Hawaiʻi Loves ‘Genki Balls’. New Studies Say They Don’t Work

A new two-year research project found the balls not only were ineffective, they might make water quality worse. Supporters of the effort don’t believe it.

In the past six years, several thousand elementary school students and other volunteers have tossed over a quarter million tennis ball-sized globs of soil, molasses and rice bran into the Ala Wai Canal in a valiant effort to help clean Hawaiʻi’s most notoriously polluted urban waterway.

The goal is to get those globs, known as “genki balls,” to release special sludge-eating microbes into the Waikīkī canal’s murky depths and boost its water quality. Since the effort started, canoe paddlers and others have at times observed clearer water and more fish. They’ve even spotted the occasional monk seal and an eagle ray.

But new research from Hawaiʻi Pacific University done on Oʻahu’s Windward side casts doubt on whether the genki balls actually led to any of that improvement — or if the novel approach that inspired the community is too good to be true. (...)

The balls, according to HPU Associate Professor Olivia Nigro and Assistant Professor Carmella Vizza, did nothing to improve water quality in the marsh canal. And in the aquarium tanks, the microbes the balls were supposed to release failed to appear in any meaningful way, the researchers said, plus the water quality actually got worse.

Specifically, phosphate levels were almost 20 times higher in the tanks with the balls than in tanks without them, Vizza said, and oxygen levels in the tanks with the balls fell by about 50%.

The nonprofit that organizes those cleanups, Genki Ala Wai Ball Project, is firmly pushing back against the research, saying insufficient genki material was used and its ball tosses into the Ala Wai remain effective. Yet one of the project’s leaders sold the balls used in the HPU study and recommended how the researchers should use them.

The HPU ecologists who completed the study don’t want to dampen any of the community enthusiasm. But far more rigorous study of the Ala Wai is needed, they say, to know exactly how the genki balls are impacting water quality there, if at all. (...)

If We Do This, We Can Do Anything

The Ala Wai, a 1.5-mile canal that developers carved across Waikīkī in the 1920s to sell real estate, has long been a stark symbol of how much urban runoff is affecting Hawaiʻi’s fragile watersheds. (...)

It now bears the brunt of storm debris from Hawaiʻi’s densest and most heavily populated watershed, in the heart of Honolulu. For decades, state officials have prohibited anyone from fishing or swimming in its waters.

In one high-profile 2006 incident, an Oʻahu man who fell in the Ala Wai died of “massive bacterial infection” following weeks of heavy rain across the state. Canoe clubs and high school teams regularly paddle up and down the canal and do their best not to huli, or flip over, into its murky waters.

... the Genki Ball Ala Wai Project launched with a goal of making the canal safe for swimming and fishing within seven years by deploying 300,000 balls. Genki translates to “health” or “energy” in English.

The key ingredient baked into every dry, cured ball tossed in the water is a trademarked substance called “EM,” short for “effective microorganisms.”

It was pioneered in the early 1980s by a horticulture professor in Okinawa, Japan, who combined naturally occurring yeasts and bacteria to help boost farm crop yields. Since then, people also found that they could take it to improve digestion and gut health.

by Marcel Honoré, Honolulu Civil Beat | Read more:
Images: David Croxford

[ed. Ouch.]

Is America Ready for Japanese-Style 7-Elevens?

The Japanese parent company of 7-Eleven is betting billions of dollars that it can expand its business in the United States by making its convenience stores more like the food meccas they are in Japan.

Convenience stores, or konbini, are an indispensable part of daily life in Japan, known for high-quality fresh food — from seasonal bento boxes to egg salad sandwiches that the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain once called “pillows of love.”

Leading the push to expand Japanese-quality fresh food to 7-Eleven in North America is Stephen Dacus, a Japanese American former Walmart executive who started as chief executive of Seven & i Holdings, the 7-Eleven parent company, three months ago.

Seven & i is under intense pressure. Over the past year, it has fended off a takeover attempt by a Canadian rival. When Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle K convenience stores, withdrew its $47 billion bid in July, Seven & i’s stock price collapsed. Mr. Dacus and his team were left to to prove they can deliver growth and returns on their own.

Now, facing a stagnant and highly competitive retail market in Japan, Seven & i’s growth is expected to come from overseas. The strategy could hinge, industry experts say, on Mr. Dacus’s ability to successfully introduce Japanese-level quality foods in the more than 13,000 stores that 7-Eleven operates, franchises and licenses in North America.

“Whether it’s hot food or cold food or any kind of food, we have to lean into how we improve the quality and the experience,” Mr. Dacus said in an interview on Friday. “That’s what Japan does extraordinarily well.”

Over the next five years, Seven & i is considering investing more than $13 billion to expand overseas. In the United States, this means initiatives like refreshing existing sites, adding more than 1,000 in-store restaurants and building a network of companies to provide more of its 7-Eleven brand prepared foods.

“And we’re launching the egg sandwiches,” Mr. Dacus said. They are, he noted, the top item purchased by the millions of American visitors descending on Japan each year and visiting 7-Eleven stores.

The sandwiches are made with the fluffy Japanese “milk bread,” and a team in Texas worked with Japanese suppliers to learn how to produce it in the United States. Milk bread and Japanese mayonnaise give the egg sandwiches “the heavenly pillow thing,” Mr. Dacus said.

Seven & i’s new fresh-food push in the United States orients it squarely in a place already stocked with competition.

“Prepared food is increasingly what sets different convenience brands apart,” said Jeff Lenard, a vice president at the National Association of Convenience Stores. Prepared goods have relatively high profit margins, particularly important for convenience stores that face declining sales of traditional staples, including tobacco and gasoline, Mr. Lenard said.

In the United States, 7-Eleven is the biggest convenience store chain, but the market is fragmented. Tens of thousands of store operators compete for fresh food, not only with one another but also with fast-food retailers.

Mr. Dacus, 64, has worked in retail for more than three decades. He was on the Seven & i board of directors when he was tapped to spread overseas the qualities that make 7-Eleven so loved in Japan.

In the past, he said, “we took a low-risk, low-return approach.” Management was too focused on Japan and too hands-off with operations in other countries. “We could have been much more aggressive,” he said. “The flip side of that is there’s that much opportunity out there for us as we shift our focus.”

Industry experts and Mr. Dacus acknowledge, however, that there are a number of reasons the Japanese convenience store model cannot easily be replicated in the United States.

Two decades ago, the Japanese convenience store FamilyMart tried to introduce its concept to the West Coast, but the business struggled to adapt. The company found it difficult to convince Americans that a convenience store could be more than a gas station selling snacks. By 2015, all the stores had closed.

Challenges include the difficulty of transporting fresh food to locations in the United States far from city centers. In Japan, the average convenience store receives multiple fresh-food deliveries per day. Beyond that, “it’s the ways in which they maintain stock and freshness, attention to detail,” said Gavin Whitelaw, executive director of the Edwin O. Reischauer Institute of Japanese Studies at Harvard.

by River Akira Davis, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Kentaro Takahashi

[ed. Can't wait. See also: Why 7-Eleven and Other Convenience Stores in Japan Are So Special (NYT).]

Institutions

Institutions and a Lesson for Our Time from the Late Middle Ages. No institution of politics or society is immune to criticism. I have met no one who would really believe this, even if notional liberals and notional conservatives both have their protected favorites. But the spirit of the time is leading directly to the destruction of institutions that are essential for our cultural, social, political, intellectual, and individual health and survival. This is a two-way street, by the way. Both wings of the same bird of prey do it throughout the Neoliberal Dispensation in the Global North and a few other places.

