As Tesla Falters, China's BYD Pulls Ahead With 5-Minute EV Charging

BYD up, Tesla down. That's the market's reaction to BYD's news of 1,000 kilowatt DC fast charging for its new Super e-Platform EVs, which go on sale later this year in China for around just $38,000. With these chargers, those cars should be able to add about 250 miles (400 km) of range in a mere five minutes.

That handily defeats any "I'll never buy an EV until it charges as fast as a gas car can fill up" counter-argument. If this technology can scale—especially in markets beyond China—it's a guaranteed game-changer for EVs everywhere.

And the news actually contributed to Tesla's dropping stock price yesterday. It's obviously been declining for some time—public opinion continues to sour on the brand and Elon Musk's actions in government turn off longtime and prospective Tesla fans. But it also seems to have investors wondering what America's supposed EV tech leader is actually doing. Via Bloomberg:

Delivering this, and quickly, would cement China’s lead in an EV industry that had its breakout moment in the Bay Area when Tesla launched the Model S sedan a little over a decade ago. That Musk felt compelled to stage a bizarre event at the White House last week with President Donald Trump, who is no fan of EVs, apparently buying a Model S to show support says a lot about where innovation can be found these days.

Musk’s politicking damages Tesla’s brand, but the underlying problem is its relatively old line-up of models even as competitors release new ones. While Tesla abandoned plans for a cheap EV, instead launching the Cybertruck priced at six figures, BYD and its competitors churned out an array of models going for less than $30,000.

[...] Tesla’s premium is now justified less by promises of growing EV sales and more by expansive, but elusive, visions of robotaxis and robots. BYD has also clouded that by releasing an advanced driver assistance system across most of its range as standard. Tesla’s, albeit more sophisticated technology, costs thousands of dollars extra for customers.

I'd add that this isn't just a Tesla problem, as columnist Liam Denning alludes to in a dek that I wish I had written myself: "The Chinese EV-maker shocked the world with a fast charger, while the U.S. is still figuring out if EVs are too woke." It's that the entire Western auto industry is far, far behind China's technology, and if our supposed tip-of-the-spear EV company can't keep up, who can?

by Patrick George, Inside EVs |  Read more:

Image: BYD

[ed. See also: Tesla Values Are Tanking Three Times Faster Than Any Other Brand; especially in Canada (IEVs).The stock is down 5% in the last five days, 35% in the last month and 42% so far this year (Axios); and finally, Tesla Is More Vulnerable Than You Think (HTW).]

"The company was losing its novelty and momentum long before he boarded the Trump ship. China is flooding Europe with inexpensive and high-quality electric vehicles, taking Mr. Musk’s original concept and mass-producing a model that the people who build it can actually afford." (NYT)

The Meager Agenda of Abundance Liberals

What the Democratic Party’s most buzzed-about policy movement gets right—and wrong. [ed. Or...everything you didn't know about government and corporate power and are now depressed to find out about.]

Donald Trump’s victory last November and his shock and-awe first two months have left his opponents stunned, disoriented, and struggling to regain their bearings. For Democratic politicians, donors, pundits, and activists as well as center-right Never Trumpers, the most immediate task has been to slow down the assault on the country’s democratic institutions led by the oligarch Elon Musk. But the opposition is also engaged in a vigorous internal debate about what the Biden administration and the Democratic Party did wrong and what a new, more electorally successful agenda might look like. While many potential contenders are vying to define that agenda, one early favorite is a group of thinkers known as “abundance liberals” (or sometimes “supply-side progressives”).

If you are a regular reader or listener of the columnist and podcaster Ezra Klein of The New York Times, or the Substack blogger Matt Yglesias, or Jerusalem Demsas and Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, you are probably at least somewhat familiar with this perspective. Its central premise is that excessive red tape—from federal environmental statutes to local zoning rules to government agency procedures—is driving up the costs and slowing down the building of things the country desperately needs, from new housing to clean energy infrastructure.

