Book Review: "Breakneck"

There was a time in 2016 when I walked around downtown San Francisco with Dan Wang and gave him life advice. He asked me if he should move to China and write about it. I told him that I thought this was a good idea — that the world suffered from a strange and troubling dearth of people who write informatively about China in English, and that our country would be better off if we could understand China a little more.

Dan took my advice, and I’m very glad he did. For seven years, Dan wrote some of the best posts about China anywhere on the English-speaking internet, mostly in the form of a series of annual letters. His unique writing style is both lush and subtle. Each word or phrase feels like it should be savored, like fine dining. But don’t let this distract you — there are a multitude of small but important points buried in every paragraph. Dan Wang’s writing cannot be skimmed.

I’ve been anticipating Dan’s first book for over a year now, and it didn’t disappoint. Breakneck: China's Quest to Engineer the Future brings the same style Dan used in his annual letters, and uses it to elucidate a grand thesis: America is run by lawyers, and China is run by engineers.

Dan starts the book by recapitulating an argument that I’ve often made myself — namely, that China and the United States have fundamentally similar cultures. This is from his introduction:

I am sure that no two peoples are more alike than Americans and Chinese.

A strain of materialism, often crass, runs through both countries, sometimes producing veneration of successful entrepreneurs, sometimes creating displays of extraordinary tastelessness, overall contributing to a spirit of vigorous competition. Chinese and Americans are pragmatic: They have a get-it-done attitude that occasionally produces hurried work. Both countries are full of hustlers peddling shortcuts, especially to health and to wealth. Their peoples have an appreciation for the technological sublime: the awe of grand projects pushing physical limits. American and Chinese elites are often uneasy with the political views of the broader populace. But masses and elites are united in the faith that theirs is a uniquely powerful nation that ought to throw its weight around if smaller countries don't get in line.

It's very gratifying to see someone who has actually lived in China, and who speaks Chinese, independently come up with the same impression of the two cultures! (Though to be fair, I initially got the idea from a Chinese grad student of mine.)

If they're so culturally similar, why, then, are China and the U.S. so different in so many real and tangible ways? Why is China gobbling up global market share in every manufactured product under the sun, while America’s industrial base withers away? Why did China manage to build the world’s biggest high-speed rail network in just a few years, while California has yet to build a single mile of operational train track despite almost two decades of trying? Why does China have a glut of unused apartment buildings, while America struggles to build enough housing for its people? Why is China building over a thousand ships a year, while America builds almost zero?

Dan offers a simple explanation: The difference comes down to who runs the country. The U.S. has traditionally been run by lawyers, while the Chinese Communist Party tends to be run by engineers. The engineers want to build more stuff, while lawyers want to find a reason to not build more stuff. (...)

Breakneck’s thesis generally rings true, and Dan’s combination of deep knowledge and engrossing writing style means that this is a book you should definitely buy. Its primary useful purpose will be to make Americans aware that there’s an alternative to their block-everything, do-nothing institutions, and to get them to think a little bit about the upsides and downsides of that alternative.

I bring up my main concerns about Dan’s argument: How do we know that the U.S.-China differences he highlights are due to a deep-rooted engineer/lawyer distinction, rather than natural outgrowths of the two countries’ development levels? In other words, is it possible that most countries undergo an engineer-to-lawyer shift as they get richer, because poorer countries just tend to need engineers a lot more?

I am always wary of explanations of national development patterns that rely on the notion of deep-rooted cultural essentialism. Dan presents America’s lawyerly bent as something that has been present since the founding. But then how did the U.S. manage to build the railroads, the auto empires of Ford and GM, the interstate highway system, and the vast and sprawling suburbs? Why didn’t lawyers block those? In fact, why did the lawyers who ran FDR’s administration encourage the most massive building programs in the country’s history?

And keep in mind that America achieved this titanic share of global manufacturing while having a much smaller percent of world population than China does.

That’s an impressive feat of building! So even though most of America’s politicians were lawyers back during the 1800s and early 1900s, those lawyers made policies that let engineers do their thing — and even encouraged them. It was only after the 1970s that lawyers — and policies made by politicians trained as lawyers — began to support anti-growth policies in the U.S. (...)

There are several alternative explanations for the trends Dan Wang talks about in his book. One possibility, which Sine argues for, is that China’s key feature isn’t engineering, but communism. Engineers like to plan things, but communists really, really like to plan things — including telling people to study engineering.

Another possibility is that engineering-heavy culture is just a temporary phase that all successfully industrializing countries go through during their initial rapid growth phase. When a country is dirt poor, it has few industries, little infrastructure, and so on. Basically it just needs to build something; in econ terms, the risk of capital misallocation is low, because the returns on capital are so high in general. If you don’t have any highways or steel factories, then maybe it doesn’t matter which one you build first; you just need to build.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Jonothon P. Sine

[ed. I've mentioned Dan's annual China summaries before (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 pick it up.]

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:

Constitutional Collapse in Real Time

This morning, FBI agents raided the home of John Bolton—former National Security Advisor, lifelong Republican, and one of the most establishment figures in American foreign policy. His crime? Writing a book critical of Donald Trump and opposing the president’s surrender summit with Vladimir Putin. The justification? A “national security investigation in search of classified records”—the same bureaucratic language once used to investigate Trump’s actual document theft, now weaponized against Trump’s critics.

We are no longer operating under constitutional government. We are witnessing its systematic dismantlement by the very people sworn to preserve it. This is what constitutional collapse looks like in real time—not dramatic overthrow or military coups, but the patient corruption of every institution designed to constrain power until they serve only to protect it.

Nobody wants to admit this reality because admitting it requires confronting what it means for everything else we’ve assumed about American democracy. But that comfort is a luxury we can no longer afford. The Bolton raid isn’t an aberration—it’s observable evidence that we’ve already crossed the line from constitutional republic to authoritarian protection racket.

The Bitter Irony of False Equivalence

There’s a devastating irony in Bolton becoming one of the first high-profile victims of Trump’s weaponized Justice Department. Throughout the 2024 election, Bolton and many establishment figures operated from the “anti-anti-Trump” position—treating both candidates as equally flawed, seeing no meaningful moral distinction between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, flattening existential differences into ordinary political disagreements.

