincere lip service to Christianity ultimately triumphed over Cruzs initial popularity with evangelicals, is also a fan of Rands and, according to one interview, identifies strongly with Howard Roarke, the protagonist of The Fountainhead. Rand would likely have condemned Trump as a heinous pull-peddler, but I digress.

Unfortunately for Cruz and Trump (and all the tea partiers who claim to serve both Christ and Rand), the two philosophies are simply incompatible.

RELATED:Ayn Rands new lost novel should have stayed lost

In a nutshell, Rands philosophy, which she dubbed Objectivism, goes something like this: There is no God. Human beings are differentiated from animals only by their reason. By freely applying that reason, men can triumph over nature and create wealth. The way to be a good person is to use your reason well, and those who use their reason well become rich. So the ability to make money is the only system of morality thats on the gold standard.

Her characters swear never to live for another man or ask another man to live for them. Altruism is a wicked system of morality and charity that, while permissible, should only be practiced when the recipient is deserving and the giver is serving his own self-interest.

Rands novels also dehumanize the disabled and glorify adultery. Oh, and she was a champion of abortion rights and had a long extramarital affair.

Obviously the entire Christian worldviewfrom the metaphysical belief in the existence of God to the ethical emphasis on humility and charitystands opposed to these beliefs, and it is not necessary to go into detail on this point. That article has already been written dozens of times.

Despite these seemingly obvious contradictions, I have friends who consider themselves committed Christians while also claiming to find truth and inspiration in Rands works.

Certainly there is common ground to be found. A byproduct of Rands insistence on the primacy of human reason is her insistence on the freedom to exercise it. In her system, no man may use violence (whether directly or implicitly) to compel another to do anything.

RELATED:If we want a smaller government, we need to learn to take care of our communities

There is certainly a strong Christian tradition of defending individual liberty, from John Paul IIs work in liberating Eastern Europe from Soviet control to Whittaker Chambers defection from communism. But it is one thing to claim that our moral obligation to the disadvantaged is best fulfilled by the free market and quite another to claim that we have no moral obligation to the disadvantaged.

The latter argument, by the way, is a far more compassionate and voter-friendly way to frame a free-market, libertarian-leaning policy agenda.

I see no problem in agreeing with isolated ideas from the works of Ayn Rand while disagreeing with major parts of her philosophy as a whole. I do the same thing with Karl Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Ursula K. LeGuin. And, I might add, House Speaker Paul Ryan does a decent job of pulling off that balance, saying in an interview with the National Catholic Register that her novels sparked his interest in capitalism and free markets, but that he later came to reject Objectivism because it reduces human interactions to mere contracts.

Those wishing to run for office as practitioners of a religion that emphasizes the dignity of all human life would do well to minimize their connection with Rand to a few key issues of individual freedom and loose regulationor, perhaps better yet, completely avoid quoting the manifestos/sexual fantasies of a woman devoid of pity.

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Sorry Ted Cruz, Christianity and Ayn Rand are incompatible - Rare.us

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There is no other feeling comparable to finishing a book that you have invested time into. You shut it, look around and realize that the world around you has not changed but the one in your head and in that book, has. Its hard to make time to read with busy schedules, events, and classes, but reading has many perks. It can prevent Alzheimers, teach you new things, be an act of therapy, and boost your analytical thinking. Some great ways to incorporate reading into your schedule is during your commute, before bed, while waiting for appointments and during travel.

Here are some top books to read in your 20s. Get to it!

1. The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

The Alchemist offers several powerful life lessons. It follows the story of Santiago, a shepherd boy that is on a journey to discover his personal legend. Along the way, he meets several key people that help direct him on his journey, to within.

2. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand

This novel is tremendous in scope, consisting of many parts and the panorama of human life. Atlas Shrugged is a philosophical revolution that will allow you to discover the true moral roots of man.

3. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini

In this heartbreaking and revolting story, a lifelong friendship between a wealthy boy and the son of his fathers servant, it follows love, betrayal, sacrifice and redemption. The focal point lies within ethnic, religious, and political tensions of the dying years of the Afghan monarchy. For you a thousand times over, Hassan.

4. How Will You Measure Your Life? by Clayton M. Christensen

This book is full of inspiration and wisdom and serves as a guide for students, professionals, and parents for a path of fulfillment in life. Along the way, Christensen poses a series of questions, answering them using lessons from some of the worlds largest businesses and personal experiences

5. The Stranger by Albert Camus

Think human life may have no meaning? Then this book is for you. Originally published in French, this novel follows an ordinary man that is drawn to a senseless murder on an Algerian beach. Underlying is Camus philosophy of absurdity, humanitys futile attempt to find rational order where none exists.

6. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

Boring self-help book, I think not. This book presents several principles for solving personal and professional problems, using insights and anecdotes. Putting these principles into practice will surely This book continues to stay relevant and answer some of lifes questions that continue to protrude over time.

7. Life of Pi by Yann Martel

If theres only one nation in the sky, shouldnt all passports be valid for it? In this novel, the protagonist, Pi, explores issues of spirituality and practicality from an early age. If youve seen the movie, I encourage you to go back and read the book. In three parts, this follows the story of a boy that is shipwrecked with a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan and an adult tiger.

8. #GIRLBOSS by Sophia Amoruso At seventeen years old, Sophia Amoruso decided to forgo continuing higher education to pursue a life of hitchhiking, dumpster diving, and petty thievery. Now, she is the Founder, CEO, and Creative Director of Nasty Gal, an e-tailer of awesome and vintage clothing. She offers straight talk about being a strong woman, making your voice heard and doing meaningful work. She writes, I have three pieces of advice I want you to remember: Dont ever grow up. Dont become a bore. Dont let The Man get to you. OK? Cool. Then lets do this. This read is great for a train commute.

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The Impact : 8 Books To Read In Your 20's - The Impact

In early DecemberI wrote a piecerecountingall of President Barack Obamas attempts to woo Republicans and wondered whether members of the Tea Party represented by the ultraconservative House Freedom Caucus would save Obamacare by once again refusing to go along with the GOPs leadership. And by gosh, they went and did it again. By all accounts, the Freedom Caucuswouldnt accept Paul Ryans draconian replacement for Obamacare because its members didnt merely wish to return to the time before theAffordable Care Act was enacted; they wanted to take the health care system back to the time of Dickensian England.

Mainstream conservatives, on the other hand, were willing to deny millions of people health care but figured that their seats might be in jeopardy if they went as far as the Freedom Caucus demanded. This bill died the way that everything dies in the Republican Congress at the hands of fanatics who will not take yes for an answer.

The best meme circulating on Twitter during the negotiations was this one:

Speaker Paul Ryan deserves the lions share of the blame for this debacle. Hes the allegedly serious wonk who was supposed to be able to whip up a quick replacement in a matter of days that House Republicanscould get through on reconciliation in the Senate with 50 votes, Trump would sign it and victory would be at hand in no time. That didnt work out. Ryans alleged grasp of policy was always a Beltway delusion, largely based on his love of Atlas Shrugged and those blue, blue eyes. The health care bill he slapped together was a monstrosity that failed on every level, from cost savings to coverage, and it pleased absolutely no one. The train wreck of a negotiationprocess shows that Ryan is just as bad at political leadership as he is at policy.

Inan insightful piece in The Atlantic about the GOPsinability to pass such an important piece of legislation,McCay Coppins observed that the party has been avoiding governance for nearly a decade and simply no longer knows how to do it. He wrote:

Indeed, without any real expectation of their bills actually being enacted, the legislative process mutated into a platform for point-scoring, attention-getting, and brand-building. At its most benign, this dynamic manifested itself in performative filibusters and symbolic votes that had no meaningful effect beyond raising a senators profile or appeasing the cable news-watching constituents back home.

That certainly explains why GOP voters were so ready to cast their ballotsfor Donald Trump as president. He is obviously the leader the party was waiting for.

I mentioned the other day that when Obama ran on fixing Washington and bringing people together, the Republicans came up with aclever plan to obstruct him at every turn and then crow that he failed to fulfill his promise. It worked pretty well. Obama spent his entire first term trying to reach out to Republicans to no avail, but even today its an article of faith on the right that Obama was divisive.

After the repeal and replace debacle, we can see there is a corollary with Trump. He didnt promise to bring people together but rather ran on a simple platform of winning. He was supposed to be the guy who could just walk into any room and hammer out a deal so fast it would make our heads spin.He claimedhe had a method of defeating ISIS quickly and effectively and having total victory. Hewould build that wall and make Mexico pay for it. He would immediately tear up all the existing trade deals and negotiate new ones on Americas terms. In fact, he was going to win so much in every way that wed get sick of all the winning and beg him to stop.

