What China Thinks

One of China's upcoming scholars and a Research Fellow at the International Cooperation Center of China's powerful National Development and Reform Commission (NDRC, the top organization for China's economic planning and policymaking.

1. Observing Trump’s Return: The Perils of Radical Change

Question 1: You have been a visiting scholar at Harvard University for the past six months and have therefore witnessed Trump’s return to power firsthand. What was your reaction to his re-election, and how would you assess his first few weeks in office?

Mao Keji: I don’t have a particularly strong opinion on Trump’s re-election: I wouldn’t say I like or dislike him. That being said, I do have a general impression [总体感觉] of him which is that, in some sense, Trump’s victory represented a kind of “course correction” [拨乱反正] in American politics. In other words, America’s problems— social, economic and political—had become so entrenched [积重难返] that they could no longer be fixed by “politics as usual” [无法通过常规的政治过程纠正]. As a result, voters turned to Trump, an unconventional politician, to push through bold and drastic [大刀阔斧] reforms.

To be honest, as a Chinese observer, many of Trump and Musk’s actions in recent weeks have really shocked me [震撼]. You could say it has been a real eye-opener [大开眼界] for me. For example, Trump openly expressed his desire for Canada to become America’s 51st state and even floated the idea of annexing Greenland. Yet just a few months ago, the Biden administration was accusing China of “undermining the rules-based international order”. It is astonishing [让我很吃惊] how the once-sacred [被奉为圭臬] norms of international politics can apparently be discarded overnight, replaced by the law of the jungle [弱肉强食]. Frankly, I have lost a lot of respect for the US because of these childish political antics [政治儿戏].

Moreover, Musk’s push to reform the federal government through DOGE with the support of Trump reminds me of the actions of two Soviet leaders. First, Khrushchev, who, in his secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, exposed many of Stalin’s dark deeds [众多黑幕]. Although this consolidated his political position in the post-Stalin era, it permanently damaged the Soviet Party’s domestic authority and international moral standing, with the Sino-Soviet split being the most direct result. [Similarly,] Musk and Trump’s tireless [不遗余力] efforts to expose the so-called “deep state” are certainly beneficial to the new administration, but the damage they are inflicting on America’s institutions and moral authority is irreversible and incalculable, with potentially terrifying consequences.

Second, Gorbachev, who believed the Soviet Union was in terminal decline, forced through bold reforms [推出了力度极大] based on his “new thinking”. He intended to address issues through reform to put the Soviet Union back on track. However, due to the huge scale of the reforms and insufficient preparation, he ended up unintentionally bringing about the USSR’s collapse. Similarly, Trump, seeing America’s problems, also wants to bring in bold and drastic reforms [大刀阔斧改革], but his radical [激进] approach is likely to lead to internal unrest or even civil war [内战]. In conclusion, I have serious doubts about such radical [激进] reforms, and I also question whether they are truly motivated by America’s interests or just the self-interest of these individuals [他们的私利].

2. Deterring Trump: Meeting Strength with Strength

Question 2: Let’s say you yourself were faced with someone like Trump, how would you respond to his threats and tariffs? How would you deter him from pursuing his pressure tactics while earning his respect?

Mao Keji: Trump is a businessman by nature; he is used to cost-benefit analyses, but less sensitive [敏感] to long-term strategic planning. Therefore, I feel the best strategy for responding to his pressure is to demonstrate that you are both able and willing to impose costs [on him]. At the same time, showing weakness or displaying anxiety in front of him will not get you any sympathy. On the contrary, it will only invite further aggression [会招致他得寸进尺的攻击].

