PEPFAR Report

On January 24, when the State Department announced a stop-work order on most foreign assistance, PEPFAR clinics shuttered. After two weeks of intense bipartisan lobbying, the State Department issued waivers intended to allow some PEPFAR programs to continue, but since PEPFAR contracts with USAID for drug orders and other functions, USAID closures have left PEPFAR services paused. This tug-of-war put PEPFAR back in the national spotlight, and it became clear that many Americans have a lot of questions about PEPFAR:

• What does PEPFAR do?
• Who, specifically, does PEPFAR help?
• How much does PEPFAR cost?
• How do we know whether PEPFAR is working?
• Why is America doing HIV/AIDS work in the first place?

Many people are rightly skeptical of the eye-popping claim that PEPFAR saved 25 million lives, mainly women and children, on a budget of $6.5 billion a year—only 0.08% of the federal budget. We found, with some caveats, that these claims are generally accurate: the budget is correct for how much America spends, and we find evidence for 7.5–30 million lives saved by PEPFAR between 2004 and 2018. Our best estimate is 19 million lives saved in that time period.

So what is PEPFAR? President George W. Bush created the President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) in 2004. PEPFAR is run by the US Department of State and is overseen by the US Global AIDS Coordinator, a Senate-confirmed role reporting directly to the Secretary of State. About half of PEPFAR’s funding is spent on providing antiretroviral drugs to people with HIV, which both extend their lives and almost always prevent them from transmitting HIV to others. (...)

The President’s Emergency Plan For AIDS Relief (PEPFAR) provides funding to prevent and treat HIV/AIDS in low- and middle-income countries. For the first twenty years of its history, it was popular and bipartisan, the shining jewel of US aid programs. But right now, many PEPFAR programs are paused, clinics are shuttered, and the upcoming reauthorization fight looks uncertain. The State Department, which administers PEPFAR, says the program has saved 25 million lives. We are an independent team of journalists, academics, and technologists who decided to investigate whether that was true.

Our key findings:

• PEPFAR has saved between 7.5 and 30 million lives, at a cost between $1,500 and $10,000 per life saved. The US government is willing to spend at least a thousand times this much to save an American life.

• In Africa, unlike in the United States, HIV/AIDS primarily affects women and children. One of the main goals of PEPFAR is to prevent “vertical transmission”, where a pregnant mother with HIV passes on her infection to her baby in utero or during delivery. PEPFAR has prevented at least 5.5 million babies from being born with HIV.

• The number of people who die of HIV/AIDS each year has been declining since 2004–the year PEPFAR began operation. PEPFAR is a major reason for this decline.

• PEPFAR helped decrease the cost of first-line HIV medications from $1000 a month to only $60 a year ($5 a month). Because of the declining cost of medications, PEPFAR is more cost-effective each year, and is doing more and more on a budget that has been declining in real dollars since 2009.

• PEPFAR also offers post-exposure prophylaxis to nurses, rape victims, and others exposed to HIV, and pre-exposure prophylaxis, medications that prevent contracting HIV, to women whose husbands have HIV and other at-risk populations.

• Over time, PEPFAR is handing off its responsibilities to the governments of the countries we’re helping, but it will take decades if we want to defeat HIV/AIDS and years if we want to not destroy the good works we have already done.

• PEPFAR is a well-audited program. The audits we spot-checked showed 0 to 2% rates of undocumented program expenses. This compares extremely favorably to other government programs: the Medicare fraud rate, for instance, is reportedly 5-10%.

• Controlling HIV/AIDS abroad keeps Americans safe from HIV/AIDS at home. The federal government spends $29 billion annually on medical care for Americans with HIV and AIDS, not counting insurance company spending: six billion for PEPFAR is a good deal.

PEPFAR advances American interests: the program is popular, appreciated, widely known, and helps us compete with China, prevent terrorism, and win allies in Africa and beyond.

by Kelsey Piper, Leah Libresco Sargeant, Colin Aitken and others, PEPFAR Report |  Read more:

Image: Our World In Data

[ed. If there's one benefit to be gained from all the blundering and idiotic 'cost cutting' this administration is currently engaged in, it's that people are becoming more aware of all the good and essential things our government does, which go unnoticed most of the time. PEPFAR Impact Counter tries to estimate the number of people affected by its closure, and says that 13,854 adults and 1,474 infants have already died from this policy. What about everything else? Here's one perspective:]

"I’m really pessimistic about all this. I think the main effect will be saving ~1% of the budget at the cost of causing so much chaos and misery for government employees that everybody who can get a job in the private sector leaves and we’re left with an extremely low-quality government workforce. I freely admit that DEI also did this, I just think that two rounds of decimating state capacity and purging high-IQ civil servants is worse than one round. In fact, this is what really gets me - both parties are careening towards destruction in their own way, there’s no real third option (...)

Probably nothing catastrophic happens for the first few years of this. The cuts to clinical research mean we get fewer medications. The cuts to environmental funding mean some species go extinct. The cuts to anti-scam regulators means more people get scammed. But the average person has no idea how much medical progress we’re making, or how many species go extinct, or how many people get scammed in an average year. Maybe there will be some studies trying to count this stuff, but studies are noisy and can always be dismissed if you disagree. So lots of bad stuff will happen, and all the conservatives will think “Haha, nothing happened, I told you every attempt ever to make things better or dry a single human tear has always been fake liberal NGO slush fund grifts”.

Or maybe one newsworthy thing will happen - a plane will fall out of the sky in a way easily linked to DOGE cuts (and not DEI?), or the tariffs will cause a recession, and then all the liberals will say “Haha, we told you that any attempt to reduce government or cut red tape or leave even the tiniest space for human freedom/progress has always been sadistic doomed attempts to loot the public square and give it to billionaires!” They’re already saying this! Everyone is just going to get more and more sure that their particular form of careening to destruction is great and that we can focus entirely on beating up on the other party, and we will never get anyone who cares about good policy ever again.

Probably this isn’t true, and I shouldn’t even say it because everyone else is already too doomy. You’d be surprised how many basically sane people I’ve heard expressing worries they’ll being put in camps (not even illegal immigrants or some other at-risk group!), or that Elon Musk sending people emails asking them what they’re doing is a form of fascism. I try to remind myself that if there had only ever been half as much government funding as there is now, I wouldn’t be outraged and demand that we bring it up to exactly the current level (and, once it was at the current level, become unoutraged and stop worrying). The current level is a random compromise between people who wanted more and people who wanted less, with no particular moral significance. This thought process helps, but I think that even in that situation one could justify a few really good programs like PEPFAR on their own terms (ie if it didn’t exist, I would be outraged until it did), and I still think that changing the size of government should be done through legal rather than illegal means, competently rather than incompetently, and honestly rather than lying about every single thing you do all the time."

New Transportation Options in Sugar Land

There once was a sugar plantation where cane fields stretched as far as the eye could see, and enslaved people—primarily African Americans—toiled away in the heat. In time, the plantation grew into a factory called Imperial Sugar, which grew into a city that was aptly named Sugar Land. Over the next few decades, Sugar Land grew beyond recognition. Master-planned neighborhoods sprouted, and as cars became popular in the 1970s, highways expanded to connect these neighborhoods—and also splinter them. In 1970, just over 3,000 people called Sugar Land home. In 2020, that number had skyrocketed to 110,000.

Sugar Land is located just southwest of Houston; today, it is the sixth-fastest growing city in the U.S., and it is running out of space. With only 4% of land left to build on, the city is looking for innovative transportation solutions—and looking up for answers.

Over the past year, Sugar Land has set in motion three big initiatives—one of them is a community microtransit service, the other two involve aerial solutions. Earlier this year, the city partnered with Wisk Aero, a company that has spent the past 14 years developing electric, self-flying taxis, also known as vertical take-off and landing (VTOL).

The pilot would allow residents to hop on an air taxi (from, say, downtown Sugar Land) and fly to a designated vertiport in a fraction of the time it would take them to drive. Mitchell Davies, deputy director of aviation at the Sugar Land Regional Airport, says the airport has identified potential locations for a so-called Vertiport and is working closely with Wisk Aero and the Federal Aviation Administration to conduct an airspace study. The Vertiport should become operational “by the end of the decade or sooner,” he says.