While abundance liberals don’t all agree on everything, they are united by an overarching aim of a world of plenty: clean air, clean water, cheap renewable energy, affordable housing, high-speed rail, and an efficient, modernized electrical transmission grid. To bring us all that, they would unleash the full potential of nuclear and geothermal power, of liquified natural gas to complement renewables, of desalination, AI, and other technologies of the future that they believe can lift billions out of poverty and greatly improve living standards at home and abroad, all without devastating the planet.

They also converge around a critique of well-intended regulation. Klein and Thompson in their new book, Abundance, the author Marc Dunkelman in Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress—and How to Bring It Back, and The Atlantic’s Yoni Appelbaum in Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, focus on rules and bureaucratic process as obstacles to progress, especially in major metropolitan hubs like New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. They lament the way that industrial policy is bogged down by what Klein calls “everything bagel” liberalism—well-meaning but costly and time-consuming requirements, such as mandating DEI hiring policies, union labor, and child care centers in subsidies for green energy or new microchip factories. In support of their arguments, these writers frequently cite the work of likeminded researchers at center-left and center-right think tanks such as the Niskanen Center, the Breakthrough Institute, the Foundation for American Innovation, and the Mercatus Center—organizations with generally anti-regulatory outlooks and connections to Silicon Valley and energy interests.

Thompson describes the “Abundance Agenda” as a synthesis of ideological strengths: the left’s concern for human welfare, the libertarian instinct to cut through stifling regulations, and the right’s fixation on national greatness—but applied to the things that actually make a nation great: clean and safe cities, world-class public services, and widespread prosperity. As Klein writes, the abundance agenda would encourage the progressive movement to “[take] innovation as seriously as it takes affordability.”

These thinkers aren’t quite techno-libertarians à la Musk, but they inject a sense of optimism and vision in our politics. They reject the prevailing fatalism on both the left and the right—that progress is an illusion and decline is inevitable. Abundance as they describe it is also morally robust. Scarcity breeds reactionary politics. Authoritarianism and blood-and-soil nationalism feed on the belief that resources are finite and must be hoarded.

There’s a lot to like about these writers (many of whom have written for—or, in the case of Klein, started their careers at—the Washington Monthly). Their insurgency against the status quo represents what the Democratic Party is desperately trying to find. They articulate an optimistic vision of the future that goes beyond just resisting Trumpism, they’re skilled on social media, and they’re funny. Their message is tapping into potentially powerful political energy, especially among Millennial and Gen Z voters facing astronomical housing costs and existential climate anxiety. The abundance liberals deserve real credit for bringing early attention to the housing crisis, and their call to roll back residential zoning restrictions has been taken up by the grassroots YIMBY (“Yes in My Backyard”) movement and endorsed during the 2024 campaign by Kamala Harris and Barack Obama.

At the moment, the abundance liberals seem like the closest thing we have to the Democratic Leadership Council in the 1980s: a group of centrist thinkers plotting a revival of liberalism by way of pragmatism and policy innovation. Like the New Democrats of that era, they show an admirable willingness to challenge their own side. They regularly call out progressives who have become reflexively opposed to growth, whether it’s liberal think tanks rejecting any permitting reform deal that compromises with natural gas, or affluent liberals in Berkeley coming up with environmental excuses to oppose new housing. The Johns Hopkins political scientist Steven Teles argues that the DLC analogy doesn’t sufficiently capture the depth and importance of the abundance movement, of which he is a leading light. He likens its thinkers to the Progressive Era intellectuals who made the case for the creation of the modern administrative state—but with the aim of reforming that state.