I am currently reading The World at First Light: A New History of the Renaissance by Bernd Roeck (transl. Patrick Baker, 2025). At 949 pages and 49 chapters, I’ll complete the task in a month at 1-2 chapters per evening. I hope. We are still only just past Magna Carta (1215) in Chapter 12: “Vertical Power, Horizontal Power.” Both axes of power are essential in any society larger than a small group of hunter gatherers. Here is Professor Bernd on institutions:

Institutions – that dry term, which we have already encountered in the discussion of universities and in other contexts, denotes something very big and important. Institutions are what first allow the state to become perpetual; without them, it dies. If advisers appear as the mind and memory of the body politic, and the military its muscles, it is law and institutions that provide a skeleton for the state. They alone are capable of establishing justice over the long term. Only they can set limits to power and arbitrary will. They preserve knowledge of how to achieve success, as well as reminders of mistakes to be avoided in the future. No one knew this better than Cicero, who emphasized the Roman Republic’s special ability to gather experience and make decisions based on it. Before the advent of modernity, no section of the globe created institutions as robust and effective as those that developed in medieval Latin Europe. Moreover, these institutions were highly inclusive. The guaranteed protection under the law and the right to private property, provided education, and were relatively pluralistic (i.e., horizontally structured).

Indeed, Rome owed its success to its institutions. They then provided the states consolidating during the Middle Ages with models of compelling rationality.

This is not the place to quibble about details. But those who want to destroy our political, cultural, social, and educational institutions rather than improve them or refocus them along lines upon which reasonable people will agree? These unreasonable people are not to be respected:

“We want the bureaucrats to be traumatically affected,” Vought (Russell Vought, OMB Director) said in a video revealed by ProPublica and the research group Documented in October. “When they wake up in the morning, we want them to not want to go to work, because they are increasingly viewed as the villains. We want their funding to be shut down … We want to put them in trauma.”

Well, it is working and the lack of imagination and humanity here is striking. These “bureaucrats” are the scientists who make sure our food is safe and that the chemical plant on the waterfront is not dumping its waste into the tidal creek. They are the scientists who hunt down the causes of emerging diseases. They are the meteorologists at the National Hurricane Center who have gotten so very good at predicting the paths of cyclones. They are the men and women who sign up Vought’s parents for Social Security and Medicare. They are the people of the IRS who sent me a substantial tax refund because I overpaid, something pleasant I did not ask for nor expect. They are also the professors who teach engineers how to build bridges that will bear the load and teach medical students the basics of health and disease. And yes, they are the professors who teach us there is No Politics But Class Politics. The key here is that all of this is debatable by reasonable men and women of good will.

To paraphrase Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, the institutions funded by our taxes are the cost of civilization. Perhaps we will remember this ancient wisdom before it is too late? Probably not. The urge to burn it all down, instead of rewiring the building and replacing the roof, is strong.

by KLG, Naked Capitalism |  Read more:

Your Review: Dating Men in the Bay Area

[ed. Funny, sad. Long]

I. The Men Are Not Alright

Sometimes I’m convinced there’s a note taped to my back that says, “PLEASE SPILL YOUR SOUL UPON THIS WOMAN.” I am not a therapist, nor in any way certified to deal with emotional distress, yet my presence seems to cause people to regurgitate their traumas.

This quirk of mine becomes especially obvious when dating. Many of my dates turn into pseudo-therapy sessions, with men sharing emotional traumas they’ve kept bottled up for years. One moment I’m learning about his cat named Daisy, and then half a latte later, I’m hearing a detailed account of his third suicide attempt, complete with a critique of the food in the psychiatric ward.

This repeated pattern in my dating life has taught me three things:

• I am terrible at small talk.

• Most men are not accustomed to genuine questions about their well-being, and will often respond with a desperate upwelling of emotion.

• The men are not alright.

This is a review of dating men in the Bay Area. But more than that, it’s an attempt to explain those unofficial therapy sessions to people who never get to hear them. It’s a review of the various forms of neglect and abuse society inflicts upon men, and the inevitable consequences to their happiness and romantic partnerships. (...)

If half the population isn’t provided proper care and attention, there’s no hope to heal the problems facing the rest of us. Thus the pain of men needs a massive increase in attention.

Yet not everyone is ready to listen to men, so I’ll try to act as a translator, using my identity as a feminist twenty-something woman as a bridge. I’ll explain the pain that’s so obvious to me, yet hidden to many others, and try to provide some insight for both genders on how these issues impact dating, and what can perhaps be done to address them.

II. The Lost Generations...

(...)

In modern America, a minority of boys are born swaddled in communities that actively guide them through the process of becoming a man. However, most of those communities are religious and conservative, adjectives that the Bay Area actively repels. You won’t find many of those men around here.

Instead, the men in the Bay’s dating scene mostly represent the modern majority category–men who weren’t provided a clear map by their immediate community, and instead depended on society at large to teach them about manhood. (...)

And as for religion? Absolutely not. Throw it in the trash and light the trashcan on fire.

The first rule of the Modern Map to Manhood is that you don’t talk about the Modern Map to Manhood. Defining “manhood” is reinforcing gender roles and thus strengthening the patriarchy. Men are just supposed to “be decent people,” end of story.

…except it’s not, because there are still certain manners and conventions that men in particular are supposed to follow. And, like it or not, the core of your identity in modern society still largely revolves around your gender.

So if you squint hard enough at the murky sea of conversation about gender, you can make out the following steps to become a man:

• Reject toxic masculinity.

• Be your authentic self!

• Provide for and protect others.

• Stop obsessing over “being a man.”

• Don’t expect anything in return for fulfilling these requirements.

This would be demanding a reward for meeting the bare minimum requirements, and that would make you gross and entitled.

This is the new guidance we’re tossing at young men. It’s the equivalent of taking away GPS from a driver and handing them a map scrawled by a half-blind cartographer tripping on acid.

The obvious result is getting disastrously lost; the only question is which type of lostness will impact a man.

III. Patterns Within the Pain

Over the years, I’ve developed mental categories for the varieties of lostness men are faced with. Each one comes with its own unique troubles that stymie the health of men and the success of their relationships.

There is no science behind my categories; they are merely my attempt to find patterns within the misery of others. Their boundaries are fuzzy, so men may belong to multiple categories, or may transition from one to another.

I find it impossible to review dating in the Bay Area without utilizing these categories. My experiences with each category are wildly different; some cause me to walk away from a date feeling sad, some scared, some hopeful.

Below, I offer a description of five of the most common categories I’ve encountered, the paths that lead to these particular forms of lostness, and what happens to men who fall into these categories. I also offer my review of dating men from each category and discuss how their lostness impacts relationships. (...)

But more importantly, I hope this framework can help people to have more empathy for men who fall into these categories. The public commons are filled with lamenting about “floundering,” “immature,” “selfish,” “hateful” men who are “toxic to society.” While much of the concern is deserved, channeling it into spite and disgust toward individuals is a waste of energy.

These men did not wake up one day and intentionally decide to be filled with anger, anxiety, and apathy toward society; society failed them, and when they tried to point this out, their concerns were shrugged off.

Our broken system for raising young men deserves spite and disgust; the individuals trapped in that system deserve empathy and help. I hope this framework can help to shift conversations about these lost men toward finding solutions, rather than blaming young men for their troubles.

So without further ado, I present my categories of lostness.

IV. The Categories of Lostness

THE MAN WHO IS NOT

The Man Who Is Not isn’t the sort of person you’d expect to get lost, at least not if you knew him when he was young. He was a pretty normal kid with a pretty normal childhood. Good friends, decent family, stable home life. Yeah, there were a few rough spots, but who didn’t have those?

He’s not exactly a stand-out success, but he gets good enough grades that get him into a good enough college. He’s reluctant to go; he doesn’t enjoy school all that much. But his parents push him to get a degree, and after he arrives, he decides college life isn’t half bad–he makes some friends, dates a couple girls casually, and enjoys plenty of parties.

The worst stressor seems to be the nagging question of his degree concentration and what career he’s going to pursue. He’s changed his mind three times already, unsure what he really wants from his life, and his guidance counselor and parents are starting to lose their patience.

He finally settles on Economics. It’s certainly not his passion, but he’s always been good at math, and this seems like a decent way to make money from that talent. He still has no idea what he wants from life, but at least now he’ll have time and resources to figure it out.

He graduates with his bachelors and takes a job as a data analyst at a big bank in the city. He’s excited; he’s been promised by mentors and Hollywood and Instagram that this is going to be a magical time of his life, full of new adventures and self-discovery.

What he finds isn’t nearly so exciting. Work is boring and draining, consisting of the same tasks every day with a workload that grows ever larger, and he has zero emotional attachment to the end product. He quickly starts to suspect he chose the wrong major, or maybe the wrong job, although mentors shrug off his concerns.

