Let's Kill Any Ideas About a DOGE Dividend Check Right Now

Wondering if or when to expect a $5,000 dividend check from DOGE? Here's an update on what to know about the status of the stimulus and who would potentially qualify to receive it.

President Donald Trump said he would consider the plan to pay out $5,000 stimulus checks to taxpayers in the form of a 'DOGE dividend' during a recent speech. He explained it as a part to take 20% of the savings identified by Elon Musk's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and give it back to the American taxpayers.

This 'DOGE dividend' idea was originally floated by Azoria investment firm CEO James Fishback on Musk's social media platform X, suggesting Trump and Musk "should announce a ‘DOGE Dividend’ — a tax refund check sent to every taxpayer, funded exclusively with a portion of the total savings delivered by DOGE." To which, Musk replied "Will check with the President."

“The numbers are incredible, Elon. So many millions, billions — hundreds of billions,” Trump said in his speech. “And we’re thinking about giving 20% back to the American citizens, and 20% down to pay back our debt.”

In an interview with NewsNation, Fishback said he was "optimistic a bill is forthcoming to put President Trump's vision for DOGE coming full circle into law." Adding, "It isn't just enough … to identify waste, fraud and abuse. We have to refund the taxpayer their hard-earned money when their money was wasted and misused, and that's what the DOGE dividend calls for."

Fishback described meetings with lawmakers in the House and Senate as "very productive" and said a plan may be revealed soon.

Trump hasn't shared any further specifics or details about the possible 'DOGE dividend' or its certainty.

Fishback's four-page proposal of the 'DOGE dividend' described it as a refund "sent only to tax-paying householders." Noting the difference from past stimulus checks, he added that DOGE checks would not be inflationary as they would be "exclusively funded with DOGE-driven savings, unlike COVID stimulus checks which were deficit-financed."

Fishback's proposal would send dividends only to households above a certain income level as opposed to pandemic-era checks that were sent “indiscriminately.”

“A lot of low-income households essentially saw transfer payments of 25 to 30% of their annual … income,” Fishback said of the pandemic stimulus checks, adding, “This exclusively goes to households that are net-payers of federal income tax, and what that means is that they have a lower propensity to spend and a higher propensity to save a transfer payment like the DOGE dividend.”

The potential refund would be sent only to households that are net-income taxpayers — people who pay more in taxes than they get back — with lower-income Americans not qualifying for the return, according to news reports. The Pew Research Center cites most Americans who have an adjusted gross income of under $40,000 pay effectively no federal income tax.

"I'm honored to have the president's support, but the plan is very simple," Fishback said last week, according to news source. "DOGE is going to save X amount of money over the next couple of years. Let's take 20 percent of that and send it right back to the hard-working taxpayers who sent it to D.C. in the first place."

By definition, a dividend is a distribution of profits by a corporation to its shareholders and refund is a payment made back to a user that previously paid for something. A stimulus check on the other hand, is a direct payment to encourage spending and stimulate the economy by putting money directly into the consumers' hand.

by Maria Francis, USA Today |  Read more:

Image: X

[ed. This is the scariest thing I've heard yet, and so far everyone is being very, very quiet. I've seen first-hand what government dividends do to the voting public (Alaska Permanent Fund). Suddenly, anything that could potentially stop the free flow of free money is dead in the water - including funding of basic governmental services. Thankfully, DOGE isn't finding much in the way of fraud (although curiously they've avoided the elephant in the room - defense spending; wonder why), but that won't stop a disinformation campaign from occuring, illusory or not. Keep your eyes open! As much as people love free money this would definitely establish a strong incentive to keep finding new programs to cut. Forever.]

"Public opinion strongly favors the Dividend program. Indeed, in 1999, with oil prices going as low as $9 per barrel and Alaska's oil consultant Daniel Yergin forecasting low prices "for the foreseeable future", the State put an advisory vote before Alaskans, asking if government could spend "some" part of Permanent Fund earning for government purposes. Gov. Knowles, Lt. Gov. Ulmer, and many other elected officials urged a "yes" vote. Campaign spending greatly favored the "yes" side. Despite this, the public voted "no" by nearly 84%.... Perceived support of the dividend program is so universally strong that it ensures the dividend's continuity and the protection of the Fund's principal, since any measure characterized as negatively impacting dividend payouts represents a loss to the entire populace. That is, legislators willing to appropriate the Fund's annual earnings are constrained by the high political costs of any measures leading to a decrease in the public's dividend." (Wikipedia).

‘Beyond My Wildest Dreams’: The Architect of Project 2025 is Ready for His Victory Lap

A year ago, Paul Dans was chief architect of what was shaping up to be the blueprint for Donald Trump’s second term. Eight months ago, he was sent into MAGA exile.