And against all odds through an anachronistic constitutional fluke, Trump won the Electoral College vote despite coming up millions of votes short in the popular count the real measure of his popularity. It was a win that wasnt really a win, and he clearly knows it. As president, Trump has suffered one defeat after another. From the disaster of his travel ban to the fiasco of the health care strategy and the Michael Flynn debacle (as well as the ongoing Russia scandal), his new administration is a catastrophic fail so far. The question now is when his voters are going to realize that Trump is not the winner he said he was.

Many people knew this before he was elected, including some Republicans:

After the House leadership pulled the halth care billfrom being votedon Friday, this quote from Trumps book The Art of the Deal made the rounds on social media:

You cant con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press and you can throw in a little hyperbole, But if you dont deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.

But that book wasnt written by Trump. It was written by his ghostwriter, Tony Schwartz. Trumps real belief is that when you dont deliver the goods, let them sue and get them agree to take pennies on the dollar. When you fail, always blame someone else.

Trump had signaled throughout the health care debatethat he didnt really want to deliver anything at all. He said he believed the best thing to do was lethealth care deteriorate so that people would blame the Democrats. On his terms then, he won.

And Trump actually loses a lot in life. He goes bankrupt and issued and exposed as a fake and fraud with alarming frequency. He constantly lives on the edge of self-destruction, and when he iscaught, he dances away by blaming others. Indeed, except for having been born wealthy, Trump isnt a winner at all. Hes asurvivor,which is not what hes been selling. And he might survive as president. The question is whether the country will survive as well. Its already obvious that the nationwont be winning.

See more here:

So much for all that winning: Will the health care debacle expose the fraudulent nature of Trump's presidency? - Salon

In an impressive rant at a Senate hearing this afternoon, Thom Tillis somehow managed to cite Ayn Rand and go on a tirade against the demonization of Goldman Sachs, citing their apparent commitment to employing "the little guy," the Huffington post reported.

"I feel like sometimes I'm living a reality TV version of Atlas Shrugged," Tillis quipped during the confirmation hearing for Jay Clayton, Trumps nominee for chairing the Securities and Exchange Commission. "There are a lot of people in this Congress that want to beat down job creators and employers. People want to demonize Goldman Sachs. Thats an easy thing to do, right? Just beat up on a financial services institution. An institution thats committed to, let me look at the general numbers here they have 36,500 employees. Theres probably a lot of little guys in there. Theyve contributed billions of dollars to nonprofits.

Unsurprisingly, Trump's pick is a Wall Street attorney who, as HuffPo previously reported, played a starring role in Goldman's 2008 bailout.

Any financial services executive or anybody in a financial services business that acts badly needs to suffer the consequences, he remarked. But if we just make the American people think that theyre all bad, you are hurting the little guy.

Tillis bizarrely repeated this "little guy" Goldman Sachs claim a number of times, with no apparent sense of the irony of his own literary citation.As reporter Zach Carter put it,

Still, Tillis most grievous error at the hearing was one of literary interpretation. Tillis simply does not understand the book he referenced during his tirade. Atlas Shruggedis a novel about a railroad tycoon who has an affair with a married steel magnate before joining a clan of very bright rich people who go on strike, letting society collapse without their talents while they enjoy the ubermensch lifestyle in a peaceful valley.

Atlas Shruggedis not a novel about all the charities supported by good-hearted corporations. Its heroes literally abandon society to chaos and destruction rather than deploy their talents for the public good. Ayn Rand, the author of Atlas Shrugged, would not have approved of Goldmans philanthropic work, because she believed all charitable activity fostered weakness and opposed it on principle. She literally wrote a book called The Virtue of Selfishness, which celebrates people who act in their own interests at the expense of their communities.

Its not exactly an alien worldview on Wall Street.

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Thom Tillis, Textbook Definition of a Schmuck, Says Goldman Sachs ... - The Independent Weekly

PROPHET MOTIVE Elon Musk, co-founder of Tesla and OpenAI, inside part of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, in Cape Canaveral, Florida, 2010.

Photograph by Jonas Fredwall Karlsson.

It was just a friendly little argument about the fate of humanity. Demis Hassabis, a leading creator of advanced artificial intelligence, was chatting with Elon Musk, a leading doomsayer, about the perils of artificial intelligence.

They are two of the most consequential and intriguing men in Silicon Valley who dont live there. Hassabis, a co-founder of the mysterious London laboratory DeepMind, had come to Musks SpaceX rocket factory, outside Los Angeles, a few years ago. They were in the canteen, talking, as a massive rocket part traversed overhead. Musk explained that his ultimate goal at SpaceX was the most important project in the world: interplanetary colonization.

Hassabis replied that, in fact, he was working on the most important project in the world: developing artificial super-intelligence. Musk countered that this was one reason we needed to colonize Marsso that well have a bolt-hole if A.I. goes rogue and turns on humanity. Amused, Hassabis said that A.I. would simply follow humans to Mars.

This did nothing to soothe Musks anxieties (even though he says there are scenarios where A.I. wouldnt follow).

An unassuming but competitive 40-year-old, Hassabis is regarded as the Merlin who will likely help conjure our A.I. children. The field of A.I. is rapidly developing but still far from the powerful, self-evolving software that haunts Musk. Facebook uses A.I. for targeted advertising, photo tagging, and curated news feeds. Microsoft and Apple use A.I. to power their digital assistants, Cortana and Siri. Googles search engine from the beginning has been dependent on A.I. All of these small advances are part of the chase to eventually create flexible, self-teaching A.I. that will mirror human learning.

WITHOUT OVERSIGHT, MUSK BELIEVES, A.I. COULD BE AN EXISTENTIAL THREAT: WE ARE SUMMONING THE DEMON.

Some in Silicon Valley were intrigued to learn that Hassabis, a skilled chess player and former video-game designer, once came up with a game called Evil Genius, featuring a malevolent scientist who creates a doomsday device to achieve world domination. Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and Donald Trump adviser who co-founded PayPal with Musk and othersand who in December helped gather skeptical Silicon Valley titans, including Musk, for a meeting with the president-electtold me a story about an investor in DeepMind who joked as he left a meeting that he ought to shoot Hassabis on the spot, because it was the last chance to save the human race.

Elon Musk began warning about the possibility of A.I. running amok three years ago. It probably hadnt eased his mind when one of Hassabiss partners in DeepMind, Shane Legg, stated flatly, I think human extinction will probably occur, and technology will likely play a part in this.

Before DeepMind was gobbled up by Google, in 2014, as part of its A.I. shopping spree, Musk had been an investor in the company. He told me that his involvement was not about a return on his money but rather to keep a wary eye on the arc of A.I.: It gave me more visibility into the rate at which things were improving, and I think theyre really improving at an accelerating rate, far faster than people realize. Mostly because in everyday life you dont see robots walking around. Maybe your Roomba or something. But Roombas arent going to take over the world.

In a startling public reproach to his friends and fellow techies, Musk warned that they could be creating the means of their own destruction. He told Bloombergs Ashlee Vance, the author of the biography Elon Musk, that he was afraid that his friend Larry Page, a co-founder of Google and now the C.E.O. of its parent company, Alphabet, could have perfectly good intentions but still produce something evil by accidentincluding, possibly, a fleet of artificial intelligence-enhanced robots capable of destroying mankind.

At the World Government Summit in Dubai, in February, Musk again cued the scary organ music, evoking the plots of classic horror stories when he noted that sometimes what will happen is a scientist will get so engrossed in their work that they dont really realize the ramifications of what theyre doing. He said that the way to escape human obsolescence, in the end, may be by having some sort of merger of biological intelligence and machine intelligence. This Vulcan mind-meld could involve something called a neural lacean injectable mesh that would literally hardwire your brain to communicate directly with computers. Were already cyborgs, Musk told me in February. Your phone and your computer are extensions of you, but the interface is through finger movements or speech, which are very slow. With a neural lace inside your skull you would flash data from your brain, wirelessly, to your digital devices or to virtually unlimited computing power in the cloud. For a meaningful partial-brain interface, I think were roughly four or five years away.

Musks alarming views on the dangers of A.I. first went viral after he spoke at M.I.T. in 2014speculating (pre-Trump) that A.I. was probably humanitys biggest existential threat. He added that he was increasingly inclined to think there should be some national or international regulatory oversightanathema to Silicon Valleyto make sure that we dont do something very foolish. He went on: With artificial intelligence, we are summoning the demon. You know all those stories where theres the guy with the pentagram and the holy water and hes like, yeah, hes sure he can control the demon? Doesnt work out. Some A.I. engineers found Musks theatricality so absurdly amusing that they began echoing it. When they would return to the lab after a break, theyd say, O.K., lets get back to work summoning.

Musk wasnt laughing. Elons crusade (as one of his friends and fellow tech big shots calls it) against unfettered A.I. had begun.

Elon Musk smiled when I mentioned to him that he comes across as something of an Ayn Rand-ian hero. I have heard that before, he said in his slight South African accent. She obviously has a fairly extreme set of views, but she has some good points in there.