Bolton couldn’t bring himself to endorse Harris despite understanding perfectly well what Trump represented. Like so many sophisticated voices, he was too committed to maintaining his independent credibility to make the obvious moral choice that democratic survival required. He performed the elaborate intellectual gymnastics necessary to avoid acknowledging the clear distinction between a candidate committed to constitutional governance and one openly promising to dismantle it.

Now Bolton experiences personally the constitutional crisis he refused to prevent politically. The FBI agents who ransacked his home weren’t rogue actors—they were following orders from an administration he couldn’t oppose when it mattered. His decades of public service, his genuine expertise, his legitimate policy concerns—none of it protected him once he crossed the regime he helped normalize through sophisticated neutrality.

This pattern extends far beyond Bolton. Across the political spectrum, intelligent people convinced themselves the stakes weren’t really that high, that institutions would constrain Trump’s worst impulses, that the “adults in the room” would prevent constitutional catastrophe. The anti-anti-Trump stance provided permission structure for millions of Americans to vote for authoritarianism while telling themselves they were making a normal political choice.

By flattening the moral difference between Harris and Trump, these voices enabled the very outcome they claimed to fear. Harris represented continuity with constitutional governance—flawed and frustrating, but operating within democratic frameworks. Trump represented systematic destruction of constitutional governance—openly promising to weaponize federal power and eliminate civil service protections. These weren’t equivalent positions requiring sophisticated analysis to distinguish.

The Propaganda Function of “Objectivity”

The most insidious aspect of this false equivalence is how it masquerades as intellectual sophistication while functioning as authoritarian propaganda. When someone with a platform responds to Trump’s systematic weaponization of federal law enforcement by invoking the “Biden Crime Family,” they’re not demonstrating objectivity—they’re selling surrender.

What exactly is the “Biden Crime Family”? Hunter’s laptop? Business dealings investigated by Republican committees for years that produced no criminal charges? Meanwhile, we have documented evidence of Trump selling pardons, accepting foreign bribes, conducting government business at his properties, and now using the FBI as his personal revenge service. These aren’t comparable phenomena requiring balanced analysis—they’re manufactured distractions designed to normalize actual criminality through false equivalence.

When public figures invoke “both sides” rhetoric during an active constitutional crisis, they’re not rising above partisanship—they’re providing cover for the side that systematically benefits from confusion and paralysis. They’re giving their audience permission to remain passive while democracy dies, to treat the collapse of constitutional government as just another partisan disagreement where reasonable people stay neutral.

This sophisticated-sounding neutrality serves the same function as “just asking questions” or “maintaining balance”—rhetorical devices that sound reasonable but provide cover for unreasonable things. The “Biden Crime Family” talking point in response to the Bolton raid essentially argues: “Well, both sides weaponize law enforcement, so this is just normal political hardball.” But one side investigated actual evidence through proper channels, while the other raids former officials for writing books critical of the president.

Authoritarians don’t need everyone to support them actively—they just need enough people to remain confused and passive while they capture the machinery of state. When people with influence treat constitutional governance and authoritarian rule as equivalent, they’re not maintaining objectivity—they’re actively participating in the normalization of authoritarianism.

The Observable Reality of Systematic Collapse

We need to stop pretending this is normal politics conducted by unusual means. The evidence of constitutional collapse surrounds us daily: the executive branch operates through fake emergency declarations to bypass Congressional authority. Trump conducts trade policy through personal decree, ignoring constitutional requirements for legislative approval. The Supreme Court creates immunity doctrines that place presidents above accountability. Congress suspends its own procedures to avoid constitutional duties.

Federal law enforcement has become a revenge machine targeting political opponents while providing protection services for regime loyalists. ICE operates as domestic surveillance apparatus building algorithmic dossiers on American citizens. The FBI raids critics while ignoring documented crimes by allies. The Justice Department empanels grand juries to investigate Barack Obama while dropping cases against Trump.

This is the systemic destruction of a government constrained by law. Not merely political dysfunction. The people orchestrating this understand exactly what they’re building: a protection racket masquerading as constitutional government, where loyalty determines legal consequences and opposition becomes criminal activity.

The Bolton raid demonstrates this logic perfectly. FBI Director Kash Patel, Trump’s personal enforcer now wearing federal authority, tweeted “NO ONE is above the law” while his agents searched the home of a man whose crime was exercising First Amendment rights. Attorney General Pam Bondi amplified: “America’s safety isn’t negotiable. Justice will be pursued. Always.” This is justice as theater, law enforcement as performance art, federal power as instrument of personal revenge.

by Mike Brock, Notes From The Circus |  Read more:

Image: Shutterstock.com

[ed. For real. See also: Who Are the “Real” Americans Here? (NFTC); and, We Used to Think the Military Would Stand Up to Trump. We Were Wrong (NYT).]

Salmon Farming in Alaska: 'Are You Insane?'

Raising the idea of salmon farms in Alaska, Gov. Dunleavy swims against a tide of skeptics

Amid the hubbub of President Donald Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Alaska summit last week, Gov. Mike Dunleavy, posting on social media, posed a provocative question.

“Alaska is a leader in fresh caught wild salmon. We could also be a leader in the farmed salmon industry. Why not do both instead of importing farmed salmon from Scotland?,” he wrote, sharing an article about the value of fish farming in Scotland, where Atlantic salmon are raised in net pens in the ocean. “This would be a great opportunity for Alaska.”

The answer from scientists, wild salmon advocates, restaurant people and regular salmon-eating Alaskans has come swiftly, full of alarm and often along the lines of one of the early commenters on his post, who wrote, “Are you insane?”

Love for wild salmon cuts through partisan politics. No food is more important to the state’s culture, diet, identity and economy. As such, Alaskans don’t look kindly on farmed fish. It’s tough to find it in stores and few, if any, restaurants serve it. Farming salmon and other finfish has been banned since 1990 over concerns about environmental threats to wild stocks and economic competition. But Dunleavy, who has become increasingly interested in Alaska’s food security since the pandemic, is curious about bringing in fish farms.

