As Gen X and Boomers Age, Confronting Living Alone

Jay Miles has lived his 52 years without marriage or children, which has suited his creative ambitions as a videographer in Connecticut and, he said, his mix of “independence and stubbornness.” But he worries about who will take care of him as he gets older.

Donna Selman, a 55-year old college professor in Illinois, is mostly grateful to be single, she said, because her mother and aunts never had the financial and emotional autonomy that she enjoys.

Mary Felder, 65, raised her children, now grown, in her rowhouse in Philadelphia. Her home has plenty of space for one person, but upkeep is expensive on the century-old house.

Ms. Felder, Mr. Miles and Ms. Selman are members of one of the country’s fastest-growing demographic groups: people 50 and older who live alone.

In 1960, just 13 percent of American households had a single occupant. But that figure has risen steadily, and today it is approaching 30 percent. For households headed by someone 50 or older, that figure is 36 percent.

Nearly 26 million Americans 50 or older now live alone, up from 15 million in 2000. Older people have always been more likely than others to live by themselves, and now that age group — baby boomers and Gen Xers — makes up a bigger share of the population than at any time in the nation’s history. (...)

In interviews, many older adults said they feel positively about their lives.

But while many people in their 50s and 60s thrive living solo, research is unequivocal that people aging alone experience worse physical and mental health outcomes and shorter life spans.

And even with an active social and family life, people in this group are generally more lonely than those who live with others, according to Dr. Schafer’s research.

In many ways, the nation’s housing stock has grown out of sync with these shifting demographics. Many solo adults live in homes with at least three bedrooms, census data shows, but find that downsizing is not easy because of a shortage of smaller homes in their towns and neighborhoods.

Compounding the challenge of living solo, a growing share of older adults — about 1 in 6 Americans 55 and older — do not have children, raising questions about how elder care will be managed in the coming decades. (...)

With Space to Spare

Katy Mattingly, 52, an executive secretary, bought a house in Ypsilanti, Mich., three years ago. It is small but offers plenty of space, with three bedrooms.

The question for her, and many other single homeowners, is whether they can cash in when they get older.

Ms. Mattingly said she did not think she would ever be able to pay down the mortgage and build wealth.

“It’s implausible that I’ll ever be able to retire,” she said.

Living solo in homes with three or more bedrooms sounds like a luxury but, experts said, it is a trend driven less by personal choice than by the nation’s limited housing supply. Because of zoning and construction limitations in many cities and towns, there is a nationwide shortage of homes below 1,400 square feet, which has driven up the cost of the smaller units that do exist, according to research from Freddie Mac.

Forty years ago, units of less than 1,400 square feet made up about 40 percent of all new home construction; today, just 7 percent of new builds are smaller homes, despite the fact that the number of single-person households has surged.

This has made it more difficult for older Americans to downsize, as a large, aging house can often command less than what a single adult needs to establish a new, smaller home and pay for their living and health care expenses in retirement.

People in this group often face the reality that “it’s more expensive to get a smaller condo than the single family you’re selling — and that presumes the condo exists, which may not be the case,” said Jennifer Molinsky, director of the Housing an Aging Society Program at Harvard University.

And when they hold onto family-size houses well into retirement, there are fewer spacious homes placed on the market for young families, who in turn squeeze into smaller units or withstand long commutes in a search for affordable housing.

“Both ends of the age distribution are getting squeezed,” said Jenny Schuetz, an expert on housing and urban economics at the Brookings Institution.

by Dana Goldstein and Robert Gebeloff, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Sahar Coston-Hardy for The New York Times
[ed. Seems like pretty common knowledge. Btw...I don't know if readers are still hitting NYT (or other) paywalls, but if so try Quick Javascript Switcher.]

via:

The Illogic of Nuclear Escalation

This past summer, a bipartisan majority of Congress, with the blessing of President Biden, approved a massive military-spending bill that included $51 billion for nuclear weapons — nearly 20 percent more than allotted by the previous year’s budget, which itself broke previous records. Earlier in the spring, the Biden administration sent to congress a Nuclear Posture Review, committing to upgrade all three “legs” of the “strategic Triad” — including a new missile-launching submarine, a new bomber and a new land-based intercontinental ballistic missile — as well as a bevy of new bombs and warheads for these weapons to launch or drop. Since these weapons are still in development or the early phases of production, the costs are bound to grow; the price tag for the refurbished Triad alone is estimated at $2 trillion over the next 30 years.

The official rationale for this upgrade is that the existing subs, bombers and ICBMs are approaching obsolescence. Even if this claim were true (more about that later), it begs the question of whether the arsenal needs to be as large as it is. A serious assessment of the arsenal must begin by asking “How much is enough?” and, its corollary query, “Enough to do what?”

Yet in the debate over America’s nuclear stockpile, to the extent there is debate, these questions are going unasked. It is hard to have an informed public debate, as many of the issues are classified, esoteric or both. But even the debates in Congress and inside the executive branch tend to be shallow. Almost nobody is asking those basic questions. In fact, in the 60-plus years of the nuclear arms race, almost nobody ever has. (...)

1100 Declassified U.S. nuclear targets, 1956From the national Security Archives

President Dwight Eisenhower, a retired five-star Army general and WWII commander, was not at all bloodthirsty; once he understood the power of nuclear weapons, he feared and detested them. But he also believed, as did most officials and analysts, that if the U.S. and the USSR ever locked arms, even in a “small” war over a narrow strip of territory in Europe or Asia, it would soon escalate to nuclear exchanges. So the wise policy would be to deter the Soviets from attacking in the first place, and the best way to do that, he figured, was to warn them that we’d blow them to smithereens if they did. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, called the policy “massive retaliation,” and the Joint Chiefs of Staff — composed of the top U.S. military officers — translated it into a war plan that italicized massive.

Few realized at the time, or in the years since, just how massive it was. By 1960, the U.S. war plan called for launching the entire nuclear arsenal — at the time, 3,423 weapons, exploding with the blast power of 7,847 megatons — against 1,043 targets in the Soviet Union, its satellite countries in Eastern Europe and Communist China. This was not a plan to strike back if the Soviets launched a nuclear attack on the U.S.; it was a plan to strike first if the Soviets mounted a non-nuclear invasion against U.S. allies.

Some in Washington asked how many people such an attack would kill. The answer that came back from those who devised the war plan at Strategic Air Command (SAC) in Omaha was 275 million. Such a figure had previously been inconceivable. No one could imagine a war aim that required killing so many civilians.

What’s striking is that, even so, no one among the few officials privy to this plan questioned its validity or how the numbers were calculated. They never asked whether such a massive arsenal, or such a cataclysmic attack, was necessary for national security.

The plan was founded, in large part, on the basis of self-interest. SAC — the branch of the now-independent U.S. Air Force that controlled nuclear plans and operations — had set up a unit called the Joint Strategic Target Planning Staff (JSTPS). Its job was to find every plausible target inside the Soviet empire, then assign U.S. nuclear weapons to destroy each one. As JSTPS found more targets, SAC had a rationale to request more weapons. As the Soviets matched the U.S. arms buildup, they created more targets — thus driving the rationale for still more U.S. bombs and warheads. (...)