But Ayn Rand would do some re-writes on Elon Musk. She would make his eyes gray and his face more gaunt. She would refashion his public demeanor to be less droll, and she would not countenance his goofy giggle. She would certainly get rid of all his nonsense about the collective good. She would find great material in the 45-year-olds complicated personal life: his first wife, the fantasy writer Justine Musk, and their five sons (one set of twins, one of triplets), and his much younger second wife, the British actress Talulah Riley, who played the boring Bennet sister in the Keira Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice. Riley and Musk were married, divorced, and then re-married. They are now divorced again. Last fall, Musk tweeted that Talulah does a great job playing a deadly sexbot on HBOs Westworld, adding a smiley-face emoticon. Its hard for mere mortal women to maintain a relationship with someone as insanely obsessed with work as Musk.

How much time does a woman want a week? he asked Ashlee Vance. Maybe ten hours? Thats kind of the minimum?

Mostly, Rand would savor Musk, a hyper-logical, risk-loving industrialist. He enjoys costume parties, wing-walking, and Japanese steampunk extravaganzas. Robert Downey Jr. used Musk as a model for Iron Man. Marc Mathieu, the chief marketing officer of Samsung USA, who has gone fly-fishing in Iceland with Musk, calls him a cross between Steve Jobs and Jules Verne.As they danced at their wedding reception, Justine later recalled, Musk informed her, I am the alpha in this relationship.

Photographs by Anders Lindn/Agent Bauer (Tegmark); by Jeff Chiu/A.P. Images (Page, Wozniak); by Simon Dawson/Bloomberg (Hassabis), Michael Gottschalk/Photothek (Gates), Niklas Hallen/AFP (Hawking), Saul Loeb/AFP (Thiel), Juan Mabromata/AFP (Russell), David Paul Morris/Bloomberg (Altman), Tom Pilston/The Washington Post (Bostrom), David Ramos (Zuckerberg), all from Getty Images; by Frederic Neema/Polaris/Newscom (Kurzwell); by Denis Allard/Agence Ra/Redux (LeCun); Ariel Zambelich/ Wired (Ng); Bobby Yip/Reuters/Zuma Press (Musk).

In a tech universe full of skinny guys in hoodieswhipping up bots that will chat with you and apps that can study a photo of a dog and tell you what breed it isMusk is a throwback to Henry Ford and Hank Rearden. In Atlas Shrugged, Rearden gives his wife a bracelet made from the first batch of his revolutionary metal, as though it were made of diamonds. Musk has a chunk of one of his rockets mounted on the wall of his Bel Air house, like a work of art.

Musk shoots for the moonliterally. He launches cost-efficient rockets into space and hopes to eventually inhabit the Red Planet. In February he announced plans to send two space tourists on a flight around the moon as early as next year. He creates sleek batteries that could lead to a world powered by cheap solar energy. He forges gleaming steel into sensuous Tesla electric cars with such elegant lines that even the nitpicking Steve Jobs would have been hard-pressed to find fault. He wants to save time as well as humanity: he dreamed up the Hyperloop, an electromagnetic bullet train in a tube, which may one day whoosh travelers between L.A. and San Francisco at 700 miles per hour. When Musk visited secretary of defense Ashton Carter last summer, he mischievously tweeted that he was at the Pentagon to talk about designing a Tony Stark-style flying metal suit. Sitting in traffic in L.A. in December, getting bored and frustrated, he tweeted about creating the Boring Company to dig tunnels under the city to rescue the populace from soul-destroying traffic. By January, according to Bloomberg Businessweek, Musk had assigned a senior SpaceX engineer to oversee the plan and had started digging his first test hole. His sometimes quixotic efforts to save the world have inspired a parody twitter account, Bored Elon Musk, where a faux Musk spouts off wacky ideas such as Oxford commas as a service and bunches of bananas genetically engineered so that the bananas ripen one at a time.

Of course, big dreamers have big stumbles. Some SpaceX rockets have blown up, and last June a driver was killed in a self-driving Tesla whose sensors failed to notice the tractor-trailer crossing its path. (An investigation by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration found that Teslas Autopilot system was not to blame.)

Musk is stoic about setbacks but all too conscious of nightmare scenarios. His views reflect a dictum from Atlas Shrugged: Man has the power to act as his own destroyerand that is the way he has acted through most of his history. As he told me, we are the first species capable of self-annihilation.

Heres the nagging thought you cant escape as you drive around from glass box to glass box in Silicon Valley: the Lords of the Cloud love to yammer about turning the world into a better place as they churn out new algorithms, apps, and inventions that, it is claimed, will make our lives easier, healthier, funnier, closer, cooler, longer, and kinder to the planet. And yet theres a creepy feeling underneath it all, a sense that were the mice in their experiments, that they regard us humans as Betamaxes or eight-tracks, old technology that will soon be discarded so that they can get on to enjoying their sleek new world. Many people there have accepted this future: well live to be 150 years old, but well have machine overlords.

Maybe we already have overlords. As Musk slyly told Recodes annual Code Conference last year in Rancho Palos Verdes, California, we could already be playthings in a simulated-reality world run by an advanced civilization. Reportedly, two Silicon Valley billionaires are working on an algorithm to break us out of the Matrix.

Among the engineers lured by the sweetness of solving the next problem, the prevailing attitude is that empires fall, societies change, and we are marching toward the inevitable phase ahead. They argue not about whether but rather about how close we are to replicating, and improving on, ourselves. Sam Altman, the 31-year-old president of Y Combinator, the Valleys top start-up accelerator, believes humanity is on the brink of such invention.

The hard part of standing on an exponential curve is: when you look backwards, it looks flat, and when you look forward, it looks vertical, he told me. And its very hard to calibrate how much you are moving because it always looks the same.

Youd think that anytime Musk, Stephen Hawking, and Bill Gates are all raising the same warning about A.I.as all of them areit would be a 10-alarm fire. But, for a long time, the fog of fatalism over the Bay Area was thick. Musks crusade was viewed as Sisyphean at best and Luddite at worst. The paradox is this: Many tech oligarchs see everything they are doing to help us, and all their benevolent manifestos, as streetlamps on the road to a future where, as Steve Wozniak says, humans are the family pets.

But Musk is not going gently. He plans on fighting this with every fiber of his carbon-based being. Musk and Altman have founded OpenAI, a billion-dollar nonprofit company, to work for safer artificial intelligence. I sat down with the two men when their new venture had only a handful of young engineers and a makeshift office, an apartment in San Franciscos Mission District that belongs to Greg Brockman, OpenAIs 28-year-old co-founder and chief technology officer. When I went back recently, to talk with Brockman and Ilya Sutskever, the companys 30-year-old research director (and also a co-founder), OpenAI had moved into an airy office nearby with a robot, the usual complement of snacks, and 50 full-time employees. (Another 10 to 30 are on the way.)

Altman, in gray T-shirt and jeans, is all wiry, pale intensity. Musks fervor is masked by his diffident manner and rosy countenance. His eyes are green or blue, depending on the light, and his lips are plum red. He has an aura of command while retaining a trace of the gawky, lonely South African teenager who immigrated to Canada by himself at the age of 17.

In Silicon Valley, a lunchtime meeting does not necessarily involve that mundane fuel known as food. Younger coders are too absorbed in algorithms to linger over meals. Some just chug Soylent. Older ones are so obsessed with immortality that sometimes theyre just washing down health pills with almond milk.

At first blush, OpenAI seemed like a bantamweight vanity project, a bunch of brainy kids in a walkup apartment taking on the multi-billion-dollar efforts at Google, Facebook, and other companies which employ the worlds leading A.I. experts. But then, playing a well-heeled David to Goliath is Musks specialty, and he always does it with styleand some useful sensationalism.

Let others in Silicon Valley focus on their I.P.O. price and ridding San Francisco of what they regard as its unsightly homeless population. Musk has larger aims, like ending global warming and dying on Mars (just not, he says, on impact).

Musk began to see mans fate in the galaxy as his personal obligation three decades ago, when as a teenager he had a full-blown existential crisis. Musk told me that The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams, was a turning point for him. The book is about aliens destroying the earth to make way for a hyperspace highway and features Marvin the Paranoid Android and a supercomputer designed to answer all the mysteries of the universe. (Musk slipped at least one reference to the book into the software of the Tesla Model S.) As a teenager, Vance writes in his biography, Musk formulated a mission statement for himself: The only thing that makes sense to do is strive for greater collective enlightenment.

OpenAI got under way with a vague mandatewhich isnt surprising, given that people in the field are still arguing over what form A.I. will take, what it will be able to do, and what can be done about it. So far, public policy on A.I. is strangely undetermined and software is largely unregulated. The Federal Aviation Administration oversees drones, the Securities and Exchange Commission oversees automated financial trading, and the Department of Transportation has begun to oversee self-driving cars.

