Frito Pie

Not quite nachos, and not quite pie, this comforting casserole is a cheesy and crunchy delight that is thought to have roots in both Texas and New Mexico. In its most classic (and some might say best) form, a small bag of Fritos corn chips is split down the middle, placed in a paper boat and piled high with chili, topped with cheese, diced onion, pickled jalapeños, sour cream and pico de gallo, then eaten with a plastic fork. (It is often called a “walking taco,” because it’s eaten on-the-go, at sporting events and fairs.) This version is adapted to feed a crowd: The Fritos, Cheddar and chili — made with ground beef, pinto beans, taco seasoning and enchilada sauce — are layered in a casserole dish, baked, then topped with a frenzy of fun toppings. For maximum crunch, save a cup of Fritos for topping as you eat.

Ingredients

Yield: 6 to 8 servings

1 tablespoon olive or vegetable oil
1 pound ground beef, preferably 20-percent fat
1 medium yellow onion, diced
1 (1-ounce) packet taco seasoning (or 3 tablespoons of a homemade taco seasoning)
2 (15-ounce) cans pinto beans, drained and rinsed
1 (19-ounce) can red enchilada sauce (or 2½ cups of homemade enchilada sauce)
2 (9-ounce) packages or 1 (18-ounce) package Fritos, 1 cup reserved for serving (8 to 10 cups)
8 ounces shredded Cheddar (about 2 cups)
Diced white onion, sliced scallions, pickled jalapeños, sour cream or pico de gallo, or a combination, for serving (optional)

Preparation 

Step 1: Heat the oven to 400 degrees. Coat a 9-by-13-inch baking dish with cooking spray.

Step 2: In a large Dutch oven or heavy-bottomed skillet, heat the oil over medium-high. Add the beef and onion, breaking up the meat with a wooden spoon. Cook, stirring occasionally, until the meat is browned and the onion is translucent, 8 to 10 minutes. Lower the heat if the meat is browning too quickly.

Step 3: Sprinkle the taco seasoning over the meat mixture and pour in ¾ cup of water; mix well. Bring to a simmer and cook until the liquid thickens and coats the pan, scraping up any browned bits, 2 to 3 minutes. Add the beans and enchilada sauce, stirring until combined. Bring to a simmer and cook for 5 minutes.

Step 4: Assemble the pie: Sprinkle half of the Fritos in the prepared baking dish, followed by half of the Cheddar. Cover with all of the meat filling. Finally, add the remaining Fritos (minus the reserved cup) and Cheddar.

Step 5: Bake until the cheese is melted and bubbly, 7 to 10 minutes. Rest for 5 minutes, then add the desired toppings to the casserole, or spoon into individual bowls and have eaters top as they please. Add reserved Fritos for more crunch, if desired.

by Kia Damon, NY Times |  Read more:

Image:Christopher Testani for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Simon Andrews.
[ed. Forgot about these. Should be great for Seattle's upcoming Super Bowl win.] 

Anne Zahalka - The Mathematician

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Greg Girard - Hong Kong Cafe, Vancouver, Canada, 1975

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On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via

Why Even the Healthiest People Hit a Wall at Age 70

Are we currently determining how much of aging is lifestyle changes and interventions and how much of it is basically your genetic destiny?

 

[Transcript:] We are constantly being bombarded with health and lifestyle advice at the moment. I feel like I cannot open my social media feeds without seeing adverts for supplements or diet plans or exercise regimes. And I think that this really is a distraction from the big goals of longevity science. This is a really difficult needle to thread when it comes to talking about this stuff because I'm a huge advocate for public health. I think if we could help people eat better, if we could help 'em do more exercise, if we could help 'em quit smoking, this would have enormous effects on our health, on our economies all around the world. But this sort of micro-optimization, these three-hour long health podcasts that people are digesting on a daily basis these days, I think we're really majoring in the minors. We're trying to absolutely eke out every last single thing when it comes to living healthily. And I think the problem is that there are real limits to what we can do with health advice. 

So for example, there was a study that came out recently that was all over my social media feeds. And the headline was that by eating the best possible diet, you can double your chance of aging healthily. But I decided to dig into the results table. The healthiest diet was something called the Alternative Healthy Eating Index or AHEI. And even the people who are sticking most closely to this best diet, according to this study, the top 20% of adherence to the AHEI, only 13.6% of them made it to 70 years old without any chronic diseases. That means that over 85% of the people sticking to the best diet, according to this study, got to the age of 70 with at least something wrong with them. And that shows us that optimizing diet only has so far it can go. 

We're not talking about immortality or living to 120 here. If you wanna be 70 years old and in good enough health to play with your grandkids, I cannot guarantee that you can do that no matter how good your diet is. And that's why we need longevity medicine to help keep people healthier for longer. And actually, I think even this idea of 120, 150-year-old lifespans, you know, immortality even as a word that's often thrown around, I think the main thing we're trying to do is get people to 80, 90 years old in good health. 'cause we already know that most people alive today, when they reach that age, are unfortunately gonna be frail. They're probably gonna be suffering from two or three or four different diseases simultaneously. And what we wanna do is try and keep people healthier for longer. And by doing that, they probably will live longer but kind of as a side effect. 

If you look at photographs of people from the past, they often look older than people in the present day who are the same age. And part of these are these terrible fashion choices that people made in the past. And we can look back and, you know, understand the mistakes they've made with hindsight. But part of that actually is aging biology. I think the fact that people can be different biological ages at the same chronological ages, something that's really quite intuitive. All of us know people who've waltzed into their 60s looking great and, you know, basically as fit as someone in their 40s or 50s. And we know similar people who have also gone into their 60s, but they're looking haggard, they've got multiple different diseases, they're already struggling through life. 

In the last decade, scientists have come up with various measures of what's called biological age as distinct from chronological age. So your chronological age is just how many candles there are on your birthday cake. And obviously, you know, most of us are familiar with that. But the idea of biological age is to look inside your cells, look inside your body, and work out how old you are on a biological level. Now we aren't perfect at doing this yet, but we do have a variety of different measures. We can use blood tests, we can use what are called epigenetic tests, or we can do things that are far more sort of basic and functional, how strong your grip is declines with age. And by comparing the value of something like your grip strength to an average person of a given age, we can assign you a biological age value. And I think the ones that are getting the most buzz at the moment within the scientific community, but also all around the internet, are these epigenetic age tests. 

So the way that this works is that you'll take a blood test or a saliva sample and scientists will measure something about your epigenome. So the genome is your DNA, it's the instruction manual of life. And the epigenome is a layer of chemistry that sits on top of your genome. If you think of your DNA is that instruction manual, then the epigenome is the notes in the margin. It's the little sticky notes that have been stuck on the side and they tell the cell which DNA to use at which particular time. And we know that there are changes to this epigenome as you get older. And so by measuring the changes in the epigenome, you can assign someone a biological age. 

