Alfred Fernandes
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What You Would See During an AI Takeover

The NFL’s Most Anonymous Men Are Also the Happiest: ‘My Life’s Not Real’

To be a professional long snapper is to have your worth measured by maybe a half-dozen plays every week. A pass-fail exam each time for a brotherhood of perfectionists. But the job is also a quest. Do it well enough, and there is stability and longevity in a game not noted for either. There is general health, or better odds for it. There are multimillion-dollar contracts that buy a lot of freedom when you’re done. So maybe you get a beer named after you, or maybe you close a Tony Robbins seminar at midnight, or maybe you just drop your kid at school and hit golf balls in paradise.

At a position more or less immune to the bloodthirst of the sport — to the idea of earning a living by inflicting pain — a snapping career can be a rapture. Thirty-two lightning bolts waiting for a bottle. “We’re always working to be better so we can stay and hang out with the cool kids,” says Tennessee Titans snapper Morgan Cox, now in his 16th season. “The joke has always been that we’re all the same guy, basically. We’re just fired up to be out here.”

Show up, work hard. Sling a ball through your legs. Lastly — in the not-so-refined words of the Prince of Pittsburgh — don’t be an a–hole.

And, lo, the gates swing open to football nirvana. (...)

Beyond the self-deprecation — seems it was a collectively transcendent moment when EA Sports put long snappers into its “Madden 26” video game — lies the truth that the job matters. The most common margin of victory in NFL regular-season games for the past quarter century? Three points. A reliable kicking operation, especially given the increasingly superpowered legs of the kickers themselves, is a weapon. A faulty one opens black holes.

So these men take the trade seriously. “I don’t know if people understand how much of an art snapping is, and how much detail goes into it,” Buffalo Bills snapper Reid Ferguson says. They work by the fraction of an inch. Aim small, miss small, and hit your spot, is how a college coach long ago explained it to former Bears snapper Patrick Mannelly, who put his name on an award annually given to the nation’s best college player at the position. On field goal attempts, the laces must hit the holder’s hands such that he simply puts the ball down before the kick. What looks like a fine effort might turn a snapper salty for a week. And never mind the catastrophe of an actual bad snap.

“It’s like you’re a professional dart thrower and you’ve got seven plays a game,” says Clint Gresham, the snapper for the Seattle Seahawks’ Super Bowl XLVIII winners. “And if one of them is not perfect, then you’re kind of a failure.”

Thanks to a rule change in 2006, teams cannot set rushers up directly over the long snapper. It’s better, but only incrementally so: The metahumans to block are now less than a foot to the right and left. Imagine hunching over, throwing a ball perfectly and then contending with, say, former No. 1 overall pick and All-Pro linebacker Mario Williams in the A-gap. “I felt like he slapped me in the head twice before I even realized the play was happening,” says Cox, a five-time Pro Bowler.

“Everyone watches us Monday through Saturday and goes, ‘That looks like an easy job,’” says J.J. Jansen, who holds the Carolina Panthers career record for most games played, at 271 and counting. “Because Monday through Saturday, it is. But on Sunday at 4:15 p.m., when you gotta hit a game-winning field goal, everyone’s on the sideline praying.”

Still, the line at the door keeps getting longer.

That a line exists, at all, isn’t new. The list of participants at long snapping guru Chris Rubio’s camps who then went on to play in college dates back two decades. What’s wild is the current starting point. San Francisco 49ers snapper Jon Weeks first attended the Rubio camp in 2004, out of high school. By the time he was a senior at Baylor, revisiting as a counselor, morning sessions began with attendees in sixth grade. Ferguson remembers coaching a fourth-grader at the camp. And that fourth-grader, Quentin Skinner, went on to snap at LSU and Troy.

“It’s something that opens doors,” Weeks says. “Parents have realized, at least at the college level, you don’t have to be this 6-foot-3 monster to get your school paid for and play football.”

The depth of training is certainly an evolution from a Duke assistant coach telling Mannelly to hone the craft by hitting a goal post, stripped of padding, 10 times in a row after practice. This is more like building bent-over androids. “I’m addicted to snapping,” says Chris Stoll, who won the Mannelly Award in 2022 and signed a three-year contract with the Seahawks out of Penn State. “We can get so much better by just moving your thumb position or, like, keeping your weight on your insteps more.”

The math is daunting: hundreds of college spots bottlenecking into 32 NFL jobs. It doesn’t stop anyone from trying to squeeze through, given what’s on the other side.

A long snapper’s value, in short, is not being a problem. In one interpretation, that is tending to business and being a good dude. (...)

Disaster prevention and peace of mind, though, are mostly what the money is for. Scoring in the NFL in 2025 is tied for the second-highest rate ever. Every point is immense. Thus, per Over the Cap, 15 long snappers are signed for more than $1 million guaranteed. “You don’t realize how important they are until you don’t got one,” says longtime Steelers special teams coach Danny Smith. It’s not avant-garde personnel management; multiyear contracts for snappers date back decades. The outlay is minimal in a sport featuring 23 players with more than $100 million in guarantees. But it’s a reasonable price for one less thing to worry about.

“If I was the (coach) at the podium, it’s something I would never want to be thinking about,” Packers kicker Brandon McManus says. “When you feel like you have someone and you’re comfortable and can turn a blind eye to it, it’s a great feeling.” (...)

This golden ratio of trust and money, both hard-earned, creates enviable stability. “Most NFL players and most athletes in general have access to a ton of money, a ton of fame,“ Jansen says, “but they’re sort of nomads.” An NFL long snapper career, on average, lasts 7.5 years. The rate for all other positions is less than half that. How refreshing, in a game where tenure can be a punch line, to establish roots. To make a plan. Jansen has lived in three houses in one city while buying a small stake in the AHL Charlotte Checkers. Ferguson, who signed a four-year, $6.5 million extension in March, has invested in a restaurant and a soccer franchise in Buffalo. No, it is not the $250 million in guarantees Josh Allen received to quarterback the Bills, but any apples-to-apples comparison sort of misses the point.

At 31, the team’s most anonymous player already has steady footing for decades. “Whenever it does end, we’ve provided ourselves enough financial security to where I don’t immediately have to look for a job to support the family,” Ferguson says. “Honestly, it’s the best.”

by Brian Hamilton, The Athletic |  Read more:
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[ed. My friend Vic was one of the best snappers ever - fast, laser-like zips. Back then coaches mostly expected consistency, but he threw bullets.]

Windows Users Furious at Microsoft’s Plan to Turn It Into an “Agentic OS”

Microsoft really wants you to update to Windows 11 already, and it seemingly thinks that bragging about all the incredible ways it’s stuffing AI into every nook and cranny of its latest operating system will encourage the pesky holdovers still clutching to Windows 10 to finally let go.

Actually, saying Microsoft is merely “stuffing” AI into its product might be underselling the scope of its vision. Navjot Virk, corporate vice president of Windows experiences, told The Verge in a recent interview that Microsoft’s goal was to transform Windows into a “canvas for AI” — and, as if that wasn’t enough, an “agentic OS.”

No longer is it sufficient to just do stuff on your desktop. Now, there will be a bunch of AI agents you can access straight from the taskbar, perhaps the most precious area of UI real estate, that can do stuff for you, like researching in the background and accessing files and folders.

“You can hover on the taskbar icon at any time to see what the agent is doing,” Virk explained to The Verge.

Actual Windows users, however, don’t sound nearly as enthusiastic about the AI features as Microsoft execs do.

“Great, how do I disable literally all of it?” wrote one user on the r/technology subreddit.

Another had an answer: “Start with a web search for ‘which version of Linux should I run?'”

