photo: markk
[ed. I've been collecting sea salt lately in shallow lava depressions after strong south swells (I have my secret spots). It's the lightest, cleanist, fluffliest sea salt you can imagine. Tropical snow. Makes me feel like Walter White.]
Sunday, September 24, 2017
Saturday, September 23, 2017
Life on the Road, and in a Walmart Parking Lot
As I write this, they are scattered across the country–
In Drayton, North Dakota, a former San Francisco cabdriver, 67, labors at the annual sugar beet harvest. He works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields disgorge multi-ton loads of beets. At night he sleeps in the van that has been his home ever since Uber squeezed him out of the taxi industry and making the rent became impossible.
In Campbellsville, Kentucky, a 66-year-old ex-general contractor stows merchandise during the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse, pushing a wheeled cart for miles along the concrete floor. It’s mind-numbing work and she struggles to scan each item accurately, hoping to avoid getting fired. In the morning she returns to her tiny trailer, moored at one of several mobile home parks that contract with Amazon to put up nomadic workers like her.
In New Bern, North Carolina, a woman whose home is a teardrop-style trailer—so small it can be pulled with a motorcycle—is couch surfing with a friend while hunting for work. Even with a master’s degree, the 38-year-old Nebraska native can’t find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. She knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. Losing her job at a non-profit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. After the funding for her position ran out, she couldn’t afford rent on top of paying off student loans.
In San Marcos, California, a thirtysomething couple in a 1975 GMC motorhome is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children’s carnival and petting zoo, which they had five days to set up from scratch on a vacant dirt lot. In a few weeks they’ll switch to selling Christmas trees.
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 72-year-old van-dweller who cracked three ribs doing a campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family.
There have always been itinerants, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like:
Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?
For many the answer seemed radical at first.
You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick–and–brick domicile for life on wheels?
Some call them “homeless.” The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a different word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as “houseless.”
From a distance, many of them could be mistaken for carefree retired RVers. On occasions when they treat themselves to a movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend with the crowd. In mind-set and appearance, they are largely middle class. They wash their clothes at Laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America.
But for them—as for anyone—survival isn’t enough. So what began as a last-ditch effort has become a battle cry for something greater. Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.
And there is hope on the road. It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself. A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. It’s just ahead, in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger.
As it happens, some of those strangers are nomads, too. When they meet—online, or at a job, or camping way off the grid—tribes begin to form. There’s a common understanding, a kinship. When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat. There’s a contagious feeling: Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they’re at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.
As I write, it is autumn. Soon winter will come. Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. They’ll set out in search of friends and family, or just a place that’s warm. Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Feature-less plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge:
The last free place in America is a parking spot.
by Jessica Bruder, LitHub | Read more:
Image: SwankieWheels
In Drayton, North Dakota, a former San Francisco cabdriver, 67, labors at the annual sugar beet harvest. He works from sunrise until after sunset in temperatures that dip below freezing, helping trucks that roll in from the fields disgorge multi-ton loads of beets. At night he sleeps in the van that has been his home ever since Uber squeezed him out of the taxi industry and making the rent became impossible.
In Campbellsville, Kentucky, a 66-year-old ex-general contractor stows merchandise during the overnight shift at an Amazon warehouse, pushing a wheeled cart for miles along the concrete floor. It’s mind-numbing work and she struggles to scan each item accurately, hoping to avoid getting fired. In the morning she returns to her tiny trailer, moored at one of several mobile home parks that contract with Amazon to put up nomadic workers like her.In New Bern, North Carolina, a woman whose home is a teardrop-style trailer—so small it can be pulled with a motorcycle—is couch surfing with a friend while hunting for work. Even with a master’s degree, the 38-year-old Nebraska native can’t find a job despite filling out hundreds of applications in the past month alone. She knows the sugar beet harvest is hiring, but traveling halfway across the country would require more cash than she has. Losing her job at a non-profit several years ago is one of the reasons she moved into the trailer in the first place. After the funding for her position ran out, she couldn’t afford rent on top of paying off student loans.
In San Marcos, California, a thirtysomething couple in a 1975 GMC motorhome is running a roadside pumpkin stand with a children’s carnival and petting zoo, which they had five days to set up from scratch on a vacant dirt lot. In a few weeks they’ll switch to selling Christmas trees.
In Colorado Springs, Colorado, a 72-year-old van-dweller who cracked three ribs doing a campground maintenance job is recuperating while visiting with family.
There have always been itinerants, drifters, hobos, restless souls. But now, in the second millennium, a new kind of wandering tribe is emerging. People who never imagined being nomads are hitting the road. They’re giving up traditional houses and apartments to live in what some call “wheel estate”—vans, secondhand RVs, school buses, pickup campers, travel trailers, and plain old sedans. They are driving away from the impossible choices that face what used to be the middle class. Decisions like:
Would you rather have food or dental work? Pay your mortgage or your electric bill? Make a car payment or buy medicine? Cover rent or student loans? Purchase warm clothes or gas for your commute?
For many the answer seemed radical at first.
You can’t give yourself a raise, but what about cutting your biggest expense? Trading a stick–and–brick domicile for life on wheels?
Some call them “homeless.” The new nomads reject that label. Equipped with both shelter and transportation, they’ve adopted a different word. They refer to themselves, quite simply, as “houseless.”
From a distance, many of them could be mistaken for carefree retired RVers. On occasions when they treat themselves to a movie or dinner at a restaurant, they blend with the crowd. In mind-set and appearance, they are largely middle class. They wash their clothes at Laundromats and join fitness clubs to use the showers. Many took to the road after their savings were obliterated by the Great Recession. To keep their gas tanks and bellies full, they work long hours at hard, physical jobs. In a time of flat wages and rising housing costs, they have unshackled themselves from rent and mortgages as a way to get by. They are surviving America.
But for them—as for anyone—survival isn’t enough. So what began as a last-ditch effort has become a battle cry for something greater. Being human means yearning for more than subsistence. As much as food or shelter, we require hope.
And there is hope on the road. It’s a by-product of forward momentum. A sense of opportunity, as wide as the country itself. A bone-deep conviction that something better will come. It’s just ahead, in the next town, the next gig, the next chance encounter with a stranger.
As it happens, some of those strangers are nomads, too. When they meet—online, or at a job, or camping way off the grid—tribes begin to form. There’s a common understanding, a kinship. When someone’s van breaks down, they pass the hat. There’s a contagious feeling: Something big is happening. The country is changing rapidly, the old structures crumbling away, and they’re at the epicenter of something new. Around a shared campfire, in the middle of the night, it can feel like a glimpse of utopia.
As I write, it is autumn. Soon winter will come. Routine layoffs will start at the seasonal jobs. The nomads will pack up camp and return to their real home—the road—moving like blood cells through the veins of the country. They’ll set out in search of friends and family, or just a place that’s warm. Some will journey clear across the continent. All will count the miles, which unspool like a filmstrip of America. Fast-food joints and shopping malls. Fields dormant under frost. Auto dealerships, megachurches, and all-night diners. Feature-less plains. Feedlots, dead factories, subdivisions, and big-box stores. Snowcapped peaks. The roadside reels past, through the day and into darkness, until fatigue sets in. Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge:
The last free place in America is a parking spot.
by Jessica Bruder, LitHub | Read more:
Image: SwankieWheels
The Coming War on Business
The only time I saw Sam Francis face-to-face — in the Washington Times cafeteria sometime in the late 1980s or early 1990s — I thought he was a crank, but it’s clear now that he was at that moment becoming one of the most prescient writers of the past 50 years. There’s very little Donald Trump has done or said that Francis didn’t champion a quarter century ago.
In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights. The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.
His second insight was that the Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening. He railed against the pro-business “Economic Men” who thought G.D.P. growth could solve the nation’s problems, and the Washington Republicans, who he thought were infected with the values of the educated elites.
In 1991, when his political mentor, Pat Buchanan, was contemplating a presidential bid, Francis told him to break with the conservative movement. “These people are defunct,” Francis told Buchanan. “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
His third insight was that politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.
“Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”
Middle American voters, he wrote, were stuck without a party, appalled by pro-corporate Republican economic policies on the one hand and liberal cultural radicalism on the other. They swung to whichever party seemed most likely to resist the ruling class, but neither party really provided a solution. “A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better.”