Last legislative session, his office introduced a bill that would authorize land-based farming of non-salmon species like trout or tilapia. That bill faced an avalanche of opposition in committee. But his recent post went further, signaling a shift feared by fisheries advocates, from a narrow focus on land-based farms to a broader look at farming salmon, the vast majority of which happens in net pens in the ocean. (...)

Dunleavy didn’t have a specific plan for how salmon in Alaska might be farmed, he said. Land-based salmon farming, something some environmental groups support, is being tried in a few markets but can be cost-prohibitive. There are concerns over open-net pens that need to be addressed, he said, as well as concerns about what species of salmon might be raised.

Salmon is the second-most popular seafood in the country, just behind shrimp, and roughly 75% to 80% of the salmon Americans eat is farmed Atlantic salmon. Atlantic salmon in the wild have almost disappeared due to overfishing and they cannot be fished commercially. Alaska provides the lion’s share of the wild salmon in the country’s fish markets. But in the world, Dunleavy pointed out, Russia provides the largest share of salmon. Farming fish might be a way for Alaska, and the U.S., to occupy a larger position in that marketplace, he said.

“What I’ve said is, basically, is the discussion worthwhile that Alaska has today, in 2025, to visit the idea of Alaska being part of that game of a new sector?” he said.

At-sea fish farming has gotten cleaner in recent decades, thanks to advances in technology and feeding practices that minimize the impacts of effluent, said Caitlyn Czajkowski, executive director of the National Aquaculture Association, a Florida-based aquaculture trade association.

“There’s a lot of things about the ocean that we know now that we didn’t know 20 years ago,” she said.

Some non-salmon operations also now farm fish that are genetically sterile, so that if they escape, they can’t mix with local populations. That technology is still under development for salmon, however. There are a number of places that used to have commercial salmon fisheries in the Atlantic region, including Maine, Canada and a number of European countries that now farm Atlantic salmon. There isn’t another place, like Alaska, where salmon farming is happening in tandem with a robust wild salmon fishery, Czajkowski said.

At Crush Bistro, a high-end restaurant in downtown Anchorage bustling with tourists this week, Rob DeLucia, owner and general manager, said he was dumbfounded by the governor’s post. Guests come into the restaurant every night and say they came to Alaska for two reasons: to see Denali and to eat wild fish, he said.

“It is crystal clear when you get a piece of salmon at a restaurant in Alaska, that thing was swimming around in the last couple of days out in the wild blue ocean, and now we’re going to have guests be like, ‘Well, is this farmed or is this wild?’” he asked.

Atlantic farmed salmon, from a culinary standpoint, is inferior in taste and texture, he said. It made no sense to promote it.

“(Dunleavy) should have his Alaskan card revoked,” DeLucia said.

by Julia O'Malley, Anchorage Daily News | Read more:
Image: Pens for farmed salmon sit off the shore of Tasmania, Australia in 2023. (AP Photo/Matthew Newton)
[ed. Not insane, just a Republican. If he really cared about salmon, gold medal branding, supporting Alaskan communities, he'd be dead set against something like this (and other self-inflicted threats, like a proposed Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay). He isn't. See also: Help wanted. Job opening with good pay, free housing, free parking, 4-year contract:]

***

Help Wanted: Unique opportunity to lead the largest state in the country, with more miles of coastline, taller mountains, more fish and game, more dreams and less reality than those other 49 pipsqueaks.
Dynamic, credible decision maker with strong personality needed to lead the second-youngest state in the nation into the future, albeit without enough money to meet all its needs.

It’s a fixer-upper job; the current employee has let a lot of things go bad, never learned to get along with co-workers, and hasn’t been working all that hard. Which means the next person has loads of opportunity to make a difference. The bar is low, but the need is high.

Applicants have plenty of time to study and do their homework; the job opens up next year.

Job candidates can use that time to think about how they will bring together disagreeable factions, confront decades-old problems, pay attention to the work at home and less attention to national media, all while winning the hearts and minds of the public — and the support of their colleagues in elected office.

Most importantly, job applicants need to tell the truth about realistic plans. The state has suffered too long with leadership that believes in crystal balls, while public services have fallen behind the eight ball.

The job pays $176,000 a year and includes free housing in a historic home in the state capital city, easy walking distance to the office that comes with a remodeled conference room, a full kitchen and reserved parking.

It’s a four-year job, which should be enough time for the right person to make a difference.

Applications are now being accepted for the job of governor of Alaska. The deadline to apply is June 1 next year. The first cut will come in the Aug. 18 primary election, with the final decision in the Nov. 4 general election.

Already, eight Republicans and one Democrat have applied for the job. By the time applications close, the list likely will exceed a baker’s dozen.

Candidates may be judged by the public on how well they can answer questions about state finances, state tax policies, school funding, social services, law enforcement, housing and the other basics of life, like water and sewage services.

The best candidates will be the ones who truly understand why a state with $82 billion in savings can seem so broke; who can explain why nonresidents who come here to work go home every two weeks without paying any taxes; why some corporations doing business in Alaska pay taxes and others don’t; why the state can’t seem to process Medicaid and food stamp applications on time; why the ferry system has shrunk and rusted away; why some cities pay for police services while others sponge off the state troopers; and why child care and children’s services come up short in the budget.

Don’t apply if you don’t want to deal honestly with the problems, and if you don’t have specific positions and proposals to share. This is not a job for vague answers, wishful thinking and fields of dreams. Remote work not allowed.

Canada is Killing Itself

The country gave its citizens the right to die. Doctors are struggling to keep up with demand.

The euthanasia conference was held at a Sheraton. Some 300 Canadian professionals, most of them clinicians, had arrived for the annual event. There were lunch buffets and complimentary tote bags; attendees could look forward to a Friday-night social outing, with a DJ, at an event space above Par-Tee Putt in downtown Vancouver. “The most important thing,” one doctor told me, “is the networking.”

Which is to say that it might have been any other convention in Canada. Over the past decade, practitioners of euthanasia have become as familiar as orthodontists or plastic surgeons are with the mundane rituals of lanyards and drink tickets and It’s been so long s outside the ballroom of a four-star hotel. The difference is that, 10 years ago, what many of the attendees here do for work would have been considered homicide.