At the moment, these epigene clocks are a really great research tool. They're really deepening our understanding of biological aging in the lab. I think the problem with these tests as applied to individuals is we don't know enough about exactly what they're telling us. We don't know what these individual changes in epigenetic marks mean. We know they're correlated with age, but what we don't know is if they're causally related. And in particular, we don't know if you intervene, if you make a change in your lifestyle, if you start taking a certain supplement and that reduces your biological age. We don't know whether that actually means you're gonna dilate or whether it means you're gonna stay healthier for longer or whether you've done something that's kind of adjacent to that. And so we need to do more research to understand if we can causally impact these epigenetic measures. (...)

Machine learning and artificial intelligence are gonna be hugely, hugely important in understanding the biology of aging. Because the body is such a complicated system that in order to really understand it, we're gonna need these vast computer models to try and decode the data for us. The challenge is that what machine learning can do at the moment is it can identify correlations. So it can identify things that are associated with aging, but it can't necessarily tell us what's causing something else. So for example, in the case of these epigenetic clocks, the parts of the epigenome that change with age have been identified because they correlate. But what we don't know is if you intervene in any one of these individual epigenetic marks, if you move it in the direction of something younger, does that actually make people healthier? And so what we need to do is more experiments where we try and work out if we can intervene in these epigenetic, in these biological clocks, can we make people live healthier for longer? 

Over the last 10 or 15 years, scientists have really started to understand the fundamental underlying biology of the aging process. And they broke this down into 12 what are called hallmarks of aging. One of those hallmarks is the accumulation of senescent cells. Now senescent is just a biological technical term for old. These are cells that accumulate in all of our bodies as the years go by. And scientists have noticed that these cells seem to drive a range of different diseases as we get older. And so the idea was what if we could remove these cells and leave the rest of the cells of the body intact? Could that slow down or even partially reverse the aging process? And scientists identified drugs called it senolytic drugs. 

These are drugs that kill those senescent cells and they tried them out in mice and they do indeed effectively make the mice biologically younger. So if you give mice a course of senolytic drugs, it removes those senescent cells from their body. And firstly, it makes them live a bit longer. That's a good thing if you're slowing down the aging process, the basic thing you want to see. But it's not dragging out that period of frailty at the end of life. It's keeping the mice healthier for longer so they get less cancer, they get less heart disease, they get fewer cataracts. The mice are also less frail. They basically send the mice to a tiny mouse-scale gym in these experiments. And the mice that have been given the drugs, they can run further and faster on the mousey treadmills that they try them out on. 

It also seems to reverse some of the cognitive effects that come along with aging. So if you put an older mouse in a maze, it's often a bit anxious, doesn't really want to explore. Whereas a younger mouse is desperate to, you know, run around and find the cheese or whatever it is mice doing in mazes. And by giving them these senolytic drugs, you can unlock some of that youthful curiosity. And finally, these mice just look great. You do not need to be an expert mouse biologist to see which one has had the pills and which one hasn't. They've got thicker fur. They've got plumper skin. They've got brighter eyes. They've got less fat on their bodies. And what this shows us is that by targeting the fundamental processes of aging, by identifying something like senescent cells that drives a whole range of age-related problems, we can hit much perhaps even all of the aging process with a single treatment. 

Senescent cells are, of course, only one of these 12 hallmarks of aging. And I think in order to both understand and treat the aging process, we're potentially gonna only treatments for many, perhaps even all of those hallmarks. There's never gonna be a single magic pill that can just make you live forever. Aging is much, much more complicated than that. But by understanding this relatively short list of underlying processes, maybe we can come up with 12, 20 different treatments that can have a really big effect on how long we live. 

One of the most exciting ideas in longevity science at the moment is what's called cellular reprogramming. I sometimes describe this as a treatment that has fallen through a wormhole from the future. This is the idea that we can reset the biological clock inside of our cells. And the idea first came about in the mid 2000s because there was a scientist called Shinya Yamanaka who was trying to find out how to turn regular adult body cells all the way back to the very beginning of their biological existence. And Yamanaka and his team were able to identify four genes that you could insert into a cell and turn back that biological clock. 

Now, he was interested in this from the point of view of creating stem cells, a cell that can create any other kind of cell in the body, which we might be able to use for tissue repair in future. But scientists also noticed, as well as turning back the developmental clock on these cells, it also turns back the aging clock, cells that are given these four Yamanaka factors actually are biologically younger than cells that haven't had the treatment. And so what scientists decided to do was insert these Yamanaka factor genes into mice. 

Now if you do this in a naive way, so there's genes active all the time, it's actually very bad news for the mice, unfortunately. because these stem cells, although they're very powerful in terms of what kind of cell they can become, they are useless at being a liver cell or being a heart cell. And so the mice very quickly died of organ failure. But if you activate these genes only transiently, and the way that scientists did it the first time successfully was essentially to activate them at weekends. So they produced these genes in such a way that they could be activated with the drug and they gave the mice the drug for two days of the week, and then gave them five days off so the Yamanaka factors were then suppressed. They found that this was enough to turn back the biological clock in those cells, but without turning back the developmental clock and turn them into these stem cells. And that meant the mice stayed a little bit healthier. We now know that they can live a little bit longer with this treatment too.

Now the real challenge is that this is a gene therapy treatment. It involves delivering four different genes to every single cell in your body. The question is can we, with our puny 2020s biotechnology, make this into a viable treatment, a pill even, that we can actually use in human beings? I really think this idea of cellular reprogramming appeals to a particular tech billionaire sort of mentality. The idea that we can go in and edit the code of life and reprogram our biological age, it's a hugely powerful concept. And if this works, the fact that you can turn back the biological clock all the way to zero, this really is a very, very cool idea. And that's what's led various different billionaires from the Bay Area to invest huge, huge amounts of money in this. 

Altos Labs is the biggest so-called startup in this space. And I wouldn't really call it a startup 'cause it's got funding of $3 billion from amongst other people, Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon. Now I'm very excited about this because I think $3 billion is enough to have a good go and see if we can turn this into a viable human treatment. My only concern is that epigenetics is only one of those hallmarks of aging. And so it might be the case that we solve aging inside our individual cells, but we leave other parts of the aging process intact. (...)

Probably the quickest short-term wins in longevity science are going to be repurposed existing drugs. And the reason for this is because we spent many, many years developing these drugs. We understand how they work in humans. We understand a bit about their safety profile. And because these molecules already exist, we've just tried them out in mice, in, you know, various organisms in the lab and found that a subset of them do indeed slow down the aging process. The first trial of a longevity drug that was proposed in humans was for a drug called metformin, which is a pre-existing drug that we prescribe actually for diabetes in this case, and has some indications that it might slow down the aging process in people. (...)

