Pentagon Keeps Pouring Cash Into Golf Courses — Even As Trump Slashes Government Spending

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth says he has a singular mission. “Your job [as secretary] is to make sure that it’s lethality, lethality, lethality. Everything else is gone. Everything else that distracts from that shouldn’t be happening,” he said during his confirmation process. Since taking the helm at the Pentagon, Hegseth has doubled down. “We do warfighting here at the Department of Defense,” he said at a Pentagon town hall, demanding a “laser focus on readiness, lethality, and warfighting.”

Not everyone at the Defense Department seems to have gotten the message. Right now, the U.S. military is looking to pour money into the renovation of 35 golf course sand traps at the Woodlawn Golf Course at Ramstein Air Base in Germany. Contracting documents show that Air Force Special Operations Command also wants to purchase sterile mushroom compost for the golf course greens at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. It is also looking into hydroseeding at that same course. The Army, for its part, plans to issue a service contract that will cover maintenance in the golf course clubhouse at the U.S. Military Academy in West Point, New York.

What golf has to do with lethality is a question that the Defense Department failed to answer. Nor would the Pentagon weigh in on the hundreds of millions of dollars wrapped up in, or swallowed up by, military golf courses over decades. The Pentagon did not provide a full tally of its current inventory of golf courses, which The Intercept put at around 145. What is clear is that critics have been raising alarms about the military’s golf obsession for at least 60 years, and, despite claims of a new dawn at the Pentagon, putting-green pork is still par for the course.

“The military shouldn’t be in the golf resort business,” said Gabe Murphy, a policy analyst at Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget watchdog advocating for an end to wasteful spending. 

The courses instead tend to serve a clientele of military retirees and dependents. Some are open to public membership. Service members, he said, are seldom primary beneficiaries. “They don’t have the spare time to go golfing for hours during the week,” Murphy said. [ed. not so, they're actually primary beneficiaries with much reduced greens fees and priority tee times.]

Even at a time of rampant cost-cutting across the federal government — including calls from Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency to cut as many as 80,000 jobs from the Department of Veterans Affairs — the U.S military’s golf habit is not on the chopping block.

“This is reflective of a broader disconnect between the Trump administration’s rhetoric and its actions, particularly when it comes to Pentagon spending,” Murphy said. “Just like you don’t pour money into sand traps if your goal is defense, you don’t give Congress the go-ahead to boost Pentagon spending by $100 billion if your goal is to cut wasteful spending at the Pentagon.” (...) [ed. the Pentagon hasn't been able to pass an audit in the last seven years, and has no idea where the nearly $1 trillion it receives each year is going. It ain't because of golf courses.]

Sen. William Proxmire, D-Wis., said in 1975 that the $14 million a year spent on the Defense Department’s 300 courses, including 19 in foreign countries, was a “waste of the taxpayers money.” He complained that the funds came “directly out of the defense budget.” It took until the late 1980s for Con­gress to finally curb the use of such appropri­ated funds for military golf courses.

In the decades since, the Pentagon’s golf courses — run by the military’s Morale, Welfare, and Recreation as well as Marine Corps Community Services programs — have shrunk in number. The Intercept counted about 145 golf courses, although this is something of an understatement. The Army owns 54 separate golf courses, and while some are just nine holes, many others have the standard 18 holes and still others boast 27 or even 36 holes. The Intercept also counted 51 courses for the Air Force, 29 for the Navy, and 10 for the Marine Corps.

Military courses are classified as revenue-generating programs that should provide “for a majority” of their operating expenses or be supported by other sources of revenue, such as military bowling alleys and eateries, as well as outside donations. Golf course funding is not supposed to come from congressional appropriations, and Pentagon boosters have long wielded this as a cudgel in defense of the military’s golf obsession. But critics question why such funds are used for putting greens instead of troops. (...)

Whether military golf courses actually generate profit and conduct repairs and improvements exclusively with non-appropriated funds has also been as much aspiration as a hard and fast rule. When the General Accounting Office examined Defense Department golf courses in the 1990s, investigators found courses losing money or using taxpayer funding at 40 percent of the bases analyzed. Of 10 bases inspected, two had courses that lost $43,645 and $225,546, respectively, in a single year. Another two bases used congressionally appropriated funds for their golf courses, including maintenance of a golf clubhouse and repairs to golf course structures. (...) [ed. In the 90s? C'mon...in the present overall Pentagon budget this is just lint, or random change you find under couch cushions. The cost of just one sidewinder missle (and hundreds are used in training and other military uses every day), is $400-500k per missle.]

Profligate spending on golf is de rigueur under President Donald Trump, who reportedly played at least 289 rounds of golf, at a cost to taxpayers of at least $150 million for travel and security, during his first term. In 2019, Trump also faced corruption allegations following reports that U.S. military personnel were frequently staying at a Trump golf resort in Scotland. He countered that he was not enriching himself, but that he was instead losing money as a result.

Trump had, by the middle of last month, already spent around $11 million in taxpayer dollars on golf this year. Each trip to his Florida country club Mar-a-Lago costs, on average, $3.4 million, including travel on Air Force One, limousines for Trump’s motorcade, and the stationing of armed boats nearby, according to a 2019 GAO report. The DoD incurred most of these costs. Ironically, Trump could save taxpayers money by playing at the many military golf courses closer to the White House, such as the two 18-hole championship golf courses at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland, the Marine Corps’ Medal of Honor Golf Course in Virginia, the two championship 18-hole golf courses at the Army’s Fort Belvoir Golf Club also in Virginia, or at the Armed Forces Retirement Home course in Washington, D.C. [ed. so these are ok, but all others are not?]

While critics have called out the Pentagon’s frivolous focus on golf for at least 60 years, the DoD has consistently played through. During that time, the U.S. military has been mired in losses and stalemates from Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, to Afghanistan, Iraq and Somalia. In each conflict, the U.S. military killed far more people than it has lost on the battlefield, but in none was it able to achieve victory. Despite this, Hegseth remains obsessed with the idea of lethality at all costs. His department, however, continues to divide its attention between the battlefield and the fairway.

by Nick Turse, The Intercept | Read more:
Image: Fei Liu/The Intercept; Getty Images
[ed. Remember when Obama went golfing once or twice a week and the Wingers went crazy? Now, crickets. Anyway, this is one Pentagon program I can actually get behind. Military personnel need R&R, that's obvious, even if they aren't always fighting, fighting, fighting against... whatever. In Alaska they closed one of the oldest and best courses in the state (Elmendorf AFB) for supposedly budgetary reasons (everybody thinks the base commander just hated golf). Now there are only three courses left in the entire Anchorage area, two of them military (with wall to wall civilian participation). Think they're losing money? Hardly.]