When Canada’s Parliament in 2016 legalized the practice of euthanasia—Medical Assistance in Dying, or MAID, as it’s formally called—it launched an open-ended medical experiment. One day, administering a lethal injection to a patient was against the law; the next, it was as legitimate as a tonsillectomy, but often with less of a wait. MAID now accounts for about one in 20 deaths in Canada—more than Alzheimer’s and diabetes combined—surpassing countries where assisted dying has been legal for far longer.

It is too soon to call euthanasia a lifestyle option in Canada, but from the outset it has proved a case study in momentum. MAID began as a practice limited to gravely ill patients who were already at the end of life. The law was then expanded to include people who were suffering from serious medical conditions but not facing imminent death. In two years, MAID will be made available to those suffering only from mental illness. Parliament has also recommended granting access to minors.

At the center of the world’s fastest-growing euthanasia regime is the concept of patient autonomy. Honoring a patient’s wishes is of course a core value in medicine. But here it has become paramount, allowing Canada’s MAID advocates to push for expansion in terms that brook no argument, refracted through the language of equality, access, and compassion. As Canada contends with ever-evolving claims on the right to die, the demand for euthanasia has begun to outstrip the capacity of clinicians to provide it.

There have been unintended consequences: Some Canadians who cannot afford to manage their illness have sought doctors to end their life. In certain situations, clinicians have faced impossible ethical dilemmas. At the same time, medical professionals who decided early on to reorient their career toward assisted death no longer feel compelled to tiptoe around the full, energetic extent of their devotion to MAID. Some clinicians in Canada have euthanized hundreds of patients.

The two-day conference in Vancouver was sponsored by a professional group called the Canadian Association of MAiD Assessors and Providers. Stefanie Green, a physician on Vancouver Island and one of the organization’s founders, told me how her decades as a maternity doctor had helped equip her for this new chapter in her career. In both fields, she explained, she was guiding a patient through an “essentially natural event”—the emotional and medical choreography “of the most important days in their life.” She continued the analogy: “I thought, Well, one is like delivering life into the world, and the other feels like transitioning and delivering life out.” And so Green does not refer to her MAID deaths only as “provisions”—the term for euthanasia that most clinicians have adopted. She also calls them “deliveries.”

Gord Gubitz, a neurologist from Nova Scotia, told me that people often ask him about the “stress” and “trauma” and “strife” of his work as a MAID provider. Isn’t it so emotionally draining? In fact, for him it is just the opposite. He finds euthanasia to be “energizing”—the “most meaningful work” of his career. “It’s a happy sad, right?” he explained. “It’s really sad that you were in so much pain. It is sad that your family is racked with grief. But we’re so happy you got what you wanted.”

Has Canada itself gotten what it wanted? Nine years after the legalization of assisted death, Canada’s leaders seem to regard MAID from a strange, almost anthropological remove: as if the future of euthanasia is no more within their control than the laws of physics; as if continued expansion is not a reality the government is choosing so much as conceding. This is the story of an ideology in motion, of what happens when a nation enshrines a right before reckoning with the totality of its logic. If autonomy in death is sacrosanct, is there anyone who shouldn’t be helped to die?

by Elaina Plott Calabro, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Johnny C.Y. Lam

New Crewless Warships

DARPA christens dagger-like, crewless ocean warship (New Atlas)

Images: DARPA

"Along with the lightness and sleekness, the systems aboard Defiant are more like those of a deep-space probe, with an emphasis on reliability and redundancy that allows it to operate at sea for up to a year without human intervention. It can even refuel itself autonomously. Where a conventional ship would have technicians aboard for repairs and routine maintenance, Defiant can tolerate wear and tear on its system and can switch to backups as needed.

Another aspect of the design is that it's highly simplified, so it can be manufactured quickly and refitted in any port that can handle yacht, tug, and workboat customers. This means that in the near future, autonomous ships can be deployed in large numbers to act as force multipliers for the US Navy, take over boring routine duties like sub hunting or harbor patrols, and carry out missions in hostile waters without risking human lives."

[ed. Sea drones.]

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.

Who and WTF Is a Laura Loomer?

For all the power she wields with the White House’s affairs, Laura Loomer does not have the traditional tools that her rivals in the MAGA influencer industrial complex have — the highest follower count, the most political power, the most internet platforms, etc. But the fact remains that she’s the influencer responsible for getting Donald Trump to fire over a dozen members of his administration (and counting) for the hazily-defined crime of being disloyal to MAGA. This is something that none of her peers, individually, have been able to do. But to understand how she operates, look no further than Loomer’s latest attempted power play, which, as always, involves a fair amount of self-humiliation (and some disgusting slander).

Earlier this week, she leaked a private deposition that she’d given in a lawsuit wherein she explained, in her own words, why she’s published some of the most outre takes and allegations against her “enemies” on social media. The deposition was given as part of her defamation suit against HBO host Bill Maher, who claimed on a February 2025 show that Loomer was having a sexual affair with president Donald Trump. But you might have missed that context, since the social media chatter and headlines gravitated toward the sections of the deposition where Loomer was grilled about her most audacious posts: she claimed, among other things, that Sen. Lindsay Graham was secretly gay, that former Vice President Kamala Harris was a “DEI skank”, and her bitter MAGA rival Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) divorced her husband because of the “Arby’s in her pants” and was a “political prostitute [who was] sucking McCarthy’s dick all day.” (...)

The fact that she constantly embarrasses herself only enhances the efficacy of “Loomering”: first, shame and embarrassment does not matter in the long term, so long as people are paying attention online. (She said as much the next day: “I wake up everyday to another hit piece. It’s because I am effective and it threatens a lot of people.”) Second: the internet is forever, and even if a judge orders a deposition to be resealed, gawkers will save copies, screenshot the juicy bits, and publish them for posterity. Loomer might have been recorded reading her own tweets out loud and forced to explain the gross bits, but she has also gotten several White House administration officials fired.

by Tina Nguyen, The Verge | Read more:
Image: Getty Images
[ed. White House advisor, 2025. The Lindsey Graham gay thing is decades old. He never responded to the rumors (as far as I know), and who cares, really? (except him, apparently); whatever, he's still one of the slimiest and most obsequious assholes in Congress. As for Loomer? (...snore), she got her moment and Wikipedia page. Nothing I'd be particularly proud of.]