As skilled as they are, however, at making the case for rapid growth of supply in key sectors like transportation, housing, and energy, abundance liberals can be awfully sketchy about what policy solutions they favor. Of the few they do clearly advocate, some, like permitting reform, are wildly insufficient to the immense tasks at hand. Others, such as overturning residential neighborhood zoning rules, are less likely to produce new housing than to spark a political firestorm that could set back liberalism for years. Worst of all, while devoting so much attention to progressive contradictions, abundance liberals are almost completely silent on the alliance between corporate behemoths and antigovernment politicians that is the biggest threat to the world of plenty they envision, not to mention the republic.

by Paul Glastris and Nate Weisberg, Washington Monthly | Read more:
Image: Kevin Belford
[ed. Today's must read. A comprehensive (and deep) assessment of how government works (and doesn't) and why corporate power and private sector consolidation are significant roadblocks to future progress. Topics include residential zoning restrictions; burdensome permitting regulations/NEPA reform; competing private energy utilities and grid bottlenecks; government understaffing and skills drain causing an outsized reliance on private industry and consultant outsourcing; and probably most importantly - just corporate power in general (beyond the effect of money and lobbying, which we're all familiar with) ie., how industry consolidation/monopolization impedes if not actively kills progress in a variety of ways, including tech innovation, rail line upgrades, hospital services, doctor shortages, transportation upgrades, and of course, endless military/industrial complex waste. For example:]

***

"If Democrats are going to take on the politically fraught issue of housing affordability—and they must—they should do so with policies that are less likely to spark a voter backlash and more likely to solve the problem. Fortunately, there is such a policy: building dense residential communities on underutilized commercial land near transportation. Prime examples of this strategy are the mini downtowns in the D.C. suburb of Arlington, Virginia, that arose around Metro stations in the 1990s and similar ones going up along Rockville Pike in suburban Maryland. These “walkable communities,” Leinberger presciently observed in the Washington Monthly in 2010, work because they give people what they most want and can’t find in today’s market: housing with easy access to commuter rail or regular bus lines as well as restaurants, retail outlets, grocery stores, and other amenities. Real estate developers can make a lot of money building such projects, as long as municipalities let them. (...)

Of course, not everyone wants to live in high-rise buildings, and there’s still a need to build more single-family homes. There, a major problem is consolidation in the home construction industry. Since the 2007 financial crisis, the number of homebuilders has plummeted by 65 percent, according to a Johns Hopkins University study. Two companies, D.R. Horton and Lennar, account for nearly as much new construction as the next eight largest builders combined. The Hopkins study authors estimate that when a local market loses competition in the homebuilding market, housing production drops by 15 percent in value, 16 percent in total square footage, and 11 percent in number of units. Prices go up, too.

Abundance liberals have little to say about homebuilder consolidation—or about the broader problem of growing corporate monopolization, as we’ll see. (...)

"Permitting delays based on federal laws like NEPA sometimes drive up costs. But they are typically only one of many factors.

Indeed, permitting delays play virtually no role at all in some of government’s most common, and commonly mismanaged, construction projects. Consider road resurfacing, a task that seldom requires complex permitting because no new land is being taken. A 2023 Yale Law and Economics study of highway resurfacing projects in all 50 states found that two variables overwhelmingly explain cost overruns. The first is bureaucratic “capacity”—that is, the number, skill level, and experience of employees at state departments of transportation—which has generally declined in recent years. This drop has led state DOTs to rely on outside consultants to plan and oversee the resurfacing projects. The second variable is a fall in the number of contractors available to bid on the projects. This is due largely to industry consolidation, which has shrunk the number of construction firms in 70 percent of U.S. states. The Yale researchers found that outsourcing infrastructure planning increased costs by 20 percent per mile, while each additional bidder on a project corresponded to an 8.3 percent reduction in cost.

This combination of capacity-starved bureaucracies and lack of contractor competition goes a long way toward explaining skyrocketing costs in another vast area of public life: national defense. The F-35 joint strike fighter is more than a decade behind schedule and $183 billion over original cost estimates, according to the GAO—a figure greater than the entire projected cost of California’s high-speed rail project. The Zumwalt-class destroyer, billed as the future of naval warfare, ran into so many design flaws that the Navy canceled it last fall after delivering only three of a planned 32 ships at a cost of $24.5 billion. These and other examples of weapons procurement catastrophes have occurred with such mind-numbing regularity over so many years that the public hardly notices anymore."