Musk believes that it is better to try to get super-A.I. first and distribute the technology to the world than to allow the algorithms to be concealed and concentrated in the hands of tech or government eliteseven when the tech elites happen to be his own friends, people such as Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Ive had many conversations with Larry about A.I. and roboticsmany, many, Musk told me. And some of them have gotten quite heated. You know, I think its not just Larry, but there are many futurists who feel a certain inevitability or fatalism about robots, where wed have some sort of peripheral role. The phrase used is We are the biological boot-loader for digital super-intelligence. (A boot loader is the small program that launches the operating system when you first turn on your computer.) Matter cant organize itself into a chip, Musk explained. But it can organize itself into a biological entity that gets increasingly sophisticated and ultimately can create the chip.

Musk has no intention of being a boot loader. Page and Brin see themselves as forces for good, but Musk says the issue goes far beyond the motivations of a handful of Silicon Valley executives.

Its great when the emperor is Marcus Aurelius, he says. Its not so great when the emperor is Caligula.

After the so-called A.I. winterthe broad, commercial failure in the late 80s of an early A.I. technology that wasnt up to snuffartificial intelligence got a reputation as snake oil. Now its the hot thing again in this go-go era in the Valley. Greg Brockman, of OpenAI, believes the next decade will be all about A.I., with everyone throwing money at the small number of wizards who know the A.I. incantations. Guys who got rich writing code to solve banal problems like how to pay a stranger for stuff online now contemplate a vertiginous world where they are the creators of a new reality and perhaps a new species.

Microsofts Jaron Lanier, the dreadlocked computer scientist known as the father of virtual reality, gave me his view as to why the digerati find the science-fiction fantasy of A.I. so tantalizing: Its saying, Oh, you digital techy people, youre like gods; youre creating life; youre transforming reality. Theres a tremendous narcissism in it that were the people who can do it. No one else. The Pope cant do it. The president cant do it. No one else can do it. We are the masters of it . . . . The software were building is our immortality. This kind of God-like ambition isnt new, he adds. I read about it once in a story about a golden calf. He shook his head. Dont get high on your own supply, you know?

Google has gobbled up almost every interesting robotics and machine-learning company over the last few years. It bought DeepMind for $650 million, reportedly beating out Facebook, and built the Google Brain team to work on A.I. It hired Geoffrey Hinton, a British pioneer in artificial neural networks; and Ray Kurzweil, the eccentric futurist who has predicted that we are only 28 years away from the Rapture-like Singularitythe moment when the spiraling capabilities of self-improving artificial super-intelligence will far exceed human intelligence, and human beings will merge with A.I. to create the god-like hybrid beings of the future.

Its in Larry Pages blood and Googles DNA to believe that A.I. is the companys inevitable destinythink of that destiny as you will. (If evil A.I. lights up, Ashlee Vance told me, it will light up first at Google.) If Google could get computers to master search when search was the most important problem in the world, then presumably it can get computers to do everything else. In March of last year, Silicon Valley gulped when a fabled South Korean player of the worlds most complex board game, Go, was beaten in Seoul by DeepMinds AlphaGo. Hassabis, who has said he is running an Apollo program for A.I., called it a historic moment and admitted that even he was surprised it happened so quickly. Ive always hoped that A.I. could help us discover completely new ideas in complex scientific domains, Hassabis told me in February. This might be one of the first glimpses of that kind of creativity. More recently, AlphaGo played 60 games online against top Go players in China, Japan, and Koreaand emerged with a record of 60--0. In January, in another shock to the system, an A.I. program showed that it could bluff. Libratus, built by two Carnegie Mellon researchers, was able to crush top poker players at Texas Hold Em.

Peter Thiel told me about a friend of his who says that the only reason people tolerate Silicon Valley is that no one there seems to be having any sex or any fun. But there are reports of sex robots on the way that come with apps that can control their moods and even have a pulse. The Valley is skittish when it comes to female sex robotsan obsession in Japanbecause of its notoriously male-dominated culture and its much-publicized issues with sexual harassment and discrimination. But when I asked Musk about this, he replied matter-of-factly, Sex robots? I think those are quite likely.

Whether sincere or a shrewd P.R. move, Hassabis made it a condition of the Google acquisition that Google and DeepMind establish a joint A.I. ethics board. At the time, three years ago, forming an ethics board was seen as a precocious move, as if to imply that Hassabis was on the verge of achieving true A.I. Now, not so much. Last June, a researcher at DeepMind co-authored a paper outlining a way to design a big red button that could be used as a kill switch to stop A.I. from inflicting harm.

Google executives say Larry Pages view on A.I. is shaped by his frustration about how many systems are sub-optimalfrom systems that book trips to systems that price crops. He believes that A.I. will improve peoples lives and has said that, when human needs are more easily met, people will have more time with their family or to pursue their own interests. Especially when a robot throws them out of work.

Musk is a friend of Pages. He attended Pages wedding and sometimes stays at his house when hes in the San Francisco area. Its not worth having a house for one or two nights a week, the 99th-richest man in the world explained to me. At times, Musk has expressed concern that Page may be nave about how A.I. could play out. If Page is inclined toward the philosophy that machines are only as good or bad as the people creating them, Musk firmly disagrees. Some at Googleperhaps annoyed that Musk is, in essence, pointing a finger at them for rushing ahead willy-nillydismiss his dystopic take as a cinematic clich. Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Googles parent company, put it this way: Robots are invented. Countries arm them. An evil dictator turns the robots on humans, and all humans will be killed. Sounds like a movie to me.

Some in Silicon Valley argue that Musk is interested less in saving the world than in buffing his brand, and that he is exploiting a deeply rooted conflict: the one between man and machine, and our fear that the creation will turn against us. They gripe that his epic good-versus-evil story line is about luring talent at discount rates and incubating his own A.I. software for cars and rockets. Its certainly true that the Bay Area has always had a healthy respect for making a buck. As Sam Spade said in The Maltese Falcon, Most things in San Francisco can be bought, or taken.

Musk is without doubt a dazzling salesman. Who better than a guardian of human welfare to sell you your new, self-driving Tesla? Andrew Ngthe chief scientist at Baidu, known as Chinas Googlebased in Sunnyvale, California, writes off Musks Manichaean throwdown as marketing genius. At the height of the recession, he persuaded the U.S. government to help him build an electric sports car, Ng recalled, incredulous. The Stanford professor is married to a robotics expert, issued a robot-themed engagement announcement, and keeps a Trust the Robot black jacket hanging on the back of his chair. He thinks people who worry about A.I. going rogue are distracted by phantoms, and regards getting alarmed now as akin to worrying about overpopulation on Mars before we populate it. And I think its fascinating, he said about Musk in particular, that in a rather short period of time hes inserted himself into the conversation on A.I. I think he sees accurately that A.I. is going to create tremendous amounts of value.

Although he once called Musk a sci-fi version of P. T. Barnum, Ashlee Vance thinks that Musks concern about A.I. is genuine, even if what he can actually do about it is unclear. His wife, Talulah, told me they had late-night conversations about A.I. at home, Vance noted. Elon is brutally logical. The way he tackles everything is like moving chess pieces around. When he plays this scenario out in his head, it doesnt end well for people.

Eliezer Yudkowsky, a co-founder of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, in Berkeley, agrees: Hes Elon-freaking-Musk. He doesnt need to touch the third rail of the artificial-intelligence controversy if he wants to be sexy. He can just talk about Mars colonization.

Some sniff that Musk is not truly part of the whiteboard culture and that his scary scenarios miss the fact that we are living in a world where its hard to get your printer to work. Others chalk up OpenAI, in part, to a case of FOMO: Musk sees his friend Page building new-wave software in a hot field and craves a competing army of coders. As Vance sees it, Elon wants all the toys that Larry has. Theyre like these two superpowers. Theyre friends, but theres a lot of tension in their relationship. A rivalry of this kind might be best summed up by a line from the vainglorious head of the fictional tech behemoth Hooli, on HBOs Silicon Valley: I dont want to live in a world where someone else makes the world a better place better than we do.

Musks disagreement with Page over the potential dangers of A.I. did affect our friendship for a while, Musk says, but that has since passed. We are on good terms these days.

Musk never had as close a personal connection with 32-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, who has become an unlikely lifestyle guru, setting a new challenge for himself every year. These have included wearing a tie every day, reading a book every two weeks, learning Mandarin, and eating meat only from animals he killed with his own hands. In 2016, it was A.I.s turn.

Zuckerberg has moved his A.I. experts to desks near his own. Three weeks after Musk and Altman announced their venture to make the world safe from malicious A.I., Zuckerberg posted on Facebook that his project for the year was building a helpful A.I. to assist him in managing his homeeverything from recognizing his friends and letting them inside to keeping an eye on the nursery. You can think of it kind of like Jarvis in Iron Man, he wrote.