Katja Lang

via:

Data Center on the Moon

Tomorrow, 26 February, SpaceX will launch a Falcon 9 rocket carrying an Intuitive Machines mission that will stay on the surface of the moon for approximately three weeks before returning to Earth. Among other things, the Intuitive Machines lander contains a mini data center, massing just 1 kilogram and containing 8 terabytes of SSD storage. This belongs to Lonestar Data Holdings and is part of a proof-of-concept mission meant to bring moon-based data centers closer to reality.

The idea of putting a data center on the moon raises a natural question: Why? Lonestar’s CEO Christopher Stott says it is to protect sensitive data from Earthly hazards.

“Data centers, right? They’re like modern cathedrals. We’re building these things, they run our entire civilization. It’s superb, and yet you realize that the networks connecting them are increasingly fragile.”

The Case for Moon-based Data Centers

Indeed, on Earth, undersea cables often get cut, leading to outages. Natural disasters like hurricanes and earthquakes, as well as war, can also disrupt networks or destroy the data itself. The lunar surface is a much more predictable place—there is almost no atmosphere, and therefore no climate events to worry about. There is radiation, but it is fairly constant. And the moon is not a war zone, at least for now.

“We call it resilience as a service,” Stott says. “It’s like a whole new level of backup that we’ve never had before.”

The other motivation is data sovereignty. Over 100 countries worldwide have laws that restrict where certain data can be processed and stored, often to within that country itself. As a data center provider, it’s impossible to accommodate all potential customers in any one location, except in outer space. According to the United Nations’ 1967 outer space treaty, space and the moon are “not subject to national appropriation by claim of sovereignty,” and as such poses a loophole for data sovereignty laws. An American satellite is under American law, but it can carry a black box inside it that’s under British law, or any other country’s. A moon-based data center can host as many separate black boxes as needed, to accommodate all of its diverse customers. (...)

Amit Verma, a professor of electrical engineering at Texas A&M University Kingsville who is not affiliated with the project, says there may be technical advantages to hosting data on the moon as well. Some parts of the moon are permanently shadowed and therefore extremely cold, as low as -173 °C. This means that no energy or water would need to be expended to cool the data center. And the electrical components will perform more efficiently.

“When you place data centers in environments that are already very, very cold...the performance actually also improves significantly,” Verma says. “Because when you go down in temperature, things like electrical resistance also go down.”

Future moon-based data centers could be powered entirely through solar, since the parts of the moon’s surface that are always cold, near the lunar poles, are relatively close to crater rims that are nearly always exposed to sunlight, unattenuated by an atmosphere. Theoretically, data centers can be hidden away from the sun and power can be transmitted from these rims, resulting in perfectly renewable operation at low temperature.

The Dark Side of the Moon-based Data Center

There are also obvious challenges. First, the moon is far away, which means data will take time to arrive. The one-way latency is 1.4 seconds, which rules out data that needs to be accessed in real time.

“Anything requiring “real-time” compute would be challenging with 1.4 second latency, such as live streaming, gaming, autonomous vehicles or high-frequency trading,” says Kent Draper, chief commercial officer of data center provider IREN who is not involved in the effort. “However, there are many workloads that could still be supported with 1-second-plus processing speeds. For example, AI training workloads or even non-real-time AI inference such as image processing.” But “in addition to high latency, low bandwidth would be a challenge,” Draper adds.

Second, if something breaks on the moon, it is much more difficult to fix.

“Operating data centers for power dense compute is extremely complex, between managing the power and cooling systems, let alone configuring servers to client specs,” Draper says. “We have teams of experts on-site operating our data centers 24/7, including network engineers, data center technicians, systems engineers, DevOps engineers, solutions engineers, etc.” Lonestar’s Stott argues that this can be mitigated by doing a lot of earth-based testing and including extra redundancy in the data.

Next, while physical interference from wars, hurricanes, and other earthly disturbances is much less likely, cybersecurity continues to be an issue, even on the moon. Texas A&M Verma suggests, however, that since these systems are being built from scratch, they could take advantage of the latest and most secure cybersecurity protocols, making them safer than the average data center on Earth.

Last but not least, it will cost money, as well as research and development time, to figure out how to get larger data centers up there. “Human beings haven’t been to the moon in the last 50 years, but they’re planning on going again in the next ten,” Verma says. “We don’t know how the cost is going to evolve in the future. So there’s a bit of uncertainty. But, it will be a one-time cost.” (...)

Lonestar has plans to next put data centers at the lunar L4 and L5 Lagrange points, gravitationally stable positions along the moon’s orbit. After that, the plan is to put data centers in the moon’s lava tubes, where the internal temperature is roughly a constant -20 °C, which would result in efficient operation without going to the extremes of the lunar poles.

by Dina Genkina, IEEE Spectrum |  Read more:

Image: Intuitive Machines

[ed. I don't know. There are some very cold environments right here on earth (polar ice caps; deep sea trenches; high mountain plateaus, etc.) with extreme engineering challenges less formidable than this (I imagine). Maybe the data sovereignty issue really is a big deal, and other forms of moon infrastructure will make this more useful in the future (giving Lonestar a foot in the door). Or (putting on my conspiracy hat), there's some other purpose this could be used for and they're laying the groundwork for that possibility.]

Starlink Expansion Plans and Unprecedented Reentries

S

Orbiting Now - active satellite orbit data

***

SpaceX started launching Starlink satellites in 2019. As of September 2024, the constellation consists of over 7,000 mass-produced small satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) that communicate with designated ground transceivers. Nearly 12,000 satellites are planned to be deployed, with a possible later extension to 34,400. (Wikipedia)

***

How many Starlink satellites are in orbit?

As of Feb. 27, 2025, there are 7,086 Starlink satellites in orbit, of which 7,052 are working, according to Astronomer Jonathan McDowell ,who tracks the constellation on his website.

The size and scale of the Starlink project concerns astronomers, who fear that the bright, orbiting objects will interfere with observations of the universe, as well as spaceflight safety experts who now see Starlink as the number one source of collision hazard in Earth's orbit. In addition to that, some scientists worry that the amount of metal that will be burning up in Earth's atmosphere as old satellites are deorbited could trigger unpredictable changes to the planet's climate. (Space.com - Starlink satellites: Facts, tracking and impact on astronomy)

***

Unprecedented Starlink Reentries

Feb. 5, 2025: What goes up, must come down–which could be a problem when you’re launching thousands of satellites. Since 2018, SpaceX has placed more than 7,000 Starlink satellites into Earth orbit, and now they are starting to come down. In January alone, more than 120 Starlinks deorbited, creating a shower of fireballs.