On January 14, 2019, Loomer convinced several men she met in a Home Depot parking lot, who she claimed were undocumented, to jump the fence with her at Nancy Pelosi's Napa, California, home. The group set up a tent on Pelosi's lawn to protest immigration before being removed by police...

On January 30, 2019, Loomer and others jumped the wall surrounding the California Governor's Mansion in Sacramento. They wore Mexican serapes and sombreros, with one wearing a large false mustache, and said they were protesting Governor Gavin Newsom's stance on immigration. They were arrested, given citations, and released within a few hours. Later that day, the group provoked a confrontation outside a Mexican restaurant in downtown Sacramento, live-streaming the event.

Eric Cartman, Welcome (for Now) to the Resistance

There is a slang term that, because I am not writing this for a foul-mouthed satire on a streaming service, I will refer to as “bleep-you money”: the amount of cash you need to feel free to do and say what you want.

For Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the makers of “South Park,” that number appears to be around $1.25 billion — the price tag on their recent deal with Paramount. Once the ink dried, they put their mouths where their money was, going hard after President Trump and their own corporate benefactors.

The Season 27 premiere aired July 23, shortly after Paramount agreed to a lawsuit settlement with the president that the late-night host Stephen Colbert called a “big, fat bribe,” and shortly after CBS, which Paramount owns, announced that Colbert’s show would end next year. (Paramount said the move was purely a financial decision.)

In the episode, “Sermon on the ’Mount,” the president is suing everyone, and everyone — from local governments to “60 Minutes” — is giving up. The town of South Park has to literally bring Jesus (a recurring character since the show’s earliest days) into its schools. President Trump appears as a tinpot dictator, in bed (again literally) with Satan. Desperate, the townspeople turn to Christ, who bestows his wisdom: “All of you, shut the [expletive] up, or South Park is over,” he says. “You really want to end up like Colbert?”

In the follow-up episode, the school counselor, Mr. Mackey, gets fired because of funding cuts and signs up with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. (“If you need a job, it’s A! Job! To have!” goes the recruiting jingle.)

Mr. Mackey and his inexperienced comrades pull up their face masks, bust a “Dora the Explorer” live show (another repurposing of a Paramount property) and raid heaven to round up Latino angels. For good performance, Mr. Mackey wins a trip to Mar-a-Lago — here, a debauched Fantasy Island with President Trump as Mr. Roarke and Vice President JD Vance as Tattoo.

If you were making a list of the series likeliest to become voices of the Trump 2.0 resistance, “South Park” would not have been close to the top. It has savaged liberal pieties and has been credited, if not by its own creators, with inspiring a wave of “South Park conservatives.”

The show’s politics have been elusive — close to libertarian, in the neighborhood of cynical. It’s not that “South Park” is amoral — it is often deeply moralistic, summing up episodes with speeches and epiphanies. But for years, its core principle has been that people who care too righteously about any cause are ridiculous.

That message may have been a blueprint for civic nihilism, an invitation to LOL all the way to dystopia. But the show’s history may also be exactly what makes “South Park” a compelling voice at this moment. Along with its three-comma price tag, the show has amassed cultural capital, a reputation for not being in any party’s corner. (...)

Beyond the crackdown on media and academic speech, the new “South Park” also focuses on the people who feel more free than ever to speak up in the new order. Eric Cartman, the show’s Magic 8-Ball of offensiveness, begins to realize that “woke is dead”: People are free to spew the kind of slurs and insults that used to get him yelled at. A classmate steals his material — anti-Jewish conspiracy theories, kneejerk sexism — to start a hit podcast. Cartman has won, and he’s miserable. “You can just say ‘retarded’ now, nobody cares,” he moans. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” (...)

Of course, you could counter that Parker and Stone are free to mock. They have become very rich doing it, and, unlike Colbert, no one is taking their show off the air yet.

But this, too, is part of the meta point. It is still a free country. You can still say what you want. So why are so many powerful institutions behaving like it isn’t and they can’t? If a few bratty cartoon kids can peel off the emperor’s clothes, what are the grown-ups so afraid of?

The show has a theory for that, and it’s also about money. In the premiere, big institutions — up to heaven itself — are brought to heel by billion-dollar litigation. Later, Mr. Mackey quits ICE despite the pressure to swallow his qualms and go along with things he doesn’t believe because he needs to “make my nut” — that is, pay his bills.

It’s the same story either way: Everyone’s got to make their nut, even if some people’s nuts are bigger than others. Maybe it takes bleep-you money to buy your freedom. But maybe, “South Park” is telling us, freedom comes from deciding that your self-respect is priceless.

by James Poniewozik, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Comedy Central

[ed. Double thumbs up. Kristi Noem episode is an instant classic.]

How the Media Shapes a Narrative. Alaska Edition.

People show their support for Ukraine outside the Government Hill gate prior to the summit with President Donald Trump and Russia President Vladimir Putin at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025. (Bill Roth / ADN) [ed. Liberals! lol!]

Supporters of Donald Trump wave signs on Friday, Aug. 15, 2025 in Midtown. (Bob Hallinen for ADN). [ed. Whoa. Well, it is a pretty red state.]

Except, the day before there was this. Which was briefly mentioned in this link:

Several hundred protesters gathered along the Seward Highway near Northern Lights Boulevard on August 14, 2025, to protest President Donald Trump’s upcoming summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin. (Marc Lester / ADN)

by By Iris Samuels, Zachariah Hughes, Anchorage Daily News |  Read more:

Additional image: Marc Lester

[ed. So, what do we know now about how things actually went down in Anchorage. Hell if I know. And... what about that Epstein guy everyone was so worked up about last week?! Was all this just convenient and reciprocal diversion tactics (for both)? See also: Trump leaves Alaska summit with Putin empty-handed after failing to reach a deal to end Ukraine war (ADN). Update: a few more sign wavers:]

[ed. See also: The Power of the Trump-Putin Presidential Photo Op (NYT):]

The two men clasped hands, and then strode to Mr. Trump’s limo, in complementary dark suits — single-breasted, two-button — matching white shirts and coordinating ties (red for Mr. Trump, burgundy for Mr. Putin), giving the impression of kindred spirits: just two statesmen meeting on the semi-neutral ground of an airport tarmac to go talk cease-fire, their respective planes looming in the background.