More recently, the city announced that it is studying the possibility of bringing an “autonomous elevated cable and rail mobility system” that would glide above its streets. The system, which is operated by a provider of urban mobility systems called Swyft Cities, can best be described as an on-demand gondola—a bit like Uber, except instead of a car, it’s a cabin that slides by to pick you up and drop you off at your desired location, with no stops in between. An engineering schematic study is currently underway to examine the potential for the gondola system, including potential locations. It is expected to be completed later this year.

When highways won’t do

The story of Sugar Land is the story of so many American cities, particularly in regions where the car is still king. Melanie Beaman, transportation and mobility manager at the City of Sugar Land, says that traffic in the region is expected to increase by 40-60% by 2045, and if the I-10 debacle in Houston is any indication, building more lanes won’t free up more space, it will simply attract more cars. “You’ll end up erasing the city with this big, huge mega-freeway,” she says.

To come up with solutions, the city conducted a yearslong study that culminated in a 163-page Mobility Master Plan. After interviewing close to 2,000 residents, they outlined plans to develop a safe streets program, to allocate more room for people to walk and bike, as well accommodate those who use wheelchairs and strollers. They also laid out their goal to position Sugar Land as an innovative mobility leader. “City leadership has told us to be bold in what we do with transportation,” says Beaman. “We’re told to be trailblazers and not be afraid to take risks.”

by Elissaveta M. Brandon, Fast Company | Read more:
Image: Wisk Aero, Whoosh Hold LP

"Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad." 

~Thomas Frank

[ed. I'll be gone for a few days.]

Analysis is Not "Opinion"

One big thing the legacy media gets wrong

Today’s post is inspired by a recent chat I had with Paul Krugman. Paul, who just left the New York Times and started blogging full-time at his Substack, explained why he abandoned the country’s most prestigious newspaper:

Columns are…a very restrictive form. You get about…800 words…and you have to write for an audience that is coming at you from a standing start…At this point…there's now at the Times three levels of editing. Before it ever goes to the copy editor, there's an editor who makes much more substantial edits than…ever before…[There’s] a lot more editing and then a layer of editing above that, which got very intrusive in the last year…So the column became…a quite unpleasant experience…And I said, well, I need some way to have longer form thoughts and an occasional chart. And so I had a newsletter at the Times, which was far more constrained than blogging…but kind of kept me going. And then in September of last year…they…eliminated the newsletter. So…you would hate, uh, the job I had this past year….I came to hate it as well…[Y]ou know, maybe…what they were doing made sense in terms of the Times as [business] objectives. I don't know…[B]ut it was, it was intolerable…from my point of view.

This really reminded of my post from last year, about why Substack writers have an advantage over op-ed writers who work for major publications. In that post, I argued that editors subtract more value than they add to the op-ed writing process, by preventing op-ed writers from developing their own distinctive voice, their own loyal audience, and their own organizational skills.

Paul brings up another important constraint that editors place on op-ed writers — they add cumbersome time and effort to the process of writing articles. One of the reasons I left Bloomberg Opinion was that they added an extra layer to the approval process for each article, which greatly increased the time between when I would pitch an article and when the article would get published. This cumbersome process was intended to make sure that only relevant op-eds got published, but it ended up having the exact opposite effect — by the time I or any other Bloomberg Opinion writer was able to publish a post about some current event, the topic had usually already gotten stale and the discussion had moved on.

But in fact, I think the problem with how legacy publications handle op-eds goes much deeper than the editorial process. Thinking about it more, I’m now dissatisfied with the post I wrote last year — it’s not just “editors vs. no editors”. The problem is about how legacy publications think about “op-ed writing” in general.

Opinion vs. analysis

In the world of newspapers — and of online publications like Bloomberg that evolved from newspapers and which hire many of their employees from newspapers — the typical distinction is between fact and opinion. This is a conceptual distinction that every child learns about in school — facts are things you can prove with evidence, while opinions are value judgements that aren’t necessarily based on facts. “Taylor Swift is a popular singer” is a fact, while “Taylor Swift is the world’s best pop star” is an opinion.

At newspapers or online legacy publications, reporters are supposed to give you the facts, while op-ed columnists give you their opinions about the facts. In fact, as Wikipedia notes, the New York Times created this system in the 1970s, building on earlier forms of writing: (...)

Newspapers draw a stark distinction between news and opinion. These are typically managed separately, by different sets of editors (called “desks”), and writers that do one kind of writing rarely do the other kind. At Bloomberg, news and opinion are two different divisions of the company.

But the hoary distinction between fact and opinion, enshrined in the organization of legacy publications, leaves out a crucial third kind of writing that’s in very high demand: analysis.

Consider a forecast about the future, such as “Democrats will win the 2026 midterm elections.” This isn’t a fact, because it can’t be proven or disproven with currently available data. And although people might colloquially call it an “opinion”, it’s not a subjective value judgement either — it’s based on facts, even though it’s not a fact itself. A forecast is a third kind of thing.

Another example of a third thing is an assessment — a more complex type of prediction. For example, consider the statement “Russia now has the upper hand in the Ukraine war.” That’s not a fact, because “upper hand” isn’t precisely defined — there’s no universally agreed-upon measure of who has the upper hand in a war, and reasonable people can disagree as to the proper measure. But it’s not an opinion either, because there’s no value judgement involved.

Other examples are theories (e.g. “Wars happen because of scarce economic resources”) and recommendations (e.g. “If you want to win a war, you should secure your supply chains”). These are based on facts, but they themselves are not facts.

Forecasts, assessments, and theories are all part of a category called analysis. Some people casually refer to analysis as “opinion” — if you say “Democrats will win the midterms”, they might say “Well that’s just, like, your opinion, man!”. But discerning people recognize that there is a salient, useful distinction between value judgements and reasoned interpretations of facts. The way people argue about the two things is fundamentally different — to argue about opinions, you typically have to make an emotional appeal, while arguing about analysis can be done using logic and reason alone.

There are plenty of analysts out there in the world, for whom providing analysis — forecasts, assessments, theories, and recommendations — is their primary job. There are stock analysts, business analysts, intelligence analysts, and many more. They all have opinions, and these often motivate them personally and influence their work, but producing opinions is not their primary job — the more dispassionate and objective they are, the better of a job they’ll do.

Now here’s the thing — news readers want analysis. They don’t want to just read the reporting from the Associated Press or some investigative journalists and then have to put it all together and decide what it all means. They want writers to explain those facts, to identify the salient implications, to make predictions, and to recommend courses of action.

Analysis is most of what I do at this blog. As I always say, I think of myself as basically an open-source version of a CIA analyst. Instead of agents in the field, I gather my facts from reporters, research papers, and other publicly available sources on the internet. I then analyze those facts and try to synthesize them into a short, comprehensible story. Instead of writing my reports for my bosses higher up in an organization, I release them to you, the public.

There’s a huge demand for what I do, and that demand is only increasing. As people’s information diet has become bigger and more complex, they’re in desperate need of people to make sense of it all. Some people come to my blog to hear me rail against totalitarianism or extol the virtues of progress, but I think most of my audience just wants me to explain what’s going on and tell them what they can do about it. They usually resonate with my opinions, but what they really want is my analysis.

Should opinion sections be about opinions?

Currently, at legacy publications like the New York Times and Bloomberg, the newsrooms do a bit of that analysis. Look at any news article, and it won’t simply be a list of quotes and numbers and events — there will be some amount of explanation there. And in recent years, news have begun to do longer, more complex features that blend more analysis into their reporting. But most of their analysis comes from their “opinion” sections. Generally speaking, reporters still just try to report the facts; forecasts, assessments, theories, and recommendations are the domain of op-eds.

And yet in my experience at Bloomberg — and from what I see at the New York Times and other legacy publications — the editors who run opinion desks still think the primary job of their writers is to dispense opinions. At Bloomberg I was always pushed to make my writing more subjective and politicized — I had to have a “take”, to distinguish myself from reporters. If you read the New York Times’ stable of regular opinion columnists — Maureen Dowd, Nicholas Kristof, David Brooks, Jamelle Bouie, Thomas Friedman, and so on — their weekly columns are chiefly polemics with a bit of analysis thrown in. 