Unfortunately, Canada, Denmark, Germany and Ukraine have all proven this point. As obedient [言听计从] allies who have always followed Washington’s lead, they trusted the US too much and never had a strategy for counteracting or resisting it. In the face of Trump’s threats, they were helpless [束手无策] and ultimately suffered humiliating blows [遭到侮辱性的敲打]. To me, this is a lesson in realism [这是一种非常现实主义的领悟]: surrendering just invites further humiliation [投降是自取其辱]; only by resisting to the very end can one turn the situation around [必须抵抗到底，才能翻转局面]. Therefore, while maintaining respect and decorum towards him, I would demonstrate China’s firm will and ability to retaliate against the US. This would ensure he takes decisions in full awareness that the costs of squeezing China will far outweigh the benefits, thereby deterring him from engaging in risky behaviour [采取冒险行动].

3. Trump’s Return: Consensus and Disagreement in China

Question 3: Sinification, as you know, focuses on China’s intellectual elite and their perspectives on the world. How have Chinese scholars and analysts—particularly those of your “post-90s” (90后) generation—reacted to Trump’s return? What key points of consensus and disagreement have you observed so far?

Mao Keji: Many of us, myself included, have not been particularly surprised by Trump’s return. In fact, it even seemed inevitable: if it weren’t Trump, someone else like him would have emerged. This is because we all believe that many of America’s domestic issues have become too deeply-entrenched to be fixable [积重难返]. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has shown that neither the Democrat nor Republican establishment can resolve these issues through conventional political processes.

There is actually very little disagreement among young Chinese intellectuals on the point that America’s internal problems are deeply entrenched and difficult to resolve. However, there are often disagreements on whether Trump’s reforms have the potential to save America [拯救美国]. Optimists believe that Trump and Musk have put together a strong [组合力度很大] package of reforms, backed by strong determination [决心很强] and an unprecedented level of support from the public. With the added boost from AI, there is a real possibility that America could be saved through radical reforms, [they claim]. Many people believe that, considering Trump’s isolationist strategy, the US could just withdraw into its North American comfort zone, settling into a new role as a regional hegemon, while gradually replenishing its strength [修复综合国力].

However, pessimists argue that the US’s overall power is fundamentally tied up [深深嵌入] in the global system, including the dollar’s status as the world’s dominant currency, its ability to attract top talent from around the world, and its ability to absorb global capital. Therefore, if Trump were to pursue isolationism forcefully and strip the US of its resource-extracting global hegemony [剥离汲取资源], [the pessimists believe that] the country would face a precipitous decline due to its inability to sustain itself [维持而断崖式坠落], potentially even resulting in a Soviet-style implosion [内爆].

There’s a quote from the The Three-Body Problem Trilogy that I really like: “Weakness and ignorance are not barriers to survival, but arrogance is.”

Although the United States appears to be in decline, it remains, by any measure, the world’s leading power. After all, the fact that an unconventional reformer like Trump could emerge suggests that the American system does indeed possess a strong capacity for self-correction. That’s my view anyway.

At the same time, I pay particular attention to the technological forces behind Trump [特朗普背后的技术力量], as they may well bring about new and unexpected changes. I would rather overestimate [the impact of] Trump’s reforms than risk underestimating them.

Many establishment think tanks and media outlets in the US display real arrogance, which comes from assuming that their values are superior [基于价值观的傲慢]. In contrast, I sometimes feel that the perspectives of Trump, Vance and others are more grounded [接地气], and more worth paying attention to.

4. Trump’s Impact on China: Threat or Opportunity?

Question 4: Some Chinese scholars view Trump’s return to power as detrimental to China’s national interests, while others see it as an opportunity. What is your perspective?

Mao Keji: Trump’s second term has only just begun, and no one knows what’s going to happen next. Although he hasn’t done much deliberate China-bashing [敲打中国] recently, once he has resolved the Russia-Ukraine issue and dismantled [清理完] the Deep State, he will have his hands free to deal with China.

During his first term, Trump followed a similar script. This is why the many Chinese people who see his re-election as beneficial to China may be celebrating a bit too soon.

To be honest, I don’t particularly care whether Trump is beneficial or harmful to China. He is only a marginal variable [边际变量] for China.

China is a vast country with a large population and a massive industrial base. In many cases, so long as its domestic affairs are well managed, there is no need to fear a volatile international situation [外部环境风云变幻].