“The sustained rate of daily reentries is unprecedented,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics who tracks satellites. “They are retiring and incinerating about 4 or 5 Starlinks every day.”

Planners have long known this would happen. First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. “More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered,” says McDowell.

When Starlinks reenter, they disintegrate before hitting the ground, adding metallic vapors to the atmosphere. A study published in 2023 found evidence of the lingering debris. In February 2023, NASA flew a WB-57 aircraft 60,000 feet over Alaska to collect aerosols. 10% of the particles contained aluminum and other metals from the “burn-up” of satellites.

What we’re observing is a giant uncontrolled experiment in atmospheric chemistry. The demise of just one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of aluminum oxide, a compound that eats away at the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the recent surge is increasing the pollution even more. (Spaceweather.com - Unprecedented Starlink Recoveries)

***

[ed. Don't look up. Remember, these are just satellites, I assume/hope someone is keeping track of all the other space junk out there (NASA? they still around?). The Orbiting Now website is an incredible resource, definitely worth exploring if you're into this kind of stuff. So, to sum up: it sounds like there are roughly 11,500 satellites in orbit now (US, China, Russia, etc.), with approximately 7086 Starlink, and another 12,000 - 34,400 likely to be added in the near future. And if that's not enough, there's this (source):]

And on the subject of SpaceX-generated space debris, SpaceX’s recent Starship launch ended with the Starship exploding during ascent, requiring commercial flights in the debris path to divert to avoid it. Scott Manley shares a video of the diverting aircraft on Twitter:

Why Is Homeowners Insurance Getting So Expensive?

The recent Los Angeles fires have highlighted the rising costs of homeowners insurance in the US. Between 2020 and 2023, US homeowners insurance premiums rose 33% on average. In some places, insurers are simply cancelling policies entirely, due to a combination of rising insurance costs and state regulations that limit how much insurers can raise rates. This has driven many customers into state-backed insurers of last resort — the number of such policies has doubled since 2018, raising liabilities so much that in many cases it's unclear how the states will fund losses in the event of a large catastrophe. This situation is currently playing out in the aftermath of the LA fires, where the state-backed insurer is estimated to face $8 billion in losses against $377 million in available funding.

Rising insurance costs have led some folks to worry that the world is becoming “uninsurable”: that is, that the risk of disaster is making homeowners insurance (and thus home ownership) either increasingly unaffordable or out of reach entirely.

It’s easy to understand why insurance in some places, like wildfire-prone areas, is getting expensive or unavailable. But the broader trend of rising insurance costs can be observed in essentially every state, and it’s harder to explain. Most potential explanations don’t seem to be sufficient to explain the increase, either because the impact is too small, or because the cause wouldn’t apply country-wide. After diving into the data on homeowners insurance spending and losses, I came up with few smoking guns.

by Brian Potter, Construction Physics |  Read more:

Image: NAIC/IFP

[ed. Quite the dive, with more nuanced results than you'd expect:]

Why the Two Parties Operate Differently

Today I'm talking with Jo Freeman: a founding member of the women’s liberation movement in the 1960s, a civil rights campaigner, and later a political scientist. She’s not the most typical guest we’ve ever had on Statecraft, to put it lightly. But I was reading an essay by my friend T. Greer, and in it, he discusses two papers Freeman wrote about the structure of America’s political parties. The ideas in the papers stuck with me when I read them, and months later I realized that Freeman is still active. We connected on a call earlier this month. (...)

Freeman has attended every Democratic party convention since 1964 (and almost every Republican convention). Her work looks at how the two parties actually work — not just what they believe, but how they operate as organizations. I found her approach incredibly useful for understanding the 2024 presidential race, and why the parties operate the way they do today.

In this conversation, we dig into:

• Why do the two parties fight so differently?
• What makes someone powerful in each party?
• How did the women's movement transform the Democratic Party?
• What happened to convention caucuses? Did they stop mattering?
• What does it mean when a movement starts "trashing" its own leaders?

***

Jo, you’ve written two papers on the political organization of the two parties, “Who You Know Versus Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” and “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties.”

What were you up to in the late ‘80s when you wrote those two papers?

I've been thinking about the political cultures of the two parties for a very long time. I've been to every Democratic convention since ‘64 and every Republican convention since ‘76. I've been particularly focused on what women were doing within the two parties, although I'll admit that in ‘64 they weren't really doing very much. In ‘76, they both were doing a lot, but they were doing it differently.

Because I saw feminists do things differently in the different parties, I began to ask myself, “Why?” The answer I came up with is that the environments they were working in were very different. We tend to think that if you’ve seen one political party, you've seen them all, but that's simply not true. Party cultures differ just as societies do, and if you're going to be active in one, it helps to know what the culture is.

In that second paper, you wrote:

"There are two fundamental differences between the parties in which all others are rooted. The first one is structural: In the Democratic Party power flows upward and in the Republican Party power flows downward. The second is attitudinal: Republicans perceive themselves as insiders even when they are out of power and Democrats perceive themselves as outsiders even when they are in power."

Tell me more about what those fundamental differences mean.

The Democratic Party is composed of constituent groups, and it has pretty much always been that way, long before feminism or anything else. Therefore, exercising power within the Democratic Party involves being able to say that you accurately reflect the interests of a particular group. Those groups can be organized or they can just be ideational groups, but to be listened to, you need to be able to say, “I represent X” — “I represent black women,” or “I represent Jews,” or “I'm speaking for the people of South Carolina.” It has to be some sort of unit.

The Republican Party flows downward; it's having personal connections that counts. You could see that in the last year — those who claimed to have a personal connection to Donald Trump were paid more attention than those who didn't. In previous years, it would have been a different set of connections to a different person or people, but right now it's Donald Trump; if Donald Trump wants to say bad things about you, your influence just disappears. And that's because people in the party listen to what the top is saying rather than the other way around.

It seems straightforwardly true that the GOP is dominated by a single person today, but I think we tend to take Trump as a sui generis case. What's an example of that orientation from a previous era of American politics?

Let me give you an example from the ‘60s. Goldwater won the Republican nomination in 1964. He was not favored by everyone in the party, but he won the nomination. Phyllis Schlafly, whom we often think of as the organizer of the opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment, gained her influence because of her relationship with Goldwater. If not for that relationship, it's highly unlikely that she would have risen to the top of her own group.

I'm curious about the second difference you mentioned as well, that Republicans perceive themselves as insiders even when they're out, and Democrats perceive themselves as outsiders even when they're in.