This ends up holding those writers back. It certainly held me back when I was writing for Bloomberg. And more importantly, the focus on the opinion section as being fundamentally about opinion rather than analysis ends up holding legacy publications back, and opening the way for platforms like Substack to steal their thunder.

There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, opinion becomes tiresome fairly quickly. The modern world of social media is absolutely chock full of political shouters, aggressively denouncing each other and shoving every possible ideology into your face. Sure, it’s nice to be able to read some writers who do that more eloquently than the average X poster or TikTok video, but ultimately it just adds to the maelstrom. Right now, when the country is exhaustedly struggling to put a decade of social unrest behind it, the constant flood of opinion seems even more intrusive; dispassionate analysis provides something of a refuge.

Another reason is that readers are inherently distrustful of opinion. A polemicist is selling you something, and usually is trying to recruit you for an ideological team; that bias makes them a little bit suspicious as a source off ideas.

And opinion is in some sense cheap — after all, everyone has an opinion. In my experience, people at legacy publications tend to look at op-ed writers with a mix of envy and contempt — envy because it’s a much more glamorous job than reporting, and contempt because there’s a sense that the glamour is undeserved. After all, what makes Tom Friedman’s opinions, or Maureen Dowd’s, more valuable than those of the average reporter?

Within legacy publications, there’s a tendency to treat op-ed writers as tawdry entertainers rather than as respected analysts. Inevitably, they are marketed as such, and encouraged to fill that role. I always felt that Bloomberg was pushing me to be a rhetorical gladiator rather than a wonk; the NYT certainly pushed Krugman in that direction, especially in more recent years. This didn’t do either of us any favors.

by Noah Smith, Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Steve Johnson on Unsplash

What Can House Republicans Cut Instead of Medicaid? Not Much.

[ed. If people think the homeless problem is bad now, just wait...]

The House passed a budget resolution Tuesday night after the speaker, Mike Johnson, persuaded several Republican lawmakers, including those who have expressed reservations about possible Medicaid cuts, to support the bill.

In theory, the budget, which kicks off the process of passing an extension of tax cuts passed in 2017 and up to $2 trillion in cuts meant to partly offset them, could become law without significant cuts to Medicaid. But it won’t be easy.

That process has a few more steps: For one, the Senate has to adopt this budget resolution. Then both houses of Congress will also need to write and pass legislation that follows its instructions.

The budget resolution itself is silent on whether Congress cuts Medicaid, which provides health coverage to 72 million poor and disabled Americans. But it instructs the House Energy and Commerce Committee, which has jurisdiction over the program, to cut spending by $880 billion over the next decade. If the committee can’t save at least that much, the entire effort could be imperiled because of the special process Congress is using to avoid a Senate filibuster.

It’s not so simple as finding the cuts elsewhere. The special process, known as budget reconciliation, means Republicans will have to find all $880 billion from within the committee’s jurisdiction. That leaves them with fewer options than one might think.

Below, a list of those options. (These numbers are not exact; they are informal or outdated estimates. Before a reconciliation bill passes, they would all get an official evaluation from the Congressional Budget Office, Congress’s scorekeeper.)

Option 1: Cut Medicare instead

If Republicans want to avoid major cuts to Medicaid, the largest pot of available money is in the other big government health insurance program: Medicare.

But Republicans face an even tighter political bind when it comes to Medicare than they do with Medicaid. President Trump has said repeatedly that he does not wish to cut Medicare. And most House Republicans have made a similar pledge. “Social Security and Medicare is off the books now,” President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said during last year’s State of the Union address, drawing a standing ovation from nearly every Republican present.

Mr. Trump said last week in a Fox News interview that Medicaid wouldn’t be “touched” either. But his record shows he has been much more open to Medicaid cuts than to Medicare reductions.

Option 2: Cut everything else the committee oversees

Even if the committee cuts everything that’s not health care to $0, it will still be more than $600 billion short.

The committee could also save around $200 billion by eliminating the Children’s Health Insurance Program, but that option has not been raised by the budget committee or anyone in House leadership.

Option 3: Consider options that aren’t exactly cuts, even if they don’t add up to $880 billion

There are some creative options that would allow the committee to find budget savings without having to cut spending it oversees. A document circulated earlier this year by the budget committee included a few such ideas.

Overturn regulations that require carmakers to raise fuel efficiency standards and reduce automobile emissions (~$110 billion). Repealing this rule would save the government money without making direct budget cuts by reducing spending on tax credits for people who buy electric cars and increasing gas tax revenue.

Auction portions of the airwaves to telecommunications companies (~$70 billion). The committee periodically passes legislation to sell the rights to transmit signals over specific bands of the electromagnetic spectrum, but the Defense Department tends to object to selling too much.

Speed up permitting for energy extraction (~$7 billion). Some of these options might run afoul of the special budget process rules. A staff member for the Senate, known as the parliamentarian, would have to rule on their suitability if the final legislation comes up for a vote there.

Option 4: Cut Medicaid after all

Even if all of these cuts, revenues and rule cancellations from outside health care can pass muster, the committee will still be left with hundreds of billions of dollars to cut to hit its goal. Mathematically, the budget committee’s instructions mean the committee would need to make major cuts to either Medicare, Medicaid or both.

Congressional leadership has been signaling that Medicaid has been the main focus.

“$880 billion is a lot of money, and even if only $600 billion is coming from health care, you have to go beyond tiny tinkering on the margins,” said Marc Goldwein, a senior policy director at the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a group that supports deficit reduction.

And several experts advising the committee say Medicaid policy changes are wise. “There’s more than enough in wasteful, inappropriate spending to get meaningful savings from the program,” said Brian Blase, the president of the right-leaning Paragon Health Institute, who was a White House economics official in the first Trump administration.

Some leading options for Medicaid cuts are below. The first few may be less politically fraught for vulnerable lawmakers, but would save less money. The last two would save more, but would have a much larger impact on the program as a result. (...)

Conclusion: Health care is where the dollars are

The committee just doesn’t have enough other places to find the money. If the budget resolution is going to become public policy, it will require legislation that cuts health programs. Almost a trillion dollars is a lot of money, even in federal budget terms, and health care is where the money is.

If the committee can’t find $880 billion, the entire reconciliation process — including the extension of tax cuts — will collapse.

by Margot Sanger-Katz and Alicia Parlapiano, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Kenny Holston
[ed. Pretty simple, even for low information voters. More tax cuts for the rich (over the next 10 years) funded by cuts in Medicaid and/or Medicare and other healthcare services. Oh... and raising the country's debt limit by $4 trillion dollars. Pretty straightforward. See also: House Passes G.O.P. Budget Teeing Up Enormous Tax and Spending Cuts (NYT):]

"The blueprint sets the contours for the legislation that House Republicans will now turn to writing. It puts a $4.5 trillion upper limit on the size of any tax cuts over the next 10 years, but does not dictate which taxes should be reduced, a complex and politically tricky question of its own that could take months to sort out.

It also calls for slashing $2 trillion in spending over the same period, without specifying which programs should be cut, though top Republicans have targeted Medicaid and food aid programs for poor Americans. And it directs increases of about $300 billion for border enforcement and defense programs, alongside a $4 trillion increase in the debt limit.

Even if they are able to cover the full $4.5 trillion, Republican tax writers have been agonizing over what they can squeeze into the bill. Much of the tax revenue will be consumed by simply continuing the tax policies that Republicans put into place in 2017, which expire at the end of the year.

Extending the 2017 tax law will cost roughly $4 trillion over a decade, while several other desperately desired business tax breaks will eat up another couple of hundred billion."

Chad Hagen, How to Peer Through a Wormhole
via:

Lady Day

via:

US Sides With Russia, North Korea, and Iran

U.S. votes against U.N. resolution condemning Russia for Ukraine war (MSN)

The United States voted with Russia, North Korea, Iran and 14 other Moscow-friendly countries Monday against a U.N. resolution condemning Russian aggression in Ukraine and calling for the return of Ukrainian territory. (...)

Oleksandr, 40, a Ukrainian army officer who runs intelligence operations in Russia’s Kursk region and whose brigade is now among those battling North Korean forces fighting for Russia, said he was stunned to see Washington aligned with Moscow, Tehran and Pyongyang.