I think one of the ones that's got the most buzz around it at the moment is a drug called rapamycin. This is a drug that's been given for organ transplants. It's sometimes used to coat stents, which these little things that you stick in the arteries around your heart to expand them if you've got a contraction of those arteries that's restricting the blood supply. But we also know from experiments in the lab that can make all kinds of different organisms live longer, everything from single-cell yeast, to worms, to flies, to mice, to marmoset, which are primates. They're very, very evolutionarily close to us as one of the latest results. 

Rapamycin has this really incredible story. It was first isolated in bacteria from a soil sample from Easter Island, which is known as Rapa Nui in the local Polynesians. That's where the drug gets its name. And when it was first isolated, it was discovered to be antifungal. It could stop fungal cells from growing. So that was what we thought we'd use it for initially. But when the scientists started playing around with in the lab, they realized it didn't just stop fungal cells from growing. It also stopped many other kinds of cells as well, things like up to and including human cells. And so the slight disadvantage was that if you used it as an antifungal agent, it would also stop your immune cells from being able to divide, which is obviously be a bit of a sort of counterintuitive way to try and treat a fungal disease. So scientists decided to use it as an immune suppressant. It can stop your immune system from going haywire when you get an organ transplant, for example, and rejecting that new organ. 

It is also developed as an anti-cancer drug. So if it can stop cells dividing or cancer as cells dividing out of control. But the way that rapamycin works is it targets a fundamental central component of cellular metabolism. And we noticed that that seemed to be very, very important in the aging process. And so by tamping it down by less than you would do in a patient where you're trying to suppress their immune system, you can actually rather than stopping the cell dividing entirely, you can make it enter a state where it's much more efficient in its use of resources. It starts this process called autophagy, which is Greek for self-eating, autophagy. And that means it consumes old damaged proteins, and then recycles them into fresh new ones. And that actually is a critical process in slowing down aging, biologically speaking. And in 2009, we found out for the first time that by giving it to mice late in life, you could actually extend their remaining lifespan. They live by 10 or 15% longer. And this was a really incredible result. 

This was the first time a drug had been shown to slow down aging in mammals. And accordingly, scientists have become very, very excited about it. And we've now tried it in loads of different contexts and loads of different animals and loads of different organisms at loads of different times in life. You can even wait until very late in a mouse lifespan to give it rapamycin and you still see most of that same lifespan extension effect. And that's fantastic news potentially for us humans because not all of us, unfortunately, can start taking a drug from birth 'cause most of us were born quite a long time ago. But rapamycin still works even if you give it to mice who are the equivalent of 60 or 70 years old in human terms. And that means that for those of us who are already aged a little bit, Rapamycin could still help us potentially. And there are already biohackers out there trying this out for themselves, hopefully with the help of a doctor to make sure that they're doing everything as safely as possible to try and extend their healthy life. And so the question is: should we do a human trial of rapamycin to find out if it can slow down the aging process in people as well? (...)

We've already got dozens of ideas in the lab for ways to slow down, maybe even reverse the age of things like mice and cells in a dish. And that means we've got a lot of shots on goal. I think it'll be wildly unlucky if none of the things that slow down aging in the lab actually translate to human beings. That doesn't mean that most of them will work, probably most of them won't, but we only need one or two of them to succeed and really make a big difference. And I think a great example of this is GLP-1 drugs, the ozempics, the things that are allowing people to suddenly lose a huge amount of weight. We've been looking for decades for these weight loss drugs, and now we finally found them. It's shown that these breakthroughs are possible, they can come out of left field. And all we need to do in some cases is a human trial to find out if these drugs actually work in people. 

And what that means is that, you know, the average person on planet earth is under the age of 40. They've probably got 40 or 50 years of life expectancy left depending on the country that they live in. And that's an awful lot of time for science to happen. And if then in the next 5 or 10 years, we do put funding toward these human trials, we might have those first longevity drugs that might make you live one or two or five years longer. And that gives scientists even more time to develop the next treatment. And if we think about some more advanced treatments, not just drugs, things like stem cell therapy or gene therapy, those things can sound pretty sci-fi. But actually, we know that these things are already being deployed in hospitals and clinics around the world. They're being deployed for specific serious diseases, for example, where we know that a single gene can be a problem and we can go in and fix that gene and give a child a much better chance at a long, healthy life. 

But as we learn how these technologies work in the context of these serious diseases, we're gonna learn how to make them effective. And most importantly, we're gonna learn how to make them safe. And so we could imagine doing longevity gene edits in human beings, perhaps not in the next five years, but I think it'll be foolish to bet against it happening in the next 20 years, for example. 

by Andrew Steele, The Big Think |  Read more:

Image: Yamanka factors via:

[ed. See also: Researchers Are Using A.I. to Decode the Human Genome (NYT).]

Anna Desnitskaya

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Football Won’t Be Forever

Football occupies a strange place in American life. It’s the most popular sport in the country by an absurd margin, but it’s also the most controversial. It’s treated as a civic ritual in some places, a primitive distraction in others, and a kind of background noise almost everywhere.

For millions of people, football Sundays (and Saturdays) structure the week. For millions more, football represents everything that feels excessive, violent, or backward about American culture.

What makes football so hard to talk about is that none of these interpretations feels fully wrong or right. The game is violent, but also beautiful. It’s deeply commercial, yet genuinely communal. It’s hyper-engineered, obsessively optimized, ruthlessly controlled, while also delivering moments of genuine unpredictability that no scripted entertainment can match.

The writer Chuck Klosterman has spent much of his career thinking about how mass culture works, why certain things take hold, and what they reveal about the people who love them. In his new book, Football, he turns that lens on the most dominant cultural object in American life.

Klosterman is especially interested in football as a mediated experience. After all, it’s a game that most fans have never played, can’t meaningfully simulate, and only encounter through television. And yet we can’t get enough of it. Why is that? And why is it that football, of all things, continues to function as one of the last true monocultural rituals in a fragmented media landscape? (...)

You’re a football fan, but this book isn’t a love letter to the game. What were you trying to do?

I say it’s not a love letter because I think when people write about something they love, especially something they’ve loved for a long time, there’s an impulse to justify that love. To persuade the reader that this thing deserves the emotional weight the writer has given it. That’s not really what I’m interested in doing.

I approach football the same way I approach music or movies or any other subject I write about. It’s just criticism. I’m trying to understand what the thing is doing, how it works, and why it exists the way it does.

I’ve been thinking about football unconsciously for 40 years and more deliberately for at least 20. At some point it occurred to me that football is going to matter less in the future than it does now. That’s not a judgment. That’s just what happens to large cultural objects. Everything eventually recedes.