The r/Windows11 subreddit wasn’t a refuge of optimistic sentiment, either. “Hard pass,” wrote one user. “No thanks,” demurred another, while another seethed: “F**K OFF MICROSOFT!!!!” Someone even wrote a handy little summary of all the things that Microsoft is adding that Windows users don’t want.

Evidently, Microsoft hasn’t given its customers a lot to be thrilled about, and it’s been pretty in-your-face about its design overhauls. The icon to access the company’s Copilot AI assistant, for example, is now placed dead center on the taskbar. The Windows File Explorer will also be integrated with Copilot, allowing you to use features like right clicking documents and asking for a summary of them, per The Verge.

Another major design philosophy change is that Microsoft also wants you to literally talk to your AI-laden computer with various voice controls, allowing the PC to “act on your behalf,” according to Yusuf Mehdi, executive vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft.

“You should be able to talk to your PC, have it understand you, and then be able to have magic happen from that,” Mehdi told The Verge last month.

More worryingly, some of the features sound invasive. That File Explorer integration we just mentioned, for one, will allow other AI apps to access your files. Another feature called Copilot Vision will allow the AI to view and analyze anything that happens on your desktop so it can give context-based tips. In the future, you’ll be able to use another feature, Copilot Actions, to let the AI take actions on your behalf based on the Vision-enabled tips it gave you.

Users are understandably wary about the accelerating creep of AI based on Microsoft’s poor track record with user data, like its AI-powered Recall feature —which worked by constantly taking snapshots of your desktop — accidentally capturing sensitive information such as your Social Security number, which it stored in an unencrypted folder.

by Frank Landymore, Futurism |  Read more:

Image: Tag Hartman-Simkins/Futurism. Source: Getty Images
[ed. Pretty fed up with AI being jammed down everyone's throats. Original Verge article here: Microsoft wants you to talk to your PC and let AI control it. See also: Scientists Discover Universal Jailbreak for Nearly Every AI, and the Way It Works Will Hurt Your Brain (Futurism).]

Marian McPartland

[ed. See also: Marian McPartland in Conversation with Steely Dan.]

What Does China Want?

Abstract

The conventional wisdom is that China is a rising hegemon eager to replace the United States, dominate international institutions, and re-create the liberal international order in its own image. Drawing on data from 12,000 articles and hundreds of speeches by Xi Jinping, to discern China's intentions we analyze three terms or phrases from Chinese rhetoric: “struggle” (斗争), “rise of the East, decline of the West” (东升西降), and “no intention to replace the United States” ((无意取代美国). Our findings indicate that China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability and is more inwardly focused than externally oriented. China's aims are unambiguous, enduring, and limited: It cares about its borders, sovereignty, and foreign economic relations. China's main concerns are almost all regional and related to parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Our argument has three main implications. First, China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Thus, a hostile U.S. military posture in the Pacific is unwise and may unnecessarily create tensions. Second, the two countries could cooperate on several overlooked issue areas. Third, the conventional view of China plays down the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address.

There is much about China that is disturbing for the West. China's gross domestic product grew from $1.2 trillion in 2000 to $17 trillion in 2023. Having modernized the People's Liberation Army over the past generation, China is also rapidly increasing its stockpile of nuclear warheads. China spends almost $300 billion annually on defense. Current leader Xi Jinping has consolidated power and appears set to rule the authoritarian Communist country indefinitely. Chinese firms often engage in questionable activities, such as restricting data, inadequately enforcing intellectual property rights, and engaging in cyber theft. The Chinese government violates human rights and restricts numerous personal freedoms for its citizens. In violation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), every country in the region, including China, is reclaiming land and militarizing islets in the disputed East and South China Seas. In short, China poses many potential problems to the United States and indeed to the world.

In U.S. academic and policymaking circles, the conventional wisdom is that China wants to dominate the world and expand its territory. For example, Elbridge Colby, deputy assistant secretary of defense during Donald Trump's first term and undersecretary of defense for Trump's second term, writes: “If China could subjugate Taiwan, it could then lift its gaze to targets farther afield … a natural next target for Beijing would be the Philippines … Vietnam, although not a U.S. ally, might also make a good target.” (...) The then–U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken said in 2022 that “China is the only country with both the intent to reshape the international order and, increasingly, the economic, diplomatic, military, and technological power to do it.” Trump's former U.S. trade representative, Robert Lithgizer, claims that “China to me is an existential threat to the United States…. China views itself as number one in the world and wants to be that way.”

These assessments of China's intentions lead mainstream U.S. scholars and policy analysts from both the Left and the Right to policy prescriptions that will take generations to unfold, and that are almost completely focused on war-fighting, deterrence, and decoupling from China. Those who believe in this China threat call for increasing U.S. military expenditures and showing “resolve” toward China. The conventional wisdom also advocates a regional expansion of alliances with any country, democratic or authoritarian, that could join the United States to contain China. As Colby writes, “This is a book about war.” Brands and Beckley argue that the United States should reinforce its efforts to deter China from invading Taiwan: “What is needed is a strategy to deter or perhaps win a conflict in the 2020s … the Pentagon can dramatically raise the costs of a Chinese invasion by turning the international waters of the Taiwan Strait into a death trap for attacking forces.” Doshi argues that the United States should arm countries such as “Taiwan, Japan, Vietnam, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, and India” with capabilities to contain China.

This leads to a key question: What does China want? To answer this question, this article examines contemporary China's goals and fears in words and deeds. In contrast to the conventional view, the evidence provided in this article leads to one overarching conclusion and three specific observations. Overall, China is a status quo power concerned with regime stability, and it remains more inwardly focused than externally oriented. More specifically: China's aims are unambiguous; China's aims are enduring; and China's aims are limited.

First, China's aims are unambiguous: China cares about its borders, its sovereignty, and its foreign economic relations. China cares about its unresolved borders in the East and South China Seas and with India, respectively. Almost all of its concerns are regional. Second, China deeply cares about its sovereign rights over various parts of China that the rest of the region has agreed are Chinese—Hong Kong, Taiwan, Tibet, and Xinjiang. Third, China has an increasingly clear economic strategy for its relations with both East Asia and the rest of the world that aims to expand trade and economic relations, not reduce them.

It is also clear what China does not want: There is little mention in Chinese discourse of expansive goals or ambitions for global leadership and hegemony. Furthermore, China is not exporting ideology. Significantly, the CCP's emphasis on “socialism with Chinese characteristics” is not a generalized model for the world. In contrast, the United States claims to represent global values and norms. What China also does not want is to invade and conquer other countries; there is no evidence that China poses an existential threat to the countries on its borders or in its region that it does not already claim sovereignty over.

We explore how China views its own position and role in the region and globally. Recognizing that public statements vary in their level of authoritativeness, we examined three main sources: People's Daily, which represents not only the state but also the Central Committee of the CCP; Xi Jinping's and other senior officials' speeches; and Qiushi, a magazine publicizing the CCP's latest policy directions. We used computer-assisted text analysis to systematically assess China's stated goals over time. This method allowed us to more accurately track China's concerns and identify how they have changed. We also show that China's top leaders consistently reiterate that China does not seek regional hegemony or aim to compete with the United States for global supremacy. Instead, China views international relations as multilateral and cooperative.

Second, China's aims are inherited and enduring, not new. There is a “trans-dynastic” Chinese identity: Almost every major issue that the People's Republic of China (PRC) cares about today dates back to at least the nineteenth century during the Qing dynasty. These are not new goals that emerged after the Communist victory in 1949, and none of China's core interests were created by Xi. These are enduring Chinese concerns, even though the political authority governing China has changed dramatically and multiple times over the past two hundred years or more.