Work isn’t supposed to be fun, they say. Get used to it.

It’s not uplifting advice, to say the least. He tries to distract himself from his miserable job with his social life, but it’s not as easy as he expected. All his college friends moved to different cities, and their texts grow increasingly rare. The city is huge, filled with hundreds of thousands of people, but it feels like they're a swarm of NPCs.

Few people talk to him unless he approaches first, and the dialogue is always transactional. He would like to buy a cup of coffee. They would like to know where the bus stop is. He wants to sign up for a gym membership.

Sometimes he tries to steer the conversations to more personal topics, and he manages to get a few phone numbers and promises to hang out sometime. But when he texts them, they never reply.

He’s lonely. He doesn’t like admitting it, not even to himself, because it feels pathetic. After all, there’s nothing wrong with him. He’s a perfectly pleasant individual, and people have said he’s smart and funny, and he’s never struggled to make friends in the past. Yet the thousands and thousands of people who surround him couldn’t care less about his existence, and their apathy begins to grow a heavy lump of despair within him. (...)

THE MAN WITH A PLAN

The Man With a Plan is the inverted twin of the Man Who Is Not. Rather than struggling to figure out what he wants, he knows exactly what his goals are: he’s going to get good grades, which get him into a good school, which earns him a good job, which finances a good house in a good neighborhood and attracts a good spouse who provides good kids. He knows this is what he wants, because it is the creed that has been repeated to him since he was in elementary school.

He does not know who he should be; his copy of the map is just as butchered as any other. But he knows what he needs to do, and that is what matters. After all, we’re merely the sum of our actions, right?

Life is smooth sailing for him. His mentors are right–hard work pays off, and once he graduates with that valuable degree, he lands an excellent job in exactly the field his parents always encouraged him to pursue. The money is great, and soon so is his apartment and his car.

Everything seems to be falling into place. He downloads a dating app and gets a fair amount of matches, one of whom turns into his girlfriend. She’s pretty, and successful, and shares his goals of settling down in a good neighborhood to have some kids.

His parents are thrilled. All their hard work has paid off, just as they expected.

He knows he should also be thrilled, too, but he’s not. There’s a vague sense of unease within him. It’s haunted him since he was young, sometimes dragging his thoughts to depressed and anxious places, although he always assumed it was because he just hadn’t completed all the steps in the plan. His work was unfinished, and thus so was he.

Yet as he checks off more and more boxes on the list of tasks to attain a good life, that feeling seems to be growing in strength, not decreasing.

He shrugs it off, reassuring himself that it’s just work stress that’s making him overthink things. Everything in his life is good. There’s no reasonable cause for despair, so he just needs to let those thoughts go.

Years pass, and he works hard to juggle work and his romantic relationship and his friends, although his friends seem to take less time these days. They’re getting married, having kids, and becoming too busy to hang out. When they do get together, it’s usually for an activity–an escape room, a movie night, karaoke. Once the event completes, people scurry off to other obligations, leaving little time for deep conversations.

But he has his girlfriend, at least. She’s just as pretty and smart and ambitious as ever. She’s also getting increasingly anxious for a ring, dropping hints that eventually start to sound more like demands.

This should excite him, but instead it just stirs the formless dread within him. He chastises himself for it–he needs to grow up and learn to commit. He’s too old to be yearning for the life of a bachelor. As they say, the grass is always greener on the other side. (...)

And his girlfriend… when he really thinks about it, there’s little in common between them except the same checklist of goals. She’s a wonderful partner, but is she a wonderful partner for him?

He doesn’t know. For so long, he’s convinced himself that people are just a sum of their actions, and if he just has a solid plan, he’s going to be a good person with a good life. Now he realizes that’s a lie. (...)

His girlfriend says they should sign up for some wine-and-paint nights. He says they should break up.

He quits his job, too. He hates it; it consumes his time and sucks at his soul, leaving behind a robotic husk. He’s done with that bullshit. Done.

His friends suggest he’s having a mental breakdown and needs help. It confirms his suspicions: they don’t know him at all. If they did, they would see that he is helping himself. He’s finally taking the time to find and understand himself, to discover his purpose.

For a few weeks, he’s elated and excited to be on this new journey. But then the existential dread begins to creep back in.

He’s never really done anything without a plan. And he’s still not entirely sure what he’s trying to accomplish; he knows he wants to “find himself,” but he’s unclear on what that requires, and the self-help books he consumes seem to have muddled and contradictory answers. (...)

He feels empty. His unknown future starts to feel like a crushing concern, rather than an exciting adventure.

His few remaining friends suggest that maybe he should try to get back together with his girlfriend, maybe try to piece together his old life. It’s not too late, they assure him.

But he doesn’t want that. He misses sex and cuddling and having someone to tell about his day, but he doesn’t miss her. It’s probably because he’s fundamentally broken, and she deserves better than him. And as for his job, he can’t bring himself to possibly go back, despite his rapidly dwindling bank account.

He turns to the dating world, hoping maybe finding a solid partner will help him solve his brokenness. Yet he seems to keep attracting women with similar forms of emptiness within them, and a void that joins with a void is still just as empty.

But he’s not going to give up. He has to find someone, something to give him purpose. Otherwise, his whole life and all his work and all his pain has been pointless. And he’s not sure he could deal with that outcome.

Dating a Man With a Plan:

In my experience, Men with Plans are the most common form of lost men in the Bay Area. I feel like half the men I go on dates with fit into this category to some degree.

These men also tend to be intensely attracted to me, or rather, to my lack of a conventional plan. I’ve stumbled through a highly unusual path, somehow getting lucky enough to gain a solid understanding of myself, pursue my passions, earn a solid living, and enjoy a happy life along the way.

My story is like crack to them. They tell me they want to be more like me; they insist they want to see more of me. There seems to be a mistaken belief that they can absorb my personality through osmosis if they date me, absolving themselves of the requirement to figure out their own path and personality.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

August 25, 2025: Federal Assault on American Cities - This Week, Chicago

This morning, President Donald J. Trump talked to reporters as he signed several executive orders in the Oval Office. Trump sat behind the Resolute Desk as he has been doing lately, seeming to put its bulk between him and the reporters. Also as he has been doing lately, he kept his left hand over the right, seemingly to hide a large bruise.

Trump was there to announce an executive order charging Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth with creating “specialized units” in the National Guard that will be “specifically trained and equipped to deal with public order issues,” apparently setting them up to take on domestic law enforcement as part of Trump’s attempt to take control of Democratic-run cities.

At the press opportunity, Trump claimed that he saved Washington, D.C.—where crime was at a 30-year low before he took control of the Metropolitan Police Department and mobilized the National Guard—from such rampant crime that no one dared to wear jewelry or carry purses. “People,” he said, “are free for the first time ever.”

Although in 1989 the Supreme Court ruled that burning a flag is a form of speech protected by the First Amendment, Trump ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone who burns a flag, claiming they would automatically go to prison for a year (he has no authority to make such an order). After seven European leaders rushed to the White House to stabilize the U.S. approach to Russia after Trump’s disastrous meeting with Russia's president, Vladimir Putin, in Alaska on August 15, Trump claimed that the seven leaders actually represented 38 countries and that they refer to Trump as “the president of Europe.”

Calling Chicago, Illinois, a “a disaster” and “a killing field,” Trump referred to Illinois governor J.B. Pritzker as “a slob.” Trump complained that Pritzker had said Trump was infringing on American freedom and called Trump a dictator. Trump went on: “A lot of people are saying maybe we like a dictator. I don't like a dictator. I'm not a dictator. I'm a man with great common sense and a smart person. And when I see what's happening to our cities, and then you send in troops instead of being praised, they're saying you're trying to take over the Republic. These people are sick.”

This afternoon, standing flanked by leaders from business, law enforcement, faith communities, education, local communities, and politics at the Chicago waterfront near the Trump Tower there, Governor Pritzker responded to the news that Trump is planning to send troops to Chicago.