One Facebooker cautioned Zuckerberg not to accidentally create Skynet, the military supercomputer that turns against human beings in the Terminator movies. I think we can build A.I. so it works for us and helps us, Zuckerberg replied. And clearly throwing shade at Musk, he continued: Some people fear-monger about how A.I. is a huge danger, but that seems far-fetched to me and much less likely than disasters due to widespread disease, violence, etc. Or, as he described his philosophy at a Facebook developers conference last April, in a clear rejection of warnings from Musk and others he believes to be alarmists: Choose hope over fear.

In the November issue of Wired, guest-edited by Barack Obama, Zuckerberg wrote that there is little basis beyond science fiction to worry about doomsday scenarios: If we slow down progress in deference to unfounded concerns, we stand in the way of real gains. He compared A.I. jitters to early fears about airplanes, noting, We didnt rush to put rules in place about how airplanes should work before we figured out how theyd fly in the first place.

Zuckerberg introduced his A.I. butler, Jarvis, right before Christmas. With the soothing voice of Morgan Freeman, it was able to help with music, lights, and even making toast. I asked the real-life Iron Man, Musk, about Zuckerbergs Jarvis, when it was in its earliest stages. I wouldnt call it A.I. to have your household functions automated, Musk said. Its really not A.I. to turn the lights on, set the temperature.

Zuckerberg can be just as dismissive. Asked in Germany whether Musks apocalyptic forebodings were hysterical or valid, Zuckerberg replied hysterical. And when Musks SpaceX rocket blew up on the launch pad in September, destroying a satellite Facebook was leasing, Zuckerberg coldly posted that he was deeply disappointed.

Musk and others who have raised a warning flag on A.I. have sometimes been treated like drama queens. In January 2016, Musk won the annual Luddite Award, bestowed by a Washington tech-policy think tank. Still, hes got some pretty good wingmen. Stephen Hawking told the BBC, I think the development of full artificial intelligence could spell the end of the human race. Bill Gates told Charlie Rose that A.I. was potentially more dangerous than a nuclear catastrophe. Nick Bostrom, a 43-year-old Oxford philosophy professor, warned in his 2014 book, Superintelligence, that once unfriendly superintelligence exists, it would prevent us from replacing it or changing its preferences. Our fate would be sealed. And, last year, Henry Kissinger jumped on the peril bandwagon, holding a confidential meeting with top A.I. experts at the Brook, a private club in Manhattan, to discuss his concern over how smart robots could cause a rupture in history and unravel the way civilization works.

In January 2015, Musk, Bostrom, and a Whos Who of A.I., representing both sides of the split, assembled in Puerto Rico for a conference hosted by Max Tegmark, a 49-year-old physics professor at M.I.T. who runs the Future of Life Institute, in Boston.

Do you own a house?, Tegmark asked me. Do you own fire insurance? The consensus in Puerto Rico was that we needed fire insurance. When we got fire and messed up with it, we invented the fire extinguisher. When we got cars and messed up, we invented the seat belt, air bag, and traffic light. But with nuclear weapons and A.I., we dont want to learn from our mistakes. We want to plan ahead. (Musk reminded Tegmark that a precaution as sensible as seat belts had provoked fierce opposition from the automobile industry.)

Musk, who has kick-started the funding of research into avoiding A.I.s pitfalls, said he would give the Future of Life Institute 10 million reasons to pursue the subject, donating $10 million. Tegmark promptly gave $1.5 million to Bostroms group in Oxford, the Future of Humanity Institute. Explaining at the time why it was crucial to be proactive and not reactive, Musk said it was certainly possible to construct scenarios where the recovery of human civilization does not occur.

Six months after the Puerto Rico conference, Musk, Hawking, Demis Hassabis, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, and Stuart Russell, a computer-science professor at Berkeley who co-authored the standard textbook on artificial intelligence, along with 1,000 other prominent figures, signed a letter calling for a ban on offensive autonomous weapons. In 50 years, this 18-month period were in now will be seen as being crucial for the future of the A.I. community, Russell told me. Its when the A.I. community finally woke up and took itself seriously and thought about what to do to make the future better. Last September, the countrys biggest tech companies created the Partnership on Artificial Intelligence to explore the full range of issues arising from A.I., including the ethical ones. (Musks OpenAI quickly joined this effort.) Meanwhile, the European Union has been looking into legal issues arising from the advent of robots and A.I.such as whether robots have personhood or (as one Financial Times contributor wondered) should be considered more like slaves in Roman law.

At Tegmarks second A.I. safety conference, last January at the Asilomar center, in Californiachosen because thats where scientists gathered back in 1975 and agreed to limit genetic experimentationthe topic was not so contentious. Larry Page, who was not at the Puerto Rico conference, was at Asilomar, and Musk noted that their conversation was no longer heated.

But while it may have been a coming-out party for A.I. safety, as one attendee put itpart of a sea change in the last year or so, as Musk saystheres still a long way to go. Theres no question that the top technologists in Silicon Valley now take A.I. far more seriouslythat they do acknowledge it as a risk, he observes. Im not sure that they yet appreciate the significance of the risk.

Steve Wozniak has wondered publicly whether he is destined to be a family pet for robot overlords. We started feeding our dog filet, he told me about his own pet, over lunch with his wife, Janet, at the Original Hickry Pit, in Walnut Creek. Once you start thinking you could be one, thats how you want them treated.

He has developed a policy of appeasement toward robots and any A.I. masters. Why do we want to set ourselves up as the enemy when they might overpower us someday? he said. It should be a joint partnership. All we can do is seed them with a strong culture where they see humans as their friends.

When I went to Peter Thiels elegant San Francisco office, dominated by two giant chessboards, Thiel, one of the original donors to OpenAI and a committed contrarian, said he worried that Musks resistance could actually be accelerating A.I. research because his end-of-the-world warnings are increasing interest in the field.

Full-on A.I. is on the order of magnitude of extraterrestrials landing, Thiel said. There are some very deeply tricky questions around this . . . . If you really push on how do we make A.I. safe, I dont think people have any clue. We dont even know what A.I. is. Its very hard to know how it would be controllable.

He went on: Theres some sense in which the A.I. question encapsulates all of peoples hopes and fears about the computer age. I think peoples intuitions do just really break down when theyre pushed to these limits because weve never dealt with entities that are smarter than humans on this planet.

Trying to puzzle out who is right on A.I., I drove to San Mateo to meet Ray Kurzweil for coffee at the restaurant Three. Kurzweil is the author of The Singularity Is Near, a Utopian vision of what an A.I. future holds. (When I mentioned to Andrew Ng that I was going to be talking to Kurzweil, he rolled his eyes. Whenever I read Kurzweils Singularity, my eyes just naturally do that, he said.) Kurzweil arrived with a Whole Foods bag for me, brimming with his books and two documentaries about him. He was wearing khakis, a green-and-red plaid shirt, and several rings, including onemade with a 3-D printerthat has an S for his Singularity University.

Computers are already doing many attributes of thinking, Kurzweil told me. Just a few years ago, A.I. couldnt even tell the difference between a dog and cat. Now it can. Kurzweil has a keen interest in cats and keeps a collection of 300 cat figurines in his Northern California home. At the restaurant, he asked for almond milk but couldnt get any. The 69-year-old eats strange health concoctions and takes 90 pills a day, eager to achieve immortalityor indefinite extensions to the existence of our mind filewhich means merging with machines. He has such an urge to merge that he sometimes uses the word we when talking about super-intelligent future beingsa far cry from Musks more ominous they.

I mentioned that Musk had told me he was bewildered that Kurzweil doesnt seem to have even 1 percent doubt about the hazards of our mind children, as robotics expert Hans Moravec calls them.

Thats just not true. Im the one who articulated the dangers, Kurzweil said. The promise and peril are deeply intertwined, he continued. Fire kept us warm and cooked our food and also burned down our houses . . . . Furthermore, there are strategies to control the peril, as there have been with biotechnology guidelines. He summarized the three stages of the human response to new technology as Wow!, Uh-Oh, and What Other Choice Do We Have but to Move Forward? The list of things humans can do better than computers is getting smaller and smaller, he said. But we create these tools to extend our long reach.

Just as, two hundred million years ago, mammalian brains developed a neocortex that eventually enabled humans to invent language and science and art and technology, by the 2030s, Kurzweil predicts, we will be cyborgs, with nanobots the size of blood cells connecting us to synthetic neocortices in the cloud, giving us access to virtual reality and augmented reality from within our own nervous systems. We will be funnier; we will be more musical; we will increase our wisdom, he said, ultimately, as I understand it, producing a herd of Beethovens and Einsteins. Nanobots in our veins and arteries will cure diseases and heal our bodies from the inside.

He allows that Musks bte noire could come true. He notes that our A.I. progeny may be friendly and may not be and that if its not friendly, we may have to fight it. And perhaps the only way to fight it would be to get an A.I. on your side thats even smarter.

