Army Wipes 442nd Combat Unit Off Its Website Amid DEI Purge

The 442nd Regimental Combat Team is one of the most decorated in the history of the United States.

Yet a web page celebrating the feats of the Japanese-American soldiers who won battle after battle in Europe during World War II has been scrubbed from official U.S. military websites as part of President Donald Trump’s purge of programs and military history that speak of diversity, equality and inclusion.

The famed Hawaiʻi unit is no longer featured on the U.S. Army’s official website as it was up until March 5, when the web page was banished to the Wayback archive machine — a site that archives material from all over the internet.

While the Army’s website still contains a few articles about individual veterans of the 442nd found by using its search field, the web page devoted to the unit is gone.

There is no telling why the 442nd is even considered DEI and why a web page devoted to it had to be eradicated. Maybe because it praises the Japanese-American infantry soldiers for stepping up to fight racial prejudice when they joined forces with other Nisei from mainland internment camps to prove their loyalty to the U.S. after the Pearl Harbor bombing.

The web page that was removed from official military sites says: “The motto of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was ‘Go for Broke.’ It is a gambling term that means risking everything on one great effort to win. The soldiers of the 4422nd needed to win big. They were Nisei —American-born sons of Japanese Immigrants. They fought two wars: the Germans in Europe and prejudice in America.”

‘Digital Content Refresh’

The late U.S. Sen. Dan Inouye lost his right arm fighting in the 442nd when as a lieutenant he led a platoon on an assault against heavily armed German soldiers shooting down at them from a ridge near San Terenzo, Italy.

The late U.S. Sen. Spark Matsunaga was also a member of the combined 100th Battalion-442nd serving with many other Hawaiʻi men, primarily from working class immigrant families, many of whom became prominent citizens.

In a Feb. 26 memo, Sean Parnell, assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, ordered the removal by March 5 of all DEI material from all military websites and social media platforms.

The subject of Parnell’s memo is “Digital Content Refresh.”

An Army spokesman told Civil Beat on Friday that the web page was “taken down in accordance with Presidential Executive Orders.”

“Articles related to the 442nd Infantry Regiment will be republished once we have had the opportunity to redesign and reorganize content to better align with current guidance,” said Christopher Surridge of the Office of the Chief of Public Affairs in an email.

It seems crazy to think with the press of a finger the history of the 442nd “Go For Broke” unit could be “refreshed” to obliterate the collective memory of the death and anguish soldiers suffered as they fought at Anzio, the Po Valley and Monte Cassino and in the dense forest of the Vosges mountains in the “Battle of the “Lost Battalion,” when they rescued Texas infantrymen trapped by the Germans.

“This takes Trump’s cuts to a whole new personal level,” said Honolulu filmmaker Stuart Yamane, whose father Masakichi Yamane served in the unit and was never the same after he returned. (...)

When it was activated in April 1943, the unit included about 4,000 men, most of them from Hawaiʻi. It later included about 10,000 Japanese-American soldiers.

The 442nd soldiers earned 21 Congressional Medals of Honor, 9,486 Purple Hearts and eight Presidential Unit Citations as well as the Congressional Gold Medal, the country’s highest civilian award.

Their courage has been honored in articles, photographs, books, documentaries and a feature-length film.

‘They Are Rewriting History’

“I think trying to wipe out this part of history is the worst part,” said Kaneohe resident Drusilla Tanaka. “I don’t know how you repair the damage.”

Her father, Bernard Akamine, served with the 100th Battalion-442nd in its shooting engagements all the way up Italy to the Battle of the Gothic Line, a heavily fortified German defensive line in northern Italy. The Gothic Line campaign — considered a significant Allied victory — came at the cost of thousands of American and British deaths.

“With all that is going on, this hurts the most,” said Tanaka. “They are rewriting history and that’s a sin.”

The Pentagon has not only purged the decorated Japanese-American soldiers from its official websites but it has also deleted thousands of pictures and reports praising the notable achievements of women, other racial minorities and anything that speaks of Black History Month.

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth warned of the purges when he said “DEI is dead.” He said it is bad for camaraderie to put one group in the spotlight ahead of any other.