The Last Dreadnoughts

Behold the mighty supercarrier, the USS Gerald R. Ford. I will explain why she is likely to be among the last of the warship species we may call dreadnoughts. Strictly speaking, the term dreadnought applies to the largest battleships. The first big gun battleship carrying this name was launched by the British navy in 1906, and it revolutionized naval warfare, leading to an arms race in which the great powers sought to build many ships of this type. The word literally means fearing nothing. Today, our greatest capital ship, the supercarrier, of which the U.S. Navy has 11, has a great deal to fear.

The Death of the Battleship

The aircraft carrier eclipsed the battleship in WWII. The Pearl Harbor attack on December 7,1941 provided an early demonstration of the potency of air attacks against capital ships at anchor. The decisive encounters of aircraft against battleships at sea began three days later with the sinking of HMS Prince of Wales, and ended with the sinking of Yamato in 1945. Prince of Wales and the accompanying battle cruiser Repulse were sunk on December 10, 1941 by a force of 88 Japanese bomber and torpedo bomber aircraft. Yamato, the largest battleship in the world, was sunk on Apri l7, 1945 by 280 U.S. bomber and torpedo bomber aircraft. All of the most important naval battles of WWII in the Pacific were fought by carrier-based aircraft, with battleships mainly relegated to shore bombardment and convoy escort duty. The aircraft carrier became the dominant weapon of naval warfare.

Enter the Supercarrier

With the advent of nuclear propulsion, the U.S. navy built the most powerful aircraft carriers in the world. Starting with the USS Enterprise in 1961, and culminating with the current Gerald Ford class, these enormous ships gave the navy a dominant global reach, effectively delivering a large air force to fight in any war zone in the world. No other nation has a comparable carrier fleet. Because of the importance of the supercarrier, it is guarded by an escort flotilla of frigates and cruisers armed with missiles that provide protection from enemy aircraft, missiles, and submarines. The carrier air wing includes early warning radar aircraft capable of detecting threats hundreds of miles away, and the carrier’s fighter aircraft can create a protective shield over a vast area. Attack missions are conducted by carrier planes armed with a wide variety of bombs and missiles, potentially including nuclear weapons.

Carriers Are Vulnerable

Although supercarriers are stoutly constructed, you don’t need to sink a carrier to achieve what is called a mission kill. If the catapults are damaged, aircraft cannot be launched. If the elevators are stuck, planes cannot be lifted from the hangar deck to the flight deck. If the ammunition hoists are disabled, weapons cannot be moved from the magazines to arm aircraft. If the carrier’s Hawkeye radar reconnaissance aircraft are shot down, the carrier loses its long-range defensive vision. In short, just a few missile hits can render the carrier combat-ineffective, largely nullifying the offensive potential of the entire carrier battle group. In addition to missiles, the carrier is vulnerable to submarines and flying and undersea drones. Even a swarm of fast suicide boats can threaten a carrier.

The Missile Attack Numbers Game

It is not widely understood that the Vertical Launch System (VLS) cells from which missiles are fired from U.S. frigates and cruisers are not reloadable at sea. Once its missiles have been expended, a ship must return to port to reload missiles. (The navy is experimenting with doing this at sea, but the problem of lowering a large and fragile missile into a narrow container on a vessel subject to wave and wind action is a serious obstacle.) Thus, the outcome of a missile exchange between an attacking force and the carrier’s escorts is a numbers game. A saturation attack that empties the VLS cells of the escorts puts the defenders out of action. Note that standard anti-missile doctrine dictates two interceptors must be fired against every incoming missile to achieve a kill probability above 90%.