And when that happens, people are going to try to explain retroactively why football mattered so much. They’ll tell neat stories about violence or capitalism or distraction or American decline. And I think those explanations will mostly be wrong, or at least incomplete.

So what I wanted to do was describe what football means while we’re still living inside it. While it still feels normal and necessary rather than strange and historical. It’s almost like writing an obituary before the subject has died. (...)

Why football, though? Why does it dominate culture so completely?

A lot of it comes down to historical timing and structural compatibility.

Football emerges in the late 19th century, right after the Civil War, and it carries a metaphorical relationship to organized conflict. It’s a simulation of war, without all the death and geopolitical consequences. That metaphor is baked into the game at a very deep level.

Then television arrives, and football turns out to be perfectly suited for it. The stoppages, the structure, the anticipation between plays, the way action unfolds in short bursts, all translate beautifully to broadcast.

You describe the game as generating a sensation of chaotic freedom inside an environment of total control. How does that happen?

Football is one of the most engineered experiences people routinely engage with, even if they don’t think about it that way. Every play is designed in advance. It’s encoded into a language that only a small group of people fully understands. It’s transmitted through headsets, wristbands, and signals. It’s rehearsed endlessly during practice. And it has to be executed within very strict time constraints.

Behind every snap, there’s all this hierarchy. Coaches, coordinators, analysts, trainers, medical staff, league officials, rules committees. It’s a deeply bureaucratic system. In a lot of ways, it’s almost corporate. Everything is planned, regulated, and optimized.

And then the ball is snapped, and all of that structure suddenly recedes. For a few seconds, what you see feels spontaneous. Twenty-two people collide, react, adjust, and improvise in real time. You don’t know exactly what’s going to happen, even though you know it’s happening inside a very rigid framework.

That contrast is where the power comes from. You get unpredictability without existential risk. You get chaos that’s bounded. The play might fail or succeed, but the system itself is stable. There’s a beginning and an end. The whistle will blow. The next play will come.

I think that mirrors how a lot of people want to experience the world more generally. Most people don’t actually want true chaos. They want the feeling of danger without real danger, the feeling of freedom without losing the structure that makes life manageable.

Would football be as entertaining if there wasn’t this continual possibility that someone will get hurt?

I don’t think people want to see anyone get hurt. Football isn’t a blood sport in that sense. But risk matters. Meaning requires stakes.

It’s like climbing Everest. People don’t climb it because they want to die. But the fact that death is possible gives the act significance. If football eliminated serious risk entirely, it would become something else.

That’s why safety rule changes provoke such strong reactions. On the surface, those reactions sound crude. But they’re pointing at a real tension between safety and meaning.

by Sean Illing with Chuck Kloserman, Vox | Read more:
Image: Dean Rutz/Seattle Times
[ed. With rising interest and fan support for flag football these days, will it ever be a viable alternative given that (controlled) violence and risk are such fundamental elements of the game? Maybe, if we start to see participation at younger ages start to decline.]

William Gropper (American, 1897-1977), Night Life

via:

Nduduzo Makhathini

Three Columnists on ICE in Minneapolis

Matthew Rose, an Opinion editorial director, hosted an online conversation with three Opinion columnists.

Matthew Rose: On Saturday, agents from the border patrol in Minneapolis shot and killed Alex Pretti, an American citizen. We don’t have a full accounting of what happened, but the available video evidence shows he was filming the agents with his phone, as many locals have done since the full weight of federal immigration enforcement descended on the city.

Lydia, you’ve been to Minneapolis recently. Tell us what you saw and give us some context for what just happened.

Lydia Polgreen: I have never been a fan of the conceit of American journalists covering the United States as if it were a backwater foreign nation, but in Minneapolis last week I could not shake the impulse to compare my experiences in a city I know so well (I spent a chunk of my childhood in the Twin Cities, and my father is from Minneapolis) with my experiences covering civil wars in places like Congo, Sudan, Sri Lanka and more. Watching the video of Pretti’s killing, I thought: If this was happening on the streets of any of those places, I would not hesitate to call it an extrajudicial execution by security forces. This is where we are: armed agents of the state killing civilians with an apparent belief in their total impunity.

I left before Pretti was gunned down, apparently in the back while he was on his knees. What I saw was so reminiscent of other conflicts — civilians doing their very best to protect themselves and their neighbors from seemingly random violence meted out by state agents. Those agents, masked and heavily armed, are roaming the streets and picking up and assaulting people for having the wrong skin color or accent, or being engaged in the constitutionally protected acts of filming, observing or protesting their presence. Anyone who knows me knows that I am allergic to hyperbole, but sometimes you need to simply call a spade a spade. This is a lawless operation.

David French: We are witnessing the total breakdown of any meaningful system of accountability for federal officials. The combination of President Trump’s Jan. 6 pardons, his ongoing campaign of pardoning friends and allies, his politicized prosecutions and now his administration’s assurances that federal officers have immunity are creating a new legal reality in the United States. The national government is becoming functionally lawless, and the legal system is struggling to contain his corruption.

We’re tasting the bitter fruit of Trump’s dreadful policies, to be sure, but it’s worse than that. He’s exploiting years of legal developments that have helped insulate federal officials from both criminal and civil accountability. It’s as if we engineered a legal system premised on the idea that federal officials are almost always honest, and the citizens who critique them are almost always wrong. We’ve tilted the legal playing field against citizens and in favor of the government.

The Trump administration breaks the law, and also ruthlessly exploits all the immunities it’s granted by law. The situation is unsustainable for a constitutional republic.

Michelle Goldberg: The administration is very consciously reinforcing that sense of impunity. First there was Stephen Miller addressing the security forces after one of them killed Renee Good: “To all ICE officers: You have federal immunity in the conduct of your duties.” On Sunday, Greg Bovino, the self-consciously villainous border patrol commander, praised the agents who executed Pretti.

I wish people weren’t allowed to carry guns in public. But they are, and after watching Republicans bring semiautomatic weapons to protest Covid closures and make a hero of Kyle Rittenhouse, it’s wild to hear the head of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Kash Patel, say, on Fox News, “You cannot bring a firearm, loaded, with multiple magazines, to any sort of protest that you want.” The point here isn’t hypocrisy; it’s them nakedly asserting that constitutional rights are for us, not you.

Rose: David, I wanted to pick up on your description of the federal government as lawless. As you’ve written, we seem to be in the world described by the Nazi-era Jewish labor lawyer Ernst Fraenkel and what he called “the dual state.” There is one we live in, where we pay taxes and go to work, and life seems to work according to common rules, and the other where the rules no longer apply. Is this what we’re experiencing?