This has a lot to do with the social basis of the parties, which does change over time. The social basis today is not entirely the same as it was 60, 70, 80 years ago. The Democratic Party has generally been composed of people who do not view themselves as elites. As it becomes the party of the educated middle and upper classes, it looks less and less like that.

Republican Party members, on the other hand, do view themselves as a party of elites. Today, to some extent, it's aspirational — people they want to be like, rather than people they actually are. But traditionally, they tended to be the people of the upper middle and upper classes. The Republican Party still has an awful lot of upper class people in it, whereas the Democrats tend to be people who are socially upwardly mobile, but not already at the top of the social hierarchy. Again, the social basis is changing, so what I was saying is not 100% true anymore.

by Santi Ruiz, Statecraft |  Read more:
Image: Britannica via

[ed. See also (Tanner Greer's essay): Why Republican Party Leaders Matter More Than Democratic Ones (Scholar's Stage):]

***

The Republican and Democratic parties are not the same: power flows differently within them. If these party differences were more widely recognized, I suspect we would see fewer evangelicals frustrated with their limited influence over the GOP party platform, fewer journalists shocked with J.D. Vance’s journey from never-Trump land to MAGA-maximalism, and greater alarm among centrist Democrats about the longer-term influence that the Palestine protests will have on the contours of their coalition.

My perspective on all this has been strongly shaped by two research articles penned by political scientist Jo Freeman. In her youth Freeman was a new left activist, one of the founding activist-intellectuals of feminism’s second wave. She is perhaps most famous today for two essays she wrote in her activist days (both under her movement name “Joreen”). The first, “The Tyranny of Structurelessness,” is a biting critique of the counterculture dream of eliminating hierarchy from activist organizations. The second, “Trashing: the Dark Side of Sisterhood,” is one of the original descriptions of “Cancel Culture.” There Freeman provides a psychological account of how cancellation (she calls it “trashing”) works and the paralyzing effect it has within leftist organizations, where cancellations are most common. If you have never read these essays I recommend you do. Freeman’s internal critiques of left-wing movements at work are more insightful than most rightwing jeremiads against them.

Neither of these essays shed much light on the Republican Party. For that we must turn to her later, more academic work. In particular, her 1987 article “Who You Know vs. Who You Represent: Feminist Influence in the Democratic and Republican Parties,” and her 1986 “The Political Culture of the Democratic and Republican Parties.”

The Song That Launched the Beatles

Twenty Flight Rock (lyrics)

"The barely 15-year-old Paul McCartney used "Twenty Flight Rock" as his first song when he auditioned for John Lennon on July 6, 1957, in Liverpool, England. The 16-year-old Lennon, introduced that day to McCartney at St. Peter's Church Hall prior to a church garden fete, was impressed by his new acquaintance's ability to play the song on the guitar. The good first impression of McCartney's performance led to an invitation to join the Quarrymen—Lennon's band that would eventually evolve into the Beatles. On The Beatles Anthology, McCartney noted that: "I think what impressed him most was that I knew all the words."  (Wikipedia) [ed. whole song '92 performance here]

Some Country For Some Women

As women stretch themselves thin, homesteader influencers sell them an image of containment.

On the question “how are we to live in an atomic age?” the writer C.S. Lewis declared, in a 1948 essay, that we think “a great deal too much” about atomic annihilation. Referencing this on her podcast, Homemaker Chic—dedicated to “rescuing the art of homemaking from the daily grind with red lips”—the homesteader Shaye Elliott describes taking comfort from Lewis whenever she feels overwhelmed by the state of the world. “If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things,” Elliott quotes, audibly moved, “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs.” Her voice quavers as she slows to emphasize Lewis's final resolution: “They may break our bodies…but they need not dominate our minds.”

Elliott is just one particularly public figure within the growing network of contemporary homesteaders who have embraced some form of subsistence farming. With 84.5K followers on Instagram and over 290K subscribers on Youtube—not to mention the podcast, a blog, and five cookbooks, in addition to selling photography of the farm and The Elliott Homestead branded apparel—Elliott also epitomizes the group of largely women homesteaders, most of them homesteader wives, who have simultaneously cultivated and capitalized on this growth by documenting their lives on social media. On Instagram, the 4.4 million posts hashtagged #homestead still comprise only a small slice of the 17.1 million #farmlife posts, though they likely perform better because of their distinctly romantic aesthetic: in this idealized pastoral, the grain of a hand-crafted kitchen table complements that of a hand-shaped sourdough loaf; linen-clad children roam free-range amongst the livestock, cheeks rosy and feet bare; milk is unpasteurized, eggs are pale blue, and pie crusts are kneaded from scratch, always with love.

The term “homestead” itself has a far longer, more complicated history in the Homestead Act of 1862, which granted 160-acre parcels of land to “American citizen[s] willing to settle and cultivate their plot for five consecutive years. Legislated during the Civil War, the act was an effort of the new Republican Party which, unconstrained by the succeeding South, aimed to empower independent “yeoman farmers” rather than wealthy, slave-owning planters, following Abraham Lincoln’s belief that “the wild lands of the country should be distributed so that every man should have the means and opportunity of benefitting his condition.” Under the act, 270 million acres—or almost ten percent of American land—was parceled off for applicants. While much of this was distributed to those who could not afford it otherwise, including poor European immigrants and formerly enslaved people, the act did not exactly democratize land ownership. On the prairie, settlers faced biblical conditions—winds, fires, swarms of locusts, and devastating droughts—in addition to the persistent threat of debt foreclosure: though land was free, resources like livestock, tools, and fertilizer were costly to acquire in remote locations, conditions which banks exploited by offering high interest loans. As a result, only forty percent of settlers managed to develop their homesteads within the required timeframe, most of them land speculators, cattle owners, miners, loggers, or otherwise equipped with start-up capital and experience; many of those for whom the act was ostensibly intended were forced to declare bankruptcy or simply abandon their land claim altogether.

In spite of this history, the prospect of owning a farm of one’s own has remained alluring to Americans, who have periodically returned to versions of homesteading particularly in the aftermath of paradigm-shifting events: the Great Depression, the Vietnam War, the anticipation of Y2K, the Great Recessions, and now the pandemic. As a balm to these crises and their various upheavals, homesteading offers the material security of self-sufficiency, namely access to food and shelter that is unmediated by supermarkets or landlords. Though it might also be said that our culture’s enduring interest in homesteading points to the more chronic, all-encompassing crisis of capitalism, to which homesteading offers not only material but also spiritual transformation: an opportunity to shed the requisite role of consumer, by effectively seizing the means of production and exiting the capitalist economy altogether. “Fresh bread & homegrown veggies are great,” tweeted “Homestead Mentor” Jill Winger earlier this year, “but the part I love most about homesteading are the transformations: From consumer to creator/From passive to active/From industrial to intentional/From sedated to alive.”