The Buchanan campaign was the first run at what we now know as Trumpian populism. In a profile of Francis called “The Castaway,” Michael Brendan Dougherty smartly observed that Buchanan and Francis weren’t just against government, they were against the entire cultural hegemony of the ruling class. [ed. Maybe. But Buchanan was first and foremost - like Trump - mostly interested in promoting himself.]
Francis wrote a wickedly brilliant 1996 essay on Buchanan, “From Household to Nation”: “The ‘culture war’ for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the gruling class.”
Francis urged Buchanan to run an unorthodox campaign (of the sort Trump ended up running), and was ignored. “If Buchanan loses the nomination, it will be because his time has not yet come,” Francis wrote. The moment would end up coming in 2016, 11 years after Francis’ death.
In a series of essays for conservative magazines like Chronicles, Francis hammered home three key insights. The first was that globalization was screwing Middle America. The Cold War had just ended, capitalism seemed triumphant and the Clinton years seemed to be an era of broad prosperity. But Francis stressed that the service economy was ruining small farms and taking jobs from the working class.
His second insight was that the Republican and conservative establishment did not understand what was happening. He railed against the pro-business “Economic Men” who thought G.D.P. growth could solve the nation’s problems, and the Washington Republicans, who he thought were infected with the values of the educated elites.In 1991, when his political mentor, Pat Buchanan, was contemplating a presidential bid, Francis told him to break with the conservative movement. “These people are defunct,” Francis told Buchanan. “Go to New Hampshire and call yourself a patriot, a nationalist, an America Firster, but don’t even use the word ‘conservative.’ It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
His third insight was that politics was no longer about left versus right. Instead, a series of smaller conflicts — religious versus secular, nationalist versus globalist, white versus nonwhite — were all merging into a larger polarity, ruling class versus Middle America.
“Middle American groups are more and more coming to perceive their exploitation at the hands of the dominant elites. The exploitation works on several fronts — economically, by hypertaxation and the design of a globalized economy dependent on exports and services in place of manufacturing; culturally, by the managed destruction of Middle American norms and institutions; and politically, by the regimentation of Middle Americans under the federal leviathan.”
Middle American voters, he wrote, were stuck without a party, appalled by pro-corporate Republican economic policies on the one hand and liberal cultural radicalism on the other. They swung to whichever party seemed most likely to resist the ruling class, but neither party really provided a solution. “A nationalist reaction is almost inevitable and will probably assume populist form when it arrives. The sooner it comes the better.”
The Buchanan campaign was the first run at what we now know as Trumpian populism. In a profile of Francis called “The Castaway,” Michael Brendan Dougherty smartly observed that Buchanan and Francis weren’t just against government, they were against the entire cultural hegemony of the ruling class. [ed. Maybe. But Buchanan was first and foremost - like Trump - mostly interested in promoting himself.]
Francis wrote a wickedly brilliant 1996 essay on Buchanan, “From Household to Nation”: “The ‘culture war’ for Buchanan is not Republican swaggering about family values and dirty movies but a battle over whether the nation itself can continue to exist under the onslaught of the militant secularism, acquisitive egoism, economic and political globalism, demographic inundation, and unchecked state centralism supported by the gruling class.”
Francis urged Buchanan to run an unorthodox campaign (of the sort Trump ended up running), and was ignored. “If Buchanan loses the nomination, it will be because his time has not yet come,” Francis wrote. The moment would end up coming in 2016, 11 years after Francis’ death.
by David Brooks, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Peter Cosgrove/Associated Press
Congress Votes to Increase Military Spending by $81 Billion
Where did all the concern over deficits go? After two years of the media lamenting, worrying and feigning outrage over the cost of Bernie Sanders’ two big-budget items—free college and single-payer healthcare—the same outlets are uniformly silent, days after the largest military budget increase in history.
Monday, the Senate voted to increase military spending by a whopping $81 billion, from $619 billion to $700 billion—an increase of over 13 percent. (The House passed its own $696 billion Pentagon budget in July—Politico, 7/14/17.) The reaction thus far to this unprecedented handout to military contractors and weapons makers has been one big yawn.
No write-ups worrying about the cost increase in the Washington Post or Vox or NPR. No op-eds expressing concern for “deficits” in the New York Times, Boston Globe or US News. No news segments on Fox News or CNN on the “unaffordable” increase in government spending. All the outlets that spent considerable column inches and airtime stressing over Sanders’ social programs are suddenly indifferent to “how we will afford” this latest military giveaway. The US government votes 89–9 to add $81 billion extra to the balance sheet—the equivalent of the government creating three new Justice Departments, four more NASAs, seven Treasury Departments, ten EPAs or 546 National Endowments for the the Arts—and there’s zero discussion as to “how we will pay for it.”
As FAIR has noted for decades (e.g., 2/23/11, 5/8/16), the media’s deficit discourse has always been a PR scam. A rhetorical bludgeon used to cry poverty any time a left-wing politician wants to help the poor or people of color that somehow is never an issue when it comes to pumping out F-22s and E3 AWACS, which evidently pay for themselves with magic.
The increase alone in military spending—over a budget that was already bigger than the next eight countries combined—is greater than the total amount spent annually on state university tuition by every student in the United States: $81 billion vs. $70 billion. This is to say that if the budget for the US military had just stayed the same for 2018, the US could have paid the tuition for every public college student this year, with $11 billion left over for board and books.
Monday, the Senate voted to increase military spending by a whopping $81 billion, from $619 billion to $700 billion—an increase of over 13 percent. (The House passed its own $696 billion Pentagon budget in July—Politico, 7/14/17.) The reaction thus far to this unprecedented handout to military contractors and weapons makers has been one big yawn.No write-ups worrying about the cost increase in the Washington Post or Vox or NPR. No op-eds expressing concern for “deficits” in the New York Times, Boston Globe or US News. No news segments on Fox News or CNN on the “unaffordable” increase in government spending. All the outlets that spent considerable column inches and airtime stressing over Sanders’ social programs are suddenly indifferent to “how we will afford” this latest military giveaway. The US government votes 89–9 to add $81 billion extra to the balance sheet—the equivalent of the government creating three new Justice Departments, four more NASAs, seven Treasury Departments, ten EPAs or 546 National Endowments for the the Arts—and there’s zero discussion as to “how we will pay for it.”
As FAIR has noted for decades (e.g., 2/23/11, 5/8/16), the media’s deficit discourse has always been a PR scam. A rhetorical bludgeon used to cry poverty any time a left-wing politician wants to help the poor or people of color that somehow is never an issue when it comes to pumping out F-22s and E3 AWACS, which evidently pay for themselves with magic.
The increase alone in military spending—over a budget that was already bigger than the next eight countries combined—is greater than the total amount spent annually on state university tuition by every student in the United States: $81 billion vs. $70 billion. This is to say that if the budget for the US military had just stayed the same for 2018, the US could have paid the tuition for every public college student this year, with $11 billion left over for board and books.
by Adam Johnson, FAIR | Read more:
Image: US Air Force/Madelyn Brown
Friday, September 22, 2017
Sarah Palin Promises Alabamans That a Vote for Roy Moore Is a Vote for Trumpism
Early Thursday evening, after a cartoonish debate between Roy Moore and Luther Strange, the Alabama politicians who are competing for Jeff Sessions’s old Senate seat, around five hundred people were gathered outside the train depot in Montgomery to rally in support of Moore. Heading into the event, Moore, a former Alabama State Supreme Court chief justice who twice was removed from office, was leading the incumbent, Luther Strange, by at least eight points in the polls. With the notable exception of President Trump, who endorsed Strange, the Republican Party’s anti-establishment wing has rallied behind Moore. Sebastian Gorka, the former Trump adviser, would be stumping at the depot on Moore’s behalf, as would Sarah Palin. At least one flyer touted the evening as a “Sarah Palin Rally with Judge Roy Moore.” An Asian woman, one of perhaps a dozen minorities in attendance, held a sign aloft that read “Mr. President and Mr. Vice President, I Love You But You Are Wrong!"