French: We’re living in a version of the dual state. Not to the same extent as the Nazis, of course, but Fraenkel’s framing is still relevant. The Nazis didn’t create their totalitarian state immediately. Instead, they were able to lull much of the population to sleep just by keeping their lives relatively normal. As you say, they went to work, paid their taxes, entered into contracts and did all the things you normally do in a functioning nation. But if you crossed the government, then you passed into a different state entirely, where you would feel the full weight of fascist power — regardless of the rule of law.

One of the saddest things about the killings of Good and Pretti is that you could tell that neither of them seemed to know the danger until it was too late. They believed they were operating in some version of the normal state (what Fraenkel called the “normative state”) where the police usually respond with discipline and restraint.

Good and Pretti both had calm demeanors. They may have been annoying federal officers, but nothing about their posture indicated the slightest threat. Good even said, “I’m not mad” to the man who would gun her down seconds later. Pretti was filming with his phone in one hand and he had the other hand in the air as he was pepper-sprayed and tackled.

The officers, however, were in that different state, what Fraenkel called the “prerogative state,” where the government is a law unto itself. The officers acted violently, with impunity, and the government immediately acted to defend them and slander their victims. As the prerogative state expands, the normative state shrinks, and our lives often change before we can grasp what happened. (...)

Rose: With immigration enforcement in Trump’s second term, we have a quasi-military force, backed by more funding than most countries give their actual militaries, deployed for the most part to enforce civil, not criminal law. Should we instead think about this as spectacle? Caitlin Dickerson of The Atlantic, interviewed by our colleague Ezra Klein, argued that immigration enforcement under Trump is being implemented for maximum visual impact.

Goldberg: That’s increasingly the critique of conservatives who don’t want to break with Trump, but also are having a hard time rationalizing ICE’s violence in Minneapolis. Erick Erickson blames what’s happening in Minnesota on the D.H.S. secretary, Kristi Noem, marginalizing Tom Homan, the border czar, in favor of Greg Bovino from Customs and Border Protection, who clearly relishes street-level confrontation.

And the administration obviously wants to make a spectacle. We don’t know why the guy who shot Renee Good was filming, but it could well have been to feed their insatiable demand for content, which in turn is feeding their recruiting efforts. Did any of you see the clip where one of the agents shooting tear gas at protesters can be heard saying, “It’s like ‘Call of Duty.’ So cool, huh?”

I’m glad that some people on the right have at least concluded that this looks bad for their side, since it could create political pressure on Trump to pull back. At the same time, I don’t think you can divorce the policy from the spectacle. Both are meant to terrorize their enemies.

Polgreen: There is no question that spectacle is the goal here. Michelle just mentioned Bovino — he has been swanning about Minnesota in a long, green wool coat that lends him a distinctly fascist look. The way these officers are kitted out is nuts. Keith Ellison, Minnesota’s attorney general, described it to me as “full battle rattle.” There is also a cartoonish aspect to the whole thing — social media is replete with videos of agents slipping on ice and falling, ass over teakettle, onto the frozen ground. You look at the videos of the shootings and there is an air of incompetence to the whole thing, even amid the horror. It is almost as if you can’t believe how amateurish and unprofessional these guys are.

Elliott Payne, the president of the Minneapolis City Council, told me about one encounter with an agent armed with a Taser. The guy held it sideways, like some kind of gangbanger, menacing Payne and other city officials as they tried to ask questions about why a man at a bus stop was being detained. Payne told me it was something out of a bad movie. No trained law enforcement officer would ever hold a weapon that way. It would be comical if it weren’t so utterly terrifying. (...)

Rose: ... when people ask you what they can do, what’s your advice?

French: This is a crucial moment in American history. I think about it like this: When we learn about our family histories, we often ask what our ancestors were doing. Did they serve in World War II? Did they serve in Vietnam? Where did they stand during the civil rights movement?

This is a moment important enough that our grandchildren and even great-grandchildren might ask: What did you know? What did you do? Think hard about what you want your answer to be. Think hard about what you can do that will stand the test of time — whether it be peacefully protesting (including peaceful civil disobedience), volunteering for a political campaign, providing meals and clothing for immigrant families or anything else that protects the vulnerable and defends human dignity.

One of the worst answers, however, would be to look a curious grandchild in the face and say: Well, I posted a lot on social media.

Polgreen: I read so much about how we live in an atomized society, glued to our phones and social media but untethered from our communities and neighbors. Minnesota is demonstrating how quickly and fearlessly communities can come together in spite of the political and technological forces seeking to keep us divided. They also built on their past experience — many of these networks of support began during the George Floyd protests. Some were groups that wanted to march against the Minneapolis cops, and others wanted to protect neighborhoods from property damage. Now they have been reactivated to work together to help one another. A lot of us formed these kinds of networks during Covid. This would be a great time to reconnect with them. Be prepared to protect the people around you. (...)

French: I’ll be completely honest. It’s a little harder for me to have hope when I know that the core political support for Trump’s aggression is coming from my own community. Without the lock step (and seemingly unconditional) support of so many millions of evangelicals, Trump’s administration would crumble overnight. So I keep looking for signs of softening hearts and opening minds in Trump’s base — among the people who helped raise me, who taught me about faith, and who told me in no uncertain terms that politicians must demonstrate high character before they can earn your support. I feel a pervasive sadness about this moment.

That’s what is so grievous about civil strife. You often find yourself in opposition not to some hated, distant foe, but rather in opposition to people you’ve loved your whole life — whom you still love.

But there is hope. It’s a mistake to believe that the G.O.P. and its Christian supporters have crossed a Rubicon, never to return. And it’s a mistake to believe — even for the most hardhearted — that their aggression is a sign of their strength. They are masking weakness, and courage is their kryptonite.

by Matthew Rose, Lydia Polgreen, David French and Michelle Goldberg, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Mark Peterson/Redux

Seahawks Win NFC Championship - In Pictures

Seahawks Win NFC Championship and the Super Bowl Might Be Easier

[ed. What a game. Something I'd like to highlight here are staff photographers for the Seattle Times who consistently produce amazing photos each week, especially Jennifer Buchanan and Dean Rutz. For another 70 or so pictures see: Photos: Seahawks beat Rams in NFC Championship thriller (there's a small paywall/subscription notice but you can get around it just by clicking on the photo behind the msg).

They Ransacked the US Capitol and Want the Government to Pay Them Back

Yvonne St Cyr strained her body against police barricades, crawled through a broken Senate window, and yelled “push, push, push” to fellow rioters in a tunnellike hallway where police officers suffered concussions and broken bones.

She insisted she did nothing wrong. A federal judge sentenced her to 30 months in prison and imposed $2,270 in financial penalties for her actions at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, declaring: “You have little or no respect for the law, little or no respect for our democratic systems.”

St Cyr served only half her sentence before President Donald Trump’s January 2025 pardon set her and almost 1,600 others free.