Dans was the director of Project 2025 at the Heritage Foundation when, midway through the 2024 presidential campaign, he and his program started to become a huge political liability for Trump. Democrats warned of Project 2025’s “radical” agenda, saying it would mean a ban on abortion, elimination of LGBTQ+ rights, and complete presidential power over federal agencies along with the elimination of some of them, including the Department of Education. At the Democratic National Convention, Saturday Night Live’s Kenan Thompson held up a giant-size replica of the 900-page Project 2025 book and quipped, “You ever see a document that could kill a small animal and democracy at the same time? Here it is.”

Conservatives began blaming Heritage and Project 2025 for hurting Trump’s election chances. Trump himself repeatedly contended he hadn’t even read Project 2025, claiming on Truth Social that he had “no idea who is behind it.” [ed. probably half true, more than usual]. In an interview with the POLITICO Deep Dive podcast published Saturday, Trump campaign adviser Chris LaCivita complained that “there was some stuff in there that we were like, ‘Where the hell did that come from?’”

Dans became a sacrificial lamb. Pressured to resign from Heritage, Dans left in a fit of pique at the end of July, and he later criticized LaCivita and campaign co-head Susie Wiles for campaign “malpractice.”

Now Dans, who lives in Charleston, South Carolina, and works as a lawyer and government relations consultant, is letting bygones be bygones and says he’s delighted with the extent to which Project 2025 has, in fact, become the Trump administration’s playbook.

This week, in his first in-depth interview since Trump returned to the presidency, Dans effectively confirmed what Democrats were saying all along and Trump himself denied: There really is almost no difference between Project 2025 and what Trump was planning all along and is now implementing. And if the White House were to call, he’d be glad to get back on the team.

“It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams,” Dans said. “It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back. But the way that they’ve been able to move and upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

So as it turns out, the Trump administration’s program and Project 2025 seem to be one and the same. True?

I’m not saying that. I’m saying that directionally, they have a lot in common, but so do great minds. We had hoped, those of us who worked putting together Project 2025, that the next conservative president would seize the day, but Trump is seizing every minute of every hour. I’m not sure that you’d be able to implement Project 2025 without Donald Trump’s ability to bring people together and Elon Musk’s ability to focus the direction of the work. (...)

You’ve said this agenda goes back much further than Trump — you wanted to attack the federal administrative state that you view as populated by liberals, one that started more than 100 years ago under Woodrow Wilson.

Well, that’s right. We are going on our 250th birthday here in a little over a year from now. And the last 100 years have been a great diversion from the enduring constitutional structure of this great American experiment in democracy. That is, we needed to undertake a restoration of democracy by slamming the door shut on the Progressive Era... One federal judge can’t come in and push the secretary of the Treasury aside and say this court knows better how to do your job than you do. To do that and hamstring the president is a naked usurpation of power. A federal court and its three law clerks cannot usurp the power granted to the president, and we are nearing a point when this will need to be resolved. (...)

Is there any way at all in which what Trump is doing is falling short or diverging from your original vision for Project 2025?

It’s actually way beyond my wildest dreams. It’s not going to be the easiest road to hoe going forward. The deep state is going to get its breath back here, but the way that they’ve been able to move and kind of upset the orthodoxy, and at the same time really capture the imagination of the people, I think portends a great four years.

by Michael Hirsh, Politico |  Read more:

Image: Francis Chung, Politico

[ed. Repugnant to its core, I read this so you don't have to - unless you're curious to know how bad things can and are likely to get (we're just three months in after all, and another co-author, Russell Vought, is leading OMB). But one thing I found interesting, and no doubt anyone who's ever tried talking sense to a MAGA extremist has experienced, is that when confronted with hard facts and an obvious contradiction in thinking, the evasive response is always something like "I don’t know one way or the other. I get second-hand reports as you do." (direct quote). Nothing penetrates.]

Why Adolescence is Such Powerful TV That It Could Save Lives

The arrival of searing new series Adolescence could hardly be more timely...

On a street level, it’s about knife crime. Over the past decade, the number of UK teenagers killed with a blade or sharp object has risen by 240%. On a cultural level, it’s about cyberbullying, the malign influence of social media and the unfathomable pressures faced by boys in Britain today. Male rage, toxic masculinity, online misogyny. This isn’t just all-too-plausible fiction. It’s unavoidable fact.

As the boy’s father, Eddie, a self-employed plumber in an unspecified Yorkshire town, Graham spends the opening hour shell-shocked. He is inclined to believe his son’s protestations of innocence, as any parent would. That is, until he is poleaxed by chilling footage of the frenzied multiple stabbing.

It might be a masterclass from the best actor working today but Graham leaves room for his castmates to shine. Ashley Walters delivers a career-best turn as lead investigator DI Luke Bascombe. Walters was considering quitting acting and moving behind the camera but Adolescence changed his mind, not least because it resonated personally with a man who, in his own teens, was sentenced to 18 months for gun possession. He has admitted to “crying most nights” while learning the script.