In 1989, soon after George H.W. Bush was sworn in as president, his secretary of defense, Dick Cheney, was briefed on the latest version of the nuclear war plan. Cheney asked his assistant on strategic issues, a civilian analyst named Franklin Miller, to sit in. Miller had perused the array of classified documents reciting the rationales for limited nuclear options. Yet, he noticed, the briefing said nothing about such options.

Cheney and Miller were also struck by one detail in the war plan: It called for hitting the Soviet transportation network with 725 nuclear weapons. Cheney asked the briefer, a SAC general, why. The general shrugged and said he’d get back to him on that. (He never did.) After the meeting, Cheney told Miller to go out to Strategic Air Command’s headquarters, in Omaha, and conduct a thorough review of the war plan; he alerted the officers at SAC that Miller should have full authority to look at everything.

What Miller discovered made the term “overkill” seem a gross understatement. For example, just outside Moscow, the Soviets had an ancient anti-ballistic missile system holding 68 interceptors. After the Cold War, U.S. inspectors discovered that the system was completely useless. But the war plan specified that the site had to be destroyed with near-total certainty. SAC intelligence estimated (incorrectly) that each of the Soviet interceptors had a high probability of shooting down an incoming American warhead. So, JSTPS — Omaha’s nuclear targeting agency — assigned 69 warheads to hit the site, to make absolutely certain that at least one of the warheads got through.

Another jaw-dropping example: One part of the nuclear war plan called for destroying the Soviet tank army. As a result, JSTPS aimed a lot of weapons at not only the tanks themselves, but also the factory that produced the tanks, the steel mill that supplied the factory, the ore-processing facility that supplied the steel mill, and the mine that furnished the ore. Miller and his staff learned that some SAC analysts had already pointed out the excesses. A branch of math called nodal analysis suggested that, as long as the central links of a supply system were destroyed, there was no need to destroy every single piece; in many cases, just a few warheads, aimed at the right targets, would cripple the system. Gradually, Miller realized that the entire war plan was like this — a senseless aggregate of compartmentalized calculations.

Then came the key revelation. At this point the Bush administration was negotiating the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with the Soviets. During one of his trips, one of Miller’s assistants asked a JSTPS officer whether the treaty’s prospective cuts would affect SAC’s ability to fulfill its mission — whether the U.S. could continue to deter nuclear war and limit damage if deterrence failed. The officer replied that he didn’t do that sort of analysis. JSTPS, he went on, was prohibited from setting requirements or analyzing whether a certain kind of attack, with a certain number of weapons, would be militarily effective. When asked what the JSTPS actually did, the officer explained that they take all the weapons that are assigned to SAC and aim them at all the targets on the list.

The code was unlocked. It turned out that the war plan was based on supply, not demand — on how many weapons SAC happened to have, not on how many were needed.

by Fred Kaplan, Asterisk Magazine |  Read more:

Image: Future of Life Institute

It’s Public Land. But the Public Can’t Reach It.

The first time I showed the app to someone who had never used it, I had to gently extract my phone from the person’s hand. This happened the second time, too, and was followed by an email requesting the name of “that mapping program.”

The app is called OnX. Its basic functionality is simple: OnX shows you where you are in real time, using a blue dot exactly the same as the one on Google Maps. The difference is that OnX is designed to show where you are in a forest, on a mountain or in a canyon. It has been around since 2009 and is popular with hunters and outdoor enthusiasts.

It is also at the root of a potentially far-reaching case in federal court in which a Wyoming landowner accuses four hunters of trespassing — and causing millions of dollars in damage — even though they never stepped foot on his land.

OnX was born when Eric Siegfried, a mechanical engineer and part-time hunting guide in Montana, decided to make a Google Maps for the wilderness. He had solid navigation skills, he said, but was sick of getting lost.

To address the problem, he filled up a workspace in his wife’s scrapbooking room in Missoula with U.S. government maps, which he then loaded onto a microchip. OnX’s layers of data would eventually include everything from wind patterns to fire histories. The most important data by far, however, showed property lines. (...)

Property data is often inaccurate and outdated, and early in the development of OnX Mr. Siegfried found himself asking, “Why is there no nationwide picture of land ownership, of public and private property boundaries, of who owns what?”

This was the “game changer,” he has said. By collating state and county data and putting it on a microchip, Mr. Siegfried turned the project in the scrapbooking room into a company that just received more than $87 million from investors and that understands the American landscape arguably better than the government does.

It turned OnX almost overnight into a popular tool for the nation’s 15 million hunters.

In answering the question of who owns what, OnX helped bring to light how much public land — often highly coveted — is not reachable by the public. That’s because private landowners control access.

Across America, 15 million acres of state and federal land lies surrounded by private land, with no legal entry by road or trail. Most can be found scattered across the West, moated by ranches and corporate holdings. Such “landlocked land,” if it were one contiguous piece, would form the largest national park in the country, an area nearly the size of Vermont, New Hampshire and Connecticut. (...)

Throughout the West, hand-held technology has added a volatile ingredient to an already simmering conflict between landowners and outdoor recreationists. In small town after small town, the increased visibility of property lines on devices has coincided with a generational shift in land ownership, as wealthy out-of-state buyers have scooped up vast portions of countryside.

Many of the new owners, after buying old ranches where hunting access was generally permissive, have converted them into tightly controlled private hunting experiences charging upward of ten thousand dollars for a single elk. (...)

Using OnX’s 3-D view, hunters can zoom in on the mountain’s rugged, varied terrain, which provides abundant refuge for pronghorn antelope, black bear and mule deer. They might even pinpoint the ledge where they intend to perch on Opening Day, waiting for one of the mountain’s 2,000-pound bull elk to pass by.

More important than its game-friendly topography, however, what Elk Mountain offers is landlocked land — and a legal loophole of sorts, offering access for a hunter willing to take risks.

Most of the nearby area is owned by Fred Eshelman, a drug company founder from North Carolina. In 2005, Mr. Eshelman bought a 50-square-mile ranch encompassing much of the mountain and multiple trout-filled lakes. His large home is visible for miles. And as he settled in, he aggressively moved to ward off hunters. (Not because he opposes hunting. Mr. Eshelman is a mountain lion hunter.)

However, he couldn’t keep the public out, for interspersed within his property lay 27 parcels — 11,000 acres in total, an area the size of several airports — owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management and the State of Wyoming.

Hunters tend to steer clear. “If you cross, they call the sheriff,” reported one poster on Hunt Talk, a message board. Wyoming has multiple laws against trespassing. And “if you were looking for a red-as-red county where people are pro property rights,” said Sabrina King, a lobbyist for the Wyoming chapter of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, Carbon County, home of Elk Mountain, “would be it.”

Some hunters have long believed, however, that the publicly owned parcels on Elk Mountain can be legally reached using a practice called corner-crossing.