“Sometimes it feels like we are living in a postapocalyptic sci-fi novel,” he said...

Image: © Charly Triballeau/AFP/Getty Images
[ed. Let that sink in for a while, patriots. You are the company you keep. Even the token conservative columnist at the NY Times calls it America’s Most Shameful Vote Ever at the U.N. If you're skeptical about all this foreign aid we're providing around the world (which among other things helps prop up U.S. Agricultural and Military/Instustrial industries) See also:]

***

"Seventy-five years of U.S. foreign assistance has produced more fiction than fact when it comes to how American tax dollars are being spent around the world.

In the interest of providing taxpayers with information about the value of their federal investment in this regard, it might be helpful to look at some of the top myths surrounding foreign aid, and how these myths compare with reality.

Myth #1: America spends too much on foreign aid

Opinion polls consistently report that Americans believe foreign aid is in the range of 25 percent of the federal budget. When asked how much it should be, they say about 10 percent. In fact, at $39.2 billion for fiscal year 2019, foreign assistance is less than 1 percent of the federal budget."  ~ What every American should know about US foreign aid (Brookings Institute).

Doge Pound Demolition Crew

On President Donald Trump’s authority alone, Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has been unleashed on federal agencies. Employees from Musk’s companies and those of his allies, as well as young staffers he’s recruited, are wresting authority from career workers and commandeering computer systems.

While some have been public about their involvement, others have attempted to keep their roles secret, scrubbing LinkedIn pages and other sources of data. With little information from the White House, ProPublica is attempting to document who is involved and what they are doing. 

None of the people identified responded to requests for comment.

by Avi Asher-Schapiro, Christopher Bing, Annie Waldman, Brett Murphy, Andy Kroll, Justin Elliott, Kirsten Berg, Sebastian Rotella, Alex Mierjeski, Pratheek Rebala and Al Shaw, ProPublica |

Read more:  Elon Musk's Demolition Crew

[ed. Their parents must be so proud (and their grandparents rolling in their graves). What really gets me is the careless and almost gleeful cruelty they bring to destroying people's lives. Every one would have made a "Good Nazi" back in the day. If you know any of these folks you might ask how their new jobs are going. Making new friends? Next on deck: Social Security (and don't think for a minute it's not in their sights. They're already priming the pump.):]

Source: Thomas Frank's The Wrecking Crew. "Bad government is the natural product of rule by those who believe government is bad." Read more: here and here. 

On Crossing the Rubicon

We Might Have to “Shut Down the Country”

To understate matters radically, Trump has sparked many debates. One of them is how close is the United States to a constitutional crisis: Are we headed toward one, on the brink, or already there?

If there is going to be a concerted resistance to Trump’s blizzard of executive actions, it will likely play out largely in courts across the country and, ultimately, in the Supreme Court. And if the Administration spurns court orders, what happens next will conceivably determine the fate of democracy and the rule of law in our time. Chief Justice John Roberts himself said in December, as the Biden Administration began closing shop and the incoming Trump Administration made its intentions increasingly clear, that in our current politics, we now live with the “specter of open disregard for federal court rulings.” (...) Some legal scholars recommend a keep-your-powder-dry attitude for the time being. But there has arguably not been such a potentially dramatic test of the country’s constitutional order since the Civil War era.

The American Civil Liberties Union, a major player in this drama, has been quick to file lawsuits on, among other issues, birthright citizenship, which the Administration seeks to eliminate. Anthony Romero, who is fifty-nine and grew up in public housing in the Bronx and later in New Jersey, has been the executive director of the A.C.L.U. since 2001. I spoke with him recently for The New Yorker Radio Hour. His sense of resolve and confidence were all in evidence. But if things go south and Trump defies the courts, he said, “we’ve got to shut down this country.” What does that mean? Our conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Let’s begin with the most essential question, legal and political. Are we—less than a month into the Trump Administration—on the brink of a constitutional crisis?

I think we could very well be there. We’re at the Rubicon. Whether we’ve crossed it is yet to be determined.

Well, describe what the Rubicon is.

The Rubicon is the flagrant disabuse of judicial power. If the Trump Administration decides to run the gantlet and openly defy a judicial order, in a way that is not about an appeal, it’s not about clarifying, it’s not about getting a congressional fix, but open defiance to a judicial order, then I think we’re there.

What are the issues where that’s a possibility?

Well, there are forty cases, so many of the issues could be the one that precipitates the Rubicon moment. There have been a bunch of lawsuits around the Department of Government Efficiency, and whether or not the DOGE and Elon Musk have overextended their power. There are some who say that they’re violating the Privacy Act; that they’re accessing personal identifiable information on American citizens—their Social Security numbers, their tax returns, all sorts of information that are in the government data banks. Now, whether or not they’ve actually accessed that, whether there’s harm, whether or not the individuals who are bringing cases have standing, those things are all to be determined by the judges.

Then there’s all the questions around shutting down, or the closure of grants from the federal government, from U.S.A.I.D. and other agencies. And there’s the “fork in the road” litigation.

And just to be clear, this is considered illegal by legal experts because—

Because Congress appropriates the money. It’s not in the President’s power to rewrite the appropriations from Congress.

You have the Vice-President of the United States saying that judges are not allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power. What say you, as the head of the A.C.L.U.?

“Legitimate”—that’s the word that jumped out at me. And that’s what we’re arguing about, whether it’s a legitimate use of executive-branch power. It’s not a new controversy. We’ve had these debates before. The unitary executive—remember that back in the days of George [W.] Bush? Of course, most Presidents have tried to exert a much more muscular approach to executive power than I think the courts or Congress often give them the room for.

Where do you think the Rubicon will be—on what issue and in what court?

The one I’m most worried about is birthright citizenship. That was the first executive order. That was the first case we filed, two hours after he signed it.

What does the Trump Administration want and what does the A.C.L.U. want?

They want to eliminate the right to citizenship if you are born here, which was established in the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s also in the statute. It’s how we created American citizens out of the children of slaves.

For us in the civil-rights community, this is hallowed ground. This is how we fixed that problem that we had in terms of chattel slavery, and how we made all of us citizens and so that the citizens included the children of slaves. It’s also the way that we became a nation of immigrants and levelled the playing field. It’s the great equalizer, David.

And so to go at it and say, in an executive order, I’m going to repeal birthright citizenship is both trying to undo a core tenet of the Bill of Rights and also the statutory provisions, which are equally clear. So we have belt and suspenders on when it comes to birthright citizenship, and they’re trying to rip them both off.

If birthright citizenship goes the direction that the Trump Administration wants it to, what are the repercussions and what are the actions that could follow?

Well, the repercussions are enormous. If they were allowed to repeal birthright citizenship, that means that even people who are here lawfully, and whose kid is born here, would not be a U.S. citizen. So take, for instance, two graduate students at Princeton who are here lawfully, and are endeavoring to make a life here. If their kid is born here, it wouldn’t necessarily mean that that child is entitled to birthright citizenship. So the implications are enormous.

Do we have any sense of the number of people that would be in jeopardy?

There would be hundreds of thousands. We have clients already in our litigation who are pregnant women, whose children would be born after the date of the executive order, whose citizenship would be called into question.

So siblings would be potentially rent apart, and parents and children would be rent apart as well.

And you would create a legal vehicle for intergenerational stigma and discrimination. In places like Germany or Japan, these countries still struggle with what it means to be a German citizen or Japanese citizen. You see the discrimination against Koreans in Japan. That’s because they haven’t had a concept like birthright citizenship, the way we do. (...)

If you lose?

We ain’t going to lose.

O.K. But if you lose, that case would then be sent to the Supreme Court?

It would go up into the Federal Court of Appeals and then to the Supreme Court.

And knowing what you know about the Supreme Court, ideologically, politically—

I think we win.

You win anyway?

We win anyway.

Because you have to say that?

No, no. I’ve never been this bold. I’ve been in my job twenty-three years. I don’t usually predict the outcome of our cases, because my heart’s been broken multiple times.

And you don’t think your heart will be broken again?

No.

Why?