From a dialectical perspective, the most beneficial thing Trump did for China during his first term was launching the trade and tech war. This was a wake-up call that made China realise the urgency of developing independent and controllable technological pathways [技术路线] and accelerating its transition towards smart technologies [智能化].

Without Trump’s policy of extreme pressure, no Chinese government department or domestic enterprise would have been able to drive the transition to domestic alternatives [国产替代的转型]. Doing so would not only have been costly but [the outcome would also have] been highly uncertain. As a result, China might still be, at this crucial moment in time, neglecting the development of critical industries and allowing risks to accumulate, with potentially irreversible and catastrophic consequences [无法挽回的灾难性后果].

Many things that seem beneficial to China may not actually be that significant [没有那么大的作用], while other things that seem highly detrimental may, in fact, serve as powerful stimuli for growth. Ultimately, whether something is beneficial or harmful depends on how [well] China can absorb external shocks. At the end of the day, strengthening China’s capabilities and focusing on domestic priorities is probably more important than anything else. There is no need to fixate on Trump.

5. The World in 2029 and 2049

Question 5: Looking ahead, what do you think the US and the world will look like in four years’ time? And by 2049?

Mao Keji: Predicting what will happen in the four years of Trump’s second term is extremely difficult, but for now, one thing seems certain: the US’s global influence will shrink significantly. This is perhaps the clearest trend [最鲜明倾向] to emerge so far from Trump’s second term.

If Trump’s policymaking continues at its current pace, then by the end of his four years, the US alliance system, the dollar’s status as a global currency, America’s influence over multilateral institutions, its military presence across the world, and even its ideological and media dominance will all be significantly diminished. This is a deliberate choice by the Trump administration, most likely based on the belief that the costs of maintaining these global arrangements outweigh their benefits to the US.

At the same time, Trump’s retreat may be a calculated one, effectively reviving the 19th-century doctrine of spheres of influence. That means a return to an era akin to that of the warring states period, in which great powers can simply draw circles on a map to determine the fate of smaller nations.

Such a world, where the law of the jungle reigns [丛林秩序], may seem inconceivable. However, Trump’s encouragement of European defence autonomy, his tacit acceptance of Russia’s actions, his territorial ambitions concerning Canada and Greenland, and even his blunt remark that he would “leave Bangladesh to PM Modi”, all suggest a [growing] tendency towards a world carved-up [into spheres of influence] [全球割据]. This is something that cannot be ignored.

Domestically, the next four years in the US are equally difficult to predict [扑朔迷离]. As mentioned earlier, although I believe Musk, with Trump’s backing, could indeed carry out some important reforms, I remain highly sceptical of their radical [激进的方式] approach. It even reminds me a little of China’s Cultural Revolution in the sense that a small group of political outsiders [少数体系边缘人], with the tacit approval of their leader, has gained access to the core of government and power [进入权力核心] and is exploiting widespread social dissatisfaction to rally large numbers of ordinary people—especially those from the lower rungs of society and young people with little experience of the world—to launch a fierce assault on the existing system. At the moment, it seems that much of what DOGE is doing—exposing shocking “dirt” [黑料] on social media—is less about genuinely pushing for reform and more about maintaining the “revolutionary legitimacy” of this movement, ultimately creating a cycle of self-reinforcing and escalating fervour [狂热].

As Trump continues to use attacking the Deep State as an excuse to dismantle the federal government, growing numbers of people may find the situation [increasingly] intolerable and join the ranks of a fierce opposition to Trump [选择加入激烈反对的阵营]. This could create an unprecedented level of division within American society. I don’t know how this situation will ultimately end, but rifts in society, combined with economic turbulence and growing international pressures, undoubtedly present a thorny challenge.

As for how I envisage 2049, the world one generation from now, I haven’t given this much thought until now. I don’t think I’m very good at imagining things that far off. However, since you asked, I will try my best to provide an answer.