Corner-crossing can be visualized in terms of a checkerboard. Ever since the Westward Expansion, much of the Western United States has been divided into alternating squares of public and private land. Corner-crossers, like checker pieces, literally step from one public square to another in diagonal fashion, avoiding trespassing charges. The practice is neither legal nor illegal. Most states discourage it, but none ban it.

by Ben Ryder Howe, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Elk Mtn. Wyoming/ James Stukenberg for The New York Times

Semaglutidonomics

Semaglutide started off as a diabetes medication. Pharma company Novo Nordisk developed it in the early 2010s, and the FDA approved it under the brand names Ozempic® (for the injectable) and Rybelsus® (for the pill).

Patients reported significant weight loss as a side effect. Semaglutide was a GLP-1 agonist, a type of drug that has good theoretical reasons to affect weight, so Novo Nordisk studied this and found that yes, it definitely caused people to lose a lot of weight. More weight than any safe drug had ever caused people to lose before. In 2021, the FDA approved semaglutide for weight loss under the brand name Wegovy®.

Weight loss pills have a bad reputation. But Wegovy is a big step up. It doesn’t work for everybody. But it works for 66-84% of people, depending on your threshold.

(Source)

Of six major weight loss drugs, only two - Wegovy and Qsymia - have a better than 50-50 chance of helping you lose 10% of your weight. Qsymia works partly by making food taste terrible; it can also cause cognitive issues. Wegovy feels more natural; patients just feel full and satisfied after they’ve eaten a healthy amount of food. You can read the gushing anecdotes here (plus some extra anecdotes in the comments). Wegovy patients also lose more weight on average than Qsymia patients - 15% compared to 10%. It’s just a really impressive drug.

Until now, doctors didn’t really use medication to treat obesity; the drugs either didn’t work or had too many side effects. They recommended either diet and exercise (for easier cases) or bariatric surgery (for harder ones). Semaglutide marks the start of a new generation of weight loss drugs that are more clearly worthwhile.

Modeling Semaglutide Accessibility

40% of Americans are obese - that’s 140 million people. Most of them would prefer to be less obese. Suppose that a quarter of them want semaglutide. That’s 35 million prescriptions. Semaglutide costs about $15,000 per year, multiply it out, that’s about $500 billion.

Americans currently spend $300 billion per year total on prescription drugs. So if a quarter of the obese population got semaglutide, that would cost almost twice as much as all other drug spending combined. It would probably bankrupt half the health care industry.

So . . . most people who want semaglutide won’t get it? Unclear. America’s current policy for controlling medical costs is to buy random things at random prices, then send all the bills to an illiterate reindeer-herder named Yagmuk, who burns them for warmth. Anything could happen!

Right now, only about 50,000 Americans take semaglutide for obesity. I’m basing this off this report claiming “20,000 weekly US prescriptions” of Wegovy; since it’s taken once per week, maybe this means there are 20,000 users? Or maybe each prescription contains enough Wegovy to last a month and there are 80,000 users? I’m not sure, but it’s somewhere in the mid five digits, which I’m rounding to 50,000.

That’s only 0.1% of the potential 35 million. The next few sections of this post are about why so few people are on semaglutide, and whether we should expect that to change. I’ll start by going over my model of what determines semaglutide use, then look at a Morgan Stanley projection of what will happen over the next decade.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: Silverman et.; Jastreboff. et al.; wegovy.com; IQVIA; Morgan Stanley Research

[ed. Pharmaceutical economics.]

Moët Hails New ‘Roaring 20s'

The company behind Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot, Krug and Dom Pérignon has said it is “running out of stock on our best champagnes” as the wealthy spend big on luxury goods in a new “roaring 20s” age of decadence.

Working Britons may have suffered the biggest slump in living standards since records began in the 1950s, but according to the head of LVMH’s wines and spirits division, “pent-up demand” following the easing of coronavirus restrictions has prompted a run on the finest fizz.

The chief executive of Moët Hennessy, Philippe Schaus, said 2022 would be “a fabulous year” for its champagne – which starts at about £40 a bottle and can runs into the thousands – as evidenced by stocks running low in the company’s network of cellars that stretch for 17 miles under the town of Epernay in France’s Champagne region.

“We are running out of stock on our best champagnes. As people are coming out of Covid there’s been pent up demand for luxury, enjoyment and travelling,” Schaus told Bloomberg in an interview at New Economy Forum in Singapore on Tuesday.

He said the leap in demand had been so big that, internally, the company was referring to the current boom as “the roaring 20s”, a reference to the economic prosperity of a century ago.

Schaus – whose wines and spirits division includes Glenmorangie single malt whiskies, Belvedere vodka and New Zealand’s Cloudy Bay wine – did not state which champagnes were running low, or how low stocks had fallen.

In its latest financial results, LVMH said its “Champagne Maisons” had “enjoyed excellent momentum, which increased pressure on supplies”. The company, which is part-owned and run by France’s richest person, Bernard Arnault, said growth was particularly strong in Europe, the United States and Japan and had been “led by tourism recovery”. Overall, champagne and wine sales were up 32% in the first nine months of 2022 compared with 2021.(...)

It’s not just champagne that’s flying off shelves. Luxury goods companies across the world have recently reported booming sales in everything from designer label clothing and handbags to expensive watches and supercars as the ranks of the ultra wealthy hit record highs.

There are now record 218,200 people classed as ultra-high net worth (UHNW), with assets of more than $50m (£43.7m), according to research by the investment bank Credit Suisse. It said there had been “almost an explosion of wealth” during the recovery from the pandemic.

by Rupert Neate, The Guardian | Read more:

Image: François Nascimbeni/AFP/Getty
[ed. Yay.]

An Alaskan Town Is Losing Ground—and a Way of Life

For years, Kivalina has been cited—like the Maldives, in the Indian Ocean, or the island nation of Tuvalu, in the Pacific—as an example of the existential threat posed to low-lying islands by climate change. In the past two decades, stormwaters have overtopped Kivalina at least once, threatening lives and infrastructure. In 2003, the Government Accountability Office reviewed nine Alaskan villages and identified Kivalina as one of four in “imminent danger.” (Of those four, only one, Newtok, a Yupik village near the Bering Sea, has been able to move some of its residents.) A more recent report designated Kivalina as one of seventy-three Alaska Native villages threatened with destruction because of erosion, flooding, and permafrost degradation. On a visit to the state in 2015, President Barack Obama flew over Kivalina and posted a photograph of the island on social media from the air. “There aren’t many other places in America that have to deal with questions of relocation right now,” Obama wrote, “but there will be.” He described what was happening in the village as “America’s wake-up call.”