Because I think this is really, really going a step too far. [Samuel] Alito and [Clarence] Thomas are the only ones I can’t bet on, but I think even [John] Roberts, [Neil] Gorsuch, [Brett] Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, and certainly the three liberals, are there at a point where the Supreme Court would eviscerate their legitimacy among constituents and audiences that really care.

Is your confidence specific to birthright citizenship or is it across the board?

No, it’s birthright citizenship. The rest of it is more up for grabs.

Where else could you locate a constitutional crisis that’s now happening, or in the process of happening?

Suits around congressional appropriation of funds that are now being disregarded by the executive branch—those very well could be the precipitating factor for a constitutional crisis.

What happens when and if there is a constitutional crisis? What happens if a White House refuses to obey a court order?

Well, then you’ve got to sue to implement it. I mean, we’ve been here before. We’ve had two different lawsuits, years ago, against Sheriff Joe Arpaio and Kris Kobach, both of whom refused to implement an A.C.L.U. order that we had won in litigation. [Maricopa County] Sheriff Joe Arpaio was someone who was trying to round up immigrants in Arizona. He was corralling people up and having Gestapo-like law-enforcement efforts focussed on immigrants. [Kansas Attorney General] Kris Kobach was the one who was trying to purge people from the polls.

And both of these individuals we sued, and we won, and they didn’t like the fact that we won. They tried to defy these court orders in both of those instances, and so you sue to implement your rulings. You would threaten them with fines and threaten them with incarceration. Ultimately—

You’re going to do that with the President of the United States?

You bet.

We’ve seen the Republican Party become the party of Trump. They are well aware that if they defy Trump in any way, they’re going to lose their seat. Doesn’t give you a lot of confidence, does it?

Look at the Supreme Court. Six to three. It has been a generational shift in the consolidation of conservative power in the Supreme Court. If I’m a good old conservative, I’m not going to fritter away that power. Why would I immediately allow my Supreme Court or my federal judges to be diminished in their status and power? (...)

One of the characteristics of the moment we’re living in is the absolute speed and volume of what’s coming out of the White House—what Steve Bannon called “flood the zone with shit.” That’s the strategy and it’s being enacted with real efficiency and real skill as compared to the first term.

But the zone is responding. There are more than fifty or so executive orders that have come down. There are more than forty lawsuits that have been filed in response. I’m really quite impressed with the ecosystem of groups that have been involved. The A.C.L.U. can’t do it alone. A group like Democracy Forward is an excellent group doing outstanding work on many of the issues that we don’t cover. There are groups of attorneys general, as you mentioned, the blue-state attorneys general. It’s really quite a different moment. People realize that the zone is being flooded and it requires us to coördinate with each other in a way I haven’t seen before.

You sound pretty confident.

I’m not sure I’m confident in the ultimate outcome. I’m confident in the response that we’re engaged with. We have filed over ten lawsuits already in three weeks. (...)

The crisis moment comes when the Supreme Court rules and says, The Trump Administration has flagrantly disregarded a clear judicial order, and thou must comply. And if they don’t comply, then we’re in a different moment.

I realize I’m repeating myself, but: play that moment out.

We have to exhaust all the remedies. We have to get fines. We have to ask for incarceration of individuals who flagrantly disregard judicial orders.

And that includes?

And that includes the federal-agency heads.

And it also includes the President of the United States, does it not?

He himself or the Vice-President? Sure, sure. No one’s above the law, right? Now, if we do not succeed, let’s say no one comes—the cavalry doesn’t ride—

Then what?

Then we’ve got to take to the streets in a different way. We’ve got to shut down this country.

What does that mean?

We’re just beginning to think it through. We’re talking with colleagues and other organizations. There’s got to be a moment when people of good will will just say, This is way too far. (...)

When you say “shut the country down” and take to the streets, who’s doing that? Because I have to tell you, this time around, so far—and we’re not even a month into this—the number of people that you sense have decided things are so complicated, difficult, or awful, and have decided to shut politics out of their mind—“I’m not watching the news,” you hear this—is alarming.

It is alarming, but it’s also true that it’s evolving. I mean, for instance, we had a town hall recently. Fifty thousand people turned up. Largest number ever, even compared to Trump One.

It’s a self-selecting group, though.

Yeah, but that still shows you that there’s more energy there. There’s more of a heartbeat. I wouldn’t give up on the patient just yet. There’s more of a pulse.

Let’s go back to the phrase “shut the country down” that you used. What does that mean?

I think you have to call on, for instance, corporate leaders. We’ll have to yank them into the pool with us if they believe that part of what is going to protect good corporate interests or the workings of the economy is the rule of law. There’s got to be a moment when people are saying, Can you countenance this?

President Biden had a number of instances when he bristled at judicial oversight and judicial review. He hated the effort to shut down his student-loan program. It’s one of his signature programs. He never got it through, because the courts got in his way.

But it’s really quite another matter when there’s a final order, from the highest court of the land, and the President just says, Doesn’t bother me. I don’t have to heed you or hear you. That is a moment when I think we’ll be able to harvest the opinions of people, and get people engaged in a very different way.

One of the instruments for mobilization is communication—information, the press. We’ve seen, in the last weeks, a lot of outlets of the press pay obeisance as well.

Sure. The settlements.

And what does that tell you?

Well, that means that we’ve had to help them find their spine.

It’s located in the back. It connects the brain to the rest of the body.

And it can be reinforced with a steel rod. With or without anesthesia. But I think it will have to come, David. And I think—

Haven’t the courts, though, changed in recent years? Donald Trump had time to install a lot of—

Twenty-eight per cent of the federal judges are Trump appointees.

And have you sensed that difference in your cases?

Sure, sure. They’re on the bench and sometimes they watch his back, and sometimes they rule in ways that are kind of head-scratching in terms of how far they will go to protect the person who put them on the bench. It’s also true that sixty-five per cent of the judges have been appointed by Obama and Biden. So there’s a larger number of them. That will change as they start to move judicial appointments.

I mean, what’s in front of us? I mean, let’s talk a little bit about what else might be in front of us that’s not just the onslaught of the executive orders. This is where I’m going to curl, or uncurl, your listeners’ hair.

We have not yet seen the mass deportations that I think are on the horizon. I think the number I’ve seen is somewhere between five and six thousand people in the first two weeks. It’s about half the number of the deportations that you saw in the last year of Biden. I don’t believe it’s just smoke and mirrors on this one. I do think they’re going to run the gantlet on deportations. When they start revving up that machinery, that’s going to be massive. So that’s No. 1. I think the deportations is something to watch out for.

Have you looked at the polls on how people favor deportations?

Yeah, but when they start seeing that their nannies or their gardeners or their fellow-workers or the local shoeshine guy—

Or their neighbors—

Or their neighbors are getting ripped up, and that U.S. citizen kids are put in family protective services as a result of it, when they start seeing . . . Because what they ran on was saying, We’re going to get rid of the criminals. Well, that’s clearly not what they’re doing already. When they really ramp up and they start grabbing all these individuals who are part of the social fabric, I think we’ll harvest that.

You’re suing the Trump Administration for an executive order forcing passports to reflect gender assigned at birth, which has laid out a binary definition of gender. What’s the point of Trump making that claim, and how do you form a legal case against it, and him?

It’s fearmongering. It’s a card that he played in the election. You saw the ads he ran. “She is for they/them, I’m for you.” It was clear fearmongering against a community, 1.5 million people, who are really under assault. You have over five hundred state laws that have been targeted at the trans community. It’s really an onslaught the likes of which we haven’t seen in generations.

On matters of speech: Would the A.C.L.U. today defend the right of American Nazis to march in Skokie, Illinois? [In 1977, the A.C.L.U. defended the National Socialist Party of America, which applied for a permit to march in Skokie, home to more than forty thousand Jews, including many survivors of the Holocaust.]

You bet. We just took the N.R.A. case a year ago. The N.R.A. came to us saying, You are the best litigation organization on free speech. And I said, O.K., I’ll take over your case. You are the client. We are the lawyers. We will argue for the N.R.A. in the Supreme Court. This was a case of Governor [Andrew] Cuomo and the administration trying to shut down the N.R.A. because they didn’t agree with its pro-gun policies. And we saw it as a free-speech issue, and we brought that case and won, 9–0, in the Supreme Court.