Juanita Allen is one of the few people I spoke with who was not upset by the Pentagon purge.

“If the Department of Defense wants to remove the 442nd from websites, be my guest,” she said. “We all know how wonderful they were. We don’t need the U.S. government to toot their horn.”

Allen’s father, Maj. William P. Wright, was one of the Caucasian officers who led the Japanese-American troops. He served through the war as executive officer of the unit’s 522nd Field Artillery Battalion.

Allen is the secretary of the Sons and Daughters of the 442nd, a Hawaiʻi nonprofit organization founded by the adult children of the veterans.

Even though the Pentagon removed the web page honoring the 442nd from its own websites, Allen says family members and supporters of the unit have at least six websites in Hawaiʻi and on the mainland with pictures and memories of its wartime achievements.

“We are apolitical,” she said. “We will not speak ill of the president or the Department of Defense. All we want to do is honor the men for what they did in the war.”

by Denby Fawcitt, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Images: US Army website before being removed.

[ed. The website has apparently been restored now (haven't checked the "redesign and reorganization" changes ), but you can see where this is all headed. Will Japanese internments during WWII eventually be considered DEI? As for Ms. Allen, thank you for burying Hawaii's heritage and history in a few local websites. See also: Hawaiʻi Veterans Deserve Better Than Trump's VA Cuts  - administration’s proposal to eliminate 80,000 VA jobs will hit Hawai‘i especially hard (CB). UPDATE: Trump's anti-DEI purge is erasing these military legends (Axios). Not just the 447th.]

The Future Looks Ratty

If we are, as some city officials have said, in a war with rats, we are clearly losing. We’ve been losing for years.

Although cities have ramped up their use of poisons and traps, the number of rats in places like New York City, San Francisco, and Toronto has increased in recent years, according to a new study published in the journal Science Advances. The researchers analyzed rat complaints and inspection reports for 16 cities that had consistent, long-term data available. More than two-thirds of those cities saw a significant increase in rat sightings.

Washington, D.C., had the largest increase in sightings over roughly the last decade, according to the study, which is the most comprehensive assessment of city rats to date. [ed. it figures.]

“We are on our heels and being pushed backward,” Jonathan Richardson, the study’s lead author and an ecologist at the University of Richmond, says about the fight against rat infestations.

There’s more bad news: The study found a strong link between an increase in rats and rising temperatures, a consequence of climate change. Cities that had warmed more quickly had larger increases in rat sightings, the research found. This is in part because, with warmer winters, rats can spend more time eating and reproducing and less time hunkering down underground.

Scientists project that urban areas will warm by between 1.9 and 4.4 degrees Celsius (3.4 and 7.9 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century, depending on how much oil and gas we burn. Cities tend to be hotter than rural areas—because concrete and other human infrastructure absorb and re-emit more heat than vegetation—and warm faster. That means that not only are current rat control methods failing, but the problem is likely to get much worse.

It’s a good thing, then, that there’s an obvious solution. And better yet, it’s simple. (...)

Part of the problem, experts say, is that for much of the past century, cities have relied on rodenticides and baited traps to eradicate rats.

This approach just doesn’t work.

“It’s fairly clear that widespread application of rodenticide does not curb rat populations,” says Jason Munshi-South, an ecologist and rat expert at Drexel University in Pennsylvania. “What it does is kill rats on a local level, so it feels like you’re doing something. But you’re up against the brutal math of rodent reproduction.”

A well-fed mother rat can have 10 or more babies in a litter, and have several litters a year. Plus, poison doesn’t reach every rat, and some have learned to avoid it.

What poison does do is cause gnarly deaths for rats—often leading to prolonged internal bleeding—and it kills other wildlife, too. When scientists collect dead birds of prey, they find rodenticide in most of them. “Dying from rodenticide like an anticoagulant is a terrible way to die,” Munshi-South says.

Exterminators continue to rely heavily on poison and baits in part because it’s easy, Richardson says. “They’re just doing what they have the capacity to do in a practical, short time frame,” he says.