Debbie Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, drove a hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to attend the rally. As members of the Bikers for Trump group flexed their muscles for TV cameras, young children waved American flags, and churchgoers clutched copies of Palin’s books, hoping to get them autographed, Dooley worked the crowd urgently. By 7 p.m. it was still nearly ninety degrees outside, but Dooley—e-mailing, texting, and talking in equal measure—was unfazed. She had come to explain the importance of next Tuesday’s G.O.P. runoff, and of voting for Moore, to anyone still sitting on the fence.
At one point, Dooley approached three women who stood at the edge of the crowd in a tight semicircle. They looked to be in their sixties, a bit older than Dooley. Two were sisters, split in their support.
“I drove three hours one way to get here,” Dooley told the women, who hadn’t asked.
“Why?” one sister asked.
“This is the most important Senate election we’ve had in a long time,” Dooley replied. “I went to the University of Alabama. So, roll, Trump, roll.”
Dooley went on, “Let me tell you why. Am I upset about Trump? Oh, heck yes, I am. But I’ve been in politics for over forty years, O.K.? The last thing you want is for this to be a contest between those that like Trump and those that don’t like Trump.” She pointed at her phone. “So I even made a thing on Facebook that shows that Trump’s base supports Judge Moore.”
“I don’t support Moore,” the first sister said.
“I do,” Dooley said. “Who do you support?”
“Strange,” the sister replied.
“Neither one of them are fit to serve, in my opinion,” the second sister said.
“He’s not gonna win,” Dooley said, referring to Strange. “Judge Moore is going to win.” The sisters and their silent friend were eyeing Dooley more intently now.
“Look at all this,” Dooley said, again pointing to the screen of her phone, where she’d pulled up what appeared to be a news story. “ ‘Luther Strange set up a sweetheart deal.’ Look at all this corruption. I call him Lying Luther.”
“Do you know about Moore’s?” one sister said. “I know about Moore’s. Years, years, years of corruption. I don’t trust him.”
“I think Donald Trump has been given bad advice,” Dooley said. “I think that Mitch McConnell—look at the way he’s kind of slowly moving the President away from the Trump doctrine. I think the President has got advisers around him that are doing bad. Roy Moore winning can do more to advance the Trump doctrine. We will have sent the message that this is a referendum on Mitch McConnell’s leadership.” She went on, “I hear that if Roy is elected, the establishment will be so afraid, you’ll have some senators step down and decide not to run.”
“Do you support building the wall?” one sister asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dooley replied.
“Well, Moore doesn’t.”
“That’s a lie,” Dooley said.
“Well, I heard him say it.”
“You heard part of it,” Dooley countered. “You did not hear all of it.” She then pivoted: “Luther refuses to go on record against daca. I actually saw the video.”
This went on for another ten minutes. Then Dooley saw a Biker for Trump she knew and wandered off.
“Who was she, again?” one of the women asked once Dooley was out of earshot.
The biker was named Bill Taylor. He had a braided beard and a tattoo on his left arm that said “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” He was friendly. “Moore and Trump are more or less the same,” Taylor said. “Trump jumped the gun. He just went for the incumbent. We’re sending a hundred, hundred and fifty bikes to Trump’s rally for Strange in Huntsville tomorrow.” He added, “For the President, not for Strange.”
“I can promise you,” Dooley chimed in, “that Luther will say you endorsed him.”
“It’s been a big rift in the organization,” Taylor went on. “This week, especially. Because everybody backs Moore, but it’s ‘Bikers for Trump.’ So we have to go up there to Huntsville for the President.”
After a group rendition of “Proud to be an American,” as well as the national anthem and a prayer for Moore rebuking Strange for “hiding behind the skirts of others,” a local radio personality took the stage. He noted that Trump had been “ill advised” in his endorsement of Strange. The d.j. for the event also seemed to have been misled: at seven-thirty, John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on the speakers. Only half of it played, right up to “no religion, too.” (The d.j. later said, “It was just a test song I picked. It was on my phone.”)
Soon, another local speaker was excoriating the Senate Majority Leader. “Mitch McConnell,” he said, “you can spend five million, ten million, or fifteen million, but you can’t make chicken salad out of chickenshit!” Siran Stacy, a former running back for the University of Alabama, took the podium next and addressed Trump. “You can come down here,” he said. We’ll slaughter a hog and give you some sausage. But don’t tell us how to run our house.”
After being introduced as a “rock star who helped write Trump’s U.N. speech,” Gorka finally emerged from Moore’s bus. “Washington watched the debate, and they’re worried,” he said. “Tuesday must be a sign to the swamp dwellers in D.C.” He went on, “Tuesday is November 8th all over again: the voters can choose corruption or choose America.” With that, Palin, introduced as “the original mama grizzly,” appeared. She told the crowd that Moore “was deplorable before deplorable was cool.” She employed a number of football metaphors—“trick plays may razzle-dazzle,” she said, in apparent criticism of McConnell, “but defense wins championships.” A man in the crowd told a friend, “She’s speaking our language.”
by Charles Bethea, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Tami Chappell / Reuters
Debbie Dooley, a co-founder of the Atlanta Tea Party, drove a hundred and fifty miles from Atlanta to attend the rally. As members of the Bikers for Trump group flexed their muscles for TV cameras, young children waved American flags, and churchgoers clutched copies of Palin’s books, hoping to get them autographed, Dooley worked the crowd urgently. By 7 p.m. it was still nearly ninety degrees outside, but Dooley—e-mailing, texting, and talking in equal measure—was unfazed. She had come to explain the importance of next Tuesday’s G.O.P. runoff, and of voting for Moore, to anyone still sitting on the fence.At one point, Dooley approached three women who stood at the edge of the crowd in a tight semicircle. They looked to be in their sixties, a bit older than Dooley. Two were sisters, split in their support.
“I drove three hours one way to get here,” Dooley told the women, who hadn’t asked.
“Why?” one sister asked.
“This is the most important Senate election we’ve had in a long time,” Dooley replied. “I went to the University of Alabama. So, roll, Trump, roll.”
Dooley went on, “Let me tell you why. Am I upset about Trump? Oh, heck yes, I am. But I’ve been in politics for over forty years, O.K.? The last thing you want is for this to be a contest between those that like Trump and those that don’t like Trump.” She pointed at her phone. “So I even made a thing on Facebook that shows that Trump’s base supports Judge Moore.”
“I don’t support Moore,” the first sister said.
“I do,” Dooley said. “Who do you support?”
“Strange,” the sister replied.
“Neither one of them are fit to serve, in my opinion,” the second sister said.
“He’s not gonna win,” Dooley said, referring to Strange. “Judge Moore is going to win.” The sisters and their silent friend were eyeing Dooley more intently now.
“Look at all this,” Dooley said, again pointing to the screen of her phone, where she’d pulled up what appeared to be a news story. “ ‘Luther Strange set up a sweetheart deal.’ Look at all this corruption. I call him Lying Luther.”
“Do you know about Moore’s?” one sister said. “I know about Moore’s. Years, years, years of corruption. I don’t trust him.”
“I think Donald Trump has been given bad advice,” Dooley said. “I think that Mitch McConnell—look at the way he’s kind of slowly moving the President away from the Trump doctrine. I think the President has got advisers around him that are doing bad. Roy Moore winning can do more to advance the Trump doctrine. We will have sent the message that this is a referendum on Mitch McConnell’s leadership.” She went on, “I hear that if Roy is elected, the establishment will be so afraid, you’ll have some senators step down and decide not to run.”
“Do you support building the wall?” one sister asked.
“Yes, ma’am,” Dooley replied.
“Well, Moore doesn’t.”
“That’s a lie,” Dooley said.
“Well, I heard him say it.”
“You heard part of it,” Dooley countered. “You did not hear all of it.” She then pivoted: “Luther refuses to go on record against daca. I actually saw the video.”
This went on for another ten minutes. Then Dooley saw a Biker for Trump she knew and wandered off.
“Who was she, again?” one of the women asked once Dooley was out of earshot.
The biker was named Bill Taylor. He had a braided beard and a tattoo on his left arm that said “Better to die on your feet than live on your knees.” He was friendly. “Moore and Trump are more or less the same,” Taylor said. “Trump jumped the gun. He just went for the incumbent. We’re sending a hundred, hundred and fifty bikes to Trump’s rally for Strange in Huntsville tomorrow.” He added, “For the President, not for Strange.”