How does the A.C.L.U. feel about cases at, say, universities where protesters shut down a speaker?

No, the heckler’s veto is a problem. You have a right to free speech, but you don’t have a right to shut down information, debate, discussions. There are limits.

Finally, what are the main challenges now in front of the A.C.L.U.?

We are going to see a scaling up of deportation efforts. I think they will come for the millions of undocumented people in our communities. And that will rip apart the social fabric.

Congress has been on the sidelines. Congress can get into this game, to our detriment. The Republican Party controls both houses of Congress. When Congress starts rolling out its version of the avalanche of executive orders that we’ve seen—in terms of a federal abortion ban, any of the efforts to defund Planned Parenthood; there’s a whole bunch of revising of the nation’s immigration laws through statute—that could be quite a moment.

The third one would be, of course, the issues around defying a judicial order that I think we are already looking at and trying to anticipate. But when those elements come, I think that we’ll have really a very different debate in this country.

One of the seminal texts that’s been published in the past decade, warning about authoritarianism, is Timothy Snyder’s “On Tyranny.” And he warns against knuckling under in advance, and warning against exhaustion. Do you see that? Or do you see the opposite?

Knuckling under in advance? You see that in other places. I mean, look, that’s what a lot of these tech leaders, that beautiful parade of billionaires who were preening for the camera behind the President as he took the oath of office. Now, I know some of them personally, and I know that some of them were there because they felt they had to defend their corporate interests, their shareholder interests.

But I think there, you definitely see the knuckling under in the private sector. I think the fatigue factor is a matter of pacing ourselves.

Is it possible to pace yourself considering the ferocity and speed at which things are happening?

You’ve got to retain bandwidth. If we run the gantlet and we file all the cases that we need to right now, and then don’t have the ability to file them in years two, three, and four, we’ll do the country no good. We have to play this game smartly. And we are picking and choosing our battles. 

by David Remnick, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: ACLU

[ed. Damn. This is the kind of resolve we need, which is sorely lacking at the moment. I know if it came to it, even though retired, I'd gladly join in shutting this country down in whatever way would be maximally effective (and not just standing on some street corner waving a dumb sign... more like shutting the whole street down, and more). I imagine there are millions of others who'd do the same.]

Elon's Long-Term Plan

I'm surprised by how few people seem to be aware that Elon is pursuing a long-term plan. He isn't just making random power moves, as the media and the left often portrays him 

Elon repeatedly states things like, "My plan is to...preserve the light of consciousness." He believes himself to be working toward the "long-term survival of humanity and all life"

Whether he's pursuing his plan in a good or bad way is of course up for serious debate. In 100 years he might be seen as a misunderstood hero willing to do whatever it takes. OR he might be seen as one of the most destructive people to ever have lived. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" as they say 

The pieces of his plan: 

A. Tesla & SolarCity to transition the world away from fossil fuels toward sustainable energy, both for a proposed Martian future & to diminish the threat of climate change 

B. SpaceX to back up the human race by getting us to Mars 

C. Boring Company to build underground habitats on Mars that would protect humans from radiation and extreme temperature fluctuations 

D. Starlink to practice building a communications network around Mars. (Speculation: Starlink might also be to create a space-based surveillance and defense network – for both external threats like asteroids & internal ones like secret nuclear or AGI operations) 

E. Neuralink so human intelligence can keep pace with technology 

F. OpenAI (originally) to align AGI so that it doesn't extinct us. This backfired when OpenAI became closed-source and for-profit. So now he's trying to destroy OpenAI through lawsuits, by targeting Sam Altman's reputation, and through other means 

Other speculative pieces: 

G. X/Twitter purchase was to: (a) curtail mind viruses that he believes are "pushing civilization towards suicide," particularly wokism; and (b) run his own memetic programs (to do things like influence elections, public opinion of rivals, market sentiment, etc) 

H. His often-erratic behavior is largely the result of neurodivergence – but: he could reign it in if he wanted to. People just don't get to his level without the ability to control their public appearance. So why doesn't he reign it in? Doesn't he care about reputation? Actually, he's a master of reputation. Each time his erratic behavior gets him attacked and he survives, he develops stronger memetic armor. He can increasingly get away with anything. Allies will go, "Oh, that's just Elon, you know how he is." People underestimate how powerful this is because they personally would be terrified to get attacked by news outlets, internet mobs, and people shouting "cringe!" en masse 

I. As for his political alignment, he's non-tribal, he's just trying to gain the convergent instrumental good of political power. Thus he will align with whatever side (a) works with his plan and (b) has an ideology that he doesn't think is overtly "suicidal" for civilization. It's unclear to me to degree to which he's brainwormed or dedicatedly play-acting these days. Probably a mix of both. Notably he was aligned with the dems for over a decade. Eg he received a $465 million loan from the Department of Energy under Obama in 2010. As recent as 2018, he tweeted, “I’m not a conservative." But then the Biden admin started rejecting him, dems created policies that messed with his plans, and leftists started attacking him. So now he's pursuing political power through the side that will back him 

J. DOGE is to (a) ease restrictions on his companies, accelerating their timelines, but probably more generally to practice and gain political power, which is convergently instrumental. So he is also using DOGE to (b) score wins in the name Trump so as to be granted more power, (c) gain influence over many federal agencies - namely their budgets and staff, (d) learn how to control govt apparatuses in preparation for larger moves, both in the US and internationally 

You really don't need to have insider information to puzzle most of this out. You just need eyes, ears, and half of a brain. Unlike most other live players, Elon works out in the open and will mostly tell you exactly what he's doing

by Tyler Alterman, X |  Read more:

[ed. If even half of this is true, Trump's just a useful idiot and way out of his league (which is like saying the sky is blue). Same with Congressional Republicans who'll pay the price for all the damage Musk is inflicting on their districts, constituents and supporters.]

The Fraud That Wasn't

"I’ve learned to interrogate my conclusions, especially when those conclusions do one of two things: make me feel better about myself—superior to someone else—in the immediate moment or give me a reason to be angry. (...)

And it’s the main reason, not my mathematical prowess, that I didn’t fall for the nonsense almost everyone on the center-right and right did this week.

This heuristic—“If something makes me angry, especially in a way that fuels a sense of superiority, I should assume something important is hiding in my blind spots and find it before doing anything else”—is a lifesaver.

It works just like “If it sounds too good to be true, it almost certainly is” does against financial scams. (...)

Why the Right Fell For It

Before diving into why these fraud-on-a-galactic-scale claims are nonsense, I want to address why the right fell for them.

Three factors, in varying degrees, explain why so many on the right and center-right fell for this.

• The emotions that my therapist has taught me to use as a clue that something very important might be standing in the center of my blind spot, superiority and anger, and especially the combination of the two: superiority-fueled rage. This narrative instantly triggered self-righteous fury on the center-right and right. All along, the goddamn Democrats had been bankrupting the country—$200 billion a year in payments to dead people! They knew it! They always knew why taxes were so high and government so bloated! And now, a month into our side’s greatest comeback, we’re fixing it!

• The center-right and right have been treated so shabbily by institutions and elites that when someone with power and influence says something they believe—or want to believe—the dopamine rush is staggering. There’s a reason grown-ass adults attend rallies for a politician, something that ought to be embarrassing. Trump making average Americans feel welcome and seen in their own effing country, finally, is not unlike a neglected child seizing a rare scrap of parental approval. This is why Trump, a thrice-married serial adulterer and hedonist, the antithesis of traditional values, commands such rabid devotion on the right: he makes them feel seen, heard, welcomed, and respected.

• The idea that Woke functions like a religion is both common and obvious. Woke is the dominant faith on the left [ed. hardly.]. Most on the right already have a religion—and don’t need another. But it also means the right has the mental framework to follow a leader—especially one who makes them feel important, valued, and cared for. This isn’t a criticism. I’ve often written about how much I wish I could believe in God. I’m simply noting that many on the right are primed to follow a leader with complete trust—and far too much benefit of the doubt. They’re vulnerable to this, just as someone with a serious trauma history (like the MathNerd in my mirror) is vulnerable to self-sabotaging via rationalizing, not taking risks she should take.