The status quo is also benefiting the extermination industry.

“Exterminators don’t get paid to remove rodents entirely,” Parsons says. “They get paid to control rodents so that they’re always needed. I’m not at all cynical. This is just the way it works.”

by Benji Jones, bioGraphic |  Read more:

Image: anatolypareev/Shutterstock

Robots Testing a Bulletproof Cybertruck

[ed. Prioritizing practical applications of advanced technology.]

source: YouTube Shorts

Directions to a Journalistic Gold Mine

In late 2023, as the US presidential election was heaving into view, the author Michael Lewis called up six writers he admired – five Americans and one Briton – and asked if they’d like to contribute to an urgent new series he was putting together for the Washington Post. At the time, Lewis was hearing talk that if Donald Trump got back into power, his administration would unleash a programme of cuts that would rip the federal government to shreds. Lewis decided to launch a pre-emptive strike. The series, entitled Who Is Government?, would appear in the weeks running up to the election. Its purpose, Lewis explains over a Zoom call from his book-lined study in Berkeley, California, “was to inoculate the federal workforce against really mindless attacks”. It would do this by valorising public service and, as he puts it, “jarring the stereotype people had in their heads about civil servants”. (...)

The British writer John Lanchester, who contributed a standout piece to the series, got a glimpse of Lewis’s appeal when they first met in 2014. It was behind the stage at the London School of Economics. Lanchester had agreed to interview Lewis about Flash Boys, which plumbs the murky world of high-frequency trading. “Not only was the venue sold out,” Lanchester recalls, “but they’d had to add on another room at the theatre for people to watch, and that was sold out too. I remember thinking: ‘There’s a tube strike on, it’s absolutely pissing down, nobody’s going to come.’ But not a bit of it. The place was packed.” (...)

As the 2024 election approached, amid warnings that Trump might do much worse than neglect the civil service if he got back into power, Lewis decided to revisit the government’s inner workings. Joining him for the ride this time was Dave Eggers, who reported on a team of scientists probing for extraterrestrial life from Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. In turn, Geraldine Brooks profiled online sleuths at the Internal Revenue Service who uncover evidence of cybercrime and child sexual abuse in the darker regions of the net, and W Kamau Bell wrote touchingly about his Black goddaughter’s work as a paralegal at the justice department.

For his part, Lewis tracked down a mining engineer at the labour department named Christopher Mark, whose research had helped prevent fatal roof falls in underground mines. He also wrote about Heather Stone, a rare-diseases expert at the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), who had saved lives by fast-tracking authorisation for an experimental drug to treat potentially lethal balamuthia infections.

Lanchester, meanwhile, opted to write not about a person but a number – the consumer price index, a fiendishly complex statistic that acts as the main official measure of inflation. The lack of a human protagonist doesn’t make the piece any less absorbing, and Lanchester has fun uncovering the staggering amount of data on seemingly insignificant matters (such as the average length of the adult bedbug or the average annual income for a nuclear medicine technologist in Albany, New York) that the federal government hoovers up every year. [ed. which Elon and Vought now have.]

The overall effect of the series, just published as a book –Who Is Government?: The Untold Story of Public Service – is to transform civil servants from faceless bureaucrats into selfless superheroes. It’s a cracking read but sadly, contrary to Lewis’s hopes, it did nothing to prevent the flurry of devastating cuts that Trump and Musk, via his “department of government efficiency” (Doge), have inflicted on the government over the past couple of months. Of the 3 million-plus federal workers, it’s estimated that more than 20,000 have already been fired. Many of the subjects of the book are at risk of losing their jobs.

“Maybe we’re in early stages in the war, but it’s amazing how little effect the series has had,” Lewis says ruefully. “Not only have I not heard a peep from Doge, but I haven’t had any sense that they were worried about what I might write. (...)

Now Lewis and Lanchester are looking back at a collection of essays conceived in a more hopeful time and wondering what will become of the departments they wrote about – and the country that relies on them. They are not optimistic. Over the course of our 90-minute conversation towards the end of last month, they talked about the motivation behind Trump and Musk’s war on the civil service, its probable effects on the US and the lessons the UK should be taking.