Erin Doherty drops in for a blistering head-to-head as clinical psychologist Briony. Christine Tremarco is heartbreaking in the finale as Jamie’s mother, Manda. And then come the kids. Newcomer Owen Cooper – incredibly, it’s the 15-year-old’s acting debut – is flat-out phenomenal as Jamie. He goes from sympathetic to scary, lost little boy to angry young man, often within the same breath, announcing himself as a major talent in the process. Fatima Bojang is movingly raw as Katie’s bereaved best friend Jade. Amélie Pease excels as Jamie’s elder sister Lisa, whose low-key wisdom becomes the glue holding her fractured family together.

The story is brought to life by telling details. The way that Jamie still has space-themed wallpaper in his bedroom and wets himself when armed police burst in, reminding us of the “gormless little boy” behind the shocking violence. The way the secure training centre where he awaits trial is populated by youngsters with radiator burns who yell at Coronation Street. The way incidental characters – the creepy CCTV guy, the DIY store conspiracy theorist – warn us that adult males can be equally threatening. The way nonsensical graffiti and a nosy neighbour are what finally tip Eddie over the edge. (...)

Adolescence lays bare how an outwardly normal but inwardly self-loathing and susceptible youngster can be radicalised without anyone noticing. His parents recall Jamie coming home from school, heading straight upstairs, slamming his bedroom door and spending hours at his computer. They thought he was safe. They thought they were doing the right thing. It’s a scenario which will ring bells with many parents. Some will be alarm bells.

We take pains to teach them how to cross roads and not talk to strangers. We rarely teach them how to navigate the internet. There is often a glaring gap between parents’ blissfully ignorant image of their children’s lives and the truth of what they get up to online. We think they’re playing Roblox but they’re actually on Reddit. We think they’re doing homework or innocently texting mates. They are watching pornography or, as DS Frank pithily puts it, “that Andrew Tate shite”.

Jamie’s plight becomes a poignant study of the nightmarish influence of the so-called manosphere – that pernicious online world of “red pills”, “truth groups” and the 80-20 rule (which posits that 80% of women are attracted to 20% of men). It’s a shadowy sphere populated by alphas, “incels”, MRAs (men’s rights activists) and PUAs (pickup artists), whose fragile egos turn into entitled fury. From mocking emojis on Instagram to the dark web and deepfakes, it’s another country to anyone over 40. No wonder parents are, as Bascombe’s son points out, “blundering around, not getting it”. (...)

As unanimous five-star reviews attest, Adolescence is the best drama of 2025 so far. We’re less than a quarter of the way through, admittedly, but the rest of the year’s TV will have to go some to beat it. This is old-fashioned, issue-led, socially conscious television – and all the better for it. 

by Michael Hogan, The Guardian |  Read more:

Image: Netflix
[ed. Powerful throughout. See also: Is this the most terrifying TV show of our times? Adolescence, the drama that will horrify all parents (Guardian):]

***

“Steve’s starting point was not wanting to blame the parents,” says Thorne of his collaboration. “It was: ‘Let’s not make this about a kid who commits a crime because of an evil thing going on at home.’”

“I didn’t want his dad to be a violent man,” confirms Graham. “I didn’t want Mum to be a drinker. I didn’t want our young boy to be molested by his uncle Tony. I wanted to remove all of those possibilities for us to go: ‘Oh, that’s why he did it.’”

As a result, Adolescence takes us somewhere even more terrifying. Jamie, the show’s 13-year-old subject, is an outwardly normal, well-adjusted kid. But the conversations around him, at school and online, start to lean towards incels and the manosphere. Slowly, a picture builds about how this regular kid found himself radicalised without anyone even realising. (...)

Still, as heavy as Adolescence is, it also stretches the capacity of what can be achieved with a single take... the scale of Adolescence meant that the camera had to be continually passed from operator to operator, getting clipped in and out of different devices by various teams as necessary.

He takes me through the show’s opening sequence. “When the episode starts, my cinematographer Matt is holding the camera,” he explains. “As we’re filming the actors in the car, the camera’s being attached to a crane. The car drives off, and the crane follows. While this is happening, Matt has gone in another car, driven ahead and jumped out so he can take the camera into the house. When we come back out of the house, the other camera operator Lee is sat in the custody van. Matt would pass Lee the camera, so now Lee’s got the camera while Matt drives ahead to the police station, so he’s ready to take the camera when we go inside.”

Such visual flashiness might suggest that Adolescence is purely a technical experiment, but that couldn’t be further from the case. “I never want the one-take thing to be at the forefront,” says Barantini. “I wanted this to be seamless, but not a spectacle.

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):]

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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.”