That’s the picture that was caught by the waiting cameras, and those are the photos that have gone around the world to accompany reports of the nonproductive meeting.

In the absence of an actual resolution to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, they have become the takeaway. And that, said both President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine and Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, even before the meeting, was Mr. Putin’s goal in the first place.

“He is seeking, excuse me, photos,” Mr. Zelensky said. “He needs a photo from the meeting with President Trump.”

Why? Because whatever happened afterward, a photo could be publicly seen — and read — as an implicit endorsement.

After all, the Russian president has been a virtual pariah in the West since his full-scale invasion of Ukraine; accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court. Whether or not Mr. Trump was tough with him behind the closed doors of their meeting room — whether or not their talks were, as Mr. Trump later said, “productive” — what has now been preserved for posterity is Mr. Putin’s admission back into the fold.

And of all current world leaders, the only one who understands, and embraces, the power of the image quite as effectively as Mr. Trump is Mr. Putin. Both men have made themselves into caricatures through costume and scenography, the better to capture the popular imagination.

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand

Why Putin Thinks Russia Has the Upper Hand (NYT)

Vladimir V. Putin exuded confidence. Sitting back, surrounded by foreign dignitaries, the Russian president explained the futility of Ukrainian resistance. Russia had the advantage on the battlefield, as he saw it, and by rejecting his demands, Ukraine risked even more for peace.

“Keep at it, then, keep at it. It will only get worse,” Mr. Putin said at an economic forum in June, as he taunted the Ukrainian government. “Wherever a Russian soldier sets his foot, it’s ours,” he added, a smirk animating his face.

His self-assurance is born out of the Russian military’s resurgence.

In the depths of 2022, his underequipped forces were disoriented, decimated and struggling to counter Ukraine’s hit-and-run tactics and precision-guided weapons. Instead of abandoning the invasion, Mr. Putin threw the full strength of the Russian state behind the war, re-engineering the military and the economy with a singular goal of crushing Ukraine. In his push, the country revamped recruitment, weapons production and frontline tactics.

This is now a war of attrition favoring Russia, which has mobilized more men and arms than Ukraine and its Western backers. While their casualties are mounting, Russian forces are edging forward across most of the 750-mile front, strengthening Mr. Putin’s resolve to keep fighting until he gets the peace deal he wants.

via:
Image: Production of the Geran-2 drones at the Yelabuga plant; Russian television.]

NPR vs. DOGE

 Today, we’re taking a look at a predecessor to DOGE: The Reinventing Government project (officially known as the NPR, for National Partnership for Reinventing Government). The NPR ran for almost the full duration of President Bill Clinton’s two terms, and led to the elimination of over 100 programs and over 250,000 federal jobs.

Both NPR and DOGE are case studies in a long history of government reform efforts — some more successful than others. Our guest is John Kamensky, who served as Vice President Al Gore's deputy for the National Performance Review (NPR) for eight years. Kamensky was colloquially known as “Mr. Checklist” for his work organizing the Reinventing Government initiative.

We discuss:

Did the NPR actually work?
What was the Board of Tea Experts?
Why was the federal government subsidizing mohair?
NPR made the federal workforce older. Was that bad?
What doesn’t Elon understand about the federal government?

As I understand it, the Reinventing Government initiative was the longest-running government reform project in American history.

Yeah, that's how I understand it. I’ve researched previous reform efforts from the past century and haven't seen anything that had that kind of endurance.

In broad strokes, would you call the initiative a success?

I would say yes, it was a success. It changed what government employees understood their jobs to be. The goal was to empower them to be able to get results, and they felt that in many cases. We conducted a survey and found that after eight years, 40% of the civil service understood what we were trying to get at — that’s enough to create some momentum.

Even in future administrations, people still talked about some of the initiative’s outcomes. There were about 100 different statutes that included bits and pieces of our recommendations, and a number of administrative changes, like designating the deputy secretaries for various departments as chief operating officers and having them meet government-wide as the President's Management Council. I believe that has continued until today, although I don't know what the current administration's approach has been.

You’ve flagged that government reform efforts like NPR and DOGE are a recurring feature of American policy. Can you place the NPR in the context of the history of government reform efforts?

.... There’s a long history of approaches to government reform: there were efforts under Johnson and Nixon, and the Grace Commission under Reagan. Typically, advisers outside of government came in to advise on best practices from the private sector, but the Reinventing Government initiative was different. We turned to civil servants and asked them what needed to be done to fix government operations, focusing on the “how” and not so much on what the government should be doing.

What was the policy conversation like in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s, before the Reinventing Government initiative?

This was toward the tail end of Reagan’s Reform ‘88, which were largely administrative reforms. In the late ‘80s under President George H.W. Bush, the focus shifted to improving government performance and financial management, which led to the passage of the Chief Financial Officers Act (CFO Act) in 1990. I was at the GAO at the time, and I was tapped to look at how to measure and improve government performance. I wound up looking at what was going on in other countries as examples. (...)

So you're at the GAO in the late ‘80s. How did you end up at the Reinventing Government initiative?

David Osborne and I had an ongoing conversation — he was fascinated by what other countries were doing, and I was fascinated by what he was finding in the states. In a previous book called Laboratories of Democracy, he did a case study of Bill Clinton’s governorship of Arkansas, so he was in the Clinton circle. During Clinton’s presidential campaign, David Osborne drafted a speech on how Clinton could reinvent the federal government. That speech was never made, but the ideas stuck.

When they organized the transition team, Al From of the Progressive Policy Institute was leading the government reform piece. They brought in John Sharp, who was running the Texas Performance Review, and it was more like DOGE. They went into the agencies and terrorized them to find savings. On David Osborne’s suggestion, they came to me to get the international perspective.

Then in early March of 1993, Clinton gave a press conference, and said the administration would create a National Performance Review. I called my counterpart at the OMB to ask what was going on, and he said, “Well, this is the Clinton administration. This is live and unrehearsed. We don't know what's going on.”