You say in the intro to Who Is Government? that “the sort of people who become civil servants tend not to want or seek attention”. Was it hard to find interesting people to write about?
ML: It took about a nanosecond. And I think there’s a reason for that: there are just a lot of great subjects [in the federal government], and the minute they face existential risk, they become really interesting. They’re weird and different. They’re not interested in money, for a start. They’ve got some purpose in their lives.

You two are watching from afar. Are you watching the end of our democracy? Or are you watching some kind of false jeopardy situation?
JL: Well, we had an exchange over email about this, and I’ve been thinking about what you said, Michael, that we’ll probably muddle through but we are playing Russian roulette with democracy. That image lodged in my head. And the thing that is deeply shocking and surprising is that nobody seems to give a shit about [the government cuts].

The cuts are being made in the name of efficiency but it looks more like an ideological purge. Is that how you see it?
ML: I don’t think it’s one person’s will being exerted; it’s a combination of Trump, Musk and Russell Vought, who’s now the director of the office of management and budget. He was the architect of that Project 2025 book and he’s a Christian nationalist-slash-libertarian, whatever that is. Trump is the easiest to grok. He’s a trust-destroying machine. He needs chaos where nobody trusts anybody and then there’s a weird level playing field, and he excels in that environment.

My simple view of Musk is that he’s like an addict. He’s addicted to the attention, the drama – he’s stuck his finger in the social media socket and his brain is fried. He’s probably got cheerleaders, his little Silicon Valley crowd, telling him he’s doing a great thing, but most of them don’t know anything about it or the consequences. Vought’s the only one, I think, with a clear vision, but it’s a weird vision – really drastically minimum government. Those are the threads I see of what’s going on, and the backdrop is that they can do anything and the polls don’t move – people here don’t seem to care.

But isn’t it only a matter of time before people do start to care… once the effects of the cuts kick in?
ML: The pessimistic response is that, when things go wrong, there’ll be a war of narratives. The Trump narrative will inevitably say something like: “These bureaucrats screwed it up,” and it creates even more mistrust in the thing that you actually need to repair. I do think we’re going to muddle through. But I don’t think Trump’s ever going to get blamed in the ways he ought to. And whoever comes and fixes it is never going to get the credit they should.

JL: When you look at the historical analogies to this kind of collective delusion, it’s quite hard to think of a way of recovering from losing a sense of an agreed consensus reality. The only historical examples I can think of is, basically, you lose a catastrophic war. You know, the Germans lose and they wake up and they have a reckoning with their past. But that’s historically quite rare and hard to imagine … But maybe that’s too dark. Maybe what happens is specific impacts arise from specific programmes being cut that make people think: “Oh, actually, that’s not such a great idea.”

A clip just circulated of Musk talking about the US Agency for International Development (USAid) and he said something like: “Oh yeah, we made a couple little mistakes, like we briefly cut Ebola prevention there for just a second, then we brought it back again.”

And then I saw someone who ran the USAid Ebola response during one of the outbreaks saying: “That’s flatly not true [that Musk restored the Ebola response].” Musk talks loudly about fraud and theft in government, but these things aren’t fraud and theft – they’re just programmes they don’t like. In fact I haven’t actually seen anything that you could with a straight face categorise as fraud – have you, Michael?

ML: There’s almost no worse place to be trying to engage in fraud or theft than the US government, because there are so many eyes on you. When you take a federal employee out to lunch, they won’t let you pay for their sandwich – they’re so terrified. In fact it’s far easier to engage in fraud and theft in a Wall Street bank or a Silicon Valley startup, and there’s probably much more waste too. (...)

Which is the real Bezos; the one who was supportive of this series celebrating public service or the one who’s now dedicating the Washington Post’s opinion pages to championing free markets?
ML: I feel some sympathy towards Bezos. I really like him, personally. He’s fun to talk to. He seems to be basically sane. He’s not obviously megalomaniacal or even that self-absorbed. He’s really interested in the world around him. He makes sense on a lot of subjects. So I think the real Bezos is not a bad guy.