Third, what China wants is limited, even though its power has rapidly expanded over the past generation. China's claims and goals are either being resolved or remain static. This reality is in contrast to many of the expectations of U.S. policymakers and to the conventional wisdom of the international relations scholarly literature, which maintains that states' interests will grow as power grows. Rather, the evidence shows that the Chinese leadership is concerned about internal challenges more than external threats or expansion.

We find that China does not pose the type of military threat that the conventional wisdom claims it does. Consequently, there is no need for a hostile military posture in the Pacific, and indeed the United States may be unnecessarily creating tensions. Just as important, we suggest that there is room for the two countries to cooperate on a number of issues areas that are currently overlooked. Finally, the conventional view of China de-emphasizes the economic and diplomatic arenas that a war-fighting approach is unsuited to address. The conventional wisdom about U.S. grand strategy is problematic, and the vision of China that exists in Washington is dangerously wrong.

This article proceeds as follows. First, we discuss the conventional wisdom regarding China's goals as represented by top policymakers in the United States and in the existing scholarly literature. The second section examines Chinese rhetoric and points out nuances in how to read and interpret Chinese rhetoric. The third section uses quantitative methods to more systematically and accurately assess Chinese claims across time as reflected in the most authoritative Chinese pronouncements. The fourth section details how China's main priorities are enduring and trans-dynastic, and the fifth section shows how the most important of these claims are not expanding, even though China's power has grown rapidly over the past generation. We present the implications of our argument for the U.S.-China relationship in the conclusion.

by David C. Kang, Jackie S. H. Wong, Zenobia T. Chan, MIT Press | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. The Roman empire collapsed because it was overextended. China won't make that mistake. They'll just get stronger and more self-reliant - securing their borders, advancing technology, providing security for their citizens. Dominant because they have a strategy for advancing their country's long-term interests, not dominance for its own sake. Most US problems have been self-inflicted - militarily, economically, politically, techologically. We've been distracted and screwing around for decades, empire building and trying to rule the world.]

Naeemeh Naeemaei, The Moon Falls a Thousand Times (b. 1984)

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Jack Penny, Midnight Dining Rooms
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On the Death of Tech Idealism (and Rise of the Homeless) in Northern California

One can imagine a young Steve Jobs digging the communalism of today’s Bay Area camps, whose countercultural idealism shares many threads with that of the Valley’s early hippie-nerds—ironic given the bulldozing of camps in the shadows of contemporary tech campuses and their tightly conformist corporate cultures. The commonalities don’t stretch very far: A rather thick thread in the hippie-techie braid is individualism, a whole lot of which hid behind the Me generation’s “New Communalist” movement. The marriage of these Bay Area cultures is alive and well, but today has more of a New Age–Burning Man vibe. (...)

Unhoused communities don’t randomly burble up from the sidewalk. They are born of the housed communities around them, which in the Valley’s case is a particularly curious one. The Valley’s valley is wide and smoggy enough that some days you can’t see the mountain ranges that form it. The scorching Diablo Range, where cattle roam oceans of desiccated grass, lies to the east.

On the other side, the lusher Santa Cruz Mountains, a place of dank redwood forests, organic farming communes, and uppity vineyards, form a verdant curtain between the Valley and the ocean. Here the tech elite build their villas and take to the fog-kissed ravines for athleisure-clad recreation.

The valley started to become the Valley in 1943 when IBM opened a factory to manufacture punch cards in San José. At the time, orchards carpeted much of the region. When the trees blossomed in early spring, the honey-scented flowers intoxicated bees and lovers alike. During the late summer harvest, the air was a punch bowl. Maps referred to it then as the Santa Clara Valley, but romantic minds of the day christened it the Valley of Heart’s Delight, after a 1927 poem by a local writer with Wordsworthian sensibilities, named Clara Louise Lawrence.

No brush can paint the picture
No pen describe the sight
That one can find in April
In “The Valley of Heart’s Delight.”

Cupertino did not exist back then. The Glendenning family farmed the land where the Apple Spaceship now sits. Prunes were their specialty. The farm was on Pruneridge Avenue—the valley was considered the prune capital of the world, supplying 30 percent of the global market—which passed through their orchards near the present location of Steve Jobs Theater, a smaller circular building next to the mothership.

But Apple bought the road from the city—$23,814,257 for a half mile—so you can’t drive through there anymore. Between the steel bars of the fence you can still catch a glimpse of the Glendennings’ old fruit-drying barn, which has been renovated and is now storage for landscaping equipment. The new orchards and the old barn help soften the Pentagon vibe with a little farm-to-table ambience.

The Valley’s valley is not a stereotypical one because it lacks a mighty river meandering between the mountain ranges. Instead, there is the southern leg of San Francisco Bay, a shallow, brackish estuary fed by measly creeks that barely run in the dry season. It’s a bird and crustacean paradise, but the lack of fresh water and ocean currents make for a putrid aroma that’s further intensified by the landfills, wastewater treatment plants, and commercial salt-harvesting operations clustered around the waterfront.

The smell is so intense that it’s spawned a South Bay Odor Stakeholders Group “dedicated to identifying and resolving odor issues.” One finds Reddit threads with titles like South Bay Fucking Smell: “south bay people, you know what i mean. where the fuck is this rancid ass smell coming from. it’s pretty common for it to smell like shit here, i’ve smelled it my whole life, but i just want to know where it’s comin from. My guess is the shitty salty shallow south bay water spewing out smelly air, but idk.”

“That, or else it’s your mom,” replied another user, who referred to the odor as “the ass cloud.” The poetics of the region have shifted since Lawrence’s day.

The ass cloud did not dissuade the early tech settlers, who followed the money flowing from the patron saint of the Valley’s venture capitalists: DARPA, the Department of Defense’s secretive research agency, which commissioned much of the basic science from which the IT revolution sprang. While farms like the Glendennings’ continued to pump out prunes on the arable land between the Bay and the mountains, the military-industrial complex set up along the mud flats. The Navy built an eight-acre dirigible hangar in Mountain View, still one of the largest freestanding structures ever erected. The CIA quietly rooted itself among the reeds and spread rhizomatically. During the Cold War, aerospace companies blossomed between DOD installations. Lockheed was the Valley’s biggest employer when Kent and Steve Jobs were growing up in the suburbs that slowly consumed the orchards.

The American tech industry was born in the Bay Area because its defense industry parents came here to ward off the Japanese—during World War II, this was the gateway to the “Pacific Theater,” as the Asian front of the war was euphemistically referred to. This first generation of the Valley “seeded companies that repurposed technologies built for war to everyday life,” writes Margaret O’Mara, a tech industry historian. “Today’s tech giants all contain some defense-industry DNA.”

Jeff Bezos’s grandfather, for instance, was a high-ranking official at the US Atomic Energy Commission and at ARPA, the precursor to DARPA. Jerry Wozniak, father of Apple’s other Steve—Steve “The Woz” Wozniak, the company cofounder and part of the gang tweaking on computers in the Jobs’ garage—was an engineer at Lockheed. The military forefathers of the Valley must have been horrified at the hippies their children became, though by the eighties the arc of flower power had bent toward the common ground of Wall Street.

The Navy’s dirigible hangar still looms over the Bay, but Google now rents the property from the government for the parking of private jets. The company dominates the neighborhood to the west of the hangar, a spread of dull office buildings revolving around the central Googleplex, with its employee swimming pools, volleyball courts, and eighteen cafeterias. There are no houses or apartments in the neighborhood, though there are residential districts—of a sort. These are surprisingly affordable, which means that some of the folks who smear avocado on the techies’ toast and stock the kombucha taps have the good fortune to live nearby.