This kind of promise seems to have resonated particularly in recent years, as the American population reconsiders its relationship to work. While the pandemic exposed how “essential work” and the people who perform it are critically undervalued, the vacuum where the long-fallen girlboss once stood is now occupied by “quiet quitting” and actual quitting, amounting to what others have called “The Great Resignation.” In the absence of viable solutions to this widespread discontent, online homesteaders like Hannah Neeleman, better known as the face of @ballerinafarm, have supplied the next best thing: seemingly attainable fantasy.

In a TikTok from last year, Neeleman forms and fries buttermilk sourdough donuts to a breezy Ella Fitzgerald tune, exhibiting in the process the various accouterments which comprise her signature style: copper utensils and unbleached parchment strewn over a wood-slat table; the kelly green AGA stove that her “family treasures'' adorned with a spray of artfully wilted wildflowers; an audience of flaxen-haired children, perched on a stool, on the table, on her hip. To appreciate the true impact of this scene, one might look beyond the sheer quantity of Neeleman’s 9.8M TikTok and 10M Instagram followers, which indicates less than the kind of reaction represented by the top comment on this video: “I do not want a career. I want this life.”

From that phrasing arises the question: what exactly is “this life”? Ostensibly, a life of sourdough starter and adoring children and twenty thousand dollar stoves that is crucially liberated from the treachery of professional striving. Though this translates, more broadly speaking, into a life contained within a little house on a prairie, removed entirely from professional existence or responsibility for anyone outside of the immediate family unit— in other words, tradlife. (...)

The Homestead Act also subjected pioneer women to exploitation, where their domestic labor, romanticized as a “labor of love,” was not recognized by any proprietary right but instead, rewards like “pleasure,” “pride,” and “purpose,” which transcended quantification. If second-wave feminism worked to expose this narrative, then contemporary homesteader wives have renewed its purchase by framing their domestic labor in neat squares and 280-character anecdotes: portrayed in videos like Neeleman’s and photographs like Elliott’s, cooking isn’t a “chore,” as Winger recently retweeted, but “an amazing daily opportunity to tap into a sensory experience, to be creative, and to nourish yourself and loved ones.”

That style of rhetoric approaches defensiveness in one of Neeleman’s more recent posts, a vague non-response to a Times profile that disturbingly pulled back the curtain on Ballerina Farm. In the profile, Neeleman reflected that she “[gave] up a piece of [herself]” with her first pregnancy, which marked the end of her Juilliard career, and a gradual shift toward her farm-bound existence: one in which she abstains from birth control, delivered seven of her eight children without pain relief (she indulged in an epidural on the one occasion when her husband wasn’t present), and competed in a beauty pageant twelve days after birthing her youngest; put simply, an existence that requires week-long spells of bedrest to combat exhaustion-induced sickness. In the aftermath of the controversy that ensued—with comments urging, "Girl, run”—Neeleman posted a video to her account on July 29 in collaboration with her husband’s, @hogfathering. It shows the couple kissing, in cowboy boots, with their cattle field as background and newborn as prop. Through a disembodied voice over, Neeleman describes how they “snuck over” to their new dairy for date night, presumably built to supply the Ballerina Farm store with an expanded arsenal of artisanal goods. “When we started to farm, I was swept up in the beauty of learning to make food from scratch,” she continues. “It’s the world we created, and I couldn’t love it more.”

As an opportunity for tradlife to further its own anti-feminist cause, these idyllic depictions of domestic work are pitched to, as well as against, the disillusioned career woman. It is through this “gloomy figure of the working woman,” writes Zoe Hu in Dissent, that tradwives conflate “their rejection of both capitalism and feminism.” By suggesting that a woman’s fulfillment might be found beyond the home, feminism has, to the tradwife, degraded homemaking as a form of drudgery, as well as those women who find fulfillment from being wives and mothers. There is no possibility of peaceful coexistence from this perspective, notes Rebecca Klatch in Women of the New Right, only a zero-sum game in which traditional values and the wives that uphold them have either defeated, or been defeated by, feminism. As such, the disillusioned career woman might provide affirmation to the homesteader wife while supplying crucial ammunition to the tradwife seeking her vindication; cast in stark relief against the burned-out career woman, the tradwife’s domestic existence is rendered not only as an alternative, but as the only solution to the abasement of capitalism. “It was such a transition going from working in finance to sahm [stay at home mom],” begins one comment on a TikTok video posted by @gwenthemilkmaid, whose content revolves around “homemaking,” “homesteading,” and “holistic health.” “I don’t wake up anxious anymore, I wake up grateful to make brekky for my family.”

Yet despite her comprehensive retreat, not only from the workplace but also market pressures in general, the tradwife ironically becomes the ultimate capitalist subject by insisting that her labor is priceless. This dynamic is further complicated by the current wave of homesteading wives, many of whom enjoy profitable careers through social media, ironically by selling the idea of unpaid labor. In a recent post, Elliott mused that “if all of this went away, the phones, the computers, the videos, the microphones, the noise…our life would still be what it is”—“our life” meaning the curated version “of gardens, of sourdough, of lambs each spring.” But this post, which exists alongside others promoting the efficacy of geranium oil for a duck’s infected foot, lemongrass for pest control, and Roman chamomile for hives, belies the fact that Elliott became her family’s breadwinner within a year of being recruited by a fellow blogger to sell essential oils for the multilevel marketing company doTerra. With a similar sleight of hand, Neeleman has framed her Instagram profile in the following terms, as a candid record of one ordinary family’s journey: “With the ink still wet on the real estate contract for our new little farm, we drove to the nearest farm goods store…we had zero experience. Zero background in farming. Didn’t own a shovel or single animal ... .Already short on sleep, we did the only thing we knew how to do: tell our story and document the journey for all to see.”

While this version of events nicely lends itself to the sponsored #FedExSmallBusiness campaign to which it was attached, it patently glosses over the fact that Neeleman’s father-in-law is the founder and former CEO of JetBlue, as well as four other airlines. This inheritance is particularly relevant given the fact, as Anne Helen Peterson has identified, that there is no possible way for the Neeleman’s 328-acre farm to cover the costs of its own operation, let alone break a profit. Listing the variety of goods available for purchase through the Ballerina Farm website (everything from vacuum sealed “mountain raised meat” and baggies of “high protein farm flour,” to gingham aprons and clogs photographed with a smattering of grass), Gaby Del Valle has observed in The Baffler that Neeleman’s content functions as advertisement for these wares, as well as for her life—in other words, that homespun fantasy and the commercial reality are two sides of the tradwife’s coin.

by Kim Hew-Low, New Inquiry |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Moai

1956 excavation of a Moai on the Easter Island by Thor Heyerdahl (via:)

The production and transportation of the more than 900 statues is considered a remarkable creative and physical feat. The tallest moai erected, called Paro, was almost 10 metres (33 ft) high and weighed 82 tonnes (81 long tons; 90 short tons). Statues are still being discovered as of 2023.