He began by saying: “I want to speak plainly about the moment that we are in and the actual crisis, not the manufactured one, that we are facing in the city and as a state and as a country. If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”

He acknowledged that “[o]ver the weekend, we learned from the media that Donald Trump has been planning for quite a while now to deploy armed military personnel to the streets of Chicago. This is exactly the type of overreach that our country's founders warned against. And it’s the reason that they established a federal system with a separation of powers built on checks and balances. What President Trump is doing is unprecedented and unwarranted. It is illegal, it is unconstitutional. It is un-American.”

Pritzker noted that neither his office nor that of Chicago’s mayor had received any communications from the White House. “We found out what Donald Trump was planning the same way that all of you did. We read a story in the Washington Post. If this was really about fighting crime and making the streets safe, what possible justification could the White House have for planning such an exceptional action without any conversations or consultations with the governor, the mayor or the police?”

“Let me answer that question,” he said. “This is not about fighting crime. This is about Donald Trump searching for any justification to deploy the military in a blue city in a blue state to try and intimidate his political rivals. This is about the president of the United States and his complicit lackey Stephen Miller searching for ways to lay the groundwork to circumvent our democracy, militarize our cities, and end elections. There is no emergency in Chicago that calls for armed military intervention. There is no insurrection.”

Pritzker noted that every major American city deals with crime, but that the rate of violent crime is actually higher in Republican-dominated states and cities than in those run by Democrats. Illinois, he said, had “hired more police and given them more funding. We banned assault weapons, ghost guns, bump stops, and high-capacity magazines” and “invested historic amounts into community violence intervention programs.” Those actions have cut violent crime down dramatically. Pritzker pointed out that “thirteen of the top twenty cities in homicide rates have Republican governors. None of these cities is Chicago. Eight of the top ten states with the highest homicide rates are led by Republicans. None of those states is Illinois.”

If Trump were serious about combatting crime, Pritzker asked, why did he, along with congressional Republicans, cut more than $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants? “Trump,” Pritzker said, “is defunding the police.”

Then Pritzker turned to the larger national story. “To the members of the press who are assembled here today and listening across the country,” he said, “I am asking for your courage to tell it like it is. This is not a time to pretend here that there are two sides to this story. This is not a time to fall back into the reflexive crouch that I so often see where the authoritarian creep by this administration is ignored in favor of some horse race piece on who will be helped politically by the president's actions. Donald Trump wants to use the military to occupy a U.S. city, punish his dissidents, and score political points. If this were happening in any other country, we would have no trouble calling it what it is: a dangerous power grab.”

Pritzker continued: “Earlier today in the Oval Office, Donald Trump looked at the assembled cameras and asked for me personally to say, ‘Mr. President, can you do us the honor of protecting our city?’ Instead, I say, ‘Mr. President, do not come to Chicago. You are neither wanted here nor needed here. Your remarks about this effort over the last several weeks have betrayed a continuing slip in your mental faculties and are not fit for the auspicious office that you occupy.’”

The governor called out the president for his willingness to drag National Guard personnel from their homes and communities to be used as political props. They are not trained to serve as law enforcement, he said, and did not “sign up for the National Guard to fight crime.” “It is insulting to their integrity and to the extraordinary sacrifices that they make to serve in the guard, to use them as a political prop, where they could be put in situations where they will be at odds with their local communities, the ones that they seek to serve.”

Pritzker said he hoped that Trump would “reconsider this dangerous and misguided encroachment upon our state and our city's sovereignty” and that “rational voices, if there are any left inside the White House or the Pentagon, will prevail in the coming days.”

But if not, he urged Chicagoans to protest peacefully and to remember that most members of the military and the National Guard stationed in Chicago would be there unwillingly. He asked protesters to “remember that they can be court martialed, and their lives ruined, if they resist deployment.” He suggested protesters should look to members of the faith community for guidance on how to mobilize.

Then Pritzker turned to a warning. “To my fellow governors across the nation who would consider pulling your national guards from their duties at home to come into my state against the wishes of its elected representatives and its people,” he said, “cooperation and coordination between our states is vital to the fabric of our nation, and it benefits us all. Any action undercutting that and violating the sacred sovereignty of our state to cater to the ego of a dictator will be responded to.”

He went on: “The state of Illinois is ready to stand against this military deployment with every peaceful tool we have. We will see the Trump administration in court. We will use every lever in our disposal to protect the people of Illinois and their rights.”

“Finally,” he said, “to the Trump administration officials who are complicit in this scheme, to the public servants who have forsaken their oath to the Constitution to serve the petty whims of an arrogant little man, to any federal official who would come to Chicago and try to incite my people into violence as a pretext for something darker and more dangerous, we are watching, and we are taking names. This country has survived darker periods than the one that we are going through right now. And eventually, the pendulum will swing back, maybe even next year. Donald Trump has already shown himself to have little regard for the many acolytes that he has encouraged to commit crimes on his behalf. You can delay justice for a time, but history shows you cannot prevent it from finding you eventually.

“If you hurt my people, nothing will stop me, not time or political circumstance, from making sure that you face justice under our constitutional rule of law. As Dr. King once said, the arc of the moral Universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Humbly, I would add, it doesn't bend on its own. History tells us we often have to apply force needed to make sure that the arc gets where it needs to go. This is one of those times.”

by Heather Cox Richardson, Notes From An American |  Read more:

Image: AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh; via

[ed. A speech for the ages, summarizing nicely where we are and how we got here (and echoed by others (below). I think this country is primed for a massive disobedience event. It would be a good bookend to Woodstock (and provide some atonement for what we've done to this world, our lives, and future generations). Democracy Day(s): D-Day.]

via:

No Place Like Nome

Book review: ‘No Place Like Nome’ explores the outpost and its deep historical relevance

Nome seems both unlikely and inevitable. Perched on the Seward Peninsula, it’s the westernmost sizable city in Alaska and the United States. Spawned by a gold rush, it somehow survived the frenzy despite its location, which can only be called remote.

And yet, in deep time it’s hardly remote at all. The region was once a way stop along the Bering Land Bridge, the pathway through which humans migrated from Asia to the Americas. As water levels rose and the continents broke apart, interlinked cultures continued trading across the waters. And except for a few short decades during the Cold War, barely a blip on the timeline since people arrived, it has remained a crossroads ever since.

Nome itself is barely 125 years old, but beneath it lies a vast history, one that longtime Alaska author Michael Engelhard scratches the surface of in his latest book. “No Place Like Nome” is a meandering but thoroughly engrossing collection of observations and explorations that wander along the streets of the small outpost and then outward, far beyond the city limits.

“Few environments that are not wildlands have inspired me so as a writer,” Engelhard tells us in the first paragraph of his book’s introduction. And across some 300 pages, he shows us why.

“No Place Like Nome” is not a history in the formal sense, and Engelhard makes little to no effort at offering such a narrative. A writer who is at his best when using the essay as his form, he sets a general theme with each chapter, and then lets his account follow his mind wherever it goes.

But first he sketches the scene, providing readers who perhaps have never been there with a striking sense of what it means to live in Nome. Through a cascading series of memorable sentences, he takes us on a spiraling tour of all that follows.

The city sits so precariously upon the shore, he writes, that “It’s a farmer’s blow away from sliding into the sea.” The air abounds with such constant movement that “If the wind ever stopped, you’d do a face plant.” The region’s polar bears are “white ghosts on plate-size paws.”

And on he goes. Engelhard is a wordsmith with few equals among Alaska’s many talented writers. Were it not for copyright considerations and lack of space, I’d simply submit the entire introduction for a review and leave it at that.

Engelhard, a naturalist at heart, can’t help but look to the lands and flora and fauna found on them in the chapters that follow. But in what amounts to his first book focused primarily on humans, he explores how they have, for untold centuries, availed themselves of animal and plant life. Most of that time by the necessity of survival, more recently through the luxury afforded by spare time and imported food and goods.

And so the first formal chapter leads us to the long-extinct wooly mammoth, once found from Europe to North America. Stalked by ancient generations of humans, many surmise that such predation is what drove the beasts to extinction. Yet it lingers still, its remains emerging from the ground upon which descendants of those early carnivores now walk.