But her story doesn’t end there. St Cyr headed back to court, seeking a refund of the $2,270. “It’s my money,” the Marine Corps veteran from Idaho said in an interview with The Washington Post. “They took my money.” In August, the same judge who sentenced her reluctantly agreed, pointing to a legal quirk in her case.

“Sometimes a judge is called upon to do what the law requires, even if it may seem at odds with what justice or one’s initial instincts might warrant. This is one such occasion,” U.S. District Judge John D. Bates wrote in an opinion authorizing the first refund to a Jan. 6 defendant.

The ruling revealed an overlooked consequence of Trump’s pardon for some Jan. 6 offenders: Not only did it free them from prison but it emboldened them to demand payback from the government.

At least eight Jan. 6 defendants are pursuing refunds of the financial penalties paid as part of their sentences, according to a Post review of court records; judges agreed that St Cyr and a Maryland couple should be reimbursed, while five more are appealing denials. (St Cyr and the couple are still waiting to receive their payments, however.) Others are filing civil lawsuits against the government seeking millions of dollars, alleging politically tainted prosecutions and violations of their constitutional rights. Hundreds more have filed claims accusing the Justice Department, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies of inflicting property damage and personal injuries, according to their lawyer.

The efforts are the latest chapter in an extraordinary rewriting of history by the president and his allies to bury the facts of what happened at the Capitol, sustain the false claim that the 2020 election was rigged, and recast the Jan. 6 offenders as victims entitled to taxpayer-funded compensation.

“Donald Trump and the DOJ want taxpayers to reimburse a violent mob for the destruction of the U.S. Capitol. The Jan. 6 nightmare continues,” said Rep. Joe Morelle (D-New York), the top Democrat on the House Administration Committee, which oversees the Capitol’s security and operations.

The pro-Trump mob that ransacked the Capitol caused almost $3 million in damage, according to a 2022 estimate by the Justice Department. The losses included smashed doors and windows, defaced artwork, damaged furniture, and residue from gas agents and fire extinguishers. Defendants were sentenced to more than $1.2 million in restitution and fines, according to a tally by The Post.

But the government recovered less than $665,000 of those court-ordered payments, according to a source with firsthand knowledge who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of fear of retaliation. Sen. Alex Padilla (D-California) and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-Rhode Island) are pushing legislation — backed by some law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol on Jan. 6 — to block government payouts to rioters. Without any Republican co-sponsors, the legislation is not expected to proceed.

“The audacity of them to think they didn’t do anything, or to think that they’re right and then get their money back,” said former Capitol police officer Harry Dunn, who attended the sentencing of St Cyr and other Jan. 6 offenders. “It’s frustrating and it should not happen. They should have to pay more.”

Stacy Hager, a 62-year-old former warehouse supervisor, made his first trip to Washington, D.C., for the Jan. 6 rally. The lifelong Texan wasn’t that interested in politics before, but he was certain that Donald Trump was the rightful winner of the 2020 election.

Wearing a Trump hat and waving the Texas flag, Hager took photos and videos of himself roaming through the Capitol. He was convicted on four misdemeanor charges related to disorderly conduct and trespassing; he paid $570 in penalties and served seven months in prison, a punishment he describes as totally unjust and “a living hell.”

Hager still believes, fervently, that fraud marred the 2020 vote and that Trump won, though no new evidence has surfaced to contradict the findings of Justice Department officials, cybersecurity experts and dozens of judges appointed by Democrats and Republicans alike.

“You tell me why I shouldn’t be entitled to getting my money back,” Hager said. “The government took money from me for doing the right thing, for standing up for the people’s vote. That’s the reason we were there — for a free and fair election.”

About one month after Trump’s pardon in January 2025, Hager was the first of the Jan. 6 defendants to ask for his money back, court records show. “It’s a principle thing,”...

While the charges and punishments vary, the defendants seeking refunds share one legal quirk: All of them were appealing their convictions when Trump pardoned them on Jan. 20, 2025. After the pardon, courts vacated their convictions and dismissed their indictments following requests from federal prosecutors, as the Justice Department that once prosecuted the Jan. 6 defendants now takes their side. (...)

In the most far-reaching effort on behalf of Jan. 6 offenders, Missouri lawyer Mark McCloskey is trying to build support for a government-backed compensation panel, similar to the fund that has distributed billions of dollars to families of victims in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. McCloskey attracted national attention in 2020 when he and his wife pointed guns at Black Lives Matter protesters marching past their home; they pleaded guilty to firearms charges but were pardoned by the Missouri governor.

McCloskey said he has advocated for the Jan. 6 fund in four meetings with Justice Department officials, including Ed Martin, the director of a unit tasked with investigating Trump’s political opponents.

Martin, who helped plan and finance Trump’s rally that preceded the rampage through the Capitol, has said publicly that he supports “reparations” for Jan. 6 defendants.

Trump also has expressed support for government payouts. Asked about compensating Jan. 6 offenders in a March 2025 Newsmax interview, Trump said: “Well, there’s talk about that. … A lot of the people in government really like that group of people. They were patriots as far as I was concerned.”

by Beth Reinhard, Ellie Silverman and Aaron Schaffer, Washington Post/MSN |  Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. Roaches gotta roach.]

Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]

Richard Nadler
via:

French 75 Studios

via:

211-mile Ambler Road Project Through Gates of the Arctic National Park Gets Approval

Trump Sacrifices Alaska Wilderness to Help AI Companies

Trump’s approval of the Ambler Road Project is a reversal for the federal government. Only last year, the Bureau of Land Management released its Record of Decision selecting “No Action” on Ambler Road, in cooperation with Alaska tribal councils, the Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and many others.

In the document, the impact on fish habitat, water and air quality, disruption of groundwater flow, hazardous materials from spills, and the negative impact on the Western Arctic caribou herd, which has been steadily declining since 2017, were all cited as reasons for denial. The Record of Decision also stated that the Ambler Road Project would forever alter the culture and traditional practices of Alaska Native communities, who have lived and thrived in the region for centuries.

by Gavin Feek, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post via Getty Images

[ed. I used to permit/mitigate mine development in Alaska. Imagine what a 211-mile gravel road, 30+ years of year-round maintenance, and relentless heavy truck/support traffic will do to the area, its wildlife and nearby native communities (not to mention blasting a massive mining crater, constructing sprawling support facilities, airstrip(s), and discharging millions of gallons of wastewater (from somewhere, to... somewhere).]

Socialism For Dummies

[ed. Prompted by a recent letter to the editor in our local paper (below):]

Overview of Socialism

Socialism encompasses a range of economic and political systems advocating for social ownership and democratic control of the means of production. It aims to address inequalities created by capitalism by redistributing wealth and ensuring that production meets the needs of the population.

Types of Socialism

1. Democratic Socialism: Focuses on political democracy alongside social ownership.
Advocates for reforms within a capitalist framework.
Examples include the Nordic countries, which combine a welfare state with a capitalist economy.