Unless there is a geopolitical disaster like a nuclear war or a science-fiction-like scenario such as a robot uprising, and assuming current trends continue on a linear path, it is highly probable that by 2049 China will have overtaken the United States as the world’s largest economy. From now until then, as long as China focuses on managing its own affairs effectively, it should naturally achieve this leap due to its sheer size, thereby circumventing [today’s] tricky structural “contradictions” [结构性矛盾] between the US and China. [But] this should not be seen as a unilateral geopolitical victory for China over the US.

What will China look like by 2049? Over a billion people (let’s hope China’s population is still of that size!), fully industrialised and automated, and living in a socialist system that prioritises the public interest [公众利益]. At that point, China could become the first truly advanced socialist nation in human history, fulfilling Karl Marx’s great prophecy from two centuries ago.

I look forward to seeing China achieve further institutional innovations [更多制度创新] and material advancements, thereby contributing to the betterment of human civilisation [为全人类的文明进步多做一点贡献] and making the world a better place.

by Thomas des Garets Geddes and Mao Keji, The China Academy |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. They don't seem too worried. tl;dr version here: (X). I'm glad he mentioned the Chinese Cultural Revolution under Mao, which has echos here; the ideological purging and banishment of anyone with bureaucratic or scientific expertise. See also: Avoiding the Abyss: An Urgent Need for Sino-U.S. Crisis Management (Responsible Statecraft).]

King of Fruits

King of Fruits (WiP)

Images: Wikimedia/Del Monte

"By the late eighteenth century, ‘pineries’, as pineapple gardens were called, had become a regular feature of large European estates. The fruit had gone from being a rare curiosity to become an expensive but attainable luxury, at least for the wealthy. It became common practice to display a fresh pineapple at dinner parties to impress guests. This led to delightfully absurd situations: the pineapple became valued more for showing than for eating, and some people, who wanted to show their wealth but couldn’t afford multiple specimens, reused the same one again and again for weeks until it began to rot. A rental industry of pineapples arose to meet this demand. A pineapple was one of the riskiest items a maid could carry around since it presented a particularly attractive target for thieves.

Around the turn of the twentieth century entrepreneurs realized that steamship transport, refrigeration, and canning could be combined into a new business opportunity.

The first person to understand this was a young man named James Dole. After graduating from Harvard with a degree in agriculture, Dole moved to Honolulu in 1899 (it helped that his cousin, Sanford D. Dole, had been president of the short-lived Republic of Hawaii and now held the position of the first governor of the US territory of Hawaii). He bought a farm, experimented with some crops, and settled on the pineapple. In 1901, he formed the Hawaiian Pineapple Company (today known as Dole), and by 1903, he was shipping canned pineapple to the mainland US. His success was quickly imitated by other businesses, notably by the California Packing Corporation, now known as Del Monte.

In the next three decades Hawaiian pineapple production skyrocketed. This was due in part to Hawaii’s climate, where the pineapple plantations grew to be the largest in the world. Famously, the island of Lanai, the sixth-largest of the archipelago, was turned into an island-wide plantation for Dole in the 1920s." ~ King of Fruits

Seeing Things For What They Are

Born into a chaotic world, all of us develop a frame of reference to make everything intelligible. Consciously or not, we all have a narrative about reality that we overlay on events, placing them into a context in our own minds, allowing us to understand why things happened and what is likely to happen next. In the same way that our brains automatically filter out much incoming stimulus in order to provide us with a breadth of sensation that we can handle, our belief systems allow us to turn life’s waterfall of events into a story that we can read, and participate in.

Once we have developed this frame, this mental machine that inhales life and exhales explanations, it is tempting to allow it to run unimpeded. We can anchor ourselves to it and stop wondering why things happen. Religion is the classic example of this, but it applies to all realms of thinking. The problem with this approach is that it ignores the fact that these frames we generate are only approximate—they are the best we can do at any given time given the facts at hand. If we are actually concerned with keeping them as close to truth as possible, we must constantly dust them off and rework them in light of the unfolding of reality. This is what learning is. It takes work. It is tempting to check out from it, after we have enough to get by. Once we have an explainer machine that seems to work, it is easy to stick with it. The passing of time, the ceaseless interaction of people and things and ideas that produce events in the world, will render our frames anachronistic. Still, it is human nature to kind of relax into them, at a certain point, like an elderly person who sticks with their 20 year-old computer because they know how it works, turning off the software updates, satisfied with what they have.