This is the farthest back Engelhard travels, but in subsequent chapters he frequently ties his topics to the land. Thus we learn about foul-smelling wild sage, seen as a medicinal herb. We visit with weavers who collect qiviut, the soft under wool of musk oxen, the warmest natural fiber on Earth. The clothing that was necessary for protecting bodies, crafted from skins and fur, is dissected. And we find out that jade, unlike gold, held tremendous value long before Europeans arrived on the scene.

In other chapters, Engelhard introduces us to some of the often eccentric people who found their way to Nome and left their mark.(...)

And of course there’s Nome’s founding days, evoked early in the book before Engelhard moves on to other topics of equal — if not greater — importance.

“Rome wasn’t built in a day, but Nome almost was,” Engelhard tells us in a breathless chapter about the town where America’s Wild West played its last hand. Amid a deluge of highly quotable lines, he provides an anecdotally-detailed description of the manic gold rush that birthed a ragtag city on ground that was almost barren a year earlier. The collective madness, he explains, “resembled a page from one of those I-Spy busy picture books, with the search object being sanity.” 

by David A. James, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:
Image:Nome, Alaska. Photographed on Wednesday, March 12, 2025. (Loren Holmes/ADN)

[ed. Nome doesn't look anything like this picture (lots more mud) but is still an interesting, quirky, and slightly dysfunctional town surrounded by some really stunning country. Did a study there back in the early 80s and have been back a few times, once spending a week there one night (shuttling between the Nome Nuggest and Breakers Bar).]

How Cheaply Could We Build High-Speed Rail?

At the end of April, the Transit Costs Project released a report: it’s called How to Build High-Speed Rail on the Northeast Corridor. As the name suggests, the authors of the report had a simple goal: the stretch of the US from DC and Baltimore through Philadelphia to New York and up to Boston, the densest stretch of the country. It’s an ideal location for high-speed rail. How could you actually build it — trains that get you from DC to NYC in two hours, or NYC to Boston in two hours — without breaking the bank?

That last part is pretty important. The authors think you could do it for under $20 billion dollars. That’s a lot of money, but it’s about five times less than the budget Amtrak says it would require. What’s the difference? How is it that when Amtrak gets asked to price out high-speed rail, it gives a quote that much higher?

We brought in Alon Levy, transit guru and the lead author of the report, to answer the question, and to explain a bunch of transit facts to a layman like me. Is this project actually technically feasible? And, if it is, could it actually work politically? (...)

 I’m excited for this conversation, largely because although I'm not really a transit nerd, I enjoyed this report from you and your colleagues at the Transit Costs Project. But it's not really written for people like me. I'm hoping we can translate it for a more general audience.

The report was pretty technical. We wrote the original Transit Costs Project report about the construction cost of various urban rail megaprojects. So we were comparing New York and Boston projects with a selection of projects elsewhere: Italian projects, some Istanbul subway and commuter rail tunnels, the Stockholm subway extension, and so on.

Essentially the next step for me was to look at how you would actually do it correctly in the US, instead of talking about other people's failures. That means that the report on the one hand has to go into broad things, like coordination between different agencies and best practices. But also it needs to get into technical things: what speed a train can go on a specific curve of a specific radius at a specific location. That’s the mood whiplash in the report, between very high-level and very low-level.

I think you guys pulled it off very well. Let's get into it —  I'll read a passage from the intro:

“Our proposal's goal is to establish a high-speed rail system on the Northeast Corridor between Boston and Washington. As the Corridor is also used by commuter trains most of the way… the proposal also includes commuter rail modernization [speeding up trains], regularizing service frequency, and… the aim is to use already committed large spending programs to redesign service.”

As a result, you think we could get high-speed rail that brings both the Boston–New York City trip and the New York City–Washington trip under two hours. You'd cut more than a third of the time off both those trips.

And here’s the kicker: you argue that the infrastructure program would total about $12.5 billion, and the new train sets would be under $5 billion. You're looking at a $17–18 billion project. I know that's a big sticker price in the abstract, but it's six to eight times cheaper than the proposals from Amtrak for this same idea. That’s my first question: Why so cheap?

First of all, that $18 billion is on top of money that has already been committed. There are some big-ticket tunnels that are already being built. One of the things that people were watching with the election was if the new administration was going to try to cancel the Gateway Tunnel, but they seem to have no interest in doing so. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy talks about how there’s a lot of crime on the New York City subway, and how liberals want people to ride public transportation more and to drive less, but I have not seen any attacks on these pre-existing projects. So, as far as I’m concerned, they’re done deals.

The second thing is that along the length of the Northeast Corridor, this investment is not all that small. It’s still less than building a completely new greenfield line. With the Northeast Corridor, most of the line pre-exists; you would not need to build anything de novo. The total investment that we’re prescribing in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and most of Maryland is essentially something called a track-laying machine.

The Northeast Corridor has this problem: Let’s say that you have a line with a top speed of 125 mph, and the line has six very sharp curves that limit the trains to 80 mph. If those six curves are all within a mile of each other, there’s one point in the middle of the line where you have six 80 mph curves. That couple-mile stretch is 80 mph, while the rest of the line is 125. Now, what happens if these curves are evenly spaced along the line?

You have a way longer commute, right?

Yes. If you have to decelerate to 80 mph and back five times, that’s a lot slower. That’s the problem in the Northeast Corridor: there are faster and slower segments. Massachusetts is faster. Rhode Island is mostly fast. Connecticut is slow. If you have a line that’s slow because you have these restrictions in otherwise fast territory, then you fix them, and you’ve fixed the entire line. The line looks slow, but the amount of work you need to fix it is not that much.

The Northeast Corridor (red is stretches with commuter rail)

Most of the reason the Northeast Corridor is slow is because of the sharp curves. There are other fixes that can be done, but the difficult stuff is fixing the sharp curves. The area with the sharpest curves is between New Haven and southern Rhode Island. The curves essentially start widening around the point where you cross between Connecticut and Rhode Island, and shortly thereafter, in Rhode Island, it transitions into the fastest part of the Corridor.

In southeast Connecticut, the curves are sharp, and there’s no way to fix any of them. This is also the lowest-density part of the entire Northeast: I-95, for example, only has four lanes there, while the rest of the way, it has at least six. I-95 there happens to be rather straight, so you can build a bypass there. The cost of that bypass is pretty substantial, but that’s still only about one-sixth of the corridor. You fix that, and I’m not saying you’ve fixed everything, but you’ve saved half an hour.

Your proposal is not the cheapest possible high-speed rail line, but I want to put it in context here. In 2021, there was a big proposal rolled out by the Northeast Corridor Commission, which was a consortium of states, transit providers, New Jersey Transit, Amtrak, and federal transportation agencies. Everybody got in on this big Connect Northeast Corridor (Connect NEC) plan, and the top line number was $117 billion, seven times your proposal. And this is in 2021 dollars.

They didn’t think that they could do Boston to New York and New York to DC in two hours each, either. There are two different reasons for their high price tags. The first reason is that they included a lot of things that are just plain stupid.

For example, theirs involved a lot of work on Penn Station in New York. Some of it is the Gateway Project, so that money is committed already, but they think that they need a lot beyond the tunnel. They have turned Gateway into a $40 or $50 billion project. I’m not going to nitpick the Gateway spending, although I’m pretty sure it could be done for much cheaper, but they think they need another $7 billion to rebuild Penn Station, and another $16 billion to add more tracks.

And you don’t think that’s necessary.

No. We ran some simulations on the tracks, and it turns out that the Penn Station that currently exists, is good enough — with one asterisk — even if you ran twice as much service. You can’t do that right now because, between New Jersey and New York Station, there is one tunnel. It has two tracks, one in each direction. They run 24–25 trains per hour at the peak. This is more or less the best that can be done on this kind of infrastructure. (...)

Unfortunately, they think Penn Station itself can’t handle the doubled frequency and would need a lot of additional work. Amtrak thinks that it needs to add more tracks by condemning an entire Midtown Manhattan block south of Penn Station called Block 780. They’re not sure how many tracks: I’ve seen between 7 and 12.

To be clear, the number of additional tracks they need is 0, essentially because they’re very bad at operations.