Trump sits squarely at the intersection of these three forces. Musk, in turn, inherits Trump’s goodwill—along with the entirely deserved gratitude he earned for buying Twitter and ensuring at least one place online remains where saying “Men aren’t women” won’t get you banned.

If you see yourself in these patterns and feel insulted, I hope you’ll still let yourself think about it. If you’re on the right or center-right and don’t see yourself in this, good for you—this section wasn’t about you."

by Holly Mathnerd, Holly's Substack |   Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Good advice.]

Robot Umps Are Here

It was pitchers and catchers who reported to spring training last week. Been there, done that.

But you know who reports to spring training this week who has never been or done any of this? Get ready. Here come the robots.

We’ve never lived in a world in which major-league spring training games had balls and strikes called by robot umps, otherwise known as the Automated Ball-Strike system (ABS). But it’ll happen this spring, when MLB will give its players a chance to test out the ABS challenge system in games all over Florida and Arizona. The dry run begins Thursday in a nationally televised Cactus League game between the Cubs and Dodgers.

So is that a sure sign those robots will arrive in a regular-season ballpark near you by 2026? Not necessarily. The arrival date remains uncertain. The league might want to postpone implementing anything significant until it gets to the other side of the next labor crisis in two years. Or not.

But does it feel inevitable that one of these years, MLB will be using technology to get the big ball-strike calls right? Not much doubt about that.

So it’s a good thing they’re not unleashing the robots without getting extensive feedback from the players. And those reviews will be flowing within days, as soon as teams test-drive a system in which each club will get two chances per game to challenge ball-strike calls. (Just like replay, they won’t burn a challenge if ABS — and the Hawk-Eye cameras that power it — decides: You’re right.)

Fan feedback will also be a thing this spring. MLB will be paying close attention to how fans react to seeing umpires have actual strike calls overturned in actual games played by actual major leaguers. And won’t that be fun? (...)

Lesson one: The strike zone is not the same

We’ve all watched baseball games on TV. We’ve all seen that attractive-looking rectangle that comprises the K Zone. So is that K Zone what big leaguers are about to get dropped into? Um, not quite. This zone — unlike those zones — will actually be accurate.

But there will be one important similarity between those TV zones and the ABS zone — namely…

That rectangle.

We’ll let you in on a critical secret that is about to get exposed. That strike zone called by human umpires in the big leagues may be a rectangle in theory — but it’s more like an oval in real life. That’s because many pitches up and in, or up and away, are not called strikes by human umps, even though they’re technically in the zone.

by Jayson Stark, The Athletic |  Read more:

Image: Mike Janes/Four Seam Images/AP

[ed. The robots are coming.]

Damn It, Do Something!

As Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, sat seething in his office last month watching President Trump blame diversity requirements at the Federal Aviation Administration for the deadly plane crash over the Potomac River, members of his staff warned him against publicly venting his rage.

The midair collision had happened less than 12 hours earlier, they reminded him; bodies were still in the water and families were still being notified about the deaths of loved ones. Perhaps it would be more befitting of a U.S. senator to be respectful of the tragedy and all of its unknowns, rather than seize the political moment and respond?

Mr. Murphy had no time for that.

“Everybody in this country should be outraged that Donald Trump is standing up on that podium and lying to you — deliberately lying to you,” he said in an impassioned video he recorded and posted within 30 minutes of Mr. Trump’s news conference. “Every single senator and member of Congress should call him out for how disgraceful it was.”

Many did, but none managed to do so quite as quickly or concisely as Mr. Murphy, 51, who has seemed to be everywhere, all at once, since Inauguration Day, staging a loud and constant resistance to Mr. Trump at a time when Democrats are struggling to figure out how to respond to him.

Mr. Murphy, a career politician who rose to national prominence as a gun safety advocate after the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school shooting in Newtown, Conn., has emerged in the opening weeks of Mr. Trump’s second term as one of the most effective Democratic communicators pushing back against a president unbound.

In two-minute videos on social media, which he records from his office on Capitol Hill; an almost constant stream of posts on X; passionate floor speeches; and essays he writes on his Substack, Mr. Murphy is attempting to explain in digestible sound bites that what is happening in Washington is very simple: It’s a billionaire takeover of American democracy. (...)

“It’s an overwhelming moment,” Mr. Murphy said in an interview on Wednesday in his office on Capitol Hill. “Our political brand is fundamentally broken, the rule of law is disintegrating and a lot of people still don’t know what Trump’s actual agenda is.” (...)

He’s providing Democrats with a messaging blueprint for how to take on Trump and Musk and win back working-class voters.”

Mr. Murphy, who is aging out of the “boy wonder” phase of his political career (he was 33 when first elected to the House), is not exactly charismatic; he is cerebral and serious. At a recent news conference, he did not crack a smile when Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, made corny jokes about his grandson losing his first tooth, waiting them out stone-faced until it was his turn to speak. (...)

“Dictators and despots, they use law enforcement to try and compel loyalty,” he said in one video, explaining why people needed to care that the Justice Department had dropped its charges against Mayor Eric Adams of New York. “They threaten you with arrest if you’re not loyal; they will let you get away with crimes if you are loyal. That’s what’s happening in America today.”

But a constitutional crisis can offer an opportunity for a civics refresher, and Mr. Murphy appears to be breaking through.

Over the past two months, he has doubled his Instagram following on both his official and political accounts. Since Jan. 1, Mr. Murphy’s Facebook and Instagram accounts have racked up 29.2 million impressions. On Substack, Mr. Murphy’s subscribers have increased by 223 percent. His campaign has spent more on fund-raising ads on Meta in 2025 than it did in the entirety of the 2023-24 cycle, when he was running for re-election.

“My 16-year-old son for the first time, he said to me, ‘What’s going on? My friends are seeing your stuff,’” Mr. Murphy said. “I’m showing up on a 16-year-old’s TikTok feed.”

That is one of his current metrics of success.

“People are trying to understand this moment,” he said. “They’re looking for people who can explain it in terms that are pretty simple. I want to create explanations and content that get sent to people that are not reading and thinking about politics every day, but know something is screwy and want to understand it.”

Mr. Murphy insists he is not just doing all this to set up a run for president, in part because he thinks it is no sure thing that there will even be a race to enter in four years.

“Right now, there is a distinct possibility that we do not have a free and fair election in 2028, and all of our work is to make sure that doesn’t happen,” he said.

Mr. Murphy said he can easily envision a future where “the press is so demoralized, the opposition is so beleaguered and harassed that you just don’t have the ability to mount an opposition.” (...)

“Nothing matters other than the question of whether or not we let the billionaires destroy our democracy,” he said. “There’s a ticking time bomb inside our body politic right now. It’s very possible this thing could be completely rigged by the summer or fall of this year.”

So Mr. Murphy has decided to set his hair on fire to get people to pay attention. He is on YouTube, doing interviews with Mr. Minaj and political influencers like Brian Tyler Cohen, Mehdi Hassan and Jack Cocchiarella. He is on Substack, talking to Anand Giridharadas. He is on TikTok talking to Aaron Parnas. And he is wherever you get your podcasts, talking to Jon Favreau.

“The actual TV appearance has limited impact right now,” he said. “What you’re actually doing those TV appearances for is to create content that ultimately lives somewhere else.”

Mr. Schumer, who has come in for criticism from some progressive activists for failing to effectively respond to Mr. Trump, has been encouraging him to keep going.

“Chris Murphy’s frustration and anger at what Trump is doing is genuine and he has a unique, strong, and incredibly valuable way of pushing back,” he said.

Mr. Murphy is also shifting with the times. These days, he bemoans the fact that economic populists in Congress like Senators Bernie Sanders, independent of Vermont, and Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, are treated like radicals. He thinks their ideas have the best chance of crossing over and picking up voters who are currently in Mr. Trump’s camp. But in 2016, Mr. Murphy was an early and eager backer of Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign over Mr. Sanders in what became a heated Democratic primary.

His party’s devastating 2024 losses, coupled with Mr. Trump’s blatant abuses of his authority, have made Mr. Murphy rethink a conventional approach to politics. These days, he has been meeting with his Senate colleagues to persuade them that this is not a time to play by any old political rules.