Kurzweil told me he was surprised that Stuart Russell had jumped on the peril bandwagon, so I reached out to Russell and met with him in his seventh-floor office in Berkeley. The 54-year-old British-American expert on A.I. told me that his thinking had evolved and that he now violently disagrees with Kurzweil and others who feel that ceding the planet to super-intelligent A.I. is just fine.

Russell doesnt give a fig whether A.I. might enable more Einsteins and Beethovens. One more Ludwig doesnt balance the risk of destroying humanity. As if somehow intelligence was the thing that mattered and not the quality of human experience, he said, with exasperation. I think if we replaced ourselves with machines that as far as we know would have no conscious existence, no matter how many amazing things they invented, I think that would be the biggest possible tragedy. Nick Bostrom has called the idea of a society of technological awesomeness with no human beings a Disneyland without children.

There are people who believe that if the machines are more intelligent than we are, then they should just have the planet and we should go away, Russell said. Then there are people who say, Well, well upload ourselves into the machines, so well still have consciousness but well be machines. Which I would find, well, completely implausible.

Russell took exception to the views of Yann LeCun, who developed the forerunner of the convolutional neural nets used by AlphaGo and is Facebooks director of A.I. research. LeCun told the BBC that there would be no Ex Machina or Terminator scenarios, because robots would not be built with human driveshunger, power, reproduction, self-preservation. Yann LeCun keeps saying that theres no reason why machines would have any self-preservation instinct, Russell said. And its simply and mathematically false. I mean, its so obvious that a machine will have self-preservation even if you dont program it in because if you say, Fetch the coffee, it cant fetch the coffee if its dead. So if you give it any goal whatsoever, it has a reason to preserve its own existence to achieve that goal. And if you threaten it on your way to getting coffee, its going to kill you because any risk to the coffee has to be countered. People have explained this to LeCun in very simple terms.

Russell debunked the two most common arguments for why we shouldnt worry: One is: Itll never happen, which is like saying we are driving towards the cliff but were bound to run out of gas before we get there. And that doesnt seem like a good way to manage the affairs of the human race. And the other is: Not to worrywe will just build robots that collaborate with us and well be in human-robot teams. Which begs the question: If your robot doesnt agree with your objectives, how do you form a team with it?

Last year, Microsoft shut down its A.I. chatbot, Tay, after Twitter userswho were supposed to make her smarter through casual and playful conversation, as Microsoft put itinstead taught her how to reply with racist, misogynistic, and anti-Semitic slurs. bush did 9/11, and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now, Tay tweeted. donald trump is the only hope weve got. In response, Musk tweeted, Will be interesting to see what the mean time to Hitler is for these bots. Only took Microsofts Tay a day.

With Trump now president, Musk finds himself walking a fine line. His companies count on the U.S. government for business and subsidies, regardless of whether Marcus Aurelius or Caligula is in charge. Musks companies joined the amicus brief against Trumps executive order regarding immigration and refugees, and Musk himself tweeted against the order. At the same time, unlike Ubers Travis Kalanick, Musk has hung in there as a member of Trumps Strategic and Policy Forum. Its very Elon, says Ashlee Vance. Hes going to do his own thing no matter what people grumble about. He added that Musk can be opportunistic when necessary.

I asked Musk about the flak he had gotten for associating with Trump. In the photograph of tech executives with Trump, he had looked gloomy, and there was a weary tone in his voice when he talked about the subject. In the end, he said, its better to have voices of moderation in the room with the president. There are a lot of people, kind of the hard left, who essentially want to isolateand not have any voice. Very unwise.

Eliezer Yudkowsky is a highly regarded 37-year-old researcher who is trying to figure out whether its possible, in practice and not just in theory, to point A.I. in any direction, let alone a good one. I met him at a Japanese restaurant in Berkeley.

How do you encode the goal functions of an A.I. such that it has an Off switch and it wants there to be an Off switch and it wont try to eliminate the Off switch and it will let you press the Off switch, but it wont jump ahead and press the Off switch itself? he asked over an order of surf-and-turf rolls. And if it self-modifies, will it self-modify in such a way as to keep the Off switch? Were trying to work on that. Its not easy.

I babbled about the heirs of Klaatu, HAL, and Ultron taking over the Internet and getting control of our banking, transportation, and military. What about the replicants in Blade Runner, who conspire to kill their creator? Yudkowsky held his head in his hands, then patiently explained: The A.I. doesnt have to take over the whole Internet. It doesnt need drones. Its not dangerous because it has guns. Its dangerous because its smarter than us. Suppose it can solve the science technology of predicting protein structure from DNA information. Then it just needs to send out a few e-mails to the labs that synthesize customized proteins. Soon it has its own molecular machinery, building even more sophisticated molecular machines.

If you want a picture of A.I. gone wrong, dont imagine marching humanoid robots with glowing red eyes. Imagine tiny invisible synthetic bacteria made of diamond, with tiny onboard computers, hiding inside your bloodstream and everyone elses. And then, simultaneously, they release one microgram of botulinum toxin. Everyone just falls over dead.

Only it wont actually happen like that. Its impossible for me to predict exactly how wed lose, because the A.I. will be smarter than I am. When youre building something smarter than you, you have to get it right on the first try.

I thought back to my conversation with Musk and Altman. Dont get sidetracked by the idea of killer robots, Musk said, noting, The thing about A.I. is that its not the robot; its the computer algorithm in the Net. So the robot would just be an end effector, just a series of sensors and actuators. A.I. is in the Net . . . . The important thing is that if we do get some sort of runaway algorithm, then the human A.I. collective can stop the runaway algorithm. But if theres large, centralized A.I. that decides, then theres no stopping it.

Altman expanded upon the scenario: An agent that had full control of the Internet could have far more effect on the world than an agent that had full control of a sophisticated robot. Our lives are already so dependent on the Internet that an agent that had no body whatsoever but could use the Internet really well would be far more powerful.

Even robots with a seemingly benign task could indifferently harm us. Lets say you create a self-improving A.I. to pick strawberries, Musk said, and it gets better and better at picking strawberries and picks more and more and it is self-improving, so all it really wants to do is pick strawberries. So then it would have all the world be strawberry fields. Strawberry fields forever. No room for human beings.

But can they ever really develop a kill switch? Im not sure Id want to be the one holding the kill switch for some superpowered A.I., because youd be the first thing it kills, Musk replied.

Altman tried to capture the chilling grandeur of whats at stake: Its a very exciting time to be alive, because in the next few decades we are either going to head toward self-destruction or toward human descendants eventually colonizing the universe.

Right, Musk said, adding, If you believe the end is the heat death of the universe, it really is all about the journey.

The man who is so worried about extinction chuckled at his own extinction joke. As H. P. Lovecraft once wrote, From even the greatest of horrors irony is seldom absent.

Jeff Bezos: The C.E.O. of e-commerce and delivery giant Amazon and the owner of The Washington Post has already sparred with Trump. But Trump could come after Bezos for anti-trust issues, too: Trump is on the record as saying Amazon is controlling so much of what they are doing. The fact that The Washington Post has been reporting on Trump, often critically, probably does not endear Bezos to Trump, either.

Tim Cook: Trump has repeatedly criticized Apple for making its products overseas, and has called on the company to start building their damn computers and things in America. Cook must also contend with tariffs that will inevitably arise if Trump gets the U.S. into a trade war with China. And then theres the fact that Trump denounced Apple in 2016 for refusing a court order to cooperate with an F.B.I. request to unlock an iPhone belonging to one of the shooters in the San Bernardino terrorist attack last year.

Jack Dorsey: Twitter, already a tech company struggling with employee retention and a falling stock price, has been forced to contend with its role in handing Trump a megaphone to spout his opinions, whether those include attacking a union leader or merely suggesting the U.S. stock up on nuclear arms. Dorsey was also excluded by Trump from the tech summit at Trump Tower in December, reportedly as retribution for not allowing the Trump team to use an emoji-fied version of the #CrookedHillary hashtag. Sad!

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Elon Musk's Billion-Dollar Crusade to Stop the A.I. Apocalypse ... - Vanity Fair

Atlas holding the world at Rockefeller Center. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand is an honored favorite for many in the GOP. (Flickr CC 20.0 /GmanViz)

The one question you never hear journalists ask Republicans is why?

Why do so many Republicans want to throw 24 million struggling Americans off the health insurance rolls? Why does the allegedly populist Trump administration submit a budget that slashes job training programs for the very same jobless white folks he claimed to represent?

Why cut Meals on Wheels, child care, after-school programs and learning centers for the poor, affordable housing and aid to the homeless? Why zero out occupational safety training and economic growth assistance in distressed communities in Appalachia and the Mississippi Delta (more Trump constituents)? Why slash legal aid and medicine and food for the sick and hungry in the developing world, among many others?

the real and simple question they should be asking is a moral one: Why do Republicans seem intent on hurting the most vulnerable among us?