It’s easy to miss their humble abodes, however. An out-of-towner who gets off at the Google exit to take a leak could be forgiven for thinking they’d stumbled across some sort of RV convention. But those aren’t recreational vehicles lining the backstreets of the Google-burbs—those are homes on wheels.

RVs parked on the side of the road are the new desirable real estate, and like the old industrial cores of American cities that have evolved from roughshod hangouts for unemployed artists to haute loft developments for upwardly mobile professionals, their inhabitants aren’t immune to class stratification. Most of the rigs are older, ramshackle models, but here and there shiny coaches broadcast the relative wealth of their inhabitants—techies who could afford an apartment but don’t want to waste their money on rent.

They roll out of bed, hop on a company bike, and are at the office in three minutes, in the meantime saving up for a big house in the outer, outer, outer burbs, where you can still get a McMansion for under $3 million. Some already have the McMansion and use their RV as a workweek crash pad.

The more-rickety RVs belong to the avocado smearers and lawn mower operators. Crisanto Avenue, five minutes from the Googleplex, is the Latin America of Mountain View’s homes-on-wheels community. It’s like a museum of 1980s RVs—Toyota Escapers, Winnebago Braves, Chevy Lindys, Fleetwood Jamborees—most of them emanating Spanish banter, many with blue tarps over the roof, and some leaking unmentionable juices from onboard septic tanks. Apartments line one side of Crisanto, but the side with the RVs fronts onto train tracks. A shaded strip of earth along the tracks, maybe twelve feet wide, serves as a communal front yard, complete with potted plants and patio furniture, for pets and kids to play.

An older Peruvian woman named Ida invited me into her RV, where a half-eaten pineapple sat serenely on an otherwise empty table. She used to live in a two-bedroom apartment with sixteen other people—“Fue imposible!” she said—until she learned of the RV scene. She couldn’t afford to purchase one, but there’s a growing industry in the Valley for old-school RV rentals; residents on Crisanto told me they pay between $500 and $1,000 per month, depending on the RV, plus a $75 fee to pump sewage.

Since Ida arrived in the US in 2003, she has worked mainly as a nanny, often for around six dollars per hour. Work was sparse during the pandemic, so she accepted whatever pay she was offered. One family gave her twenty dollars for taking care of their two children for twelve hours. She’d held America in high esteem before living here. “La vida en los Estados Unidos es terrible,” she said.

My visual experience of the Valley began to shift. My eyes had once flashed at views of the water, clever billboards (“Hey Facebook, our planet doesn’t like your climate posts”), and homes with the billowy, buff-colored grasses and scrawny wildflowers that signify the aesthetics of people who can afford expensive landscaping designed to look feral.

But the more time I spent with the Valley’s have-nots, the more my focus became trained on the visual language of the income inequality ecosystem: the camouflage patterns of desiccated vegetation pocked with blue tarps and plastic bags flapping in the branches; the hulking silhouettes of recreational vehicles parked in non-recreational environments; the bodies splayed out on the sidewalk. (...)

“Vanlife has become the norm here,” a veteran gig worker named Chase, who’s driven for Uber, Instacart, and Amazon Flex, told me. He was not talking about hipsters who move into a home on wheels because it sounds like a fun and Instagrammable lifestyle. He was referring to his colleagues who have no other choice.

by Brian Barth, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Helen Appel (b. 1976), Dirty sink paintings
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The Bookie at the Center of the Ohtani Betting Scandal

It was a round of poker, fittingly, that upended Mathew Bowyer’s life in spectacular fashion. While he preferred to sate his appetite for risk by playing baccarat, poker had served as his formative introduction to the pleasures and possibilities of gambling. Back in the early Nineties, as an enterprising high school student in Orange County, California, Bowyer ran a regular game out of his childhood home that provided a template for what he later organized his adult life around on a dizzying scale: the thrill of the wager, the intoxicant of fast money, and the ability to shimmy into worlds inaccessible to most. Unlike so many of Orange County’s native sons, for example, Bowyer wasn’t raised with access to bottomless funds. But his adolescent poker winnings netted him enough to buy a pickup, which he tricked out with a thunderous subwoofer that ensured that his presence was felt even when he wasn’t seen.

Thirty years later, on Sept. 8, 2021, Bowyer was behind the wheel of a very different vehicle, his white Bentley GT Continental, driving to a very different poker game. Held in a hotel conference room in San Diego, it was hosted by some players and staff of the L.A. Angels, who were in town for two games against the Padres. For Bowyer, then a 46-year-old father of five who could be mistaken for a retired slugger — confident gait, hulking arms mosaicked in tribal tattoos — attending was a no-brainer. These were the back rooms where he cultivated new clients to expand what he referred to, cryptically, as “my business.”

During the poker game, Bowyer and one of his friends, a stocky guy named Michael Greenberg who had been a fixture at those long-ago high school poker games, began talking to a man seated at the card table. Japanese, slight in build, sporting a gray T-shirt, with inky hair cut into a modish bowl, neither Greenberg nor Bowyer yet knew the man’s name — Ippei Mizuhara. But both were aware that he was the interpreter and close friend of a player being heralded as the most extraordinary in baseball history: Shohei Ohtani, the two-way phenomenon who was then in his third year with the Angels, and finishing up a transcendent season in which he would hit 46 home runs, strike out 156 batters, and be named the American League Most Valuable Player. This connection, however, was not the reason Bowyer was keen to talk to Mizuhara. Between hands at the poker table, the interpreter was obsessively placing bets on sports through his phone.

Bowyer sidled up for a brief conversation — one he’d later come to spend many sleepless nights replaying in his mind.

“What are you betting on?”

“Soccer,” replied the interpreter.

“I run my own site,” said Bowyer, speaking as he always did: polite tone, penetrating eye contact. “We do soccer — we do it all. And with me, you don’t need to use your credit card. I’ll give you credit.” He extended his hand. “My name’s Matt.”

“I’m Ippei.”

“Ippei, if you’re interested, hit me up.”

And that was that, an exchange of the sort that Bowyer had been finessing for the better part of two decades in constructing one of the largest and most audacious illegal bookmaking operations in the United States. He’d had versions of this talk on manicured golf courses, over $5,000 bottles of Macallan 30 scotch, while flying 41,000 feet above the Earth in private jets comped by casinos, and lounging poolside at his palatial Orange County home. He’d had the talk with celebrities, doctors, day traders, trial lawyers, trust-fund scions. Often nothing came of it. But sometimes it led to a new customer — or “player,” in his industry’s parlance — adding to a stable of nearly 1,000 bettors who placed millions in weekly wagers through Bowyer. He used the bulk of his earnings to fuel his own ferocious thirst for gambling and the attendant lifestyle, escaping often to villas at Las Vegas casinos for lavish sprees that earned him a reputation as one of the Strip’s more notorious whales — a high roller with an icy demeanor doted on by the top brass of numerous casinos.

In this case, however, the exchange with Mizuhara sent Bowyer down a different path. Shortly after the poker game, he set up Mizuhara with an account at AnyActionSports.com, the site Bowyer used for his operation, run through servers in Costa Rica. It was the start of a relationship that, while surreal in its bounty, would eventually come to attract the unwanted attention of the Department of Homeland Security, the criminal division of the Internal Revenue Service, Major League Baseball, the Nevada Gaming Control Board, and, as Bowyer’s illicit empire crumbled, the world at large.

‘Victim A’

Two years later, in December 2023, Shohei Ohtani signed what was then the largest contract in professional sports history with the Los Angeles Dodgers: 10 years, $700 million. The deal for “Shotime” dominated the sports media for months. But on March 20, 2024, news broke that threatened to derail the show just as it was beginning.