Archaeologists believe that the statues were a representation of the ancient Polynesians' ancestors. The moai statues face away from the ocean and towards the villages as if to watch over the people. The exception is the seven Ahu Akivi which face out to sea to help travelers find the island. 

The more recent moai had pukao on their heads, which represent the topknot of the chieftains. According to local tradition, the mana [ed. universal life force/energy] was preserved in the hair. The pukao were carved out of red scoria, a very light rock from a quarry at Puna Pau. Red itself is considered a sacred color in Polynesia. The added pukao suggest a further status to the moai. [more]

The Rise of the Drones

The Drone Explosion

Drones are experiencing an evolutionary explosion as they invade every domain of military conflict. In the air, on land, at sea, and even in space, drones promise to change dramatically the character of armed conflict. (...)

The complete replacement of human combatants by drone forces is a technologically feasible end state for the evolution of drone weaponry. There is no reason why the command hierarchy of human armed forces cannot be emulated and improved upon by appropriate software, with every level of operational units responsive to commands from above it and directing the levels below. The greater decision-making bandwidth of automated control nodes would likely result in a highly efficient and flexible organization of forces. Thus, under competitive evolutionary pressure, it is likely that the current hybrid human/drone order of battle will steadily shift its composition toward a full drone force, with considerable autonomy, operating under high-level human directives.

The reason why drones are evolving so rapidly and unpredictably is that both microchip power and AI software technology are on exponential growth curves. The cheap and capable cameras and processors in our phones are providing the eyes and brains for inexpensive drones. At the same time, fierce competition in AI development is pushing out the frontiers of machine vision, problem solving, and adaptive behavior for drones. Weapons designers can now use COTS (commercial off the shelf) hardware and software that dramatically reduces the cost of drones. Moreover, the ability to upgrade the “intelligence” of drones via software downloads means that, unlike conventional military hardware, the capabilities of a drone arsenal can continue to grow after the hardware is deployed.

[ed. I read somewhere about "drone swarms" (maybe a Neal Stephenson book), no bigger than small birds, or in some cases, bees. Hundreds, guided in sync. Imagine that.]

Eastern Promises

The yen is low, and everybody is coming to Tokyo. If that sounds familiar, it’s not because I’m being coy or hedging my bets; it is the only information to be found in most English-language coverage of Japan’s capital in the aftermath of the pandemic. I can’t stop reading these accounts. After nine years in the country, you’d think I would have learned enough Japanese to liberate myself from the Anglo-American internet, but I’m afraid I’m stuck with flimsy stories about the tourist uptick for the time being. Sure, I can extract the basics of a television news report or a newspaper article, but that’s asking for too much concentration to pleasurably distract me.

Part of the reason that so much coverage of the city where I live errs on the side of optimism is that Tokyo remains lodged in the postwar American imagination as a place of sophistication and wealth, good taste and cultural authenticity, with a reputation for deferential hospitality. Never mind that this was the calculated effect of bilateral postwar public relations campaigns, a boom in exportable middlebrow culture, and fearmongering about Japanese industrial dominance. Now, some eighty years after the American invasion, Tokyo is accessible to anyone with a couple thousand dollars. Just as, in the popular telling, Mexico City is an oasis for digital nomads, or Yiwu is a modern-day Alexandria—a cosmopolitan shipping hub, attracting dealers in durables and Third World middlemen—the travel-brochure-as-think piece only comes as a surprise to those who have managed to remain innocent of a century of complete transfiguration. It is perhaps unintentional that the authors of such pieces suggest, always in the mildest, most consumer-friendly terms, that calling budget tourism down on Tokyo is the last hope for a country burnt to the filter economically, culturally, and demographically. Japan’s economy never regained the heights of the asset price bubble of the late 1980s; wage increases have all but vanished for the past three “lost decades,” and the number of citizens has plummeted over the past fifteen years (the population is estimated to become half its current number by 2100). Hence, every tourist delivered to Haneda or Narita counts, whether they are purchasing frocks on Omotesando, pornographic manga in Akihabara, or fried dough at the FamilyMart.

Or maybe, the next story in the cycle will venture, the real problem is that there are too many tourists. An ambitious author might draw parallels between the struggles against overtourism in Venice or Bali and Japan’s panicky municipal schemes to address vacationers thronging formerly sedate neighborhoods or trawling red-light districts for teenaged prostitutes, citing editorials about foreigners yanking on cherry trees and eating so much rice they’ve endangered domestic supplies. I cringe when the television set in the kissaten airs a story about foreign hooligans in Shibuya; if I’m in a coffee shop, I feel the eyes of the Japanese patrons on me as they consider my criminal predilections, but alone in my bedroom I actually savor the reports of congestion on public transit and interviews with outraged local residents making noise complaints. Most reports are helpfully followed by a commentator bold enough to bring up kanko kogai, or “tourism pollution,” a term born in the academy before becoming ubiquitous in coverage of Chinese tourists since around 2018.

Tokyo’s race toward peak tourism hasn’t been all bad. In this massive city, with an economy surpassing that of almost every country in Europe and an area of around five thousand square miles, the ebb and flow of tens of millions of tourists can be better accommodated than in more boutique tourist traps abroad. The real estate market has received a modest jolt from developers buying up property for hotels, and tight restrictions on short-term rentals introduced six years ago have saved Tokyo from the market distortion of cities like Florence, where Airbnb and predatory landlords have been blamed for an affordability crisis.

Still, mass tourism is as demoralizing and demeaning here as anywhere. Tourists disrupt the rhythm of the city, agents of minor turmoil set loose in familiar spaces. There may be no way to describe these transgressions without sounding like a crank—I know it is not maliciousness on their part—but I have lived in Japan long enough that the surprise of encountering a broad, looming American, with their transparent expressions and flashy Lycra pants, stuns me out of the daze into which the city has lulled me. I am rankled by offenses invisible to outsiders. While part of me sympathizes with the family of sightseers blundering their way onto a crowded Yamanote Line train with their suitcases or the young women filming TikToks in the aisles of a Ministop, my Tokyo training means I know infringement of its unwritten rules when I see it. This is a city that expects people to suffer in peculiar ways. You would need to live here to know that using a bicycle bell is anathema when you can simply squeeze the brakes by way of warning. There is no way to explain that the cement curbs around the overgrown green spaces carved out of the sidewalk at many intersections are not for sitting. I couldn’t say for sure why the rumble of the plastic wheels of rolling suitcases is more frightening than jackhammers.