Seven years later, Kivalina’s move is still mostly in the future, even though the island continues to lose ground. Building housing is an expensive and laborious process in the remote Arctic, and no single federal agency is responsible for relocating communities facing environmental threats. After more than a decade of navigating government bureaucracies, tribal members successfully lobbied for the construction of a bridge from Kivalina to the mainland. Its completion, in 2021, created a vital evacuation route where once the only possibility of escape was by water or air. The bridge is part of an eight-mile road that zigzags across the tundra, which is covered in snow in winter and prone to flooding in spring and fall. It ends at the foot of a large hill, where a newly constructed school forms the heart of the future village. More years are likely to pass before homes are built there, even as engineers predicted, in 2013, that Kivalina will be fully under water by 2025. The new site is a desolate and rocky place, but, at an elevation of a hundred and twenty-five feet, it is a safe distance from Kivalina’s receding beach and eroding riverbanks. Until the community can move inland, residents live with the worry that the right storm at the right moment could wipe out everything. (...)

One afternoon, I set off to visit Janet Mitchell at her house, a wooden building in the center of the village. It was a brilliantly sunny day, with clear skies and temperatures in the mid-forties. The equinox had just passed; the snow that blankets the island for most of the year had not started falling, but the change of seasons was in the air. I walked past houses with snowmobiles parked haphazardly outside, and dogs chained to fenceposts. A family were putting away a harpoon, used to hunt beluga in the summer, and readying their boat for seining, the net fishing that happens in the fall. Another family rolled past on A.T.V.s. They were bundled up in parkas, with rifles strapped to their backs, heading inland to look for moose and caribou. (Before the bridge was built, people had to travel upriver by boat to hunt in the interior.)

The caribou, part of the Western Arctic herd, were late showing up this year, a much discussed subject in the village. The seining had also been delayed. In Kivalina, fish are traditionally left to age on the riverbanks for at least several days before being eaten or stored in freezers. (“The Western people call them stinky fish,” a villager explained to me, “but here we call them ambrosia.”) If the fish are caught too early in the season, before the frost, they spoil. The fall had been warm, and the thin layer of ice known in Inupiat as qinu, which used to begin forming over the lagoon in late August, had not yet appeared by the last week of September. The puddles in the road which froze overnight would melt by midmorning.

Mitchell, who has gray hair and a friendly demeanor, welcomed me into her living room. Dressed in a black T-shirt and sweats, she was seated on a couch beneath a large photograph of her grandfather Clinton Swan, a whaling captain, a member of the tribal council, and a minister in the Episcopal Church, from whom she had inherited the house. In the picture, the elderly Swan looks dapper in a red lumberjack shirt, suspenders, and nineteen-fifties-style glasses with black-topped rims; in his left hand, he holds a small whale’s tail carved out of walrus ivory. The Swans are one of several families who are active in village politics. (Captains of whaling crews, which are typically organized by family, are also integral to the community, even though a bowhead whale has not been caught in Kivalina in more than two decades.) Above the photograph, wolf and wolverine furs were draped over a clothesline—they belonged to Mitchell’s mother, who died in 2019. A computer and headphones lay on a coffee table, and on a shelf was a large pile of hard drives, evidence of Mitchell’s years of digital documentation, which include audio recordings with older relatives and video footage of major storms.

Mitchell grew up in a sod house on the site of the house she now lives in, part of a multigenerational compound presided over by her great-grandmother Regina, who was born in 1870. In the summer, the family would move into tents on the beach, where it was much cooler. It is common in Inupiat families for grandparents to adopt a grandchild to help them around the house as they age. When Mitchell was eight or nine, her grandmother chose her to come live with her and her husband, just as today Mitchell’s grandson Aaron lives with Mitchell. Her youth was one of physical labor—chopping wood, lugging ice, and hanging the slabs of ugruk, or bearded seal, that her grandmother butchered. Mitchell’s family followed the subsistence food-gathering patterns of the seasons, and in the spring she would sometimes join her father’s whaling crew at their encampment on the ice, to hunt bowhead whales. Mitchell reminisced about the years when the arrival of qinu marked the time to dig whale out of underground caches, “the permafrost freezers, if you will,” she said. “That’s when they would pull out the maktak and distribute it to the whole village. They always waited for qinu.”

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

According to oral histories recorded in the late nineteen-sixties and early nineteen-seventies, the region that Kivalina occupies today was known in the nineteenth century as Kivalliñiq, and the people who inhabited the area, the Kivalliñigmiut, were considered their own nation. Until the mid-nineteenth century, they had only minimal contact with Westerners. Then American whalers came to the region, decimating the bowhead and walrus populations and contributing to the spread of deadly epidemics. The Kivalliñigmiut nation was scattered by famine in the early eighteen-eighties, but for Mitchell’s great-grandmother’s generation the barrier island of Kivalina remained a summer base from which to hunt marine mammals: ugruk, walrus, and beluga whales. In late summer and fall, when the caribou arrived and fish migrated upriver, families would travel inland, setting up camp with winter supplies of meat and oil.

Kivalina remained a sparsely populated seasonal hunting ground until 1905, when the federal government constructed a school there. Like many Alaska Native villages situated on shorelines and riverbanks around the state, Kivalina was presumably chosen because of its accessibility by water. The government, in mandating the attendance of the region’s children, began a project of forced settlement in a place that was seen as precarious from the outset. Mitchell maintains a history of Kivalina on a Web site, which references the oldest known written request for relocation. A teacher named Clinton S. Replogle wrote an official report in 1911: Kivalina “is very beautifully situated when the weather is nice and calm, but when the wind blows from the south it raises the water in the ocean until it sometimes almost comes over the banks. . . . We believe that to move would be the wiser if not the safer plan.”

The subject of relocation was raised again many times during the next century. In 1963, the tribe voted on the issue, and a split vote resulted in the community’s staying on the island. It was in the nineteen-seventies that the village’s wooden houses replaced the sod ones. There were other changes, too. Snow machines (as snowmobiles are known in Alaska) replaced dogsled teams. Outboard motorboats and Hondas (regional shorthand for the four-wheel A.T.V.s that everyone in Kivalina uses to get around) replaced skin boats. Stove oil replaced driftwood for heat. An airstrip, completed in 1960, connected Kivalina by air to the rest of Alaska and beyond. Electrification arrived in 1971.

Today, Mitchell works as the shareholder-relations coördinator in Kivalina for the nana Regional Corporation, which is owned by Inupiat shareholders who live or have roots in Northwest Alaska. The corporation was formed after the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, in 1971, which ceded some forty million acres of land in Alaska to Native-owned corporations (in exchange for their relinquishing claims over the rest) and offered Native Alaskans a stake in the sale of oil and mineral leases on their land. The act gave Native Alaskans greater self-determination, but it also linked their economic w ell-being to the commercial exploitation of their lands.

by Emily Witt, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Ash Adams for The New Yorker
[ed. I usually skip over disaster travelogues (as I imagine them) but Ms. Witt is an excellent writer and captures well the lives and lifestyles of many people in Alaska's remote villages - the conflicts between traditional cultures, history, modernization, and powerless frustration. See also: Climate change from A to Z - the stories we tell ourselves about the future (New Yorker).]