The revelation that millions of dollars had been transferred from Ohtani’s bank account to an illegal bookmaker surfaced in dueling reports from ESPN and the Los Angeles Times. Both centering on his then-39-year-old interpreter, Ippei Mizuhara, the dispatches were as confounding as they were explosive. In an interview with ESPN, Mizuhara initially presented himself as a problem gambler, declared that Ohtani was not involved in any betting, and explained the payments as Ohtani bailing out a friend, going so far as to describe the two of them sitting at Ohtani’s computer and wiring the money.

But the following morning, before ESPN went live, Mizuhara disavowed his earlier statements. The Dodgers immediately fired Mizuhara; investigations were launched by MLB and the IRS; and five days later, Ohtani issued a statement denying any role in a scandal that echoed unsavory chapters of the sport’s past. “I never bet on sports or have willfully sent money to the bookmaker,” Ohtani said. “I’m just beyond shocked.”

Given the whiplash of shifting narratives, the speculation that followed was inevitable. Flip on talk radio, or venture into a conspiratorial corner of the internet, and you were treated to bro-inflected theorizing as to what really happened, what Ohtani really knew. Equally intriguing was the timing. The scandal erupted at a moment when the longtime stigma surrounding sports betting had, following a 2018 Supreme Court ruling that paved the way for wider legalization, given way to a previously unfathomable landscape where pro athletes had become spokespeople for entities like DraftKings and FanDuel; where ESPN operated its own multimillion-dollar sportsbook; and where Las Vegas, a town historically shunned by professional sports leagues, had just celebrated its reinvention as a sporting mecca by hosting the Super Bowl. But if such factors tempered the public’s instinct to rush to the harshest judgments, the ordeal also revealed how the corporatization of sports betting had done little to snuff out a secretive underworld estimated to be responsible for $64 billion in illicit wagers annually. (California is one of 11 states where sports betting remains illegal.)

Yet perhaps most remarkable was the speed at which the matter was seemingly resolved. Acting with uncharacteristic swiftness, the federal government issued a scathing criminal complaint against Mizuhara just three weeks later — on April 11 — that supported Ohtani’s narrative. The numbers were vertigo-inducing. Over roughly 24 months, Mizuhara had placed more than $300 million in bets, running up a debt of $40.6 million to an illegal bookmaking operation. To service it, the government alleged, Mizuhara himself became a criminal, taking control of one of Ohtani’s bank accounts and ­siphoning almost $17 million from the superstar. In June, Mizuhara pleaded guilty to bank and tax fraud.

One person who was not shocked by any twist in this saga was a central character who, throughout, remained an enigma: Mathew Bowyer. Since meeting Mizuhara at that poker game in San Diego, he had received at least $16.25 million in wires directly from Ohtani’s account, had poured most of it into conspicuous escapades in Vegas, and had been braced for a reckoning since the previous October, when dozens of armed federal agents raided his home. While the raid inadvertently unearthed the Ohtani-Mizuhara ordeal, the mushrooming scandal obscured a more complex, far-reaching, and ongoing drama. The agents who descended upon Bowyer’s home were not interested in the private misfortunes of a baseball superstar, but rather in exposing something Bowyer understood more intimately than most: how Las Vegas casinos skirted laws — and reaped profits — by allowing major bookies to launder millions by gambling on the city’s supposedly cleaned-up Strip.

by David Amsden, Rolling Stone |  Read more:

Image: Philip Cheung/Kyodo AP/Matthew Bowyer

Suzuribako writing box, Last third of the 19th century. Box: wood, lacquer, mother-of-pearl, ivory, stone. 1998.

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I Taught an Octopus to Play Piano in 6 Months

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[ed. It's been said that if there are intelligent aliens on earth, octopuses are probably the best candidates. Too bad they're so tasty.]

The Big Reveal

The Bible, as every Sunday-school student learns, has a Hollywood ending. Not a happy ending, certainly, but one where all the dramatic plot points left open earlier, to the whispered uncertainty of the audience (“I don’t get it—when did he say he was coming back?”), are resolved in a rush, and a final, climactic confrontation between the stern-lipped action hero and the really bad guys takes place. That ending—the Book of Revelation—has every element that Michael Bay could want: dragons, seven-headed sea beasts, double-horned land beasts, huge C.G.I.-style battles involving hundreds of thousands of angels and demons, and even, in Jezebel the temptress, a part for Megan Fox. (“And I gave her space to repent of her fornication; and she repented not.”) Although Revelation got into the canonical Bible only by the skin of its teeth—it did poorly in previews, and was buried by the Apostolic suits until one key exec favored its release—it has always been a pop hit. Everybody reads Revelation; everybody gets excited about it; and generations of readers have insisted that it might even be telling the truth about what’s coming for Christmas.

In a new book on those end pages, “Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation” (Viking), Elaine Pagels sets out gently to bring their portents back to earth. She accepts that Revelation was probably written, toward the end of the first century C.E., by a refugee mystic named John on the little island of Patmos, just off the coast of modern Turkey. (Though this John was not, she insists, the disciple John of Zebedee, whom Jesus loved, or the author of the Gospel that bears the same name.) She neatly synopsizes the spectacular action. John, finding himself before the Throne of God, sees a lamb, an image of Christ, who receives a scroll sealed by seven seals. The seals are broken in order, each revealing a mystical vision: a hundred and forty-four thousand “firstfruits” eventually are saved as servants of God—the famous “rapture.” Seven trumpets then sound, signalling various catastrophes—stars fall, the sun darkens, mountains explode, those beasts appear. At the sound of the sixth trumpet, two hundred million horsemen annihilate a third of mankind. This all leads to the millennium—not the end of all things but the thousand-year reign of Christ on earth—which, in turn, finally leads to Satan’s end in a lake of fire and the true climax. The Heaven and Earth we know are destroyed, and replaced by better ones. (There are many subsidiary incidents along the way, involving strange bowls and that Whore of Babylon, but they can be saved, so to speak, for the director’s cut on the DVD.)

Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers—by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system—to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.

What’s more original to Pagels’s book is the view that Revelation is essentially an anti-Christian polemic. That is, it was written by an expatriate follower of Jesus who wanted the movement to remain within an entirely Jewish context, as opposed to the “Christianity” just then being invented by St. Paul, who welcomed uncircumcised and trayf-eating Gentiles into the sect. At a time when no one quite called himself “Christian,” in the modern sense, John is prophesying what would happen if people did. That’s the forward-looking worry in the book. “In retrospect, we can see that John stood on the cusp of an enormous change—one that eventually would transform the entire movement from a Jewish messianic sect into ‘Christianity,’ a new religion flooded with Gentiles,” Pagels writes. “But since this had not yet happened—not, at least, among the groups John addressed in Asia Minor—he took his stand as a Jewish prophet charged to keep God’s people holy, unpolluted by Roman culture. So, John says, Jesus twice warns his followers in Asia Minor to beware of ‘blasphemers’ among them, ‘who say they are Jews, and are not.’ They are, he says, a ‘synagogue of Satan.’ ” Balaam and Jezebel, named as satanic prophets in Revelation, are, in this view, caricatures of “Pauline” Christians, who blithely violated Jewish food and sexual laws while still claiming to be followers of the good rabbi Yeshua... The scarlet whores and mad beasts in Revelation are the Gentile followers of Paul—and so, in a neat irony, the spiritual ancestors of today’s Protestant evangelicals.