Journalists ask Republicans about policies, mechanisms and money, but those are technical questions when the real and simple question they should be asking is a moral one: Why do Republicans seem intent on hurting the most vulnerable among us?

Unfortunately, the answer may just be, to paraphrase Clint Eastwoods Dirty Harry on why serial killers murder: because they like it.

Sure, we know the rote answers. Republicans love to talk about choice and freedom and markets and deficit reduction and personal responsibility and all sorts of ideological claptrap that seems to slap principle on what really is punishment. At best these are smokescreens, at worst traps that have succeeded in entangling the media, Democrats and Americans generally in arguments about tactics or priorities rather than arguments about motives and their real-life consequences.

There was a time when Republicans worried they might be perceived as being on the wrong side of morality, even if that worry didnt move them to get on the right side. They used to dress up their cruelty not only in those old Milton Friedman free market clichs but in new ones like compassionate conservatism, because even as they knew there was nothing compassionate about it, they also knew that most Americans werent buying into letting the poor fend for themselves. That wasnt American. That wasnt human.

Some of that window dressing remains in the Trump era, but not much. Republicans still feel obliged to declare that their health care plan will cover more Americans at a lower cost, but everyone knows they are lying. By one report, when the White House ran the numbers, it predicted 26 million would lose health coverage 2 million more than the Congressional Budget Office figure.

BY Neal Gabler | March 13, 2017

Speaker Paul Ryan was more than sanguine about those sufferers. He flashed a vulpine smile in recounting the CBO numbers, actually saying they were better than he had thought, which is to say that the American Health Care Act, as they call it, may have been intended to deny coverage, just as Trumps budget clearly was intended to hurt the most vulnerable, including those vulnerable supporters of his. To my mind, these werent collateral effects. They were the very reasons for the AHCA and the budget.

So, again, why? What kind of people seem dedicated to inflicting pain on others?

It is not an easy question to answer, since it violates all precepts of basic decency. I suspect it comes from a meld of Calvinism with social Darwinism. From Calvinism, conservatives borrowed both a pinched and unsparing view of humanity as well as the idea of election namely, that God elects some folks for redemption, which, when rebooted for modern conservatism, has an economic component. Plain and simple, rich people are rich because they are better than poor people.

By the same token, poor people are poor because they are worse. This is Gods edict, so to speak. (The so-called Calvinist revival has an awful lot in common with Trumpism.) From social Darwinism, they borrowed the idea that this is the way the world should be: winners and losers, those who can succeed and those who cant. It is a world without luck, except for tough luck.

Plain and simple, rich people are rich because they are better than poor people.

From this perspective, conservatives may not really think they are harming the vulnerable but instead harming the undeserving, which is very different. In effect, conservatives believe they are only meting out divine and natural justice. Its convenient, of course, that this justice turns out to be redistributive, taking resources from the poor and middle class and funneling them to the wealthy, who happen to be the benefactors of conservatism as well as its beneficiaries. (Just note how Republicans howl about redistribution when it is the other way around.) Where many of us see need, they only see indolence and impotence. It is, by almost any gauge, not only self-serving but also plainly wrong moralistic rather than moral.

But if Republicans see their moral duty as denying help to the weak, that denial is part of a larger and even uglier social equation. In a recent New York Times column, Linda Greenhouse recalled an exchange 30 years ago between Robert Bork and Illinois Sen. Paul Simon during Borks confirmation hearings for the Supreme Court. Simon asked Bork about a speech he had given two years earlier, in which the judge said:

when a court adds to one persons constitutional rights, it subtracts from the rights of others.

The senator asked, Do you believe that is always true?

Yes, Senator, Judge Bork replied. I think its a matter of plain arithmetic.

Sen. Simon: I have long thought it is kind of fundamental in our society that when you expand the liberty of any of us, you expand the liberty of all of us.

Judge Bork: I think, Senator, that is not correct.

Remember that although (or perhaps because!) his Supreme Court nomination failed, Bork is a conservative deity. As far as conservatives and Republicans are concerned, to give anything to the less fortunate is to subtract it from everyone else a zero-sum game between the rich and the rest of America.

This isnt politics. This is bedrock conservative philosophy. And it may have no more eager avatar than Donald Trump, who is all about winning and losing. Trump has always professed to want to blow up the system. He is like a child knocking down a tower of blocks, only in his case the blocks are American democracy and decency.

But with the AHCA and his Draconian budget, one that even a few Republicans no doubt fearing voter retribution blanched at, Trump may not have blown up the system so much as he has blown the Republicans cover. He even seems to have emboldened some of them to come out of hiding and admit that any assistance for the poor is too much.

This we always suspected. What is harder to parse is the joy conservative Republicans seem to get in hurting the weak, making the GOP not just the punishment party, but also the schadenfreude party. Or put in different terms: Conservatism didnt create meanness, but meanness sure created conservatism.

We might be able to understand that sense of smug moral and social superiority from doctrinaire Republicans who spout Ayn Rand and detest those whose hurdles are the highest. We all know hate can be intoxicating. But these past two weeks Ryan and Trump have been gambling on something else that many of their fellow Americans agree with them, that these Americans share a deep and abiding hostility to those who need government assistance. Whether Ryan and Trump are right may very well determine the fate of this administration and the country.

So the second big question, alongside why Republicans and conservatives seem to luxuriate in cruelty, is why any other ordinary American would. There have been predictions on the left that once those ordinary Americans feel the sting of losing health care or job training or work safety regulations or clean water and air, they will revolt, and Trump will be dust. But there is no certainty to this. A recent New York Times piece on this very issue indicated that at least some Trump supporters know they will suffer from his budget and still support him.

Another Times article, by Eduardo Porter, quoted a Harvard economist suggesting that the white working class feel they get so little benefit from the so-called welfare state that they see things through the same zero-sum prism as Bork, Ryan and Trump. Whatever the poor gain, the white working class loses.

When you think how much the government does for so many across such a wide spectrum, you wonder what world these people are living in. Indeed, a signal achievement of conservatism, decades in the making, has been pitting the have littles against the have nots while the have lots stayed above the fray. Of course, by that calculation, you might think the struggling white working class would be on the loser side of the ledger, sentenced to defeat by their own deficiencies in our Darwinist world. But in another neat trick, Republicans have managed to convince them they are victims of twin demonic forces, government and liberal elites, that disrupt the natural order of things. In this way, many Republicans helped turn many Americans into brutes and our American community into a state of nature. There couldnt have been a President Trump without it. There couldnt have been an ACHA or a Trump budget either.

This, then, is a vital moment for American morality and, to the extent the two are intertwined, American democracy. You cant pretend Trump and his Republican pals are trying to achieve good ends by different means. They arent. You cant act as if they give a damn about the millions of poor and working-class Americans. They dont.

But even as their cover is blown, someone needs to keep asking them the fundamental question again and again and again: Why?

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Has the Trump Budget Blown Republicans' Cover? - BillMoyers.com

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NorthJersey 1:17 p.m. ET March 21, 2017

House Speaker Paul Ryan was inspired to become a politician when he read Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand.The premise is simple: There are makers and there are takers.The makers create wealth and provide jobs. The government taxes the makers and gives the money to the undeserving takers. Whenever government does this, the takers call it entitlements.The Republicans call it welfare, class warfareand a redistribution of wealth.

The rush to repeal and replace Obamacare is a masquerade. It is a huge tax cut for the wealthy, disguised as health reform. Republicans cannot pass more tax cuts for the rich by a simple majority in the Senate unless they do so in a way that doesnt add to the deficit.By cutting money for Medicaid and Obamacare, they will able to reduce the federal deficit and thus can move to tax reform where the lions share of tax cuts will again go to the wealthy.

Die-hard conservatives Ryan, Clarence Thomasand Ben Carson are all Ayn Rand devotees.All have benefited from government largess. Ayn Rand, herself, was recipient of both Social Security and Medicare near the end of her life.

JohnnieNajarian

River Edge, March 20

Read or Share this story: https://njersy.co/2mMr1WW

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Letter: Ayn Rand's influence in the rush to repeal Obamacare - NorthJersey.com

A sea of daffodils blooming in Hyde Park in London on March 1, 2017.

In the Arguable e-mail newsletter, columnist Jeff Jacoby offers his take on everything from politics to pet peeves to the passions of the day. Sign up here.

Spring has sprung

Happy vernal equinox! Today is the official start of spring, the date when night and day are each 12 hours long, right? Actually . . . wrong.

Two parents are better than one

Last year, 140 million babies were born around the world. About 15% of them were born out of wedlock. While it is still almost unheard-of in many Asian and African countries for unmarried mothers to have a baby, in much of Europe and the Americas it has become only too common.

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In a new study published by YaleGlobal, demographer Joseph Chamie notes that of the 35 leading industrialized nations, only five Greece, Israel, Japan, South Korea, and Turkey still have out-of-wedlock birth rates below 10%.