“I can promise you,” Dooley chimed in, “that Luther will say you endorsed him.”
“It’s been a big rift in the organization,” Taylor went on. “This week, especially. Because everybody backs Moore, but it’s ‘Bikers for Trump.’ So we have to go up there to Huntsville for the President.”
After a group rendition of “Proud to be an American,” as well as the national anthem and a prayer for Moore rebuking Strange for “hiding behind the skirts of others,” a local radio personality took the stage. He noted that Trump had been “ill advised” in his endorsement of Strange. The d.j. for the event also seemed to have been misled: at seven-thirty, John Lennon’s “Imagine” came on the speakers. Only half of it played, right up to “no religion, too.” (The d.j. later said, “It was just a test song I picked. It was on my phone.”)
Soon, another local speaker was excoriating the Senate Majority Leader. “Mitch McConnell,” he said, “you can spend five million, ten million, or fifteen million, but you can’t make chicken salad out of chickenshit!” Siran Stacy, a former running back for the University of Alabama, took the podium next and addressed Trump. “You can come down here,” he said. We’ll slaughter a hog and give you some sausage. But don’t tell us how to run our house.”
After being introduced as a “rock star who helped write Trump’s U.N. speech,” Gorka finally emerged from Moore’s bus. “Washington watched the debate, and they’re worried,” he said. “Tuesday must be a sign to the swamp dwellers in D.C.” He went on, “Tuesday is November 8th all over again: the voters can choose corruption or choose America.” With that, Palin, introduced as “the original mama grizzly,” appeared. She told the crowd that Moore “was deplorable before deplorable was cool.” She employed a number of football metaphors—“trick plays may razzle-dazzle,” she said, in apparent criticism of McConnell, “but defense wins championships.” A man in the crowd told a friend, “She’s speaking our language.”
by Charles Bethea, New Yorker | Read more:
Image:Tami Chappell / Reuters
[ed. Incomprehensible (on many levels). I can't figure out what the hell these people are voting for, and it doesn't sound like they know either. But rest assured, if there's an event where Sarah Palin can command a stage (and even better, a nice payoff), she'll be there.]
Report: Nothing Stopping You From Deleting Your Facebook Account Right Now
by The Onion | Read more:
Image: Facebook
Japan braces as North Korea threatens hydrogen bomb test in Pacific
via:
[ed. Insanity x 2. See also: ADD politics.]
Change Becomes You
Six years have passed since I discovered that my son was using drugs,’ wrote Vincenzina Urzia in Anthony and Me (2014), a memoir of her son’s drug addiction. ‘I was really sad all the time and devastated, not to mention how worried I was about his wellbeing. My son was not the same person anymore.’
This is a puzzling idea, for someone to become ‘not the same person any more’. The phrase smacks of philosophy – perhaps even obscurity. Yet it is simultaneously apt, capturing the emotive sense of no longer recognising someone whom we once knew. Many have witnessed someone they loved change so profoundly that the person remaining seems an entirely different one.
Drug dependence powerfully exemplifies this phenomenon of not being the same person: a mother sees addiction transform her son into a shadow of his former self. Other examples can evoke the same feeling. A ruinous relationship or divorce leaves a friend so changed that he seems like a totally different person. So too can Alzheimer’s disease – which affects up to half of elderly Americans. A parent or relative develops severe Alzheimer’s, and it seems as if the person once known has disappeared. Across a range of experiences, profound changes can make well-known friends or family become entirely different people.
These examples suggest that change fundamentally challenges our sense of self. Yet, many other large changes don’t disrupt our identities. In fact, some profound changes actually seem to make us become really or truly ourselves. Consider finding one’s true self through romantic love; discovering a hidden life passion; committing to radically improving one’s health; or experiencing a religious or spiritual conversion. The same effect might arise from harder experiences, such as surviving a period of wartime or incarceration. All of these result in tremendous transformations, but they don’t threaten identity. Instead, these changes seem to unearth our core selves, making us become who we really are. This allows for a seemingly paradoxical statement: paradigm cases of continuing to be the same person involve becoming radically different. (...)
Our apparent purposes are broader than those given by nature or even culture. While the singular purpose of an acorn is to grow into an oak, humans are creatures of multifaceted and diverse potentiality. This implies an exciting – but dangerous – aspect of the purposeful self. Often, who we seem to be now becomes more lucid over time. To illuminate this feature, consider examples of great achievements. Imagine that a young child grows into a great artist. In such a case, we reflect back to years earlier and see the seeds of artistry in the younger person. This judgment might be an error or bias; maybe it is not truly their purpose. But it is undoubtedly a common story we tell.
And whether this story is right or wrong, it seeps into our morality. The philosopher Bernard Williams introduced a fictional thought experiment about ‘Paul Gauguin’ inspired by the life of the real artist. In the thought experiment, young Gauguin decides to leave his family to pursue his artistic ambitions. As Williams astutely noted, whether young Gauguin’s choice is blameworthy or praiseworthy seems to depend on how things turn out. Philosophers call this phenomenon ‘moral luck’. If old Gauguin fails as an artist, young Gauguin seems blameworthy, but if old Gauguin succeeds, we say, as Williams puts it in Moral Luck (1981): ‘a little grudgingly perhaps: “Well, all right then – well done.”’ A different way to understand the story is in terms of young Gauguin’s apparent true self and purposes. Upon seeing old Gauguin the successful artist, we attribute seeds of artistic potential in young Gauguin; pursuing his true calling seems more excusable. In the hypothetical world in which old Gauguin fails, we worry that the young man who left his family – years earlier – departed from his moral and familial purposes (as we now perceive that he did not really have an artistic one).
This interpretation of the self as purpose-driven also makes sense of a recent experimental-philosophy discovery: we have a tendency to see improvements as more identity-preserving than deteriorations. People judge changes for the better as more consistent with identity than changes for the worse. The hypothesis of the purposeful interpretation is that the change for the better informs our impression of the earlier person. When we see someone improve, we attribute this goodness to the potentiality of their earlier self. Upon seeing the growth of a magnificent oak, we are more confident about what the acorn was really meant to be. And upon seeing a person’s positive powerful improvement, we are more confident about that part of the person’s true self, at the time before the improvement. However, upon seeing a person’s deterioration, we worry that they have departed from their true callings.
This is a puzzling idea, for someone to become ‘not the same person any more’. The phrase smacks of philosophy – perhaps even obscurity. Yet it is simultaneously apt, capturing the emotive sense of no longer recognising someone whom we once knew. Many have witnessed someone they loved change so profoundly that the person remaining seems an entirely different one.
Drug dependence powerfully exemplifies this phenomenon of not being the same person: a mother sees addiction transform her son into a shadow of his former self. Other examples can evoke the same feeling. A ruinous relationship or divorce leaves a friend so changed that he seems like a totally different person. So too can Alzheimer’s disease – which affects up to half of elderly Americans. A parent or relative develops severe Alzheimer’s, and it seems as if the person once known has disappeared. Across a range of experiences, profound changes can make well-known friends or family become entirely different people.These examples suggest that change fundamentally challenges our sense of self. Yet, many other large changes don’t disrupt our identities. In fact, some profound changes actually seem to make us become really or truly ourselves. Consider finding one’s true self through romantic love; discovering a hidden life passion; committing to radically improving one’s health; or experiencing a religious or spiritual conversion. The same effect might arise from harder experiences, such as surviving a period of wartime or incarceration. All of these result in tremendous transformations, but they don’t threaten identity. Instead, these changes seem to unearth our core selves, making us become who we really are. This allows for a seemingly paradoxical statement: paradigm cases of continuing to be the same person involve becoming radically different. (...)
Our apparent purposes are broader than those given by nature or even culture. While the singular purpose of an acorn is to grow into an oak, humans are creatures of multifaceted and diverse potentiality. This implies an exciting – but dangerous – aspect of the purposeful self. Often, who we seem to be now becomes more lucid over time. To illuminate this feature, consider examples of great achievements. Imagine that a young child grows into a great artist. In such a case, we reflect back to years earlier and see the seeds of artistry in the younger person. This judgment might be an error or bias; maybe it is not truly their purpose. But it is undoubtedly a common story we tell.