Well, let’s talk about operations. You say one way to drive down the cost of high-speed rail is just better-coordinated operations for all the trains in the Corridor. The idea is that often fast trains are waiting for slow trains, and in other places, for procedural reasons, every train has to move at the speed of the slowest train that moves on that segment.

What’s the philosophical difference between how you and the rail managers currently approach the Corridor?

The philosophical difference is coordinating infrastructure and operations. Often you also coordinate which trainsets you’re going to buy. This is why the proposal combines policy recommendations with extremely low-level work, including timetables to a precision of less than a minute. The point of infrastructure is to enable a service. Unless you are a very specific kind of infrastructure nerd, when you ride a train, you don’t care about the top speed, you don’t care about the infrastructure. You care about the timetable. The total trip time matters. Nobody rides a TGV to admire all the bridges they built on the Rhone.

I think some people do!

I doubt it. I suspect that the train goes too fast to be a good vantage point.

But as I said, you need 48 trains per hour worth of capacity between New Jersey or Manhattan. You need to start with things like the throughput you need, how much you need to run on each branch, when each branch runs, how they fit together. This constrains so much of your planning, because you need the rail junctions to be set up so that the trains don’t run into each other. You need to set up the interlockings at the major train stations in the same way. When you have fast and slow trains in the same corridor, you need to write timetables so that the fast trains will not be unduly delayed.

This all needs to happen before you commit to any infrastructure. The problem is that Connect NEC plans (Connect 2035, 2037) are not following that philosophy. They are following another philosophy: Each agency hates the other agencies. Amtrak and the commuter rail agencies have a mutually abusive relationship. There’s a lot of abuse from Amtrak to various commuter rail operators, and a lot of abuse by certain commuter rail operators, especially Metro North and Connecticut DOT against Amtrak. If you ask each agency what they want, they’ll say, “To get the others out of our hair.” They often want additional tracks that are not necessary if you just write a timetable.

To be clear, they want extra tracks so that they don’t have to interact with each other?

Exactly. And this is why Amtrak, the commuter railways, and the Regional Plan Association keep saying that the only way to have high-speed rail in the Northeast Corridor is to have an entirely separate right of way for Amtrak, concluding with its own dedicated pair of tunnels to Penn Station in addition to Gateway.

They’re talking about six tracks, plus two tracks from Penn Station to Queens and the Bronx, with even more urban tunneling. The point is that you don’t need any of that. Compromising a little on speed, the trip times I’m promising are a bit less than four hours from Boston to Washington. That’s roughly 180 kilometers an hour [~110 mph]. To be clear, this would be the slowest high-speed line in France, Spain, or Japan, let alone China. It would probably be even with the fastest in Germany and South Korea. It’s not Chinese speed. For example, Rep Moulton was talking about high-speed rail a couple of months ago, and said, “This is America. We need to be faster. Why not go 200, 250 mph?” He was talking about cranking up the top speed. When we were coming up with this report, we were constantly trying to identify how much time a project would save, and often we’d say, “This curve fix will speed up the trains by 20 seconds, but for way too much hassle and money.” The additional minutes might be too expensive. Twenty seconds don’t have an infinite worth. (...)

I want to go back to something you said earlier. You were contrasting the aesthetic of this proposal with Representative Moulton’s proposal, who wants our top speeds to be faster than Chinese top speeds. How do you get voters to care about — and I mean this descriptively — kinda boring stuff about cant angles?

Voters are not going to care about the cant angle efficiency on a curve. They’re not going to care about approach speed. However, I do think that they will if you tell voters, “Here's the new timetable for you as commuters. It looks weird, but your commute from Westchester or Fairfield County to Manhattan will be 20 minutes faster.”

With a lot of these reports, the issue is often that there are political trade-offs. The idea of what you should be running rail service for, who you should be running it for, that ended up drifting in the middle of the 20th century.

But also, the United States is so far from the technological frontier that even the very basics of German or Swiss rail planning, like triangle planning of rolling stock/infrastructure/operations, that's not done. Just doing that would be a massive increase in everything: reliability, frequency, speed, even in passenger comfort.

 The main rail technology conference in the world, it's called InnoTrans, it's in Berlin every two years. I hear things in on-the-floor interviews with vendors that people in the United States are just completely unaware of.

by Santi Ruiz and Alon Levy, Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Fascinating stuff! (I think, anyway). And, for something completely different, see: How to Be a Good Intelligence Analyst (Statecraft):]

***

I think the biggest misconception about the community and the CIA in particular is that it's a big organization. It really isn't. When you think about overstuffed bureaucracies with layers and layers, you're describing other organizations, not the CIA. It is a very small outfit relative to everybody else in the community. (...)

What kinds of lessons were consistently learned in the Lessons Learned program?

There's an argument that the lessons learned are more accurately described as lessons collected or lessons archived, rather than learned.

Because learning institutionally is hard?

Learning institutionally is hard. Not only is it hard to do, but it's also hard to measure and to affect. But, if nothing else, practitioners became more thoughtful about the profession of intelligence. To me, that was really important. The CIA is well represented by lots of fiction, from Archer to Jason Bourne. It's always good for the brand. Even if we look nefarious, it scares our adversaries. But it's super far removed from reality. Reality in intelligence looks about as dull as reality in general. Being a really good financial or business analyst, any of those kinds of tasks, they're all working a certain part of your brain that you can either train and improve, or ignore and just hope for the best.

I don't think any of those are dull, but I take your point about perception vs. reality.

I don't mean to suggest those are dull, but generally speaking, they don't run around killing assassins. It's a lot less of that.

Border Patrol Wants Advanced AI to Spy on American Cities

The recent passage of Trump’s sprawling flagship legislation funnels tens of billions of dollars to the Department of Homeland Security. While much of that funding will go to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to bolster the administration’s arrest and deportation operations, a great deal is earmarked to purchase new technology and equipment for federal offices tasked with preventing immigrants from arriving in the first place: Customs and Border Protection, which administers the country’s border surveillance apparatus, and its subsidiary, the U.S. Border Patrol.

One page of the presentation, describing the wishlist of Border Patrol’s Law Enforcement Operations Division, says the agency needs “Advanced AI to identify and track suspicious activity in urban environment [sic],” citing the “challenges” posed by “Dense residential areas.” What’s considered “suspicious activity” is left unmentioned. (...)

The reference to AI-aided urban surveillance appears on a page dedicated to the operational needs of Border Patrol’s “Coastal AOR,” or area of responsibility, encompassing the entire southeast of the United States, from Kentucky to Florida. A page describing the “Southern AOR,” which includes all of inland Nevada and Oklahoma, similarly states the need for “Advanced intelligence to identify suspicious patterns” and “Long-range surveillance” because “city environments make it difficult to separate normal activity from suspicious activity.”

Although the Fourth Amendment provides protection against arbitrary police searches, federal law grants immigration agencies the power to conduct warrantless detentions and searches within 100 miles of the land borders with Canada, Mexico, or the coastline of the United States. This zone includes most of the largest cities in the United States, including Los Angeles, New York, as well as the entirety of Florida.

The document mentions no specific surveillance methods or “advanced AI” tools that might be used in urban environments. Across the Southwest, residents of towns like Nogales and Calexico are already subjected to monitoring from surveillance towers placed in their neighborhoods. A 2014 DHS border surveillance privacy impact assessment warned these towers “may capture information about individuals or activities that are beyond the scope of CBP’s authorities. Video cameras can capture individuals entering places or engaging in activities as they relate to their daily lives because the border includes populated areas,” for example, “video of an individual entering a doctor’s office, attending public rallies, social events or meetings, or associating with other individuals.”

Last year, the Government Accountability Office found the DHS tower surveillance program failed six out of six privacy policies designed to prevent such overreach. CBP is also already known to use “artificial intelligence” tools to ferret out “suspicious activity,” according to agency documents. A 2024 inventory of DHS AI applications includes the Rapid Tactical Operations Reconnaissance program, or RAPTOR, which “leverages Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enhance border security through real-time surveillance and reconnaissance. The AI system processes data from radar, infrared sensors, and video surveillance to detect and track suspicious activities along U.S. borders.”

The document’s call for urban surveillance reflect the reality of Border Patrol, an agency empowered, despite its name, with broad legal authority to operate throughout the United States.