Only the long-range U.S. Navy SM-6 missile is theoretically capable of intercepting hypersonic missiles, the greatest threat to the carrier. The typical U.S. carrier battle group has roughly 200 SM-6 missiles distributed across the escorting cruisers and frigates. Thus, a saturation hypersonic missile attack of 100 missiles would likely exhaust the defensive missile armament of the escorts. This would be an optimistic outcome for the defenders, assuming no technical superiority of the incoming missiles and no malfunctions of the defending missiles. A more realistic scenario would include electronic jamming, decoy missiles, terminal maneuvering of incoming warheads, and multiple attack waves, further increasing the odds against the defenders.

The Reckoning

If we calculate the cost of 100 hypersonic missiles at $25 million per round, totaling $2.5 billion, against the cost of the supercarrier at $11 billion, plus the embarked aircraft at $4 billion, plus $5 billion for the escort ships, totaling $20 billion, we get an economically favorable ratio of 1 to 8 for the attacker. Even four waves of 100 missiles each would be a favorable trade. And, of course, replacement attack missiles can be manufactured faster than supercarriers. These are crude estimates based on publicly available data, but the asymmetry is clear. War games simulating outcomes of a naval war against China in the Pacific support this pessimistic assessment. (...)

Floating Pork Barrels

Building supercarriers is a profitable franchise for Newport News Shipbuilding, the sole builder of U.S. nuclear powered aircraft carriers. That’s right, this division of Huntington Ingalls Industries is the monopoly producer of a very expensive weapons system with tremendous political and military backing. Over the last 10 years, HII’s revenues have increased from $7 billion to $11 billion, with net income rising from $400 million to $550 million, most of which comes from the construction and maintenance of navy warships. Clearly the magic of the marketplace is not working in favor of U.S. taxpayers when it comes to supercarriers.

by Haig Hovaness, Naked Capitalism | Read more:
Images: uncredited

The Week Everyone Realized Apple Is Decaying

I want to highlight what I find to be the most significant and underplayed story of the week, which is Apple shocking the tech press and its most diehard fans by admitting that it can’t actually build Apple Intelligence, the big upgrade play it has been promising and Wall Street had been expecting.

This moment will be understood in retrospect as one in a series revealing that the U.S. big tech model of development is actually bad, and against the traditions of Silicon Valley as a place with lots of small and medium size nimble firms. Like Boeing, and auto giants before them, U.S. big tech monopolies are in the initial stages of their collapse, though they will still be immensely profitable for some time.

For the last ten years or so, Apple has morphed into an increasingly boring corporation. Every new phone or laptop is slightly better, with impressive changes inside the equipment, like redesigned chips, but the annual Apple product announcement season is just not culturally relevant anymore, a far cry from the days of Steve Jobs.

AI promised to shake up this dynamic, to give Apple back some spark. Last year, the phone giant introduced the brand Apple Intelligence. This would be a computing transition, perhaps as important as the shift from mainframes to personal computers, or desktops to mobile. You would no longer have to touch or type, you could just talk to your machine, and have it talk back or do what you want.

Apple’s marketing said it would release features allowing Siri to look across your personal information and apps and run your life somewhat seamlessly.

For example, a user can say, “Play that podcast that Jamie recommended,” and Siri will locate and play the episode, without the user having to remember whether it was mentioned in a text or an email. Or they could ask, “When is Mom’s flight landing?” and Siri will find the flight details and cross-reference them with real-time flight tracking to give an arrival time.

As one would expect for a breakthrough of this magnitude, the company ran ads promising this new and improved Siri, and encouraged people to buy its new phone upgrades on the premise that Apple Intelligence would be coming out in a software update. And reviewers waited for the release. And waited. A few random AI-enabled features, like messaging summaries, came out, but nothing major. And then, Apple issued a statement on Friday saying that “it’s going to take us longer than we thought to deliver” on its product line. The new and improved Siri was just not ready.