And whether this story is right or wrong, it seeps into our morality. The philosopher Bernard Williams introduced a fictional thought experiment about ‘Paul Gauguin’ inspired by the life of the real artist. In the thought experiment, young Gauguin decides to leave his family to pursue his artistic ambitions. As Williams astutely noted, whether young Gauguin’s choice is blameworthy or praiseworthy seems to depend on how things turn out. Philosophers call this phenomenon ‘moral luck’. If old Gauguin fails as an artist, young Gauguin seems blameworthy, but if old Gauguin succeeds, we say, as Williams puts it in Moral Luck (1981): ‘a little grudgingly perhaps: “Well, all right then – well done.”’ A different way to understand the story is in terms of young Gauguin’s apparent true self and purposes. Upon seeing old Gauguin the successful artist, we attribute seeds of artistic potential in young Gauguin; pursuing his true calling seems more excusable. In the hypothetical world in which old Gauguin fails, we worry that the young man who left his family – years earlier – departed from his moral and familial purposes (as we now perceive that he did not really have an artistic one).
This interpretation of the self as purpose-driven also makes sense of a recent experimental-philosophy discovery: we have a tendency to see improvements as more identity-preserving than deteriorations. People judge changes for the better as more consistent with identity than changes for the worse. The hypothesis of the purposeful interpretation is that the change for the better informs our impression of the earlier person. When we see someone improve, we attribute this goodness to the potentiality of their earlier self. Upon seeing the growth of a magnificent oak, we are more confident about what the acorn was really meant to be. And upon seeing a person’s positive powerful improvement, we are more confident about that part of the person’s true self, at the time before the improvement. However, upon seeing a person’s deterioration, we worry that they have departed from their true callings.
by Kevin Tobia, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Paul Gauguin Self Portrait with Halo and Snake (1889).
Thursday, September 21, 2017
Eh! U Da Kine, Ah?
[ed. Local Hawaiian food show (his daughter cracks me up). If you're wondering what U da kine means, this kind of explains it... kine of (the last two paragraphs, anyway).]
Wednesday, September 20, 2017
A Plea for Culinary Modernism
Modern, fast, processed food is a disaster. That, at least, is the message conveyed by newspapers and magazines, on television cooking programs, and in prizewinning cookbooks.
It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.
We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grandmothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s — modern, fast, homogenous, and international.
Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.”
I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Cooking, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.
Meanwhile Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”
At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian. (...)
The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.
Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back two thousand years, a dozen have been invented in the last two hundred. The French baguette? A twentieth-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. English fish and chips? Dates from the late nineteenth century, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. (...)
We may mistake the meals of today’s European, Asian, or Mexican middle class (many of them benefiting from industrialization and contemporary tourism) for peasant food or for the daily fare of our ancestors. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products — failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market, foreign restaurants to eat at, and new recipes to try.
A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian, not Mexican food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food (even though we’ve all had lousy traditional cooking), we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for seventy two hours. Nor is the housewife likely to turn out fine soy sauce or miso.
And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to the availability and long shelf life of two convenience foods that even purists love, high-quality factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.
If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, peasant, fresh, and natural foods.
Virgin olive oil, Thai fish sauce, and udon noodles come to us thanks to international marketing. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the preserved and processed staples — salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea — produced by agribusiness and food corporations. Asparagus and strawberries in winter come to us on trucks trundling up from Mexico and planes flying in from Chile.
Visits to charming little restaurants and colorful markets in Morocco or Vietnam would be impossible without international tourism. The ethnic foods we seek out when we travel are being preserved, indeed often created, by a hotel and restaurant industry determined to cater to our dream of India or Indonesia, Turkey, Hawaii, or Mexico. Culinary Luddism, far from escaping the modern global food economy, is parasitic upon it.
Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy.
Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.
It is a mark of sophistication to bemoan the steel roller mill and supermarket bread while yearning for stone ground flour and brick ovens; to seek out heirloom apples and pumpkins while despising modern tomatoes and hybrid corn; to be hostile to agronomists who develop high-yielding modern crops and to home economists who invent new recipes for General Mills.
We hover between ridicule and shame when we remember how our mothers and grandmothers enthusiastically embraced canned and frozen foods. We nod in agreement when the waiter proclaims that the restaurant showcases the freshest local produce. We shun Wonder Bread and Coca-Cola. Above all, we loathe the great culminating symbol of Culinary Modernism, McDonald’s — modern, fast, homogenous, and international.
Like so many of my generation, my culinary style was created by those who scorned industrialized food; Culinary Luddites, we may call them, after the English hand workers of the nineteenth century who abhorred the machines that were destroying their traditional way of life. I learned to cook from the books of Elizabeth David, who urged us to sweep our store cupboards “clean for ever of the cluttering debris of commercial sauce bottles and all synthetic flavorings.”I progressed to the Time-Life Good Cook series and to Simple French Cooking, in which Richard Olney hoped against hope that “the reins of stubborn habit are strong enough to frustrate the famous industrial revolution for some time to come.” I turned to Paula Wolfert to learn more about Mediterranean cooking and was assured that I wouldn’t “find a dishonest dish in this book . . . The food here is real food . . . the real food of real people.” Today I rush to the newsstand to pick up Saveur with its promise to teach me to “Savor a world of authentic cuisine.”
Culinary Luddism involves more than just taste. Since the days of the counterculture, it has also presented itself as a moral and political crusade. Now in Boston, the Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust works to provide “a scientific basis for the preservation and revitalization of traditional diets.
Meanwhile Slow Food, founded in 1989 to protest the opening of a McDonald’s in Rome, is a self-described Greenpeace for Food; its manifesto begins, “We are enslaved by speed and have all succumbed to the same insidious virus: Fast Life, which disrupts our habits, pervades the privacy of our homes and forces us to eat Fast Foods . . . Slow Food is now the only truly progressive answer.” As one of its spokesmen was reported as saying in the New York Times, “Our real enemy is the obtuse consumer.”
At this point I begin to back off. I want to cry, “Enough!” But why? Why would I, who learned to cook from Culinary Luddites, who grew up in a family that, in Elizabeth David’s words, produced their “own home-cured bacon, ham and sausages . . . churned their own butter, fed their chickens and geese, cherished their fruit trees, skinned and cleaned their own hares” (well, to be honest, not the geese and sausages), not rejoice at the growth of Culinary Luddism? Why would I (or anyone else) want to be thought “an obtuse consumer”? Or admit to preferring unreal food for unreal people? Or to savoring inauthentic cuisine?
The answer is not far to seek: because I am an historian. (...)
The dishes we call ethnic and assume to be of peasant origin were invented for the urban, or at least urbane, aristocrats who collected the surplus. This is as true of the lasagne of northern Italy as it is of the chicken konna of Mughal Delhi, the mooshu pork of imperial China, the pilafs, stuffed vegetables, and baklava of the great Ottoman palace in Istanbul, or the mee krob of nineteenth-century Bangkok. Cities have always enjoyed the best food and have invariably been the focal points of culinary innovation.
Nor are most “traditional foods” very old. For every prized dish that goes back two thousand years, a dozen have been invented in the last two hundred. The French baguette? A twentieth-century phenomenon, adopted nationwide only after World War II. English fish and chips? Dates from the late nineteenth century, when the working class took up the fried fish of Sephardic Jewish immigrants in East London. Fish and chips, though, will soon be a thing of the past. (...)
We may mistake the meals of today’s European, Asian, or Mexican middle class (many of them benefiting from industrialization and contemporary tourism) for peasant food or for the daily fare of our ancestors. We can represent the peoples of the Mediterranean, Southeast Asia, India, or Mexico as pawns at the mercy of multinational corporations bent on selling trashy modern products — failing to appreciate that, like us, they enjoy a choice of goods in the market, foreign restaurants to eat at, and new recipes to try.
A Mexican friend, suffering from one too many foreign visitors who chided her because she offered Italian, not Mexican food, complained, “Why can’t we eat spaghetti, too?” If we unthinkingly assume that good food maps neatly onto old or slow or homemade food (even though we’ve all had lousy traditional cooking), we miss the fact that lots of industrial foodstuffs are better. Certainly no one with a grindstone will ever produce chocolate as suave as that produced by conching in a machine for seventy two hours. Nor is the housewife likely to turn out fine soy sauce or miso.