A few days later, I get a call from Elaine Kamarck, and she says, “I just started working for Vice President Gore. He was asked to do this reinventing government thing, and David Osborne says that I need to talk to you.” They called me, Bob Stone, who was doing the reinvention of the Defense Department, and Bob Knisely, who was over in the Department of Transportation.

I told them what was going on in other countries. Bob Stone was a sort of renegade in the Defense Department, a civilian in charge of the Department’s military installations. He oversaw a large team and was trying to delegate authority; rather than having them ask whether to repave a parking lot in San Diego, he said, “No, you know whether you need to repave it, don't ask me.” So he talked about how the DoD had screwed up. Bob Knisely had worked in a lot of different civilian agencies and saw parallels there.

Elaine suggested we tell the Vice President about it. The three of us met at Bob Stone's house to figure out what we would tell the Vice President, because this was our one chance as civil servants to say what needed to be done to fix the government. Clinton had actually done total quality management when he was the governor of Arkansas and wanted the Reinventing Government initiative to consist of civil servants, rather than turning to business executives as Reagan had.

Bob Stone had developed a set of principles for his model installation program and suggested we use those. He made this “gold card,” which had those principles and Clinton and Gore’s names on it. Over the years, we handed out those cards to around 100 civil servants, but the first gold card was made in the middle of a snowstorm at Bob's house to give to Gore at our meeting the next day. Bob Stone is a storyteller at heart, and he said that we really needed to convince him of how screwed up the government is. He had a box of his “toys”: examples of how idiotic things were in the Defense Department. We decided to take it with us to the White House. The vice president has an office over in the corner, which Gore called the Square Office as opposed to the Oval Office.

The next day, we went and sat down with him, Elaine, and the deputy director for management of OMB. After we each told our stories, Bob Stone brought out the box. He took out a can of spray paint and told a story: the Defense Department hired chemists with chemistry degrees and tasked them with making sure that each can of spray paint hadn’t expired. They had to sign a little form that's stuck to the side of each can to say that the paint is still useful.

Then he pulled out a steam trap, which is a metal valve that takes dirt out of steam lines in buildings. These each cost about $100, and when they start leaking steam, they leak about $50 worth of steam a week. But the procurement people wouldn't buy a replacement until they got a bulk order. That let them get them for $90, but it took about a year to get enough orders, and you lost $50 worth of steam a week in the meantime.

Gore found this idiotic, and Bob Stone suggested letting the engineers on the base buy small items using a credit card rather than going through the procurement system. At the end, Gore asked us to come on for six months to help. I’d had no idea this was a job interview. (...)

I knew that getting detailed from the legislative to the executive branch would not go over well at GAO. Sure enough, Senator Roth was on the floor of the Senate a few weeks later, saying that this is a violation of the separation of powers. So I resigned from GAO and was picked up in the executive branch.

A vice president had never been to most of those agencies in person, so it created enormous buzz. He went from the US Department of Agriculture to the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to the central courtyard at the Pentagon, and huge crowds of enthusiastic employees showed up. The Vice President was on stage with the department secretary to listen to these people, and they would talk about some of the most embarrassing things going on in their departments that the secretary, of course, knew nothing about. And the Vice President was sitting there taking notes. When we finished our draft report, Gore asked us to change it to reflect some of what he had heard and make recommendations based on those stories. (...)

What did you prioritize in those first six months, and what did you leave on the table? That first set of recommendations did not include moving around agencies or consolidating functions.

Gore had very few dictates on what we should or shouldn't do. One of them was, “I don't want any recommendations to study this more. I want recommendations to do something.” Another was, “Don't move boxes. Fix what's inside them.” That was really sage advice, because typical government reformers want to make an org chart look rational by moving things around, even though it’s really hard and costly to do.

The last major department that we created was the Department of Homeland Security, and that was more than 20 years ago. That was really painful to create, and it took years to actually become functional. Gore believed that we had good people trapped in bad systems, which was the total quality management, W. Edwards Deming-type thing. That was sort of the mantra.

Do you think that gave NPR a longer political runway than DOGE has had? DOGE has taken on some reorganization initiatives, which come with a much higher political cost. You engender a lot more opposition.

In the second round of reinvention in ‘96, after Newt Gingrich became Speaker and the House went Republican, the NPR was asked to do a new report and study. That one was focused more on what government should do, rather than how. And much like the second Hoover Commission, it didn't land very well. Agencies were eliminated, the Interstate Commerce Commission was eliminated. My favorite was the elimination of the Board of Tea Experts, which was created in the late 1800s. (...)

With DOGE, Elon Musk has focused on holding up really egregious examples of government spending. They’re often overhyped or taken out of context, but showing millions of Twitter users what they’re cutting has been a huge focus. How much did the Clinton-Gore administration tout those examples of waste in public?

We didn't do that during the first six months. Then we issued the main report and there was a big event on the South Lawn. After that, there were 38 accompanying collateral reports for each of the agencies and systems on how to implement the recommendations in the main report. Promoting the things that were screwed up wasn’t such a big deal, and the GAO was finding a lot of them. Like, there were about seven agricultural field offices in every county in the United States.

Really?

Yeah, five to seven Department of Agriculture field offices in each of approximately 3,000 counties, including Brooklyn. There were all of these different agencies, and the Department never co-located field offices. We found closing the offices really hard because members of Congress wanted to keep them. The story that we got was that there were so many field offices because President Lincoln had said that no field office should be further than one day’s horse ride from any farmer, so field offices were about 20 miles apart. (...)

Let me ask you about some of the more difficult parts of NPR. The initiative famously cut upwards of 400,000 civil servants over those eight years; it wasn't until the last five years or so that the number of full-time federal government employees approached that 1993 peak again. How did you figure out where to cut headcount and implement it?

One later criticism of NPR was that as the number of federal employees dropped, a lot of outside contractors and what you might call Beltway Bandits ended up doing a lot of that work instead. You had this kind of dark matter version of the federal workforce: it just wasn't on the books full-time.