Pagels shows persuasively that the Jew/non-Jew argument over the future of the Jesus movement, the real subject of Revelation, was much fiercer than later Christianity wanted to admit. The first-century Jesus movement was torn apart between Paul’s mission to the Gentiles—who were allowed to follow Jesus without being circumcised or eating kosher—and the more strictly Jewish movement tended by Jesus’ brothers in Jerusalem. (...)

After decoding Revelation for us, Pagels turns away from the canonic texts to look at the alternative, long-lost “Gnostic” texts of the period that have turned up over the past sixty years or so, most notably in the buried Coptic library of Nag Hammadi. As in her earlier books (“The Johannine Gospel in Gnostic Exegesis”; “The Gnostic Paul: Gnostic Exegesis of the Pauline Letters”; “The Gnostic Gospels”), she shows us that revelations in the period were not limited to John’s militant, vengeful-minded one, and that mystic visions more provocative and many-sided were widespread in the early Jesus movement.

As an alternative revelation to John’s, she focusses on what must be the single most astonishing text of its time, the long feminist poem found at Nag Hammadi in 1945 and called “Thunder, Perfect Mind”—a poem so contemporary in feeling that one would swear it had been written by Ntozake Shange in a feminist collective in the nineteen-seventies, and then adapted as a Helen Reddy song. In a series of riddling antitheses, a divine feminine principle is celebrated as transcending all principles (the divine woman is both whore and sibyl) and opening the way toward a true revelation of the hidden, embracing goddess of perfect being who lies behind all things:

I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin.
I am the mother and the daughter.
I am the members of my mother.
I am the barren one
and many are her sons.
I am she whose wedding is great,
and I have not taken a husband.
I am the midwife and she who does not bear.
I am the solace of my labor pains.
I am the bride and the bridegroom . . .
Why, you who hate me, do you love me,
and hate those who love me?
You who deny me, confess me,
and you who confess me, deny me.
You who tell the truth about me, lie about me,
and you who have lied about me, tell the truth about me.

Astonishingly, the text of this mystic masterpiece was—a bit of YouTube viewing reveals—recently used by Ridley Scott as the background narration for a gorgeous long-form ad for Prada perfumes. The Gnostic strophes, laid over the model’s busy life, are meant to suggest the Many Mystifying Moods of the Modern Woman, particularly while she’s changing from one Prada outfit to another in the back seat of a sedan. (One feels that one should disapprove, but surely the Gnostic idea of the eternal feminine antitheses is meant to speak to the complicated, this-and-that condition of actually being a woman at any moment, and why not in Prada as well as in a flowing white robe?)

Pagels’s essential point is convincing and instructive: there were revelations all over Asia Minor and the Holy Land; John’s was just one of many, and we should read it as such. How is it, then, that this strange one became canonic, while those other, to us more appealing ones had to be buried in the desert for safekeeping, lest they be destroyed as heretical? Revelation very nearly did not make the cut. In the early second century, a majority of bishops in Asia Minor voted to condemn the text as blasphemous. It was only in the three-sixties that the church council, under the control of the fiery Athanasius, inserted Revelation as the climax of the entire New Testament. As a belligerent controversialist himself, Pagels suggests, Athanasius liked its belligerently controversial qualities. (...)

Perhaps what most strikes the naïve reader of the Book of Revelation is what a close-run thing the battle is. When God finally gets tired of waiting it out and decides to end things, the back-and-forth between dragons and serpents and sea monsters and Jesus is less like a scouring of the stables than like a Giants-Patriots Super Bowl. It seems that Manichaeanism—bad god vs. good god—is the natural religion of mankind and that all faiths bend toward the Devil, to make sense of God’s furious impotence. A god omniscient and omnipotent and also powerless to stop evil remains a theological perplexity, even as it becomes a prop of faith. It gives you the advantage of clarity—only one guy worth worshipping—at the loss of lucidity: if he’s so great, why is he so weak?

You can’t help feeling, along with Pagels, a pang that the Gnostic poems, so much more affecting in their mystical, pantheistic rapture, got interred while Revelation lives on. But you also have to wonder if there ever was a likely alternative. Don’t squishy doctrines of transformation through personal illumination always get marginalized in mass movements? As Stephen Batchelor has recently shown, the open-minded, non-authoritarian side of Buddhism, too, quickly succumbed to its theocratic side, gasping under the weight of those heavy statues. The histories of faiths are all essentially the same: a vague and ambiguous millennial doctrine preached by a charismatic founder, Marx or Jesus; mystical variants held by the first generations of followers; and a militant consensus put firmly in place by the power-achieving generation. Bakunin, like the Essenes, never really had a chance. The truth is that punitive, hysterical religions thrive, while soft, mystical ones must hide their scriptures somewhere in the hot sand.

John of Patmos’s hatred for the pagan world extended from its cruelties to its beauties—the exquisite temple at nearby Pergamon was for him the Devil’s Altar, worthy only of destruction. For all that, Pagels tells us, many claim to have found in John “the promise, famously repeated by Martin Luther King Jr., that the ‘arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.’ . . . This worst of all nightmares ends not in terror but in a glorious new world, radiant with the light of God’s presence, flowing with the water of life, abounding in joy and delight.” Well, yeah, but this happens only after all the millions of heretics, past and present, have been burned alive and the planet destroyed. That’s some long arc. It’s like the inevitable moment in an apocalyptic blockbuster, “Independence Day” or “Armageddon” or “2012,” when the stars embrace and celebrate their survival. The Hans Zimmer music swells, and we’re reassured that it’s O.K. to rejoice. Millions are annihilated, every major city has been destroyed, but nobody you really like has died. It’s a Hollywood ending in that way, too.

by Adam Gopnik, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: Ron Kurniawan

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[ed. Bluefin trevally (Caranx melampygus) aka 'papio'. A reel sizzling, nerve shredding bullet.]

Taylor Price

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Ronald Reagan and the First MAGA Movement

“Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” — Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte 

“Let’s Make America Great Again” — Ronald Reagan campaign slogan, 1980

In 2011, a Gallup poll found that when Americans were asked who the greatest president in U.S. history was, they were most likely to say Ronald Reagan. Abraham Lincoln and Bill Clinton were next on the list. George Washington came in fifth, after JFK. Reagan is less fondly remembered among certain groups, like Black Americans and LGBTQ people, who recall what his presidency meant for them. But on the whole, Americans had, and still have, a positive impression of Reagan the man. 

His policies are a different story. They were unpopular then. They’re unpopular now. Americans didn’t want to see an upward redistribution of wealth, the bloating of the military budget, tax cuts for the rich, and the arming of Central American death squads. Reagan’s secret funding of the Nicaraguan Contras, in direct violation of U.S. law, proved staggeringly unpopular, with nearly 80 percent of the public disapproving. Yet even after the exposure of the Iran-Contra scandal, threefourths of Americans still approved of Reagan “as a person.” It’s not hard to see why. Reagan’s public persona was avuncular and self-deprecating. He was a Hollywood actor, and he performed the role of president perfectly. He peppered his speech with humorous, folksy anecdotes and spoke in a warm, reassuring voice. He conveyed an impression of complete innocence, so that when repeated ethical scandals hit his administration, he was able to convince much of the public that he couldn’t possibly be responsible for anything nefarious—hence the moniker “Teflon president.” Watch clips of Reagan joshing with the press, or making light-hearted references to his assassination attempt, and we can see easily how the Reagan mystique was developed. 