And let us not forget that the current popularity of Italian food owes much to the availability and long shelf life of two convenience foods that even purists love, high-quality factory pasta and canned tomatoes. Far from fleeing them, we should be clamoring for more high-quality industrial foods.
If we romanticize the past, we may miss the fact that it is the modern, global, industrial economy (not the local resources of the wintry country around New York, Boston, or Chicago) that allows us to savor traditional, peasant, fresh, and natural foods.
Virgin olive oil, Thai fish sauce, and udon noodles come to us thanks to international marketing. Fresh and natural loom so large because we can take for granted the preserved and processed staples — salt, flour, sugar, chocolate, oils, coffee, tea — produced by agribusiness and food corporations. Asparagus and strawberries in winter come to us on trucks trundling up from Mexico and planes flying in from Chile.
Visits to charming little restaurants and colorful markets in Morocco or Vietnam would be impossible without international tourism. The ethnic foods we seek out when we travel are being preserved, indeed often created, by a hotel and restaurant industry determined to cater to our dream of India or Indonesia, Turkey, Hawaii, or Mexico. Culinary Luddism, far from escaping the modern global food economy, is parasitic upon it.
Culinary Luddites are right, though, about two important things. We need to know how to prepare good food, and we need a culinary ethos. As far as good food goes, they’ve done us all a service by teaching us to how to use the bounty delivered to us (ironically) by the global economy.
Their culinary ethos, though, is another matter. Were we able to turn back the clock, as they urge, most of us would be toiling all day in the fields or the kitchen; many of us would be starving. Nostalgia is not what we need.
by Rachel Laudan, Jacobin | Read more:
Image: French women hitched to the plow, 1914–18. American Photo Archive
Snow Crash
Way back in 1992, author Neal Stephenson published his breakthrough novel, Snow Crash, a cyberpunk exploration of then-futuristic technologies: mobile computing, virtual reality, wireless Internet, digital currency, smartphones, and augmented-reality headsets. The book famously opens with a breakneck car chase as the main character, Hiro Protagonist (it’s something of a satire), races to deliver a pizza on time. It’s a literal life-or-death scene as our harried gig-economy driver races his GPS-enabled electric car through the streets of Los Angeles before he runs out the clock and risks angering the mob. TaskRabbit "independent contractors" can surely relate.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.
In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
Twenty-five years later, Stephenson’s cult classic has become canon in Silicon Valley, where a host of engineers, entrepreneurs, futurists, and assorted computer geeks (including Amazon C.E.O. Jeff Bezos) still revere Snow Crash as a remarkably prescient vision of today’s tech landscape. Among the the more prophetic inventions in the book is something Stephenson called “the Metaverse”—the same sort of wireless, online virtual-reality experience that Facebook, Google, Samsung, and practically every other major tech company are now competing to commercialize.In an interview, Stephenson told Vanity Fair that he was just “making shit up.” But the Metaverse isn’t the only element of Snow Crash that has earned him a reputation as a tech Nostradamus. He’s credited with predicting everything from our addiction to portable technology to the digitization of, well, everything, and you can thank him, not James Cameron, for bringing the Hindu concept of “avatar” into the everyday language. Google Earth designer Avi Bar-Zeev has said he was inspired by Stephenson’s ideas, and even tried to get the author to visit his office when he was working on Keyhole, an app suite that later served as a basis for Google’s mapping technology. “He wasn’t interested in visiting Keyhole, or didn’t have time. My best guess is that he was somewhat tired of hearing us engineering geeks rave about Snow Crash as a grand vision for the future. That may have something to do with Snow Crash being a dystopian vision.”
Dystopian or no, Stephenson’s vision of the future is almost here, and at least one tech company virtual-reality start-up Magic Leap, has snapped up Stephenson in an official capacity—he became its Chief Futurist in 2014. Here, with the benefit of 25 years of hindsight, Stephenson talked to the Hive about the differences between augmented and virtual reality, how to create a convincing Metaverse, and why social media is driving us apart.
Vanity Fair: As Silicon Valley competes to build the best Metaverse, do you think consumers will be drawn more toward immersive virtual-reality experiences, like the one Mark Zuckerberg is selling with Facebook’s Oculus headset, or augmented-reality gear, like Apple’s Tim Cook is interested in developing?
Neal Stephenson: I think that those two options are more different than a lot of people realize. You look at somebody wearing a VR rig on their head, and somebody wearing an AR rig, anything that’s on the market now, and those two people kind of look the same. But what they’re seeing and experiencing is completely different. If you’re in a VR simulation, every photo that’s hitting your eye, everything you see is a virtual object that’s rendered from scratch by a computer graphics system.
If you’re in an AR application, you are where you are. You’re in your physical environment, you’re seeing everything around you normally, but there’s additional stuff that’s being added. So VR has the ability to take you to a completely different fictional place—the kind of thing that’s described in the Metaverse in Snow Crash. When you go into the Metaverse, you’re on the street, you’re in the Black Sun, and your surroundings disappear. In the book, Hiro lives in a shabby shipping container, but when he goes to the Metaverse, he’s a big deal and has access to super high-end real estate. AR’s a whole different bag.
VR: Do you see VR and AR as competitors, like VHS and Betamax, or are they distinct technology platforms?
NS: Completely separate and almost unrelated. The purpose of VR is to take you to a completely made-up place, and the purpose of AR is to change your experience of the place that you’re in. That pervades everything in terms of how you think about content, how you tell stories, what it is that you can actually do with these devices. (...)
VR: There are characters in Snow Crash called Gargoyles, who are perpetually plugged in. You wrote: "Gargoyles are no fun to talk to. They never finish a sentence. They are adrift in a laser-drawn world, scanning retinas in all directions . . . You think they’re talking to you, but they’re actually poring over the credit record of some stranger on the other side of the room, or identifying the make and model of airplanes flying overhead.” Do you anticipate a future in which we’re all plugged in 24/7?
NS: The Gargoyles in Snow Crash are kind of in a different category from the Metaverse users, because they’re using what we would now call an augmented-reality device. But I think we sort of are there already with smartphones. The real question isn’t whether it’s going to happen but how artfully it’s going to be done, and can we make it better than it is now? More social, more elegant, and just more conducive to healthy society, healthy interactions? The practice of going around hunched over a rectangle in your hand is completely normal now, and when I see somebody in a car or walking down the street hundreds of feet away, I can tell that they’re texting just by their posture. We all can. It’s what we’ve turned into because of the particular way that we’re connected through technology. I’d like to think it can get better than what we have now.
by Joanna Robinson, Hive | Read more:
Image: Amazon
[ed. I read a lot (but not much science fiction), and Snow Crash is one of those "beyond the beyonds" novels you stumble across now and then and go "how did I never hear about this before"? Pure genius. There isn't a page or two where you don't go ..."wow, how did he ever come up with that metaphor/turn of phrase/premise/insight?" Highly recommended (word of caution: I hear his later novels are almost impenetrably dense). This is a guy bursting with talent and ideas. Now I see where Ready Player One came from. See also: The moon blew up without warning and for no apparent reason.]
Tuesday, September 19, 2017
CCleanup: A Vast Number of Machines at Risk
Supply chain attacks are a very effective way to distribute malicious software into target organizations. This is because with supply chain attacks, the attackers are relying on the trust relationship between a manufacturer or supplier and a customer. This trust relationship is then abused to attack organizations and individuals and may be performed for a number of different reasons. The Nyetya worm that was released into the wild earlier in 2017 showed just how potent these types of attacks can be. Frequently, as with Nyetya, the initial infection vector can remain elusive for quite some time. Luckily with tools like AMP the additional visibility can usually help direct attention to the initial vector.
Talos recently observed a case where the download servers used by software vendor to distribute a legitimate software package were leveraged to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims. For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner. CCleaner boasted over 2 billion total downloads by November of 2016 with a growth rate of 5 million additional users per week. Given the potential damage that could be caused by a network of infected computers even a tiny fraction of this size we decided to move quickly. On September 13, 2017 Cisco Talos immediately notified Avast of our findings so that they could initiate appropriate response activities. The following sections will discuss the specific details regarding this attack.
On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner's download server as recently as September 11, 2017.