2. Market Socialism: Combines public or cooperative ownership with market mechanisms.
Allows for profit generation while ensuring that profits benefit society.
Examples include certain policies in China and Vietnam.

3. Revolutionary Socialism: Seeks to overthrow capitalism through revolutionary means.
Often associated with Marxist ideologies.
Historical examples include the Soviet Union and Cuba.

4. Utopian Socialism: Envisions ideal societies based on cooperative living and shared resources.
Early proponents include Robert Owen and Charles Fourier.

Focuses on creating small-scale communities as models for broader societal change.

5. Religious Socialism: Integrates religious principles with socialist ideals.
Variants include Christian socialism, Islamic socialism, and Jewish socialism.
Emphasizes moral and ethical dimensions of social justice.

[ed. each with various branches, subsets, etc...]

Conclusion

Socialism is not a monolithic ideology; it includes various forms that differ in their approaches to ownership, governance, and economic management. Each type reflects distinct historical contexts and societal goals. (sources: Google/AI/Wikipedia, history books, libraries...)

-----

Letter to the Editor:

"Well that’s just great socialists. Now you and your Islamic jihadi buddies have something in common with the Nazis. You both want to exterminate Jewish people. You even just hired one of your own to be mayor of New York. One of the same people that attacked and bombed New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Yep, the Nazis hated America also.

No, democracy is not in trouble, but you “Democrats” sure are. Most Americans are not as ignorant and violent as you are and they have more productive things to do than standing around protesting and complaining. If future elections are honest and as more Americans become better off for their families, your corruption, fraud and failures will become even more exposed.

If you “Democrats” sincerely want to help America, you will need to stop lying, siding with criminals, and hating on America and law enforcement. If America is so racist, why are all the tired, poor, and miserable people from socialism trying to come here? Better yet, why don’t all you socialists move to Iran, China, Russia, Somalia, Venezuela, etc.? In America it’s called assimilation and obeying the law. If you have a problem with that, then get the heck out. (...)

Affirmative action. Now it seems the socialists have decided to just change the name to diversity, equity and inclusion in order to get by the Supreme Court decision. After recently realizing that their federal grant money is now in jeopardy, the socialists are trying to just delete DEI references in order to maintain these programs and hope nobody notices. After all these years, nobody knows what affirmative action/DEI has actually accomplished.

“Our constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” John Adams."

***

[ed. Another fine American Patriot who's views are highlighted here only to show the stereotypical responses (bordering on parody) one gets whenever talking to a MAGA extremist. They're all here: the ad hominem attacks, incoherent accusations (socialists bombed NY on 9/11? Islamic socialists?), projections, and of course, that old time favorite - if you don't like it, just move! Classy as always. ]

***

*Note: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani and most self-identified socialists in this country are Democratic Socialists:

Democratic socialism

Democratic socialism differs from state communism in that the state is not all-powerful, and the political system remains democratic. Democratic socialism is associated with the Socialist parties of western Europe (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Germany, etc). They generally propose a mixed economy – with state ownership of key industries, like coal, electricity, water and gas, but allow private enterprise to operate in the rest of the economy. Democratic socialism proposes a progressive tax system to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor – through the provisions of a welfare state. Democratic socialism is often associated with the Nordic countries – where the government takes approximately 50% of GDP, but also there is a thriving market economy, giving a high standard of living. (via:)

Aspects of Democratic socialism

• Advocates nationalisation of key industries (often the natural monopolies, like electricity, water)
• Prices set by the market mechanism, except public goods, such as health and education.
• Provision of a welfare state to provide income redistribution
• Support for trade unions in wage bargaining
• Use of minimum wages and universal income to raise low-income wages
• Progressive tax and provision of public services. For example, marginal income tax rates of 70%. Tax on wealth

It’s important to note that socialism is not the same as communism, although the two are often confused. Communism is a more radical ideology that advocates for a stateless, classless society, while socialism typically operates within the framework of a democratic government. In practice, many countries have adopted aspects of socialism without fully embracing a socialist system. These can include things like nationalized industries, strong labor protections, and progressive taxation policies. [ed. and Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, SNAP, etc.] Ultimately, the goal of socialism is to balance individual freedom with social responsibility, creating a society where everyone has the opportunity to reach their full potential. (via:)

AI: Practical Advice for the Worried

A Word On Thinking For Yourself

There are good reasons to worry about AI. This includes good reasons to worry about AI wiping out all value in the universe, or AI killing everyone, or other similar very bad outcomes.

There are also good reasons that AGI, or otherwise transformational AI, might not come to pass for a long time.

As I say in the Q&A section later, I do not consider imminent transformational AI inevitable in our lifetimes: Some combination of ‘we run out of training data and ways to improve the systems, and AI systems max out at not that much more powerful than current ones’ and ‘turns out there are regulatory and other barriers that prevent AI from impacting that much of life or the economy that much’ could mean that things during our lifetimes turn out to be not that strange. These are definitely world types my model says you should consider plausible.

There is also the highly disputed question of how likely it is that if we did create an AGI reasonably soon, it would wipe out all value in the universe. There are what I consider very good arguments that this is what happens unless we solve extremely difficult problems to prevent it, and that we are unlikely to solve those problems in time. Thus I believe this is very likely, although there are some (such as Eliezer Yudkowsky) who consider it more likely still.

That does not mean you should adapt my position, or anyone else’s position, or mostly use social cognition from those around you, on such questions, no matter what those methods would tell you. If this is something that is going to impact your major life decisions, or keep you up at night, you need to develop your own understanding and model, and decide for yourself what you predict. (...)

Overview

There is some probability that humanity will create transformational AI soon, for various definitions of soon. You can and should decide what you think that probability is, and conditional on that happening, your probability of various outcomes.

Many of these outcomes, both good and bad, will radically alter the payoffs of various life decisions you might make now. Some such changes are predictable. Others not.

None of this is new. We have long lived under the very real threat of potential nuclear annihilation. The employees of the RAND corporation, in charge of nuclear strategic planning, famously did not contribute to their retirement accounts because they did not expect to live long enough to need them. Given what we know now about the close calls of the cold war, and what they knew at the time, perhaps this was not so crazy a perspective.

Should this imminent small but very real risk radically change your actions? I think the answer here is a clear no, unless your actions are relevant to nuclear war risks, either personally or globally, in some way, in which case one can shut up and multiply.

This goes back far longer. For much longer than that, various religious folks have expected Judgment Day to arrive soon, often with a date attached. Often they made poor decisions in response to this, even given their beliefs.

There are some people that talk or feel this same way about climate change, as an impending inevitable extinction event for humanity.

Under such circumstances, I would center my position on a simple claim: Normal Life is Worth Living, even if you think P(doom) relatively soon is very high. (...)