Yet the actual record of the Reagan administration is horrendous. As Peter Dreier wrote in the Nation in 2011,

During his two terms in the White House (1981–89), Reagan presided over a widening gap between the rich and everyone else, declining wages and living standards for working families, an assault on labor unions as a vehicle to lift Americans into the middle class, a dramatic increase in poverty and homelessness, and the consolidation and deregulation of the financial industry that led to the current mortgage meltdown, foreclosure epidemic and lingering recession. These trends were not caused by inevitable social and economic forces. They resulted from Reagan’s policy and political choices based on an underlying “you’re on your own” ideology.

Beneath Reagan’s “gee whiz” and “aw shucks” persona there was a cruelty, a belief that people were responsible for their own suffering and it wasn’t the job of government to help alleviate social misery. Reagan famously said that “the nine most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the Government, and I’m here to help.” This would be news to anyone who has ever been rescued by a firefighter or a park ranger or given a Social Security check. But Reagan didn’t try to make a factual, logical case that the government was incapable of doing anything but harm. Instead, he told stories that projected a vision of an idyllic small-town America where people bootstrapped their way to success. Beneath the stories, his actions were cruel and deadly. Reagan helped create many of the most devastating problems facing American society in 2024. 

Reagan always denied being in any way racist and claimed to have had a “hatred for bigotry and prejudice” from an early age. Nevertheless, in a private phone call with Richard Nixon, he called African United Nations delegates “monkeys,” and rightwing economist Thomas Sowell departed Reagan’s 1980 campaign after he insisted on giving a “states’ rights” speech in Mississippi near the site of the infamous 1964 murders of three civil rights workers, a move that was widely interpreted (including by Sowell) as a dog-whistle to white supremacists. Reagan’s support for apartheid South Africa (and softness on white supremacist Rhodesia), his reluctance to approve a federal holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr., and his initiation of the “war on drugs” all help to explain why Black Americans did not look back fondly at Reagan’s presidency once it was over. 

Reagan never cared much if what he was saying was true. He would pass movie scenes off as historical fact and even told the prime minister of Israel that he had personally helped liberate Nazi death camps, when in fact he had edited footage of them in Culver City, California, while working on films for the War Department. As Jimmy Carter said, with characteristic understatement, “President Reagan doesn’t always check the facts before he makes statements, and the press accepts this as kind of amusing.” In On Bended Knee: The Press and the Reagan Presidency, journalist Mark Hertsgaard reports that eventually, the press just gave up on fact-checking Reagan, since so much of what he said was nonsense. The national news editor of Newsweek said that “I think everybody in the press corps is just a little bit astonished at how many times the President can make horrible mistakes in public[…] [F]or a long time we were writing practically every week a little box on what he said that wasn’t true. We ultimately just couldn’t stand doing it week after week after week because it seemed sort of unfair […] [I]t seemed like persecuting him or something.” 

Much of what Reagan said was ludicrous. In the words of his daughter Patti Davis, “he [had] the ability to make statements that are so far outside the parameters of logic that they leave you speechless.” (...)

Simon Hoggart noted in The Observer in 1986 the peculiar way in which Reagan’s “errors glide past unchallenged. At one point […] he alleged that almost half the population gets a free meal from the government each day. No one told him he was crazy. The general message of the American press is that, yes, while it is perfectly true that the emperor has no clothes, nudity is actually very acceptable this year.” Mark Green notes that Reagan’s rigid anti-government ideology, his belief that the state could do no right, led him to wilfully misinterpret reality: “This loathing for government, this eagerness to prove that any program to aid the disadvantaged is nothing but a boondoggle and a money gobbler, leads him to contrive statistics and stories with unmatched vigor.” Those who interacted with Reagan up close were often shocked by his ignorance. “You sometimes wonder why it occurred to anyone that he should be president, or even governor,” commented Henry Kissinger. Richard Nixon called him a “man of limited mental capacity [who] simply doesn’t know what the Christ is going on in the foreign area.” House Speaker Tip O’Neill said that Reagan “knows less about the budget than any president in my lifetime. He can’t even carry on a conversation about the budget. It’s an absolute and utter disgrace.” Reagan was a hands-off and inattentive manager, nodding off in meetings or remaining silent and often leaving staff in the dark about what his administration’s actual policies were supposed to be. Many people have described Reagan as a mere figurehead or speculated that his Alzheimer’s symptoms began before his term in office was over.

But to treat Reagan as a vapid actor, a pleasant frontman for a rapacious oligarchy, is to underappreciate his talent and let him off the hook for his worst actions. Watch Reagan interacting with the press in 1987, and it’s clear that he’s fully lucid and engaged. After the Iran-Contra scandal, Congressional leaders declined to impeach Reagan that same year, perhaps because he successfully conveyed the impression that he was a bewildered innocent. (Famously, he confessed: “I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that’s true, but the facts and the evidence tell me it is not.”) But he deserves to be given credit for his record. 

The record was disgraceful. It’s chilling to go back and look at how Reagan’s press secretary responded to questions about AIDS, for instance. As a terrifying epidemic began to decimate the gay community, Reagan’s spokesman cracked homophobic jokes in the press room. The reporter who asked about AIDS was “met with dismissive wisecracks questioning the reporter’s own sexual orientation.” Reagan himself showed no interest in the issue and even proposed to cut funding for AIDS research, until the death of his friend Rock Hudson spurred him to action. 

Despite being the only former labor leader ever to ascend to the presidency (he had been president of the Screen Actors Guild), Reagan did everything in his power to crush the American labor movement. In 1981, 10,000 members of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) went on strike for better pay and working conditions. Reagan simply fired them all. As Richard Sharpe writes, 

The strikers were often working-class men and women who had achieved suburban middle class lives as air traffic controllers without having gone to college. Many were veterans of the US armed forces where they had learned their skills; their union had backed Reagan in his election campaign. Nevertheless, Reagan refused to back down. Several strikers were jailed; the union was fined and eventually made bankrupt. Only about 800 got their jobs back when Clinton lifted the ban on rehiring those who went on strike. Many of the strikers were forced into poverty as a result of being blacklisted for [U.S. government] employment. 

Reagan’s crushing of the union “was interpreted by many as a green light from the federal government for union-busting, and ushered in the vicious employer attacks of the 1980s.” The head of Reagan’s Office of Personnel Management said this explicitly, writing that with the strike, “American business leaders were given a lesson in managerial leadership that they could not and did not ignore. Many private sector executives have told me that they were able to cut the fat from their organizations and adopt more competitive work practices because of what the government did in those days.” Journalist Jon Schwarz dates the beginning of the 40-year-long “murder of the middle class” to Reagan’s firing of the air traffic controllers. [ed. I do too.]

Reagan began what journalist Mark Ames calls “one of the most shocking wealth transfers in the history of the world, all under the propaganda diversion of ‘making America competitive’ and ‘unleashing the creative energies of the American worker.’” With the aid of Congressional Democrats, he substantially cut taxes on the wealthy and attempted to undo both the New Deal and the Great Society. This included making more than $22 billion in cuts to social welfare programs, while still massively increasing the federal deficit, in part by bloating the military budget. Poverty, homelessness, and precarity all increased. 

It’s harder to measure the indirect cultural consequences of Reagan’s tenure, but he certainly did nothing to counteract the “greed is good” spirit of the times. As Mario Cuomo put it, Reagan “made the denial of compassion for the people who needed it most sound like a virtue.” Similarly, Cornel West says that “Reagan made it fashionable to be indifferent to the poor and gave permission to be greedy with little or no conscience.” 

In The Man Who Sold the World: Ronald Reagan and the Betrayal of Main Street America, William Kleinknecht summarizes the dire consequences of “Reaganomics”: 

He enacted policies that helped wipe out the high-paying jobs for the working class that were the real backbone of the country. This supposed guardian of traditional values was the architect of wrenching social change that swept across the country in the 1980s, the emergence of an eerie, overcommercialized, postmodern America that has left so much of the populace psychically adrift. Reagan propelled the transition to hypercapitalism, an epoch in which the forces of self-interest and profit seek to make a final rout of traditional human values. His legacy—mergers, deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, privatization, globalization—helped weaken the family and eradicate small-town life and the sense of community. 