In reviewing the Version History page on the CCleaner download site, it appears that the affected version (5.33) was released on August 15, 2017. On September 12, 2017 version 5.34 was released. The version containing the malicious payload (5.33) was being distributed between these dates. This version was signed using a valid certificate that was issued to Piriform Ltd by Symantec and is valid through 10/10/2018. Piriform was the company that Avast recently acquired and was the original company who developed the CCleaner software application.
by Edmund Brumaghin, Ross Gibb, Warren Mercer, Matthew Molyett, and Craig Williams, Talos Intelligence | Read more:
Image: CCleaner
[ed. See also: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared]
Talos recently observed a case where the download servers used by software vendor to distribute a legitimate software package were leveraged to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims. For a period of time, the legitimate signed version of CCleaner 5.33 being distributed by Avast also contained a multi-stage malware payload that rode on top of the installation of CCleaner. CCleaner boasted over 2 billion total downloads by November of 2016 with a growth rate of 5 million additional users per week. Given the potential damage that could be caused by a network of infected computers even a tiny fraction of this size we decided to move quickly. On September 13, 2017 Cisco Talos immediately notified Avast of our findings so that they could initiate appropriate response activities. The following sections will discuss the specific details regarding this attack.
TECHNICAL DETAILS
CCleaner is an application that allows users to perform routine maintenance on their systems. It includes functionality such as cleaning of temporary files, analyzing the system to determine ways in which performance can be optimized and provides a more streamlined way to manage installed applications.
CCleaner is an application that allows users to perform routine maintenance on their systems. It includes functionality such as cleaning of temporary files, analyzing the system to determine ways in which performance can be optimized and provides a more streamlined way to manage installed applications.
On September 13, 2017 while conducting customer beta testing of our new exploit detection technology, Cisco Talos identified a specific executable which was triggering our advanced malware protection systems. Upon closer inspection, the executable in question was the installer for CCleaner v5.33, which was being delivered to endpoints by the legitimate CCleaner download servers. Talos began initial analysis to determine what was causing this technology to flag CCleaner. We identified that even though the downloaded installation executable was signed using a valid digital signature issued to Piriform, CCleaner was not the only application that came with the download. During the installation of CCleaner 5.33, the 32-bit CCleaner binary that was included also contained a malicious payload that featured a Domain Generation Algorithm (DGA) as well as hardcoded Command and Control (C2) functionality. We confirmed that this malicious version of CCleaner was being hosted directly on CCleaner's download server as recently as September 11, 2017.
In reviewing the Version History page on the CCleaner download site, it appears that the affected version (5.33) was released on August 15, 2017. On September 12, 2017 version 5.34 was released. The version containing the malicious payload (5.33) was being distributed between these dates. This version was signed using a valid certificate that was issued to Piriform Ltd by Symantec and is valid through 10/10/2018. Piriform was the company that Avast recently acquired and was the original company who developed the CCleaner software application.
by Edmund Brumaghin, Ross Gibb, Warren Mercer, Matthew Molyett, and Craig Williams, Talos Intelligence | Read more:
Image: CCleaner
[ed. See also: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared]
Monday, September 18, 2017
The Rise Of Stealth Wealth: Ways To Stay Invisible From Society If You Have Money
Becoming wealthy has never been easier in America thanks to quantitative easing, improved financial education, an improving economy, a widening safety net, and a bull market in stocks and real estate. Surviving as a wealthy person on the other hand, has never been tougher. The government goes after you if you make much more than $200,000 a year (medicare tax, AMT, deduction phaseout, credit eliminations, education tax, net investment income tax). If the government doesn’t get you, regular citizens will. Who did you cheat or rob to get to where you are? This is a real problem for those who want to make it big in the land of dreams and hand guns.
Freedom is one of America’s greatest attributes. Yet, if you go too far on the income curve you’ll start feeling like a prisoner to society. Despite the rich giving more to charity in one year than many others will give in their lifetimes, people will protest their wealth and hate them forever. Class warfare is no fun, even if you do have the financial means to own a bazooka.
Most readers here are ambitious folks who want to improve their financial health. Thanks to disciplined savings and investing habits, in another 10 years, I’m sure everybody is going to be that much wealthier. But once you get to where you are going, you’ll wonder what’s next. Never lose site of the fact that it’s really the journey to financial independence that’s most rewarding.
When society turns their back on you for being successful, just recollect on all your struggles and take a deep breath. Be proud of your accomplishments because you know you’re not just doing it for yourself, but for your family as well. You don’t have to be ashamed for not being the dumb ass in high school who thought it was cool to skip class every week to smoke weed. You shouldn’t feel bad that you worked summer internships during college while your buddies went off to play. And you should certainly not feel embarrassed by your frugal habits and smart investments once you found a job.
Unfortunately, society has a fantastic way of discrediting your achievements. “Nobody is self made,” and “You didn’t build that,” are my two favorite retorts. Just try taking yourself completely out of the equation and see where that logic goes when there’s nobody to think, dream, and execute. When you are outnumbered, resistance is futile. You must blend in and rage with the rest of them.
With the below suggestions you’ll be able to better walk amongst the shadows without fear of retribution any longer. Your family will be more guarded from bullies lurking to recondition your children every chance they get. Once you finish reading this post, never speak of its matters beyond your immediate family and friends again. We’ve got to protect our own little community on the web.
A GUIDE TO STEALTH WEALTH
When Forbes came out with its Top 10 Wealthiest Chinese in China, there was huge outrage by the public and a massive anti-corruption crackdown ensued. Half of those guys fell off the list or went to jail within a couple years. As America attempts to reverse Capitalism due to widening income inequality, blending in as a middle class citizen has never been more vital. Below are 15 recommendations to help you assimilate better in society.
1) Never drive a nice car to work or to any public setting. Drive the most economical, safe car you know so that when you ultimately run into your co-workers, they’ll think you’re frugal or poor. Take public transportation and proclaim your love for buses and trains profusely. You don’t want to roll into the office in a Benzo and have your boss see you. His or her immediate thought will be to cut your bonus since you are doing so well.
Driving up to an employee salary negotiation meeting in a Bentley isn’t going to work in your favor either. Instead of choosing a new Range Rover Sport and deducting the vehicle as a business expense, consider a more moderate BMW X3 or Jeep Grand Cherokee instead. When cops huddle for breakfast thinking about which car they want to ticket, do you think they are going for the guy in a 10 year old Toyota Corolla? Cops make $50-$60,000 a year on average and are on a mission.
2) Be careful who you give your home address to. People love to snoop on Zillow.com to see what you paid for your house. Not only will they see what you paid for your house, they’ll also be able to tell whether you’re under water or making huge equity. Instead of giving an exact address, you can give them cross streets and a description of the house. e.g. I’m at the corner of Jackson and Teller. Brown wood shingle house. You can’t miss it. Inevitably, they will find out your exact address if they pay attention, but delay that information for as long as possible. Your house is your sacred abode. Protect its privacy. I recommend claiming your house on Zillow and trying to make the house look as bad as possible. Property tax assessors look at Zillow all the time now to try and jack up your taxes!
3) Always say it’s fake. Whether it’s your Panerai watch, Birkin bag, Armani suit, or Loubotin shoes, always tell the person who asks that it’s fake. Resist the urge to brag about your material things. You’re already an established individual. You can tell them you got it at Ross, Target, or at a flea market overseas and marvel with them how good knock-offs are nowadays. The quality things that you buy are for your own pleasure after all. Pretend you don’t know brands or how much things cost. Just say you like how it looks.
Freedom is one of America’s greatest attributes. Yet, if you go too far on the income curve you’ll start feeling like a prisoner to society. Despite the rich giving more to charity in one year than many others will give in their lifetimes, people will protest their wealth and hate them forever. Class warfare is no fun, even if you do have the financial means to own a bazooka.
Most readers here are ambitious folks who want to improve their financial health. Thanks to disciplined savings and investing habits, in another 10 years, I’m sure everybody is going to be that much wealthier. But once you get to where you are going, you’ll wonder what’s next. Never lose site of the fact that it’s really the journey to financial independence that’s most rewarding.When society turns their back on you for being successful, just recollect on all your struggles and take a deep breath. Be proud of your accomplishments because you know you’re not just doing it for yourself, but for your family as well. You don’t have to be ashamed for not being the dumb ass in high school who thought it was cool to skip class every week to smoke weed. You shouldn’t feel bad that you worked summer internships during college while your buddies went off to play. And you should certainly not feel embarrassed by your frugal habits and smart investments once you found a job.