By contrast, writes Chamie, who was formerly the head of the UN Population Division, In the large majority of more developed countries, including Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, more than one-third of all births take place out of wedlock. And within individual countries, there are often wide differences between population subgroups.

In the United States, for example, significant differences in out-of-wedlock births exist among major social groups. While the national average for the United States in 2014 is 40 percent, the proportions of births out of wedlock for whites are 29 percent; Hispanics, 53 percent; and blacks, 71 percent.

This weeks newsletter from columnist Jeff Jacoby.

Chamie doesnt expressly judge the desirability of children being raised by only one parent Im sure he was conditioned long ago to stay away from that highly-charged debate. In many circles, political correctness and moral nonjudgmentalism make it virtually impossible to discuss the explosion in out-of-wedlock births what used to be called illegitimacy with candor.

The closest Chamie comes to acknowledging the risks parents take when they choose to bear children without providing an intact family setting is in his final paragraph:

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In too many instances the children born out of wedlock are disadvantaged and fail to receive the necessary protections, support and assistance to ensure their health, development, and well-being. Unfortunately, this challenge, too often ignored to the detriment of the children, communities, and countries, must be addressed.

Few topics in modern discourse are as emotionally, politically, and ideologically fraught as the choices people make in forming families. When the subject turns to raising children without two parents, civility often boils away in heated self-righteousness. This isnt new: Think of the outraged reaction to Daniel Patrick Moynihans 1965 report on the breakdown of the Negro family, or the uproar over the Murphy Brown sitcom during the 1992 presidential race.

Of course not all children raised by single parents struggle economically or professionally. Barack Obama is a perfect example. He was two years old when he was abandoned by his father, yet rose to remarkable heights of power and influence. But as Obama himself stressed more than once, exceptions like him dont disprove the rule. The data arent in question.

Children who grow up without a father are more likely to live in poverty, Obama said at a Fathers Day event in 2010.

Theyre more likely to drop out of school. Theyre more likely to wind up in prison. Theyre more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol. Theyre more likely to run away from home. Theyre more likely to become teenage parents themselves. And I say all this as someone who grew up without a father in my own life.

As a rule it takes two parents to raise a child, however un-PC it has become to say so. The old stigma against unwed motherhood wasnt always fair or kind. But it was realistic. And it was certainly better than blithely accepting a society in which 40% of American children are raised without knowing the love of two parents, or being sheltered in the home they make together.

Got Grammar?

Probably it was never literally true that for want of a nail, the kingdom was lost. But it is indisputably true that for want of a comma, a $10 million class-action lawsuit against the Oakhurst Dairy Company of Portland, Maine, was lost.

For Oxford comma sticklers like me, last weeks ruling by the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was a thing of grammatical joy. The dispute involved Maines overtime statute, which exempts specified tasks from overtime pay. Among those exempted functions were these:

Oakhurst Dairys drivers claimed they were owed overtime pay for distribution of the companys products. The company argued that the statute only exempted those involved in packing for shipment or distribution not the drivers doing the actual distributing. If lawmakers had included a comma before the or, all would have been clear: Drivers employed in distribution would not be entitled to overtime pay. But without that final comma known as a serial or Oxford comma ambiguity was unavoidable. In resolving it, the appeals court ruled that the drivers had the better case, and so Oakhurst Dairy is out $10 million.

As far as Im concerned, the case for the serial comma has always seemed obvious. I cant understood why anyone would advise leaving it out as a matter of routine. A classic demonstration of the need for the serial comma is this (doubtless apocryphal) book dedication: To my parents, Ayn Rand and God. Without a comma before the conjunction, the author seems to be crazy or blasphemous enough to imagine that the author of Atlas Shrugged and the Almighty were his mother and father. But add a single comma To my parents, Ayn Rand, and God and clarity reigns.

The story reminded me of one of those great exchanges that for years made William F. Buckleys Notes & Asides the column in which he regularly reproduced his exchanges with colleagues, readers, and other correspondents the best part of National Review. From December 1972:

A ukase. Un- negotiable. The only one I have issued in seventeen years. It goes: John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges, and bananas. NOT: John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges and bananas. I am told National Reviews style book stipulates the omission of the second comma. My comment: National Reviews style book used to stipulate the omission of the second comma. National Reviews style book, effective immediately, makes the omission of the second comma a capital offense!

Among the responses was this lament from D. Keith Mano, a National Review columnist, to the magazines managing editor, Buckleys sister Priscilla:

I have read with dismay WFBs ukase on the serial comma. I cant do it. No way. Its just plain ugly. WFB says this is un-negotiable. . . . How serious is he? Can I arrange a dispensation?

Look: Ill compromise. There should be peace in the family. Instead of John went to the store and bought some apples, oranges, and bananas how about if he just buys oranges and bananas? Or a head of non-union lettuce. You see what this sort of restriction leads to. And they ask me why fiction is dying. Erich Segal, I bet, uses the serial comma.

You may tell WFB that, from now on and as ordered, I salute the red and white.

OK, OK, maybe you have to be a grammar nerd to bliss out to this kind of thing. Back in the day, I confess, I was the sentence-diagramming champion of Mrs. OBriens 7th-grade boys English class at the Hebrew Academy of Cleveland. But even you dont know a gerund from a present participle, you ought to be careful about commas. Leave one out, and it could cost someone $10 million.

Or, perish the thought, even worse.

The cost of feminism

What would you pay for a plain white cotton T-shirt, printed with the words We Should All Be Feminists? $7? $17?

In fact, at Saks Fifth Avenue, that Dior T-shirt will set you back $710. Or would, if it werent already sold out. A sucker really is born every minute, and some of them are women. Dior is happy to take their money and let them think theyre making a social statement.

How to be a jerk with snow

Perhaps you saw the story over the weekend by the Boston Globes Steve Annear, who described how a snow plow driver in Brockton, Mass., went out of his way to be a schmuck and lost his job as a result.

Out of spite and rudeness, the driver deliberately plowed a heap of slushy snow into the end of a driveway that a 21-year-old resident had nearly finished clearing. Then the driver backed up, reloaded, and shoved even more snow on the pile. Then he did it again. The resident, it seems, had made the mistake of asking the snowplow operator to bypass the driveway because he was trying to clear the way so his father to leave. The driver decided to teach the young shoveler a lesson not to mess with the plow man.

Happily, the driver swiftly got his comeuppance. His abusive behavior was captured on a cellphone video, posted to Facebook, and shown to Brocktons mayor. Long story short, the snowplow driver was tracked down and fired. Good riddance.

But snowplow operators with an attitude arent the ones out there who are jerks about snow removal.

Almost as boorish and inconsiderate as the plow driver in the Globes story are property owners who cant be bothered to clear the snow from their sidewalks after a snowstorm. Shoveling isnt optional; its a legal requirement, like paying property taxes and fixing known hazards. Clearing the snow and salting against ice arent mere niceties, either. All it takes is one or two selfish non-shovelers to make an entire block impassable and to inflict misery on a parent pushing a stroller . . . or a handicapped senior struggling with a walker . . . or someone confined to a wheelchair.

Homeowners, landlords, and shopkeepers who ignore their obligation to make their sidewalks passable often leave pedestrians no option but to walk in the street, which can be unpleasant, dirty, and dangeorus. When sidewalks are blocked by snow or ice, people often are left with no choice but to take to a busy roadway made even more congested and perilous by the snow massed along the curbs, along with the blaring of drivers horns and the constant threat of being drenched by slush and icy water.

Non-shovelers are a menace to their neighborhoods, and city hall should throw the book at more of them. Start with stiff fines for the first couple of offenses. If that doesnt do the trick, perhaps some jail time will.

Only 364 days until the next wearin o the green

He was kidnapped at age 16 by pirates, he was forced into slavery as a shepherd, he is the patron saint of Nigeria . . . and other interesting things you never knew about St. Patrick.

Looking backward

My column yesterday argued that the only meaningful way to replace and repeal Obamacare is to pull the law up by the roots and then keep going. Two generations of health-care reform have wrecked what could be a robust free market in medical care and health insurance, with vendors and providers competing to offer better and better products at lower and lower prices.

In Wednesdays column I noted that climate-change models have been consistently wrong. If scientists cannot yet make accurate predictions about the degree to which climate will change, the logical conclusion is that their understanding of the science is still incomplete. I agreed with Scott Pruitt, the new EPA administrator, who told an interviewer that we need to continue the debate and . . . the review and the analysis before making irrevocable changes to the economy.

Wild Wild Web

Whats a scary sight? Dwight Eisenhower in a bathing suit is a scary sight.

Love padlocks on fences and bridges are lame. Umbrellas on trees are cool.

This video is not in reverse:

The last line

But they never learned what it was that Mrs. Whatsit, Mrs. Who, and Mrs. Which had to do, for there was a gust of wind, and they were gone. Madeleine LEngle, A Wrinkle in Time (1962)

Arguable will be back next Monday. Have a great week!

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