Investigative journalist Greg Palast puts things even more bluntly: 

The New York Times, in its canned obit, wrote that Reagan projected, “faith in small town America” and “old-time values.” “Values” my ass. It was union-busting and a declaration of war on the poor and anyone who couldn’t buy designer dresses. It was the New Meanness, bringing starvation back to America so that every millionaire could get another million. “Small town” values? From the movie star of the Pacific Palisades, the Malibu mogul? I want to throw up. 

All of that’s just on the domestic front. Reagan’s foreign policy was a horror show. His administration supported Saddam Hussein as Iraq waged a brutal war of aggression against Iran, even covering up evidence of Hussein’s use of chemical weapons. Reagan violated both domestic and international law in his support for the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras, according to Human Rights Watch, “were major and systematic violators of the most basic standards of the laws of armed conflict, including by launching indiscriminate attacks on civilians, selectively murdering non-combatants, and mistreating prisoners.” (Reagan repeatedly compared the Contras to the American Founding Fathers, labeling them “freedom fighters” and “our brothers.”) The Reagan administration funneled money to them through arms sales in explicit violation of U.S. law, while Reagan’s terrorism against Nicaragua (mining the country’s harbors and destroying civilian boats) was found to be illegal by the World Court, a ruling the administration simply ignored. 

Like other presidents, Reagan supported friendly despots around the world when it served “U.S. interests,” including not only Hussein, but Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, the deposed Pol Pot regime in Cambodia, Suharto in Indonesia, and the genocidal Guatemalan military leader Ríos Montt, whom he called “a man of great personal integrity and commitment.” Reagan freely violated international law, such as by invading Grenada without any authorization from the United Nations Security Council. Yet some Reagan policies look moderate and restrained by comparison with recent presidential actions. Reagan was willing to restrain Israel when its conduct became embarrassing and appears to have been sincerely committed to the issue of reducing nuclear weapons, going so far as to propose eliminating nuclear weapons altogether in one meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev. 

Unfortunately, Reagan was rigidly committed to his Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI, derisively known as “Star Wars”), an attempt to intercept inbound nuclear attacks on the United States. Reagan thought nothing could be objectionable about defending against a nuclear attack, but it disrupted the logic of deterrence (if the U.S. could defend itself from a nuclear attack but the Soviet Union could not, there was less reason for the U.S. to avoid attacking the Soviet Union), and the Soviets saw it as a serious threat, which led to one of the worst nuclear scares of the Cold War. 

The Reagan presidency was a giant fraud. He promised safety but brought us closer to Armageddon. He promised prosperity but crushed American workers. His kindly demeanor belied a nasty streak. (For instance, Jon Schwarz writes in the Intercept that “when Patty Hearst’s kidnappers demanded that her family start handing out free food to the poor, Reagan privately said, ‘It’s too bad we can’t have an epidemic of botulism.’”) TIME magazine called him “a Prospero of American memories, a magician who carries a bright, ideal America like a holograph in his mind and projects the image in the air.” Reagan, “master illusionist, is himself a kind of American dream.” Well, as George Carlin said, “they call it the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.” Reagan smiled at the country in a big cowboy hat while robbing people blind. 

From Ronald to Donald

An ignorant, deceitful entertainer bamboozling Americans into thinking that plutocracy is good for them. Does this sound familiar? We’ve had another one of those recently, one even more cartoonishly dishonest in his promises to “Make America Great Again” (a slogan Trump simply lifted and repurposed from Reagan). As Schwarz writes, Trump and Reagan share the “same political DNA”: “Reagan was Trump’s progenitor, and Trump is Reagan’s degenerate 21st-century descendant. Trump is to Reagan much like crack is to cocaine: cheaper, faster-acting, and less glamorous. Still, in their essence, they are the same thing.” 

There are some important differences. Reagan exuded positivity, even utopianism, promising that “America’s best days are yet to come. Our proudest moments are yet to be. Our most glorious achievements are just ahead.” He was capable of seeming reassuring and reasonable, as in his well-received address after the Challenger space shuttle disaster. Trump’s tone is dark, hateful, vindictive, while Reagan’s was sunny. But both carried out variations on a similar fraud. 

Reagan promised to tame the worst excesses of government. But in office, he let corruption and abuse run rampant. His Department of Housing and Urban Development was “enveloped by influence peddling, favoritism, abuse, greed, fraud, embezzlement, and theft” according to the House Government Operations Committee. His presidency ultimately resulted “in the investigation, indictment or conviction of over 138 administration officials, the largest number for any president of the United States.” Reagan should plainly have been impeached and removed from office over the Iran-Contra scandal. The irony is that we only need to have a Reaganesque fear of government when people like Ronald Reagan are running the government.

 Let’s Make America Great Again, Reagan said. Did he? Of course not. It was a fantasy, an image. Trump is the same, offering an appealing lie that desperate people would very much like to believe in. But if it’s trivial to point out that these men are selling snake oil, the question is: how do you convince people not to buy it? That’s much more difficult. Reagan won two landslide victories... Perhaps one lesson of Reagan is that because appealing visions and stories can be so powerful, we need one of our own. People voted for Reagan even though they disliked his policies, because he seemed personable and he projected an image of forward-looking confidence. Trump does not seem kind or personable, but he has a powerful story to tell, one of a country being ruined and awaiting its redeemer. Counteracting salesmen like these requires a powerful alternative story, with a promise of a different, better future. Democrats since Barack Obama (who himself was an admirer of Reagan) have failed to offer such a message—consider Hillary Clinton’s “America is Already Great” or Joe Biden’s promise to his donors that “nothing will fundamentally change.” 

Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump are two of the greatest con men of the age, successfully convincing many people to do immense harm to themselves and their country. Their political talents, however, should not be underrated. Reagan has, incredibly, been successfully sold as one of the greatest presidents ever, with Republicans viewing him as something close to a saint, an achievement that Noam Chomsky says would have impressed Kim Il-Sung. We need not just to puncture the myths, which is done well in both Kleinknecht’s The Man Who Sold The World and Will Bunch’s Tear Down This Myth, but to offer a more inspiring alternative that will keep people from falling for the pitches of vicious grifters.

by Nathan J. Robinson, Current Affairs |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Good summary. I lived through it all, and in fact had to deal with a few of Reagan's policies directly (like leasing the entire coastline of the US to oil and gas development in an acceleratated 5-year OCS leasing schedule). But it wasn't just Reagan. Equal blame (if not more so) should fall on other ideologues at the time including Pat Buchanan, Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist ('drown government in the bathtub' fame); Alan Greenspan, and the numerous cabinet secretaries and others that faithfully, if not gleefully, set forth to carry out Reagan's agenda (like Interior Secretary James Watt, and EPA's Anne Gorsuch, mom of present Supreme Court justice Neal Gorsuch). Never could have imagined it could get much worse (ha!), but then we ended up taking a few detours into Afghanistan, Iraq, legalized torture, and black sites. Connect the dots. Reagan lit the fire that hollowed out the middle class, deregulated government, crippled unions, jump started neoliberalism (later supercharged by Clinton), and set us on the path to where we are now. At this point, with a completely useless Congress, weaponized military and Justice Department, open corruption, unapologetic criminal pardons, and DOGE-depleted government things can't possibly get much worse, right? Right? (ha!)]

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