But he’s done a bad thing. And it’s curious why. You would think, if you had $200bn, that you’d have some fuck-you money. I mean, how much do you have to have to be able to live by your principles? There’s some curve that bends, and at some point, when you have so much money, you’re back to being as vulnerable as someone who has almost nothing. He’s behaving like someone who has nothing, like he’s just scared of Trump. I think if you were with him and watching every step, you’d be watching an interesting psychological process where he’s persuaded himself that what he’s doing is good. He’s rationalised his behaviour, but his behaviour is really appalling.

JL: How fucking craven do you have to be, if you can lose 99% of your net worth and still be worth $2bn and you can’t say “fuck you” to proto-fascists? The thing that is frightening is that people like him, men like him, are looking into the future and basically assuming that the US is going to become a kind of fascist state. Because, I mean, $2bn is enough to say “fuck you”. But if the US is now going to become a Maga [Make America Great Again] theocracy, and we just had the last election we’re ever going to have, then maybe he’s positioning for that. I don’t know that to be true, but that’s my darkest version.

by Killian Fox, The Guardian |  Read more:
Image: Composite: Reuters, Getty, AP, Observer Design

***

[ed. Washington Post Series is below...]

After Donald Trump won his first presidential election, I had one of the strangest experiences I’ve ever had as a writer. The federal government had set aside a big pot of money for the candidates of both parties to staff their presidential transition teams. Trump and Hillary Clinton had both built massive teams of people ready to enter the 15 big federal departments and hundreds of smaller federal agencies to learn whatever was happening inside. A thousand or so Obama officials were waiting for them, along with briefings that had taken them six months to prepare. But then, days after the election, Trump simply fired the 500 or so people on his transition team. “Chris, you and I are so smart that we can leave the victory party two hours early and do the transition ourselves,” he told a perplexed Chris Christie, who’d assembled the team.

Then he appointed Rick Perry as his secretary of energy. In his own presidential campaign, Perry had called for the Energy Department’s elimination — and was forced, at his Senate confirmation hearings, to acknowledge that he’d had no real idea of what went on inside the Energy Department, but now that he’d spent a few days looking into it, he really did not want to eliminate it. At that moment, it became clear that none of these people, newly in charge of the United States government, had the faintest idea what it did. (The Energy Department, among its other critical functions, manages our nuclear weapons.) And they weren’t alone! I didn’t really have any clue what went on inside the department, either. People capable of ruining panel discussions and dinner parties with their steady stream of opinions about American politics were totally flummoxed by the simplest questions about American government. Questions like: What do all those civil servants do all day inside the Agriculture Department? (They preserve rural America from extinction, among other things.)

Who is government?

Seven writers go in search of the essential public servant

Conversations around the 2024 election were driven by a handful of names. Trump. Harris. Biden. Vance. Walz. But who really is our government? What is it made of? And what is at stake when politicians say they want to expand or dismantle it? To find out, we set seven stellar writers loose on the federal bureaucracy. Their only brief was to go where they wanted, talk with whomever they wanted, and return with a story from deep within the vast, complex system Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss and celebrate. Here are their discoveries.

See the full series

The Canary: Michael Lewis on the Department of Labor

The Sentinel: Casey Cep on the Department of Veterans Affairs

The Searchers: Dave Eggers on NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab

The Number: John Lanchester on the Bureau of Labor Statistics

The Cyber Sleuth: Geraldine Brooks on the Internal Revenue Service

The Equalizer: Sarah Vowell on the National Archives

The Rookie: W. Kamau Bell on the Department of Justice

The Free-Living Bureaucrat: Michael Lewis on the Food and Drug Administration

Epilogue: Michael Lewis on the series

***

This situation, though sad for the country, struck me as a happy journalistic opportunity. The outgoing Obama people had created what amounted to the most timely and relevant civics class ever, and no one had bothered to enroll. And so I signed up to audit it. I spent some weeks wandering around the Energy Department, where I was (I believe) the first to receive the briefing about (among other things) the nuclear stockpile. I spent some more weeks inside the Commerce Department, where I learned about (among other things) the life-changing improvements in weather prediction achieved by the National Weather Service. I consciously sought out the most obscure and infrequently visited corners of our federal government and yet never found anything less than wonderful characters engaged in work critical to the fate of our country and our species. At some point, I realized that several dozen humans could spend their lifetimes getting their briefings ignored by the incoming Trump administration, and so I stopped and wrote a series of magazine pieces about what I’d seen and heard. I then stapled the pieces together and published them as a book called “The Fifth Risk.” The pieces attracted more attention than just about any magazine articles I’ve ever written, and the book sold roughly 10 times more copies than I or anyone else imagined it would.

But even that wasn’t what was strange about the experience. What was strange was what happened next: nothing. A few times in my writing career, I’ve experienced the thrill of an unfair edge. Some special access, or insight, that was bound to vanish the minute it was revealed. Every Wall Street trader knows this feeling. You spot what appears to be some mispriced stock or bond or complicated derivative. You figure out why it’s mispriced — after all, lots of smart people are looking for free money, so you’d better have some idea why this anomaly exists, so that you can be certain it’s an anomaly. I’d sort of assumed I had the federal bureaucracy more or less to myself, because the government had always seemed less interesting to readers than politics, perhaps because it seemed so stable that nothing could shake it. I further assumed that after a book in which the central character is the Agriculture Department sold more than half a million copies, the market would correct. Clearly, there was a readership that hungered to know more about whatever Trump was neglecting. The supply would expand to fill the demand, the curiosity of the American public would be slaked, and I’d need to find something else to write about.

I was wrong. The recent series published in this newspaper — titled “Who is government?” — proves it. This time, I was joined in my plundering of our government for stories by six other writers — Casey Cep, Dave Eggers, John Lanchester, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Vowell and W. Kamau Bell. Their pieces were all great, but more to the point, they were among the most read opinion stories this year in The Post — averaging about four times the average readership for the section despite being eight times the average length of its pieces. They will appear next March as a book, for which a publisher has paid a small fortune. All six writers now have enjoyed the same experience that I had the first time around. Each has been surprised by how well it pays to write about federal bureaucrats. None required more than about five minutes to find a subject that made their socks go up and down. Each has more or less said to me: I cannot believe how good this material is — and how overlooked.

Our government — as opposed to our elected officials — has no talent for telling its own story. On top of every federal agency sit political operatives whose job is not to reveal and explain the good work happening beneath them but to prevent any of their employees from embarrassing the president. The PR wing of the federal government isn’t really allowed to play offense, just a grinding prevent defense. And the sort of people who become civil servants — the characters profiled in our “Who is government?” series — tend not to want or seek attention.

And, finally, there is the stereotype of “the government worker.” We all have in our heads this intractable picture: The nine-to-fiver living off the taxpayer who adds no value and has no energy and somehow still subverts the public will.

You never know what effect any piece of writing will have. Writers write the words, but readers decide their meaning. My vague sense is that most readers have come away from this series with feelings both of hope (these civic-minded people are still among us) and dread (we’re letting something precious slip away). My own ambition for the series was that it would subvert the stereotype of the civil servant. The typecasting has always been lazy and stupid, but increasingly, it’s deadly. Even as writers grow rich proving it wrong.

by Michael Lewis, Washington Post |  Read more:

Image: Sarah L. Voisin /The Washington Post
[ed. I just found this series last night, and lo and behold, there's an interview this morning in The Guardian with the authors. After reading some of the stories, I believe the Who Is Government? series will win a Pulitzer this year. Actually, I'm sure of it. FYI: I started with The Free-Living Bureaucrat (which includes, among other things, a brain-eating amoeba).]

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen

[ed. Not a fan of David's politics in general (see his Wikipedia bio), but he's become more nuanced and perceptive later in life, particularly with respect to human relations. Probably because the conservative party he's always championed has morphed into something completely unrecognizable these days (he addresses this late in the video). Nice lecture, interesting throughout.]

See also: How the Elite rigged Society (and why it’s falling apart). David Brooks.

John Neville | Day's Catch
via:

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]