 

by Annie Karnie, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Haiyun Jiang
[ed. Damn right. It's sickening to see spineless Republican sychophants in both the White House and Congress prostrate themselves before power, rationalizing the policies and executive orders that are destroying this country. Enablers, all. And suck-ups. Equally disgusting are Democrats who seem content to simply wring their hands, put out press releases and push grandpa Chuck Schumer out to talk about how "aroused" he is and how we'll all win if we just "fight, fight, fight". Which apparently means: passing the ball to the courts and hoping something eventually sinks in to an outraged public (post-destruction). Ack, I'm sick of them all. Fortunately, there are still a few patriots who are genuinely concerned with our impending constitutional crisis and are bringing the outrage it deserves, actively connecting with the public and providing much needed perspective and support. Mr. Murphy above, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, AOC. Damn it, every Democrat should be out on every available media platform every day making a case for protecting average citizens, with clear ideas on how that can and will be accomplished. See previous post: Listen, Liberal: Why the Democrats Fear Populism. Until then, I'm not voting for either party (and writing my Democratic senator with the same message).]

“It’s tempting to compare Republicans to Prussian aristocrats in 1930s Germany. But Prussian aristocrats were more responsible. They were dealing with civil unrest and the threat of a communist takeover. Republicans today have historically low unemployment, a record stock market. What’s their excuse?”

Political survival is one. Senate and House Republicans know Trump will orchestrate the running of a primary challenger backed by Elon Musk’s unlimited resources if a member defies him. But this is not the whole story of Republican subservience to the president. In private, Republicans talk about their fear that Trump might incite his MAGA followers to commit political violence against them if they don’t rubber-stamp his actions.

“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me. ~ “They’re Scared Shitless” (Vanity Fair)

CFPB RIP

More than a decade and a half ago, I watched Elizabeth Warren bring a crowd in Washington to its feet with a ringing indictment of Wall Street and the toxic mortgage securities that had pushed the American banking system to the brink of collapse in the great financial crisis of 2008. Warren was then a fiftysomething professor at Harvard Law School, and not very well known. Harry Reid, the Democratic Majority Leader in the Senate, had recently appointed her to a congressional panel tasked with examining the seven-hundred-billion-dollar bank bailout that George W. Bush had signed into law in October, 2008. As well as lambasting the bankers for their recklessness and greed, Warren was demanding the creation of a new agency to defend the interests of mortgage holders, savings depositors, credit-card holders, and anybody else who was obliged to deal with banks and other financial companies. In 2010, a Democratic-controlled Congress passed the Dodd-Frank reform act, which created the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (C.F.P.B). Warren served as an adviser to Barack Obama and helped to get the new agency up and running.

A week ago, Elon Musk tweeted, “CFPB RIP.” In short order, the Trump Administration has shuttered the headquarters of the agency, halted most of its operations, and laid off some of its staff. Since Musk’s démarche, Warren—who was elected to the Senate as a Democrat from Massachusetts in 2013, and is now in her third term—has led the effort to save the C.F.P.B., speaking at a rally outside its offices, tearing into the Tesla C.E.O. in television interviews, and, in a Senate hearing, pressing Jerome Powell, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, to confirm that without the C.F.P.B. there is no government agency to insure that financial companies obey consumer-protection laws.

When I caught up with Warren on the phone, late last week, she recalled that prior to the creation of the C.F.P.B., responsibility for enforcing these laws was split between six regulatory agencies. “It was nobody’s first job, and nothing got done,” she remarked. The founding of the C.F.P.B. brought consumer protection—regulation, supervision, and enforcement—under one roof. “For a dozen years, the C.F.P.B. has been the financial cop on the beat,” Warren went on. “It has found more than twenty-one billion dollars in fraud and scams, and scooped up that money and returned it directly to the people who were cheated. Now Elon Musk comes in and says, ‘Let’s fire the cops.’ What could possibly go wrong?”

Since its inception, the C.F.P.B. has tackled a broad range of abuses by financial firms. Last year, it ordered a reduction in credit-card late fees, which cut the typical payment by more than half, and capped bank overdraft fees at five dollars. In January, a week before Trump’s Inauguration, the C.F.P.B. sued Capital One, the ninth-biggest bank in the country, accusing it of cheating its customers out of more than two billion dollars in interest payments on their savings accounts by failing to inform them that higher rate options were available. (Capital One disputed the agency’s claims and said that it would vigorously defend itself in court.)

The C.F.P.B. has also sought to regulate payday lending, debt collection, and credit ratings. Last month, it announced that its victims’ relief fund, which is financed from fines levied on businesses that break the law, would pay out $1.8 billion to 4.3 million hard-pressed Americans who were preyed upon by a group of now bankrupt firms that used deceptive telemarketing, charged illegal fees, and failed to deliver on promises to repair tarnished credit ratings. In another investigation, staffers at the agency discovered that debt collectors working for hospitals and other medical providers were coercing people into making payments by threatening to report their medical debts to ratings agencies. At the beginning of January, the C.F.P.B. finalized a rule that would prohibit ratings agencies from listing medical debt on credit reports.

Like many of the C.F.P.B.’s actions, this new rule has been challenged in the courts. “The debt-collection agencies were making a ton of money from this practice, so they had a strong incentive to fight,” Julie Margetta Morgan, a former associate director of research at the agency, told me. Right now, it seems possible that the Trump Administration will completely dismantle the C.F.P.B., reverse many of its rules, and settle its outstanding cases on terms favorable to the defendants. If that happens, “it’s open season on everyone who has a credit card, a mortgage, a car loan, a payday loan, a student loan, or uses an online financial app,” Warren said.

Appearing alongside Donald Trump in the Oval Office last week, Musk claimed that slashing spending and downsizing the federal government is necessary to prevent the United States from going bankrupt. But even if financial retrenchment were the ultimate goal of the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), it wouldn’t explain why Musk has singled out the C.F.P.B. In 2024, the agency’s budget was capped at $785.4 million, while total federal spending came to $6.75 trillion. A bit of long division shows that the proportion of spending devoted to the C.F.P.B. was roughly 0.01 per cent. If the agency’s entire budget were eliminated for an entire century, it would save about one per cent of the budget for a single year.

Warren and others have pointed out that Musk may well have a personal interest in defanging the C.F.P.B. Since taking over Twitter and changing its name to X, Musk has talked about transforming the platform into an “everything app” offering services like online banking and e-commerce. Last month, X announced a partnership with Visa to create X Money Account, which would enable its users to buy stuff online and make peer-to-peer payments. In theory, such a business could well attract the attention of the C.F.P.B., which has been expanding its authority over big online-payment systems. (...)

In some of her public appearances last week, Warren likened Musk’s attack on the C.F.P.B. to a bank robber disarming the alarms as he steps into the lobby. I asked her why so many elected Republicans who aren’t launching a new financial app are also eager to hobble the C.F.P.B. She offered two explanations. First, big banks have loathed the agency since even before it started operating, and they exercise a great deal of influence in the G.O.P. “The banks see themselves having a more profitable future if they can get rid of the C.F.P.B.,” she noted.

The other explanation has to do with ideology: Warren said that this was the heart of the matter. “Republicans have preached a gospel for years that government is always wrong; it’s always stupid; it never gets things right,” she reminded me. “The C.F.P.B. is living, breathing proof, every day, that we can make government work for regular people. That we can use government to level the playing field, so that students don’t get cheated on their education loans, or a family can take out a mortgage to buy a house without worrying there’s a trick back on page thirty-six that means they are going to lose the house in two years. That’s government working the way it should, and it really gets under the skins of the most extremist Republicans.”

by John Cassidy, New Yorker |  Read more:

Image: Anna Moneymaker/Getty

[ed. Well, this is a litmus test isn't it? If you're not a billionaire or 'too big to fail' bank, what could be more beneficial (and self-explanatory) than an agency created specifically to assure Consumer Financial Protection? If the CFPB gets permanently axed, which it looks like it will, then we're back to 2008 again with banks and other financial institutions fleecing 'consumers' (ie. you and me), with new fees, penalties and collection schemes. More fake bs about protecting the little guy.]

Technofossils
Image: Sarah Gabbott and Jan Zalasiewicz