Apocalypse Nowish

The sense of an ending 

I first read the Book of Revelation in a green pocket-size King James New Testament published by the motel missionaries Gideons International. I was in seventh grade. I remember reading the tiny Bible in the hallway outside my chemistry classroom, in which lurked a boy I loathed named Glenn, who would make fun of my Journey T-shirts. It would be years before I really got into Iron Maiden, but at my friend Jonathan’s house I’d heard Barry Clayton’s creepy recitation of Revelation 13:18 on the title track of The Number of the Beast: “Let him who hath understanding reckon the number of the beast: for it is a human number; its number is six hundred and sixty-six.”

I wanted to know what that was all about. My father was so dismissive of any form of religious thought that I was in second grade before I realized that some people believed in the devil, whom I had drawn for an art project. My teacher wouldn’t post my drawing on the wall with the others, on the grounds that it might offend Christian sensibilities, though it was a standard cartoonish red devil with horns, pitchfork, and pointy tail. I was nonplussed: surely Satan was a fictional character, like Santa Claus or Batman. (Of course he is, my dad explained that night, but not everyone realizes this.) (...)

Anyway, I thought Revelation was deranged, and I loved it. “And I heard a voice from heaven, as the voice of many waters, and as the voice of a great thunder: and I heard the voice of harpers harping with their harps.” Its closing lines struck me then and still strike me as immeasurably moving: “He which testifieth these things saith, Surely I come quickly. Amen. Even so, come, Lord Jesus.”

In the decades following Jesus’ death, the apocalypse was believed to be so imminent that Paul felt he had to hurry, complaining that barely had he begun to spread the gospel in one place when another beckoned to him. In the first few centuries of the Christian era, the world was “a dark house full of war,” as Anthony the Great wrote from the desert, and heavy shit was being revealed to prophets all over the place. Some of it has been passed down in text, such as the Secret Book of John, to whom “a figure with several forms within the light” appeared to tell of “what is, what was, and what is to come, that you may understand what is invisible and what is visible; and to teach you about the unshakable race of perfect humankind.” (...)

I’ve been thinking about all this lately for obvious reasons. We live in a dark house full of war. Not that I anticipate the Christian eschaton—who needs divine revelation when you can google “more plastic than fish by 2050”? Nor have I been “black-pilled.” I didn’t ask to get “Eve of Destruction” stuck in my head. I desperately want us to get our shit together. We could build a free society that doesn’t view the planet as a profit engine. I just really doubt that we will. Climate disaster, economic collapse, war, resurgent fascism and nationalism, assaults on basic political freedoms, mass violence: all these mutually reinforcing in a sinister feedback loop, the structural stresses of capital’s death throes accelerating ecological catastrophe and exacerbating reactionary forces, which in turn further stress the structure. The collapse won’t be a single event, but a slide into what the world-systems analyst Giovanni Arrighi calls “systemic chaos.” Late-capitalist society is a coyote suspended above an abyss, believing he still stands on solid ground. We are in the interval before he notices he’s supported by thin air and plummets to the canyon floor. (...)

Today’s apocalyptic structure of feeling differs from its predecessors in that it is totally pessimistic. “Remain calm,” communist theorist Bifo Berardi advises readers. “Don’t be attached to life, and most of all: don’t have hope, that addictive poisonous weed.” Nuclear warheads may or may not fall from the skies. Ditto Jesus. But the planet will get hotter. Even in the most realistically optimistic scenario, coral reefs face complete die-off, sea levels rise, and entire species and ecosystems vanish. Extreme weather—storms, wildfires, floods, droughts—will become ever more commonplace. And of course it is the less optimistic scenarios that are more likely to come to pass. (...)

As a synecdoche for the tragedy of our historical moment, consider a news item about the murder of nineteen schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas. One victim, ten-year-old Maite Rodriguez, was identifiable only by the green Converse sneakers she wore. She had drawn a heart on her right shoe. After the actor Matthew McConaughey, for some reason delivering a press briefing at the White House, made this detail known to the public, the shoes sold out as appalled consumers ordered them online.

It is impossible to understand a society whose response to the slaughter of children is to purchase green Converse sneakers as anything other than psychotic. It is impossible, I believe, to wish for such a society to continue—a society that is also bent on murdering as many other forms of life as possible, driving entire species extinct, rendering the planet uninhabitable. To say nothing of the millions of incarcerated souls, the hundreds of millions living in slums while the superrich eat like emperors on private jets. And on and on. No, “I always wanted this world ended,” as the communist Franco Fortini said.

Within the limits of history, there is no solution, whether we look to climate accords or philanthropic billionaires. Liberals stroll the fairylands of blue waves and Green New Deals or cling to the hope that science will save us, through geoengineering or nuclear power, carbon capture or magic beans. I think of Los, in Blake’s Jerusalem, “Striving with Systems to deliver Individuals from those Systems.” The crisis cannot be resolved from within the institutions that gave rise to the crisis.

by y Michael Robbins, Harper's | Read more:
Image: Kiss the Son (detail, center panel of triptych), by Nicora Gangi © The artist

The Many Complex Layers of the Monument to Crazy Horse

Of all the striking monuments you might encounter while driving an overstuffed minivan west across the United States, few leave quite as intense and complex an impression as the Crazy Horse Memorial — the vast unfinished carving of the Oglala Lakota warrior, whose face emerges as an 87-foot-high profile from the side of Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills, about 17 miles from Mount Rushmore.

Rushmore is complex in its own way, of course: a gleaming monument to the heroes of the American Republic, sunwashed by day and lit up in the twilight, that doubles as a darker monument to the Republic’s sins, set amid land held sacred by its native inhabitants that was promised to them by treaty and conquered unjustly soon thereafter.

But Rushmore’s duality still feels simpler than the layers of significance and controversy around the monument to Crazy Horse. The unfinishedness alone makes the project fascinating: At present it’s mostly just the face, an immense profile looming above a terraced-looking rock formation that’s supposed to become a charging horse. Depending on your perspective it can seem like a monument to persistent American ambition (in its final form it will be one of the largest statues in the world) or a symbol of our national sclerosis (since Rushmore was completed in about a decade-and-a-half and the Crazy Horse Memorial began in 1948 and has no clear completion date).

Then there is the question of what the statue actually memorializes. Is it an answer to the white presidential faces just a short (if winding) drive away, a symbol of Native American resilience and power? That’s how it was envisioned by the Lakota elder who originally commissioned it, and the complex of tourist enticements around the mountain is presented as a shrine to Native culture and tradition.

But the monument also feels, at certain moments, more like a shrine to its presiding genius, the Polish-American sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski — a figure of undoubted brilliance and a certain megalomania who died in 1982 and was buried in the tomb he built for himself at the base of the mountain. This left the (privately funded) project in the hands of a foundation steeped in Ziolkowski family influence — which means that when you pay your entrance fee, it’s the Crazy Horse Memorial Foundation that gets the revenue, and when you drop some money on Native American jewelry in the gift shop, you’re funding a for-profit entity called Korczak’s Heritage, Inc.