“Border Patrol’s escalating immigration raids and protest crackdowns show us the agency operates heavily in cities, not just remote deserts,” said Spencer Reynolds, a former attorney with the Department of Homeland Security who focused on intelligence matters. “Day by day, its activities appear less based on suspicion and more reliant on racial and ethnic profiling. References to operations in ‘dense residential areas’ are alarming in that they potentially signal planning for expanded operations or tracking in American neighborhoods.”

by Sam Biddle, The Intercept |  Read more:

Image: Jenny Kane/AP
[ed. See also, via The Intercept:]

***

~ Guess Who’s Eligible for Student Loan Forgiveness: New ICE Agents

The Department of Homeland Security announced on Tuesday it will offer student loan forgiveness and repayment options to new Immigration and Customs Enforcement recruits — along with a $50,000 signing bonus.

The announcement comes as the Trump administration works to limit the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program for groups the president considers political enemies.

***

~ National Guard Ordered to Do ICE Paperwork at Immigration Facilities in 20 States

The Trump administration authorized the deployment of National Guard troops to immigration facilities in 20 states beginning early next month, further entwining the military in civil and law enforcement functions.

The move undermines long-standing prohibitions on the use of the armed forces in domestic operations, sidestepping the Posse Comitatus Act and accelerating the U.S. transition into a police state, experts said.

The National Guard will be deployed in Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Nebraska, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, and Virginia, among other states, according to a defense official who was not authorized to disclose the information. (...)

Guard members will assist ICE officials in “alien processing” – administrative work preceding detention — in 20 states while ICE leadership will “direct” troops assigned to the mission, which will begin in early August, according to a memo first revealed on Wednesday by the New York Times.

***

~ “Intense Culture of Fear”: Behind the Scenes as Trump Destroys the EPA From Within

EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin said the agency had taken “significant actions” to protect public health and the environment while working “to Power the Great American Comeback.” The agency said it was also working to fulfill Trump’s promises to revitalize the auto industry, “restore the rule of law,” and give decision-making power back to the states.

In practice, the agency has done the opposite, several EPA staffers told The Intercept. 

Under Zeldin’s leadership, the EPA announced a set of new core priorities that includes making the U.S. the artificial intelligence capital of the world and revitalizing the auto industry. (...)

“A lot of us are really confused about what our new mission is, when they’re coming out with these pillars of serving the auto industry and bringing back auto industry jobs,” Hagen said. “I don’t know how we fit into that.”

The EPA’s role is not to create jobs; it’s to regulate and protect people from pollution, she said.

“Our mission is not to promote AI or energy dominance,” she said. “That’s not our mission.” (...)

Last week, the agency said it is planning to dissolve the Office of Research and Development, which does life-saving research on toxicity and developing sampling protocols, and helped in emergencies after the East Palestine train derailment in Ohio and the Covid-19 pandemic.

As a result, more than 1,500 scientists will have to compete for 300 jobs, Hagen said.

“It’s essentially like lobotomizing our agency. If we don’t have the brain — the research behind protecting the environment — we can’t do that effectively, and I think that’s exactly what they want,” she said. “They’re doing all this under the guise of efficiency, but what they really are doing is dismantling this agency from doing its job.”

Silence on SNAP

Poverty and hunger will rise as a result of the Trump administration’s unprecedented cuts to the US federal “food stamps” program, according to experts. Low-income workers who rely on the aid are braced for dire consequences.

Katie Giede, a single mother and waitress in Conyers, Georgia, is one of the 42 million Americans who use the supplemental nutrition assistance program (Snap). Even with the maximum benefit permitted, she struggles to afford food for her and her child.

She makes $3 an hour plus tips at the fast-food chain Waffle House, where she has worked for 11 years. The company deducts meals from workers’ pay check per shift, regardless of whether they eat one or not.

“Our pay is already so little that we’re struggling with everything,” Giede told the Guardian. “Single mothers like myself are reliant upon the benefits like Snap and Medicaid. So when you go and you cut that as well, now you have mothers out here that are not only worried at night because they already can’t afford housing or a vehicle, but we’re also worried what is our kid is going to eat? Because we no longer have help.”

Giede said she received $450 a month for her and her child. She said working too many hours or receiving too much income was a constant concern, due to eligibility cut-offs.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, at the end of 2024, even the maximum Snap benefit would not cover the cost of a modestly priced meal in 99% of all counties in the US.

“I dread that trip to the grocery store every week, because you have to sit down and you really have to budget,” said Giede. “Every time you go, you’re having to make the choice between something that’s healthy or something that’s cheaper, just so you can get enough to last all week.

“There are so many people in this country that rely on these benefits, and with these cuts, half of the people that are surviving right now off of this are going to lose their benefits. That’s not even just people not eating a little bit. They’re already not eating enough, so we’re going to lose lives over this. It’s those of us at the bottom that are really feeling it.”

Waffle House did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” set the stage for significant cuts to Snap by shifting higher administrative costs to each state, expanding work reporting requirements and imposing restrictions on non-citizen eligibility.

Many lower-wage workers have grown more reliant on Snap in recent years. US food prices rose by 23.6% between 2020 and 2024, according to official data. While inflation has since moderated, grocery costs remain high.

As a result of the latest Snap changes, states will be responsible for 75% of administrative costs of handling the program from 2027, up from 50% cost-sharing with the federal government, which is likely to strain state budgets.

From 2028, for the first time states will be forced to pick up some of the multibillion-dollar bill for Snap benefits. The state of New York, for example, faces a budget impact of about $1.2bn, according to the Food Research and Action Center (Frac), a non-profit advocacy group.

While such shifting costs have raised fears that states will cut back Snap support, expanded work requirements have sparked concern that few people will be eligible. Analysis by the Urban Institute found about 22.3 million US families are set to lose some or all of their Snap benefits.

“This is a very targeted, well-thought-out plan of dismantling the Snap program that federal policy makers won’t take responsibility for, because it is the states, it is the governors who will have to cut resources for Snap, who will have to cut the program in order to say we can’t operate this because of what’s happening at the federal level,” said Gina Plata-Nino, Snap deputy director at the Frac.

“Snap is a very important ecosystem at the local level, at the state level and the federal level, because billions of dollars go into states, and this federal money supports local economies,” she added. “All of these proposals threaten this very delicate balance.”

The White House deferred comment to the office of management and budget, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

States across the US are braced for stark consequences. “We’re going to have worse hunger and ultimately, worse poverty,” said Seth DiStefano, policy outreach director at the West Virginia Center on Budget and Policy. “There are entire regions of West Virginia where there aren’t 20 hours a week [expanded Snap work requirement] of anything to apply for. What do you tell those families?

“We’re talking families with kids now that are going to be subjected to these harsh work reporting requirements. We’re talking folks in their 60s, literally in communities where there are no jobs, none, and ripping away the one outlet to their basic needs that’s available to them.”

Among the employers with the most workers reliant on Snap is Walmart, the largest private employer in the US, as much of its workforce receives only part-time hours.

Christina Gahagan, 66, has worked at Walmart for a decade in western New York at several stores. She is currently based at a store in Geneseo, New York.

“I would say at least 50% of the people in my store rely on food stamps to make ends meet for their families,” said Gahagan. “They’re always trying to figure out where the best deals are, coupon clipping at lunch and reading circulars to see who’s got the best deal on whatever, just to make their money stretch.” (...)

“Walmart is the largest employer in the US. We rival Amazon almost dollar for dollar in what we do. You would think a company like that could shell out a little bit more money per hour for associates in the store across the board, so that there aren’t people who are having to depend so heavily on public assistance.”

Walmart did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

by Michael Sainato, The Guardian | Read more:
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[ed. No one wants to comment on a new bureaucracy to process and administer oversight requirements? Jobs! Remember who did this the next time you vote.]

Breakneck: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future

I didn’t write a letter last year. Rather, I wrote seven, all of which is new material.

They make up my book BREAKNECK: China’s Quest to Engineer the Future. It’s driven by a few simple ideas. That Americans and Chinese are fundamentally alike: restless, eager for shortcuts, ultimately driving most of the world’s big changes. That their rivalry should not be reasoned through with worn-out terms from the past century like socialist, democratic, or neoliberal. And that both countries are tangles of imperfection, regularly delivering — in the name of competition — self-beatings that go beyond the wildest dreams of the other.