This announcement embarrassed the people who had always vouched for Apple’s credibility and excellence. John Gruber, who is probably the single most influential pro-Apple voice, ran a post on his site Daring Fireball titled Something Is Rotten in the State of Cupertino.

Investors and Wall Street chatter have changed their tune on Apple as well. Warren Buffett had already been reducing Berkshire Hathaway’s large Apple stake, but others, such as Scott Galloway, a longtime Apple bull, said he would be selling all his stock.

The problem isn’t that Apple flubbed a product release, that’s happened many times. The issue is one of trust. “Apple,” Gruber said, “pitched a story that wasn’t true, one that some people within the company surely understood wasn’t true, and they set a course based on that.”

So why couldn’t Apple develop this product line? Nilay Patel and David Pierce at the Verge did a long podcast titled “The fake promise of better Siri” in which they describe two major obstacles.

The first is that large language models are an untested technology, and may never actually work the way the consumer tech sector hopes. LLMs hallucinate, they get things wrong, and that’s not fixable. Machine learning is great in a lot of business to business areas, but no one, said Pierce, has gotten the consumer gadget - except for OpenAI and its various clones - right.

The second problem is that Apple has burned its bridges with third party developers, and third party developers are key to making this new platform work. And that’s one place where we get to Apple’s monopoly problem. The company has a terrible reputation with developers at this point, using its chokehold over the app store to take 30% of everything it can. And I don’t mean 30% of the price for the app, but for everything. For instance, when you download the app for Patreon, which lets you donate to creators, Apple doesn’t charge 30% of the cost of the download. It sought to take 30% of every donation to every artist or creator.

Apple’s view is that they should get a cut of every transaction that happens on any app or adjacent to any app through the iPhone. And the company is insanely aggressive. Its legal budget was apparently $1 billion a year at its height, with CEO Tim Cook backing the lawyers “through thick and thin.” Right now, the company is openly flouting a judicial order to let developers link out from the Apple app store, enraging a moderate judge so much so that she told Apple’s litigation director that "Your client is not entitled to have you engage in unethical conduct." It is also engaged in fights globally, with the EU fining Apple for discriminating against Spotify. In other words, Apple is increasingly turning into a law firm and design shop that imports electronics from China. (...)

Antitrust Enforcers Were Right

Last March, Jonathan Kanter at the Antitrust Division filed an antitrust suit against Apple, alleging that it focuses more on monopoly maintenance than innovation. The complaint noted the company spends twice as much on stock buybacks than research. But more importantly, the suit showed Apple’s executives are explicit in demanding that the company not innovate too much for consumers. Here’s one part of the complaint.

For example, Apple’s vice president of iPhone marketing explained in February 2020: “In looking at it with hindsight, I think going forward we need to set a stake in the ground for what features we think are ‘good enough’ for the consumer. I would argue were [sic] already doing *more* than what would have been good enough.” After identifying old features that “would have been good enough today if we hadn’t introduced [updated features] already,” she explained, “anything new and especially expensive needs to be rigorously challenged before it’s allowed into the consumer phone.”

It’s pretty clear that Tim Cook has positioned Apple to be focused on raw financial returns and efficiency, and not innovation. (...)

The ride is over. When mediocrity, excuses, and bullshit take root, they take over. A culture of excellence, accountability, and integrity cannot abide the acceptance of any of those things, and will quickly collapse upon itself with the acceptance of all three.

I’m glad Wall Street and the tech press are catching up to the antitrust enforcement world, and finally noticing the internal crisis at Apple. Ultimately, if we don’t start breaking these companies up, tech innovation is just going to come from China. I don’t do investment analysis, and I have no idea if Apple’s stock will suffer. But really, who cares? Those are ultimately just numbers on a spreadsheet. True wealth are the products, engineering and production capacity, and knowledge of how to build. And we’re losing that, across the board.

by Matt Stollar, BIG |  Read more:

Image: Reuters via

Lady Gaga

[ed. From her recent 2025 album Mayhem.]

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
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