Which in turn is just a layer atop the more fundamental question of whether this way of celebrating Indigenous heroism actually does appropriate honor to Crazy Horse or the Lakota way of life. In a rich 2019 New Yorker article on the memorial and its critics, Brooke Jarvis quotes Indigenous voices on both sides. On the one hand, people who love the monument’s scale and brazen counterpoint to Rushmore, the claim it makes on American history. On the other, people who consider it sacrilege to carve up sacred geography to honor a warrior who in his own life declined to be photographed and who asked to be buried in an unmarked grave.

You could distill this controversy to a still-simpler question: For its 21st-century future, what kind of power does Indigenous America want? Is it power within America as we have known it — the power to keep Crazy Horse (and Sitting Bull and Red Cloud and Chief Joseph and Sacagawea …) on the same list of American heroes as the Rushmore presidents, the power to draw crowds that rival any other great American tourist attraction, the power to interweave the Native story with stories of colonists and immigrants, the way this week’s vision of the crowded Pilgrim table tries to do?

Or is it fundamentally a different kind of power, a power against America as we have known it — a power of resistance rather than competition or integration, Indigenous Peoples’ Day against Columbus and all the other European discoverers, sustainability against industrial capitalism and its discontents? Is the Indigenous answer to Mount Rushmore a statue of Crazy Horse emerging at a gallop from a mountain, or just the mountains themselves, sacred and untouched? 

by Ross Douthat, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Simon Peter Groebner, via ZUMA Press

Successful Tool-Lending Libraries Force Us to Rethink What the Public Is Willing to Share

As the old saying goes, there’s a right tool for every job—but what happens when a sizable tree branch falls in someone’s driveway after a big storm and the person neither owns a chainsaw nor has the extra cash to rush off to purchase a new one? Or perhaps a student with a tiny apartment doesn’t have storage space for tools, and suddenly needs a drill to fix the sagging cabinet door in the kitchen but has never used one and doesn’t know how to.

For all of these moments when the right tool for the job is out of reach, there are lending libraries that have been springing up around the country, which supply more than just books.

According to a 2021 study by an alumna from San José State University (SJSU), tool libraries were first documented in the United States in the 1940s. These unique institutions lend devices such as power and hand tools, yard and garden implements, and even kitchen utensils to those in need of the right tool, but without the means to own or store them.

According to the San José State University study, more than 50 tool libraries were operating in the United States until May 2021. There was a boom in the number of tool lending libraries in the late 1970s with the establishment of these libraries in places such as Berkeley, California, which opened in 1979 with one staff member in a portable trailer, according to the study. After more than 40 years of evolution, the Berkeley Public Library’s (BPL) current tool lending library can now be accessed through BPL’s website.

The study, which compiled “news clippings, refereed articles, blog posts, and websites,” according to the author, pointed out that scholars of the subject traditionally thought that tool lending libraries sprang up in the late 1970s. However, earlier examples date further back to the 1940s when the public library in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, opened the first tool lending library. (...)

Today, the Grosse Pointe Public Library’s collection of tools includes more than 150 implements and devices ranging from bolt cutters to bird-watching binoculars, and even includes yard games such as bocce ball and croquet sets. All games, devices, and implements borrowed from the institution come with a how-to information pamphlet.

The local Rotary Club adopted the responsibility of maintaining and repairing a varied catalog of items, and still does so today. The study’s author stated that the survival and growth of the Grosse Pointe Public Library’s tool collection might not have been possible without the involvement of the Rotary Club, and that it was the only tool library in the country until the mid-1970s. (...)

The greatest increase in tool lending libraries in the United States came around 2008 during the Great Recession, according to the study, with institutions like the Sacramento Library of Things in California and the Chicago Tool Library in Illinois opening as part of this “tool-lending movement.” Another organization that provides tools to charitable groups instead of individuals, called ToolBank USA, was also established at that time in 2008. The study’s author credits advances in technology like cloud-based software to the continued boom in tool lending libraries across the United States. 

by Aric Sleeper, Naked Capitalism/Local Peace Economy | Read more:
Image: via

[ed. No way! What about those poor corporations that make these tools in the first place? Oh, that's right... they have other options (like making it impossible to repair your tools without paying more fees).]

John Mayer & Keith Urban

[ed. Guitar lesson here.]

The Pentagon Fails Its Fifth Audit in a Row

If the Defense Department can’t get its books straight, how can it be trusted with a budget of more than $800 billion per year?

---

Last week, the Department of Defense revealed that it had failed its fifth consecutive audit.

“I would not say that we flunked,” said DoD Comptroller Mike McCord, although his office did note that the Pentagon only managed to account for 39 percent of its $3.5 trillion in assets. “The process is important for us to do, and it is making us get better. It is not making us get better as fast as we want.”

The news came as no surprise to Pentagon watchers. After all, the U.S. military has the distinction of being the only U.S. government agency to have never passed a comprehensive audit. (...)

The Pentagon’s most famous recent boondoggle is the F-35 program, which has gone over its original budget by $165 billion to date. But examples of overruns abound: As Sens. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) and Jack Reed (D-RI) wrote in 2020, the lead vessel for every one of the Navy’s last eight combatant ships came in at least 10 percent over budget, leading to more than $8 billion in additional costs. (...)

Despite the long odds, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) proposed a bill last year that could help make that happen. The legislation would cut one percent off the top of the budget of any part of the Pentagon that fails an audit. That means that, if the proposal had already passed, 20 of the agency’s 27 auditing units would face a budget cut this year.

Unfortunately, momentum around that bill appears to have fizzled out, leaving the Pentagon’s accountants as the last line of defense. (...) That may coincide with another historical moment, according to Andrew Lautz of the National Taxpayers Union.

“[W]e could reach a $1 trillion defense budget five years sooner [than the CBO estimates], in 2027,” Lautz wrote.

by Connor Echols, Responsible Statecraft |  Read more:

Image: gualtiero boffi/shutterstock

[ed. One percent. Ouch! That's gonna hurt. Whenever someone starts complaining about tax and spend blah, blah, blah for unnecessary things like healthcare, social programs, infrastructure, or anything else that "we can't afford", this is what comes to mind.]

World Cup 2022: Capitalism Can’t Kill Football — Try As It Might

A week or so before the kickoff of the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, I was walking in the coastal city of Zihuatanejo in Mexico’s southern Guerrero state when I passed a group of children playing football with a plastic Coca-Cola bottle. They were as gleefully animated as any group of children playing football anywhere, while the Coke bottle was, I thought, regrettably appropriate in a world governed by corporate toxicity.

It was particularly appropriate, perhaps, given that Coca-Cola and football go way back. The company, which has been an official World Cup sponsor since 1978, entered into a formal association with FIFA in 1974 – although its logo has saturated World Cup events since 1950. The partnership was initially ostensibly meant to promote youth development programmes, since there is clearly nothing better for youth development than ingesting sticky brown liquid that is bad for human health.

Of course, that alliance is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of global capitalism’s efforts to suck the soul out of football and eradicate any remnants of primordial joy by monetising and commodifying everything on and off the field. Given the deluge of corporate propaganda that we call “sponsorship”, the uninitiated football spectator would be forgiven for thinking Adidas was a football team – or that matches are waged between Emirates and Etihad airlines.