Apart from making the city uglier and less orderly, the tourist is a reminder of an unhappy history in which the native population has been perpetually relegated to a vassal class. In recent years, the concept of omotenashi—basic hospitality, reconfigured as essentially Japanese—has been popularized by domestic tourism boosters as a national responsibility akin to wartime thrift. As a result, the tourist acts as though they are among staff members in a grand resort or actors in a stage show; the whole hospitable nation is at their service. (It can be funny to stand on an Asakusa corner and watch American or European tourists asking for directions from harried but unfailingly courteous office drones, Chinese tourists, or old men staggering toward the off-track betting parlor.) The tourist reminds the citizen that, as far as the future of the city is concerned, they are an afterthought.

by Dylan Levi King, The Baffler | Read more:
Image: Yue Zhang

Pat Metheny

DOGE Is Replacing Fired Workers With a Chatbot

"Hey senator. Did you read my shirt?"

"Yeah, I saw that."

"It says TECH SUPPORT. That's funny, right? It's because I know computers."

"Yeah. That's.... that is definitely a t-shirt."

"And it's a joke! I saw it on Red.... I made it up! Hey Marco! Did you read my shirt!? It's because I'm the computer guy. Do you know computers?"

"Yes, Elon. I know computers. Would you please excuse me, I have to be... anywhere else."

"Hey Kristi! Did you see my..."

"Get away from me, Elon."

via:

Image: Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best

Every Studio Ghibli Film, Ranked From Worst to Best (Wired)

Images: My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away (Deviant Art)

[ed. Gotta say, Spirited Away is my favorite.]

Music Therapy

‘She couldn’t walk, she couldn’t talk’: music therapy helped Joni Mitchell recover from a stroke – could it ward off depression and dementia too?

In 2015, Joni Mitchell suffered a catastrophic stroke. According to her friend, the musician and neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, “when she got back from the hospital, she couldn’t walk and she couldn’t talk, and the doctors were so pessimistic about her recovery, they hadn’t scheduled any follow-ups”. For a while it looked as though one of the most gifted songwriters of the 20th century would be permanently silenced.

One day, though, the nurses caring for her at her home found Levitin’s number on a piece of paper in the kitchen, and called him. They had noticed that Mitchell perked up when she heard music coming from their phones, and wondered if he had any suggestions for songs she might respond to. Remarkably, he’d helped her compile a CD of her favourite tracks for a series of albums called Artist’s Choice back in the early 2000s (it was a short-lived project from Starbucks, which had bought a record label in order to pipe music into its coffee shops). Their picks ranged from Debussy to Marvin Gaye and Leonard Cohen.

Here was the perfect solution, then: a tailor-made music therapy programme. The personalised aspect is something Levitin, whose new book is called Music As Medicine, knows to be all-important. As he explains to me from his home office in Los Angeles, “If you’re talking about therapeutic effects, you have to like the music. If you don’t like it, your walls are going to go up, your cortisol levels will spike. [You’ll say] ‘Get me away from this.’” As luck would have it, Mitchell had set down exactly what she’d need in these circumstances while she was well, and Levitin knew precisely where the nurses could find it – in the corner of the bookcase at the far end of her living room. He sent some extra material because he understood how getting in touch with a sense of herself would speed things along – Herbie Hancock’s River: The Joni Letters, and Our House, the song Graham Nash had written for and about her, with its opening lines: “I’ll light the fire / You place the flowers in the vase / That you bought today.”

Mitchell made steady progress with the help of speech and physical therapists, but Levitin sees music as a crucial part of the picture. “One of the things we know is that music you like increases dopamine, and dopamine is the neurochemical that motivates you to do things … having that music as a reminder of who she is, who she was, and what she cares about, helped her to do the very difficult job of recovery, and to follow through with the protocols of the therapists.”

In a touching anecdote from the book, Levitin describes how, a year after Mitchell’s stroke, he brought flowers on one of his regular visits. “She walked over to a cabinet by herself to get a vase for them,” he writes. “She moved some vases out of the way to find a particular one in the back, a glass vase with a single handle and flowers painted on it. ‘That’s a beautiful vase, where did you get it?’ I asked. ‘I bought it when I was living in Laurel Canyon with Graham.’ Oh. That vase.” (...)

In 2006 he published This Is Your Brain on Music, a mix of the technical and personal that became a runaway bestseller and was translated into 18 languages. It covered the gamut of musical theory – from rhythm, harmony and pitch (including the “Levitin effect” – the fact that even non musicians usually remember songs in the correct key) to their neural correlates and why our musical preferences are defined by what we hear up to the age of 18.

Music As Medicine marks a return to his core subject, after successful books on the neuroscience of ageing and the psychology of misinformation. “When I wrote This Is Your Brain on Music, I wanted to have at least a chapter on medical benefits of music, but there really wasn’t any good science about it – and I’m not one of those who doesn’t let the facts get in the way of a story. So I couldn’t write about it until now, because there’s actually been some good work,” he tells me. “We’re learning enough about the underlying mechanisms of music and brain and body that we can apply them, not just in the laboratory, but in clinics and hospitals and care facilities and outpatient treatments.” (...)

Since prevention is better than cure, is there any evidence that engaging with music can protect against dementia? Yes and no. “It’s not going to prevent Alzheimer’s, but it will prevent you from seeing the effects or symptoms of Alzheimer’s for some time.” And the more active your engagement, the better. “Playing an instrument is neuroprotective, because you’re creating something. You’re orchestrating your limbs and your fingers and your vocal cords in ways that you haven’t before. No two performances are ever identical, and so they’re creating new neural pathways.” This is the concept of cognitive reserve: “I think of it as being like an athlete. If you can bench press 250 pounds on a regular basis, even with a cold and a sore arm, you’re going to be able to bench press more than I can.”

So is music a bit like a workout for the brain? “Yeah: it engages every part of the brain that we know of. It invokes memory, emotion, reward systems, eye-hand coordination, planning. There’s a lot going on there, and even if you’re not a professional musician or particularly good at it, you get all the benefits.”

That’s why Levitin recommends (prescribes?) playing music, whatever your ability or age. For anyone who can’t see the point when someone like Yo-Yo Ma has a 65-year head start, he has a clear message: the idea that you need to emulate professionals or be well trained in theory is “bullshit”. “It was 500 years ago or so, when the Europeans built the first concert halls, that we created this artificial distinction between the performers and the audience. But for tens of thousands of years, music was participatory. Still, in most cultures on the planet – not in our hyper-success-oriented western culture – people are singing unselfconsciously in groups, and nobody’s making a big deal out of it.”

by David Shariatmadari, The Guardian | Read more:
Image: Jack Robinson/Getty Images

[ed. See also: Ted Gioia's excellent (and free) serialized book Music to Raise the Dead (HB).]