This goes back to empowering employees, which was one of Bob Stone’s mantras for the project. There were too many overseers and people in mission support functions — one in three civil servants were middle managers in what we called “management controls” — procurement, budget, personnel, legal. There was a 1:7 employee-to-manager ratio. Bob Stone was inspired by the business writer Tom Peters, who said that the average in the private sector is 1:15. That overhead is closer to 15% rather than 30%, so we set those two metrics as targets.

We wanted to go from 700,000 employees down to 350,000: moving 100,000 to the front line for service and returning the savings for the other 250,000 to the government. We had an initial target of 252,000, but agencies wound up cutting even more, in part because of the downsizing in the Defense Department after the end of the Cold War. We were looking at transferring some functions, like cooks, groundskeepers, and security guards at Veterans Affairs (VA) hospitals, to the private sector so that the government doesn't have to manage this enormous workforce. We saw how other countries implemented new public management theory to let agencies focus on delivering their core service and not managing police and groundskeepers, so that was the concept.

It didn't pan out that way because when we asked the agencies to cut headquarters, headquarters cut the field. And OMB wasn't really bought into what we were doing to reshape the workforce, so they let the agencies do whatever they wanted to.

Why wasn’t OMB bought in? That seems like a classically OMB thing to focus on.

Part of it was that they didn't think that the Reinventing Government people were rational. We were not traditional.

Because you were head-in-the-clouds folks?

A bit of that, but also that we were trying to empower employees, and that wasn't their shtick. OMB was more into top-down control. They have changed over the years — in fact, one of NPR’s outcomes was changing OMB, so that instead of being just budget analysts, they became resource managers. It wasn't just about money, but about how agencies function, and looking at their management and regulations.

But this didn't roll out the way we had envisioned it. There were some cases where it did, like when Jim King, who was the head of OPM at the time, cut down HR regulations and got rid of the 10,000-page personnel manual that agencies were expected to abide by.

He also worked with the agencies to downsize their staffs. That resulted in some hiring freezes, so you wouldn’t have new cohorts fall in over the years. Because of that, a gap of experience emerged, especially in procurement, which cascaded over the next 20 years.

Is that the gap the Beltway Bandits grew to fill?

In some cases, they did, but there are some functions that you just can’t delegate, like signing authority on contracts or coming up with contract strategy. We were hoping agencies would simplify HR and the procurement rules, which would let them do with fewer staff. But Congress ate dessert first and cut the number of people without simplifying the rules.

Is that what we're seeing with DOGE, where they start with the headcount cuts and hope that the regulatory cuts come later?

No, they think AI will fix it all, but it will be hard to have AI in the national parks to help someone who sprained their ankle. But they should have engaged Congress on the changes to the systems. In this current administration, we're not seeing any interaction that I can see with Congress of changing the rules of the game.

With those hiring freezes, there was a shift in the demographic composition. Federal employees started to skew older, and the share of federal workers under 35 fell by about 10% over the eight years of the NPR.

When you combine that with the median GS grade, the median place on the pay scale in the federal government is higher now than it was 20 years ago. That makes it a lot harder to fill roles with junior talent, or bring people through the ranks from a young age.

What do you make of that effect of the NPR?

There's also a shift in the mix of work that's done. For example, during NPR, the HR processes and agencies were manual, and they have since become electronic. In many agencies, small-time procurements were manual, and you had triplicate forms that took weeks to complete, and the administrative cost of processing those forms was horrendous, so they moved to credit cards. Interestingly, the current administration has reneged on the use of credit cards, and it's costing the government money. In fact, when there was credit card abuse in some agency late in the Clinton administration, Congressman Pete Sessions put in a bill to stop the use of credit cards, but the Congressional Budget Office came back and said, “That'll cost you $100 million in rebates.”

That's amazing. The rebates were a substantial chunk of money.

Yeah. You have to balance risk with the ability to get stuff done. If you want no risk, it’ll be very expensive.

Right. The current administration wants to centralize procurement at GSA, and we've seen some moves in that direction. As you describe, there's a constant pendulum swing between pushing purchasing and management authority lower into the system, and then realizing the risk and pulling it back. Then, once it's centralized, you realize that you've limited your ability to trust the outer branches of the federal government.

There are pros and cons of centralizing. One of the things that we saw was that, at the time, the US government was the last vestige of Soviet central planning. We needed to devolve that. The government had a choice between different administrative service centers, which we call franchise funds, and those still exist today. There were six or eight different franchise funds created across the government, so the Department of Health and Human Services would be able to service contracts and HR for other agencies, which allowed for transparency about how much an administrative process costs and created some competition between agencies. If an agency head gets fed up with how their procurement contracts are done, they can go to another agency. By recentralizing, you will initially gain some efficiencies, which will turn into inefficiencies over a few years as it becomes a non-responsive monopoly. (..)

If you and I are talking again at the end of this administration, what are we likely to see as the effect of DOGE four years from now?

I think we're going to see agencies lose the capacity to do things that Americans assume just happen, and that they'll see enormous holes in the safety net of what government does and how it delivers. The Clinton-Gore administration was very concerned about losing citizen trust in government, which would make it hard to maintain a democracy. By the end of the administration, it had gone from something like 20% to 40%, and now it's really low again. With DOGE, I think it will fall even further.

Let’s say Elon really is stepping back, and imagine you get installed at DOGE. Everything that’s happened already is already baked in, and there are a bunch of headcount cuts that are not being rolled back, a bunch of attempts to centralize procurement, the implementation of these digital systems, etc.

How would you try to right the ship?

You can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I don't think you can go back to where we were. The question is, “What will government look like next?” I think we’re going to have a period of huge turmoil in terms of service delivery, like no one answering the phones in the Social Security Administration, and that the current immigration enforcement efforts will lead to loss of trust in the immigration system. Will student loans still work? A lot will get broken down, and I think a lot of people are going to get hurt.

So we need to ask how to develop a new approach or system, and I have not yet come up with that answer. There is a group of people that seems to be trying to develop that, and that is where my hope lies. I think a lot of it will be a matter of using technology. We've broken things so far, but we haven't come up with a plan for how to replace or fix them in a way that makes a difference for people's lives.

by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. So, in this administration young tech bros not burdened by history (or anything else apparently, including puberty), were put in charge with no clue - and continue to be embedded like viruses, sucking up classified data.]