The simplest idea I present is that China is an engineering state, which brings a sledgehammer to problems both physical and social, in contrast with America’s lawyerly society, which brings a gavel to block almost everything, good and bad.

Breakneck begins with a bike ride I took from Guiyang to Chongqing in 2021. China’s fourth-poorest province, I was delighted to find, has much better infrastructure than California or New York, both wealthier by orders of magnitude. Five days of grueling climbs on stunning green mountains gave me glimpses of what socialism with Chinese characteristics really looks like. But there is more to the engineering state than tall bridges. The heart of the book concerns how badly Beijing goes off track when it engages in social engineering. My handy formulation of the Communist Party is that it is a Leninist Technocracy with Grand Opera Characteristics — practical until it collapses into the preposterous.

The idea of the lawyerly society became obvious when I returned to the U.S. in 2023. The Paul Tsai China Center (as I say in my acknowledgments) was the best possible place to write this book, not only because it’s so supportive, but also because it set me inside the Yale Law School. Elite law schools, now and in the past, fashion the easiest path for the ambitions to step into the top ranks of the American government. The dominance of lawyers in the American elite has helped transmute the United States into a litigious vetocracy. I believe that America cannot remain a great power if it is so committed to a system that works well mostly for the wealthy and well-connected.

The engineering state versus the lawyerly society is not a grand theory to explain absolutely everything about the U.S. and China. Rather, the book is rooted in my own experiences of living in China from 2017 to 2023. I offer this framework to make sense of the recent past and think about what might come next.

It helps to explain a number of things. For example, the trade war and the tech showdown. The U.S. has relied on legalisms — levying tariffs and designing an ever more exquisite sanctions regime — while China has focused on creating the future by physically building better cars, more beautiful cities, and bigger power plants. Though China has constructed roads and bridges abroad, it struggles to inspire global cultural appeal, because engineers aren’t smooth talkers and tend to censor whatever they can’t understand. The Chinese state is sometimes too rational, proceeding down a path that feels perfectly logical, until the country’s largest city is suddenly in a state of lockdown for months.

Breakneck will be published on August 26. I hope you’ll order this book. You can also send me an email if you would like a review copy for your publication or Substack, or to book me for speaking.

***

It’s a bit boring to write only a book announcement. This is also a space for me to reflect on the bookwriting process.

The hard part of bookwriting is the beginning, the middle, and the end. Each stage demands unrelated skills. The opening phases involve engaging an agent, beating ideas into the shape of a proposal (which typically stretch over 50 pages), and approaching a publisher. The long middle is the writing. The end is the mishmash of tasks related to revision, production, and promotion. Fortunately I had a superb agent and a faithful editor to navigate the first and third stages. Overall the process was more fun than I expected, such that I now actively encourage friends to pursue their own book ideas.

Writing is necessarily a solitary task. My usual process is to putter around until late evening, until I finally cannot bear to avoid the page any longer, at which point I spend a lot of time picking out appropriate music, and finally get to the task. I knew that could no longer be a sane approach for a lengthier writing project (not that it ever was). Every day I repeated my mantra to be a cool, calm, collected Canadian, through which I achieved a modest degree of discipline. I met my deadline.

I became a better writer over the course of the book. Breakneck, as I said, is seven annual letters. I thought I understood this format, but I still saw myself improving, such that the final chapter was much easier to write than the first. I felt my prose loosening and my confidence rising as I moved from chapter to chapter. Bookwriting is a bit like climbing a mountain: best not to look up too much at the beginning and feel daunted by the task ahead. When I had completed two-thirds of the book, I started feeling elated about how much I’ve written, which propelled me towards the end.

Writing is thinking. As I worked on my final chapter, I found myself reflecting on my Yunnan heritage. Yunnan is, in my estimation, China’s freest province: far away amid southwestern mountains, it has mostly escaped sustained attention from the imperial center, which would be attracted to greater wealth or restive minority issues. My parents both have deep Yunnan roots. They would have been in China’s middle class, only the concept did not really exist when they emigrated to Canada when I was seven. I’m glad to have had an upbringing in this economic backwater, which is undeveloped in part because it’s inflected by a bit of the suspicion of the state that is common to mountain peoples everywhere. Growing up in the periphery endowed me with greater skepticism of the state glories that Beijing chooses to celebrate and greater reluctance to participate in the competitive culture common in Shanghai or Shenzhen.

I wrote this book partly to sort out my own thoughts about China. It really was staggering to write about how many miles of roadways, how many new nuclear power plants, how much steel China has produced over the past four decades. China is a good operating model of abundance. I state clearly in the book that America doesn’t have to become China to build infrastructure; it would be sufficient to reach the construction cost levels of France, Japan, or Spain. Still, the U.S. should still study some aspects of China’s method: how do they build it? What are the tradeoffs? How do we learn? China has gotten a lot of things right with mass transit, plentiful housing, and functional cities.

The problem is that China’s leadership just can’t stop at physical engineering. Sooner or later, they treat the population as if it were another building material, to be moulded or torn apart as the circumstances demand. That’s why America shouldn’t look to China as the model. My favorite chapter concerned the one-child policy. I had been completely unprepared to study the brutality of its enforcement, which was only possible through mass sterilizations and forced abortions. At its peak in the 1980s, the one-child policy morphed into a campaign of rural terror meted out against female bodies, namely the mother and the cruelly discarded daughter.

Nearly all the letters are focused on China. The final one is about the United States. I concluded my book by writing about what my parents gained and lost with their emigration. They lost the chance to build wealth as part of China’s luckiest generation: urban residents born after 1960 who were able to acquire property or build businesses after the 2000s. But they would not trade that for their gain of living in the suburbs of Philly, which I find boring, but their friends find enviable. I also reflected on America’s own legacy as an engineering state, focused on two engineers: Robert Moses and Hyman Rickover. Too many parts of America feel like the well-preserved ruins of a once-great civilization. Americans should take a clearer look at the industrial achievements that are usually ignored and frequently scorned. (...)

I cooked a lot of fish as I wrote, in the Cantonese style: steaming a whole bronzino or a filet of sea trout for ten minutes, then drizzled with ginger, spring onion, soy sauce, and sizzling olive oil. My wife and I also planned a few writing retreats, in which we would park ourselves in new places to focus on food, exercise, and writing. After six years of intensively eating Chinese cuisines, I was also pleased to move into new culinary worlds. (...)

When I last visited Shanghai, at the end of 2024, I was surprised to feel that the average person might be eating worse than before. The trend of consumption downgrading has been real. Smart restaurants are no longer difficult to book. Sichuan and Hunan restaurants are taking over. A lot of the restaurant foods are prepared in centralized commissaries. Many more places focus more on deliveries than the sit-down experience. And there seems to be a trend of chain restaurants from third-tier cities moving to first-tier cities, offering slightly worse food at much cheaper prices.

The worst part is the influencer culture. China’s influencer culture is much more intense than America’s. It’s easy to see, in public spaces, how many people are glued to their phones. Anywhere charming, whether a café or a mountaintop, is full of people intently taking photos. It’s common to see Chinese couples or groups of friends barely interacting with each other over a meal, leaning over their phones. I remember having coffee once at the Ritz-Carlton in Shanghai, where a group of girls sat near me photographing each other over cakes for over an hour. Influencer culture has pushed restaurants to make dishes better photographed than tasted.

It doesn’t mean that China will fall behind America in food. No way. China retains a commanding lead, and it has so much vitality in smaller cities and the countryside. But I wonder whether China will maintain its culinary peaks, or if they will be corroded by consumer-driven homogenization and the priority of convenience over tastiness. On present trendlines, America is learning to get better, while China is slightly worse.

by Dan Wang |  Read more:

Image: Breakneck

[ed. I've been a fan of Dan's annual China summaries since discovering them back in 2021 (see here, here and here). When 2025 rolled around and none appeared I wrote and asked if he was still planning something. That's when he told me about this book. Definitely plan to get it when it's released.]