Unfortunately, society has a fantastic way of discrediting your achievements. “Nobody is self made,” and “You didn’t build that,” are my two favorite retorts. Just try taking yourself completely out of the equation and see where that logic goes when there’s nobody to think, dream, and execute. When you are outnumbered, resistance is futile. You must blend in and rage with the rest of them.
With the below suggestions you’ll be able to better walk amongst the shadows without fear of retribution any longer. Your family will be more guarded from bullies lurking to recondition your children every chance they get. Once you finish reading this post, never speak of its matters beyond your immediate family and friends again. We’ve got to protect our own little community on the web.
A GUIDE TO STEALTH WEALTH
When Forbes came out with its Top 10 Wealthiest Chinese in China, there was huge outrage by the public and a massive anti-corruption crackdown ensued. Half of those guys fell off the list or went to jail within a couple years. As America attempts to reverse Capitalism due to widening income inequality, blending in as a middle class citizen has never been more vital. Below are 15 recommendations to help you assimilate better in society.
1) Never drive a nice car to work or to any public setting. Drive the most economical, safe car you know so that when you ultimately run into your co-workers, they’ll think you’re frugal or poor. Take public transportation and proclaim your love for buses and trains profusely. You don’t want to roll into the office in a Benzo and have your boss see you. His or her immediate thought will be to cut your bonus since you are doing so well.
Driving up to an employee salary negotiation meeting in a Bentley isn’t going to work in your favor either. Instead of choosing a new Range Rover Sport and deducting the vehicle as a business expense, consider a more moderate BMW X3 or Jeep Grand Cherokee instead. When cops huddle for breakfast thinking about which car they want to ticket, do you think they are going for the guy in a 10 year old Toyota Corolla? Cops make $50-$60,000 a year on average and are on a mission.
2) Be careful who you give your home address to. People love to snoop on Zillow.com to see what you paid for your house. Not only will they see what you paid for your house, they’ll also be able to tell whether you’re under water or making huge equity. Instead of giving an exact address, you can give them cross streets and a description of the house. e.g. I’m at the corner of Jackson and Teller. Brown wood shingle house. You can’t miss it. Inevitably, they will find out your exact address if they pay attention, but delay that information for as long as possible. Your house is your sacred abode. Protect its privacy. I recommend claiming your house on Zillow and trying to make the house look as bad as possible. Property tax assessors look at Zillow all the time now to try and jack up your taxes!
3) Always say it’s fake. Whether it’s your Panerai watch, Birkin bag, Armani suit, or Loubotin shoes, always tell the person who asks that it’s fake. Resist the urge to brag about your material things. You’re already an established individual. You can tell them you got it at Ross, Target, or at a flea market overseas and marvel with them how good knock-offs are nowadays. The quality things that you buy are for your own pleasure after all. Pretend you don’t know brands or how much things cost. Just say you like how it looks.
by Financial Samurai | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. And definitely never be caught lighting your barbecue with $100 bills.]
[ed. And definitely never be caught lighting your barbecue with $100 bills.]
Will America Accept Refugees From Trump's White House?
The first wave of Trump White House refugees is now landing on American shores. The instability of their former abode has already set nearly a dozen senior staffers into motion, with who knows how many more to follow. No question, many of them have suffered horrible abuse and maltreatment. But compassion must be joined to realism. Are these migrants bringing with them values consistent with our way of life?
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel interrogated one of the first of the refugees, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, on his ABC late-night show. It was a very gentle vetting, not “extreme" at all. And yet the encounter raised all kinds of red flags about whether these entrants will ever appreciate and accept democratic norms. As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.
The Spicer-Kimmel interview offers some important guidance, especially this core exchange:
That’s certainly a view. But Spicer also demanded recognition and credit, not merely as a henchman of the president’s, but as a public servant.
Yet as Spicer told Kimmel: He saw himself as serving the president—the president, personally.
If he said things that were not true, and not once but repeatedly, that is justified by the president’s order. If he bullied the press and did his utmost to deceive the nation—from the nation’s own platform and at the nation’s expense—the nation has no right to complain, because he did what the president asked.
Which suggests that whatever thanks Spicer is owed, he is owed by the president, and not the nation. He was not working for you. He was working for Trump.
On Wednesday night, Jimmy Kimmel interrogated one of the first of the refugees, former Trump press secretary Sean Spicer, on his ABC late-night show. It was a very gentle vetting, not “extreme" at all. And yet the encounter raised all kinds of red flags about whether these entrants will ever appreciate and accept democratic norms. As former Trump staff seek to integrate themselves into American civic and business life, it will be important to evaluate which of them can be rehabilitated—and which have compromised themselves in ways that cannot be redeemed.The Spicer-Kimmel interview offers some important guidance, especially this core exchange:
Jimmy Kimmel: And so right off the bat, your first ever press conference, you get in there, and it’s the day after the inauguration, right?
Sean Spicer: Yes.
Kimmel: And you are charged with the job of going in front of the press and saying that the inauguration crowd was the biggest crowd ever, the biggest audience ever?
Spicer: (Chuckling) Yes I’m aware of that. I appreciate the reminder of how it went down.
Kimmel: Did the president himself—if it was up to you, would this even have been a topic?
Spicer: If it was up to me, I would have probably worn a different suit. I thought I was going in on a Saturday morning to set my office up, get the computer, make sure the emails went out …
Kimmel: And somebody told you, you need to go out there and say this?
Spicer: The president wanted to make sure the record got set straight. … Look, I said it at the time, and I believed it then, I think in all seriousness that—again—whether or not you voted for him or not, the president won the election, he faced a lot of headwinds, and I think there was a faction of people out there that didn’t want to give him the credit that he rightly deserved. I think he takes a lot of that sometimes personally. Some of us who worked very hard to get him elected felt as though a lot of folks who worked in the media in particular constantly sought to undermine the validity of that election. You have to understand it sometimes from that perspective.
Kimmel: But the validity of the election—compared to looking at photos of the crowd at an inauguration—one is this and one is THIS. Did you try to talk him out of that line of defense?
Spicer: There was a lot of us that wanted to be focused on his agenda, what he spoke about in his inaugural address. But he’s president, he made a decision …
Kimmel: So you had to go along? Even though you know, even if you know—and I’m not going to ask you to say whether you knew or not—even if you know the crowd wasn’t bigger, as press secretary you have to say that it was.
Spicer: Your job as press secretary is to represent the president’s voice, to make sure that you are articulating what he believes, his vision on policy, on issues, and other areas that he wants to articulate. Whether or not you agree or not isn’t your job. Your job is to give him advice, which is what we would do on a variety of issues, all the time. He would always listen to that advice, but ultimately he’s the president ….
Kimmel: And then you have to march out there and go, ‘Yeah, he had a bigger crowd everybody.’”
Spicer: He’s the president, he decides, that’s what you signed up to do.That’s one interpretation of White House service: to serve the president as the president wishes to be served, to tell the lies that the president wishes to have told. Spicer is not the only Trump veteran to have that view of the job. So does his successor, Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So do Kellyanne Conway and the former White House staffer Sebastian Gorka. They work for the president, they follow his orders—whatever their own interior misgivings—and they say whatever he tells them he wants said, just as his attorneys and accountants do.
That’s certainly a view. But Spicer also demanded recognition and credit, not merely as a henchman of the president’s, but as a public servant.
Yet as Spicer told Kimmel: He saw himself as serving the president—the president, personally.
If he said things that were not true, and not once but repeatedly, that is justified by the president’s order. If he bullied the press and did his utmost to deceive the nation—from the nation’s own platform and at the nation’s expense—the nation has no right to complain, because he did what the president asked.
Which suggests that whatever thanks Spicer is owed, he is owed by the president, and not the nation. He was not working for you. He was working for Trump.
by David Frum, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Joshua Roberts/Reuters
[ed. See also: Sean Spicer and the Self-Contradicting Politics of the Emmys]
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