And there’s nothing like sponsoring football’s biggest competition to improve one’s international branding. Chinese firms have also caught on – they’re leading in spending for the Qatar World Cup.

In his book, El Fútbol a sol y sombra (Football in sun and shadow), first published in 1995, the renowned Uruguayan writer and die-hard football fan Eduardo Galeano remarked how every footballer had become an “advertisement in motion”- though not everyone was happy with that arrangement. In the mid-1950s, he recalled, when the prominent Montevideo club Peñarol had endeavoured to impose company advertising on its shirts, 10 members of the team had obediently taken to the field with the updated jerseys while Black player Obdulio Varela had declined: “They used to drag us Blacks around with rings in our noses. Those days are gone.”

To be sure, it’s never just fun and games when obscene quantities of money are involved. Take the case of Horst Dassler – the son of Adidas founder Adi Dassler, himself charmingly a former member of the Nazi Party – who in 1982 started a company called International Sports and Leisure, which promptly acquired exclusive marketing and TV rights to FIFA operations, including the World Cup. This was done by paying bribes to then-FIFA President João Havelange – the same Havelange who had graciously appeared alongside Argentine dictator Jorge Videla during the 1978 World Cup in Buenos Aires. (...)

But as the US well knows, corrupt self-enrichment and corporate impunity are business as usual in capitalism – which has also produced a “gentrification” of the sport itself, as researchers have shown. A study published by the Royal Society in December 2021 found that the “excessive monetisation of football” had led to increasing inequality between teams in major European leagues and a growing predictability of match outcomes. Even as those responsible for the sport’s governance claim to be globalising football, in reality, the process replicates the inequality endemic to corporate globalisation.

by Belén Fernández, Al Jazeera | Read more:
Image: Sorin Furcoi/Al Jazeera

[ed. Seen a NASCAR/Formula 1 race recently? See also: The eerily quiet $200 billion World Cup stadiums marooned in the Qatar desert (Daily Mail).]

Kona, Hawaii
Image: Tad K

Chance of Showers

[ed. 31 degees and snowing. Looks like golf season's over for this year. Here's my friend Matt negotiating a few water hazards this summer.]
Image: markk

Sick Profit

Investigating Private Equity’s Stealthy Takeover of Health Care Across Cities and Specialties

Two-year-old Zion Gastelum died just days after dentists performed root canals and put crowns on six baby teeth at a clinic affiliated with a private equity firm.

His parents sued the Kool Smiles dental clinic in Yuma, Arizona, and its private equity investor, FFL Partners. They argued the procedures were done needlessly, in keeping with a corporate strategy to maximize profits by overtreating kids from lower-income families enrolled in Medicaid. Zion died after being diagnosed with “brain damage caused by a lack of oxygen,” according to the lawsuit. (...)

Private equity is rapidly moving to reshape health care in America, coming off a banner year in 2021, when the deep-pocketed firms plowed $206 billion into more than 1,400 health care acquisitions, according to industry tracker PitchBook.

Seeking quick returns, these investors are buying into eye care clinics, dental management chains, physician practices, hospices, pet care providers, and thousands of other companies that render medical care nearly from cradle to grave. Private equity-backed groups have even set up special “obstetric emergency departments” at some hospitals, which can charge expectant mothers hundreds of dollars extra for routine perinatal care.

As private equity extends its reach into health care, evidence is mounting that the penetration has led to higher prices and diminished quality of care, a KHN investigation has found. KHN found that companies owned or managed by private equity firms have agreed to pay fines of more than $500 million since 2014 to settle at least 34 lawsuits filed under the False Claims Act, a federal law that punishes false billing submissions to the federal government with fines. Most of the time, the private equity owners have avoided liability.

New research by the University of California-Berkeley has identified “hot spots” where private equity firms have quietly moved from having a small foothold to controlling more than two-thirds of the market for physician services such as anesthesiology and gastroenterology in 2021. And KHN found that in San Antonio, more than two dozen gastroenterology offices are controlled by a private equity-backed group that billed a patient $1,100 for her share of a colonoscopy charge — about three times what she paid in another state.

It’s not just prices that are drawing scrutiny.

Whistleblowers and injured patients are turning to the courts to press allegations of misconduct or other improper business dealings. The lawsuits allege that some private equity firms, or companies they invested in, have boosted the bottom line by violating federal false claims and anti-kickback laws or through other profit-boosting strategies that could harm patients.

“Their model is to deliver short-term financial goals and in order to do that you have to cut corners,” said Mary Inman, an attorney who represents whistleblowers.

Federal regulators, meanwhile, are almost blind to the incursion, since private equity typically acquires practices and hospitals below the regulatory radar. KHN found that more than 90% of private equity takeovers or investments fall below the $101 million threshold that triggers an antitrust review by the Federal Trade Commission and the U.S. Justice Department.

Spurring Growth

Private equity firms pool money from investors, ranging from wealthy people to college endowments and pension funds. They use that money to buy into businesses they hope to flip at a sizable profit, usually within three to seven years, by making them more efficient and lucrative.

Private equity has poured nearly $1 trillion into nearly 8,000 health care transactions during the past decade, according to PitchBook.
 
by Fred Schulte, Kaiser Health News | Read more:
Image: ABC Arizona Broadcast

[ed. It's not just healthcare, it's everything. Distressed businesses, real estate, news media, and on and on and on. A capitalistic virus. See also: What Private Equity Firms Are and How They Operate (ProPublica)]

The 20-Year Boondoggle

These days, the mess at the Department of Homeland Security is one of the only things that all of Washington can agree on. Disliked by both Democrats and Republicans, DHS has metastasized into the worst version of what we imagine when we think of bureaucracy: rigid, ineffective, wasteful, chaotic, cruel. Since its inception, DHS has been on the Government Accountability Office’s “High Risk List,” which highlights programs vulnerable to “fraud, abuse, and mismanagement.” It consistently has the lowest morale of any federal agency with more than a thousand employees, according to the Federal Employee Viewpoint Survey.

“It’s like an agency no one wanted and everyone is stuck with,” said Juliette Kayyem, assistant secretary for intergovernmental affairs at DHS from 2009–2010.

“Even for someone who is kind of cynical, it was shocking,” said John Roth, the DHS inspector general from 2014–2017. “You do a little scratching, and there was just rot underneath.”

We see the downstream effects of the Kafkaesque ineptitude at DHS every day, even if we don’t recognize the connection between headlines about alleged sexual abuse at migrant detention centers, billions of dollars disappearing into fraudulent disaster aid, and the erasure of text messages likely detailing an attempted coup. DHS functions as a loose confederation of subagencies, meaning that the absurdity of security procedures at airports is attributed to the Transportation Security Administration, not to DHS, and the anemic response to Hurricane Katrina was blamed on the Federal Emergency Management Agency, not its parent organization. Yet the tensions between these satellite operations and the cabinet secretary’s headquarters in Washington, DC, are crucial to understanding DHS.