Robert Rauschenberg, Nectar (Waterworks), (inkjet dye transfer on paper), 1993

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How New York Drove a Steak Through the Heart of Texas

They say everything’s bigger in Texas, and that’s certainly true regarding the job of lieutenant governor. It’s an express train to obscurity in most states; in Texas, the lieutenant governor controls the state Senate and chairs the budget process. So when the incumbent, Dan Patrick, sketched his legislative priorities the other day, people paid heed — even when he was trolling the state of New York.

Patrick called on lawmakers to declare that a certain cut of beef, taken from the short loin behind the ribs, shall be known, by law, as the “Texas strip” steak. It is an outrage, he maintained, that the effete coastal snobs of Manhattan have put their brand on the delectable cut, which appears on menus across the nation as the “New York strip” — or worse, to haters of the Yankees baseball club, the “N.Y. strip.”

“Liberal New York shouldn’t get the credit for our hard-working ranchers,” Patrick wrote on X after meeting with Texas cattle raisers last week.

Readers of a certain age might be thinking that this would have been catnip to satirist Molly Ivins, whose cheerful disdain for Texas politics was evident when she wrote of one legislator: “If his IQ slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day.” (...)

In fairness to the lieutenant governor, I do have a bone to pick over the etymology behind this popular bar steak — just not the same one. It’s not right that Texas should swipe the name of the New York strip because neither state is the rightful owner to begin with. Proper speakers of American English (which is, by presidential decree, the official language until we switch to Russian) should know that this much-loved beefsteak is in fact the “Kansas City strip.” Or, if you must, the “K.C. strip.”

How did a cut from the heartland come to be hijacked to Gotham and rudely rebranded? The story starts, interestingly enough, in Texas just after the Civil War. The Texas ranchers for whom Patrick wrings his hankie raised more cattle than they could eat. When the railroads entered the West, they figured they could walk the animals to Kansas or Missouri, connect with the rails, and ship the beef to Eastern cities by train.

But there was a catch: It was a long walk, and cows are not big hikers. The longhorn breed is an exception. They are good at hoofing it over long distances, at least compared with other cattle. Ranches across Texas filled up with longhorns.

But there was another catch: Longhorns walk so well because they are by nature sinewy and slender. And the steak-eating public of the Eastern cities had no appetite for tough, stringy beef. The answer to this problem was Kansas City, which became a way station between the ranchers and the diners. In sprawling stockyards on the Missouri River, the weary hikers from the Chisholm Trail gathered to feast on grasses and grains until they were nice and fat.

And then they got killed.

Butchers had a variety of ways to disassemble a steer. One popular approach involved sawing through a bone that, when sectioned, resembled the letter T, with beef of slightly different characteristics on each side of the upright. Though sometimes called a “porterhouse steak” for the beer-and-beef establishments where it was often served, this cut became widely known, for obvious reasons, as the “T-bone.” Another way of slicing things up, however, separated the marbled beef on one side of the bone into steaks known as “ribeyes” while rendering the leaner steaks on the other side into “strips.”

Simple justice demands giving credit where it’s due. The steaks aren’t “Texas strips,” because they arrived from Texas about as chewy as a cowboy’s boot. And they shouldn’t be “New York strips,” because New Yorkers contributed nothing to the process but their pieholes. They are “Kansas City strips,” in honor of the city where the beef got its flavor and the men in bloody aprons who popularized the cut.

Alas, America’s first upscale restaurant, complete with menus, was located on the island of Manhattan. Delmonico’s catered to the well-fed rich of the Gilded Age who, as everyone knows, plundered without pause. Among the things stolen in those rapacious years were the names of both the ribeye (dubbed the “Delmonico steak”) and the Kansas City (dubbed the “New York strip”).

by David Von Drahle, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Michelle Kondrich/The Washington Post

[ed. Some days it feels like we're living in a Saturday Night Live skit. See also: No harm, no fowl: Trump recommends a return to subsistence farming (WSJ):]

***

Egg prices have skyrocketed, recently surpassing $8 for a dozen wholesale large eggs. Stores are rationing cartons to customers and still getting cleared out. These phenomena are primarily driven by the spread of bird flu, which is forcing farmers to cull their flocks. That’s not Trump’s fault, though it doesn’t help that he accidentally fired bird flu experts at the Agriculture Department — setting off a scramble to rehire them — and deliberately suppressed research on the disease’s transmission. (...)

Perhaps most eg(g)regiously, the Trump administration is encouraging Americans to cope with high prices by raising their own flocks.

“How do we solve for something like this?” Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins asked on Fox News. “People are sort of looking around and thinking, ‘Wow, maybe I could get a chicken in my backyard,’ and it’s awesome.”

In no universe does it make economic sense for every American household — many of whom live in urban areas or even suburbs where it’s illegal to keep live poultry — to start farming their own food. The fact that we humans don’t have to spend all our time growing our own sustenance, and can instead specialize in other fields where we’re more productive, is a tremendous victory for our species. (...)

Encouraging millions of Americans who are completely inexperienced with animal husbandry to become amateur bird farmers in the middle of a bird flu epidemic also seems like a great way to expose more humans to bird flu.

This DIY egg production stratagem also raises questions about how the administration expects Americans to grapple with other grocery items that have grown more expensive. [ed. Cow in every garage?]

NFL Teams See Aaron Rodgers Opportunity

NEW YORK—Leaping at the opportunity to make their intentions clear, numerous NFL front offices expressed interest this week in quarterback Aaron Rodgers playing elsewhere, sources confirmed Tuesday. “Aaron Rodgers feels like he could be a great fit for the culture of other places,” said an anonymous NFC general manager among the flurry of teams across the NFL frantically stating their commitment to keeping Rodgers off their roster. “We immediately reached out to his agent to improve our chances of keeping Aaron Rodgers as far away as possible from our franchise. This puts us in a much better position than many of the other teams in the league who now risk acquiring the former Jets quarterback because they waited too long to make an insultingly low salary offer or mock his weird beliefs and idiotic conspiracy theories.” At press time, several NFL teams reportedly entered a bidding war offering high draft picks to any franchise willing to suffer Aaron Rodgers.

by The Onion |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

Ferenc Lantos (Hungarian, 1929-2014) - Shift in balance

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Chris Ware
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[ed. Anywhere, USA.]