More generally, in terms of helping: Burning yourself out, stressing yourself out, tying yourself up in existential angst all are not helpful. It would be better to keep yourself sane and healthy and financially intact, in case you are later offered leverage. Fighting the good fight, however doomed it might be, because it is a far, far better thing to do, is also a fine response, if you keep in mind how easy it is to end up not helping that fight. But do that while also living a normal life, even if that might seem indulgent. You will be more effective for it, especially over time. (...)

On to individual questions to flesh all this out.

Q&A

Q: Should I still save for retirement?
Short Answer: Yes.
Long Answer: Yes, to most (but not all) of the extent that this would otherwise be a concern and action of yours in the ‘normal’ world. It would be better to say ‘build up asset value over time’ than ‘save for retirement’ in my model. Building up assets gives you resources to influence the future on all scales, whether or not retirement is even involved. I wouldn’t get too attached to labels.

Remember that while it is not something one should do lightly, none of this is lightly, and you can raid retirement accounts with what in context is a modest penalty, in an extreme enough ‘endgame’ situation - it does not even take that many years for the expected value of the compounded tax advantages to exceed the withdraw penalty - the cost of emptying the account, should you need to do that, is only 10% of funds and about a week in the United States (plus now having to pay taxes on it). And that in some extreme future situations, having that cash would be highly valuable, none of which suggests now is the time to empty it, or to not build it up.

The case for saving money does not depend on expecting a future ‘normal’ world. Which is good, because even without AI the future world is likely to not be all that ‘normal.

Q: Should I take on a ton of debt intending to never have to pay it back?

Short Answer: No, except for a mortgage.

Long Answer: Mostly no, except for a mortgage. Save your powder. See my post On AI and Interest Rates for an extended treatment of this question - I feel that is a definitive answer to the supposed ‘gotcha’ question of why doomers don’t take on lots of debt. Taking on a bunch of debt is a limited resource, and good ways to do it are even more limited for most of us. Yes, where you get the opportunity it would be good to lock in long borrow periods at fixed rates if you think things are about to get super weird. But if your plan is ‘the market will realize what is happening and adjust the value of my debt in time for me to profit’ that does not seem, to me, like a good plan. Nor does borrowing now much change your actual constraints on where you run out of money.

Does borrowing money that you have to pay back in 2033 mean you have more money to spend? That depends. What is your intention if 2033 rolls around and the world hasn’t ended? Are you going to pay it back? If so then you need to prepare now to be able to do that. So you didn’t accomplish all that much.

You need very high confidence in High Weirdness Real Soon Now before you can expect to get net rewarded for putting your financial future on quicksand, where you are in real trouble if you get the timing wrong. You also need a good way to spend that money to change the outcome.

Yes, there is a level of confidence in both speed and magnitude, combined with a good way to spend, that would change that, and that I do not believe is warranted. One must notice that you need vastly less certainty than this to be shouting about these issues from the rooftops, or devoting your time to working on them.

Eliezer’s position, as per his most recent podcast is something like ‘AGI could come very soon, seems inevitable by 2050 barring civilizational collapse, and if it happens we almost certainly all die.’ Suppose you really actually believed that. It’s still not enough to do much with debt unless you have a great use of money - there’s still a lot of probability mass that the money is due back while you’re still alive, potentially right before it might matter.

Yes, also, this changes if you think you can actually change the outcome for the better by spending money now, money loses impact over time, so your discount factor should be high. That however does not seem to be the case that I see being made.

Q: Does buying a house make sense?

A: Maybe. It is an opportunity to borrow money at low interest rates with good tax treatment. It also potentially ties up capital and ties you down to a particular location, and is not as liquid as some other forms of capital. So ask yourself how psychologically hard it would be to undo that. In terms of whether it looks like a good investment in a world with useful but non-transformational AI, an AI could figure out how to more efficiently build housing, but would that cause more houses to be built?

Q: Does it make sense to start a business?

A: Yes, although not because of AI. It is good to start a business. Of course, if the business is going to involve AI, carefully consider whether you are making the situation worse.

Q: Does It Still Make Sense to Try and Have Kids?

Short Answer: Yes.

Long Answer: Yes. Kids are valuable and make the world and your own world better, even if the world then ends. I would much rather exist for a bit than never exist at all. Kids give you hope for the future and something to protect, get you to step up. They get others to take you more seriously. Kids teach you many things that help one think better about AI. You think they take away your free time, but there is a limit to how much creative work one can do in a day. This is what life is all about. Missing out on this is deeply sad. Don’t let it pass you by.

Is there a level of working directly on the problem, or being uniquely positioned to help with the problem, where I would consider changing this advice? Yes, there are a few names where I think this is not so clear, but I am thinking of a very small number of names right now, and yours is not one of them.

You can guess how I would answer most other similar questions. I do not agree with Buffy Summers that the hardest thing in this world is to live in it. I do think she knows better than any of us that not living in this world is not the way to save it.

Q: Should I talk to my kids about how there’s a substantial chance they won’t get to grow up?

A: I would not (and will not) hide this information from my kids, any more than I would hide the risk from nuclear war, but ‘you may not get to grow up’ is not a helpful thing to say to (or to emphasize to) kids. Talking to your kids about this (in the sense of ‘talk to your kids about drugs’) is only going to distress them to no purpose. While I don’t believe in hiding stuff from kids, I also don’t think this is something it is useful to hammer into them. Kids should still get to be and enjoy being kids. (...)

Q: Should I just try to have a good time while I can?

A: No, because my model says that this doesn’t work. It is empty. You can have fun for a day, a week, a month, perhaps a year, but after a while it rings hollow, feels empty, and your future will fill you with dread. Certainly it makes sense to shift this on the margin, get your key bucket list items in early, put a higher marginal priority on fun - even more so than you should have been doing anyway. But I don’t think my day-to-day life experience would improve for very long by taking this kind of path. Then again, each of us is different.

That all assumes you have ruled out attempting to improve our chances. Personally, even if I had to go down, I’d rather go down fighting. Insert rousing speech here.

Q: How Long Do We Have? What is the Timeline?

Short Answer: Unknown. Look at the arguments and evidence. Form your own opinion.

Long Answer: High uncertainty about when this will happen if it happens, whether or not one has high uncertainty about whether it happens at all within our lifetimes. Eliezer’s answer was that he would be very surprised if it didn’t happen by 2050, but that within that range little would surprise him and he has low confidence. Others have longer or shorter means and medians in their timelines. Mine are substantially longer and less confident than Eliezer’s. This is a question you must decide for yourself. The key is that there is uncertainty, so lots of difference scenarios matter.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: via Linkedin Image Generator

[ed. See also: The AI doomers feel undeterred (MIT).]