“I would call it unwieldy,” said Kevin McAleenan, who served as acting secretary of homeland security in 2019 after working at the department since it was founded. McAleenan recalled moments when he saw people at headquarters “trying to direct activities they didn’t understand very well and mission sets they weren’t familiar with and legal frameworks they hadn’t studied, and I thought, ‘This isn’t going to work. We’re not going to overcome the problem of expertise or, in this case, the lack of expertise.’”

Some consider the Department of Homeland Security successful because there has not been another major terrorist attack in the United States since 9/11. And it’s true that only about a hundred people have died on US soil from Islamic terrorism in the past two decades. But domestic terrorism and mass shootings are on the rise, with Americans now justifiably afraid of malls, parades, supermarkets, churches, and elementary schools. Militias plot against democracy. A deadly virus has killed over a million Americans. Foreign governments infiltrate social media and snatch our data. Storms and wildfires grow bigger and more frequent every year. Tens of thousands of migrants linger in refugee camps at the southern border. Those that make it across face what one high-level whistleblower called “a system that involves widespread abuse of human beings.”

All of this is under the purview of DHS.

The Department of Homeland Security was supposed to protect Americans from earthquakes, nukes, pandemics, assassins, smugglers, hackers, and hijackers. These are the folks in charge of securing critical infrastructure, meaning everything from voting machines to sports stadiums to the water supply. DHS checks for explosives at airports and border crossings; manages the immigration process and migrant detention centers; helps rebuild after natural disasters; and coordinates intelligence and threat response with the CIA and FBI, as well as state and local law enforcement.

It’s a truly bonkers amount of responsibility, fueled by $80–$150 billion a year in taxpayer money and encompassing an alphabet soup of around two dozen entities, including FEMA, the TSA, Customs and Border Protection (CBP), Secret Service (USSS), Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), Coast Guard (USCG), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). In a nationally televised address announcing his intention to form the department, Bush said DHS would “unite essential agencies that must work more closely together” and increase “focus and effectiveness.” But the 2002 bill creating the Department of Homeland Security may as well have been called Murphy’s law.

“It was a walking nightmare from the very beginning,” said John Magaw, the founding administrator of the TSA and a former director of the US Secret Service. “It just was not gonna work.”

(A spokesperson for DHS was given ample time to comment on this story but missed multiple deadlines to do so.)

How did the Department of Homeland Security become such a disaster? In recent months, I’ve spoken to a few dozen insiders and watchdogs across every era of DHS, reviewed thousands of pages of documents, and read up on the history and political science behind what makes government agencies effective. An investigation like this one might normally hope to answer the question: Whose fault is this? Who can we point to and fire or malign? But what I’ve found is that those lines of inquiry are irrelevant. This is a boondoggle spanning four presidencies, 11 Congresses, seven secretaries, and seven acting secretaries in a department with very high turnover that oversees 212,000 employees and hundreds of thousands of private contractors at any given moment. It’s not just one person’s fault or a handful of bad apples.

There will always be corrupt officials, lazy civil servants, sociopathic politicians, pedophile teachers, and sadistic prison guards. As James Madison wrote in 1788, “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” The Constitution’s framers were trying to build a system that would keep the worst human tendencies in check. Evil is banal, yes, but our tendency to blame individuals for bad behavior can distract from the institution incentivizing that bad behavior.

So what is it about this institution in particular that allows wrongdoing to flourish? Why does the Department of Homeland Security suck so much?

by Amanda Chicago Lewis, The Verge |  Read more:

Image: Ryan Peltier

COP Out

'Cooperate or Perish' (CNET)
Image: The Egyptian Pyramids were illuminated to mark the start of COP27 (COP27)

[ed. So depressing. This is No. 27, so that alone tells you everything you need to know. Even slick branding.]

"Despite having no agreement for a stronger commitment to the 1.5 C goal set in the 2015 Paris Agreement, "we went with what the agreement was here because we want to stand with the most vulnerable," Germany's climate secretary Jennifer Morgan, visibly shaken, told Reuters."

When asked by Reuters whether the goal of stronger climate-fighting ambition had been compromised for the deal, Mexico's chief climate negotiator Camila Zepeda summed up the mood among exhausted negotiators.

"Probably. You take a win when you can." (Reuters 11/20/2022)

A Velocity of Being

If eight years ago, someone had told me that A Velocity of Being: Letters to a Young Reader (public library) would take eight years, I would have laughed, then cried, then promptly let go of the dream. And yet here it is, all these unfathomable years later, a reality — a collection of original letters to the children of today and tomorrow about why we read and what books do for the human spirit, composed by 121 of the most interesting and inspiring humans in our world: Jane Goodall, Yo-Yo Ma, Jacqueline Woodson, Ursula K. Le Guin, Mary Oliver, Neil Gaiman, Amanda Palmer, Rebecca Solnit, Elizabeth Gilbert, Shonda Rhimes, Alain de Botton, James Gleick, Anne Lamott, Diane Ackerman, Judy Blume, Eve Ensler, David Byrne, Sylvia Earle, Richard Branson, Daniel Handler, Marina Abramović, Regina Spektor, Elizabeth Alexander, Adam Gopnik, Debbie Millman, Dani Shapiro, Tim Ferriss, Ann Patchett, a 98-year-old Holocaust survivor, Italy’s first woman in space, and many more immensely accomplished and largehearted artists, writers, scientists, philosophers, entrepreneurs, musicians, and adventurers whose character has been shaped by a life of reading.

by Maria Popova, Brain Pickings |  Read more:

Image: Art by the Brothers Hilts for a letter by David Delgado

Nit-Twits

Two Ways of Looking at a Blue Bird: What’s Really Going on at Twitter?

“Um, Twitter’s sick. My best friend’s sister’s boyfriend’s brother’s girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who’s going with the girl who saw Twitter pass out at 31 Flavors last night. I guess it’s pretty serious.” That’s basically where we are with the coverage. Meanwhile: “‘Twitter Is Dead,’ 300 Million People Post On Twitter.”

I like to think of myself as technically literate, moreso back in the day than I am now. Thanks to my Web 1.0 heritage, I can set up and run a website, including the backend. However, the systems that Twitter engineers are (or were) maintaining at scale are unimaginably complex to me. These systems — their design and implementation, who runs them, what they deliver to users — are at the heart of the Twitter story. Unfortunately, the first two aspects of Twitter are opaque just now, so finding out what’s really going on is very difficult (and on this story, Twitter the platform isn’t helping very much). So what’s really going on?

The Only Crypto Story You Need?

"Conversely, I didn’t sit down and write 40,000 words to tell you that crypto is dumb and worthless and will now vanish without a trace. That would be an odd use of time. My goal here is not to convince you that crypto is building the future and that if you don’t get on board you’ll stay poor. My goal is to convince you that crypto is interesting, that it has found some new things to say about some old problems, and that even when those things are wrong, they’re wrong in illuminating ways."

[ed. Two issues burning up the internet this week. A lot of people must have lost a lot of money, or something. Lots of links in each.]