This is a luxury that people in certain fields cannot afford. Science? Can’t stop updating. Medicine? Of course you must stay current. Literature? Technology? Academia? You must always do the painful work of tearing apart and rebuilding your knowledge and beliefs because failing to do so means that you will not be good at your job. Politics is the same. Effective political policies and strategies are direct responses to the true condition of the world. Delusion does not pay. If the world changes and our political leaders don’t, it is the political leaders and not the world that will be left behind. The people who suffer for this failure are not usually the leaders, but the citizens who find that the leaders seem to have gone blind.

Things have changed in America. There are deep undercurrents that have been exerting pressure from below—the relentless evolution of global capitalism, the growth of inequality, new forms of technology jumbling the world of information—and then there are things that have changed rapidly, closer to the surface. It was possible to use a certain frame of reference that worked pretty well in the American political system for the past 40 years or so. But now that frame is out of date. It is worse than useless. It is misleading. It is detrimental, because the answers it spits out, the explanations it gives, the strategies it recommends for specific situations, are all based upon old data and old wisdom that no longer works. The frame of reference that guides many of the people who, unfortunately, dominate the Democratic Party in Washington is like a flood map that was drawn up before climate change. They keep using these same old formulas that worked back then, ignoring the rising water as it creeps up to their necks.

by Hamilton Nolan, How Things Work |  Read more:

Image: Getty

[ed. This should be one of the basic operating principles in life: to avoid being manipulated be as informed and unbiased as possible. It's one of the most important defenses one can have in a capitalist system that, by nature, is designed to exploit blind spots and emotions for profit and other types of competitive advantage (eg. politics). Updating your priors, previous belief systems, are essential as new information becomes available, especially contradictory information. See also: Three Methods of Control (HTW); and, this message from Ralph Nader.]

Coast to Coast?

Boston Celtics to Seattle? Maybe?

The NBA has danced around the topic of expansion for more than a year, with occasional steps forward and more than a few times where the conversation has come to a halt.

Thanks to the agreed-upon sale of the Boston Celtics on Thursday, the league may finally be ready to go all-in on embracing the talk of adding one or two teams to the league and seeing where Seattle stands in the discussion.

It’s not going to happen immediately and the process likely won’t be at a pace to the liking of fans who have longed for the return of the SuperSonics. But several issues have been settled and created a situation where moving forward on the topic seems it could happen soon.

Here’s a rundown of where things stand:

What happened in Boston?

The current owners of the Celtics reached agreement with a group led by Bill Chisholm for a sale process at a valuation of $6.1 billion, a record for a pro sports franchise in North America.

One of the benchmark franchises in the league being up for sale was an unexpected twist in the expansion saga and delayed the NBA moving forward on discussing the possibility of adding teams.

Why the Celtics’ sale matters?

The Celtics’ sale was the last major piece of financial business the league needed to settle. Two years ago, the NBA reached a new collective bargaining agreement with the players and last year finalized a landmark media rights deal that’ll pay out $76 billion over the next 11 years.

The sale of the Minnesota Timberwolves seems to be closer to completion after an arbitration panel ruled in February in favor of the new owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez.

The Celtics’ sale was the one lingering piece that was unresolved and perhaps more importantly than the status of the franchise being settled, it gives the league a current franchise valuation for which an expansion fee could be based off. Before the agreement on the Celtics, the last sale of an NBA franchise was the Phoenix Suns at a valuation of $4 billion.

It seems like the midpoint between the sales of the Suns and Celtics could be a smart figure for a potential expansion fee. Maybe a little lower. But if NBA owners are about to divide up their pie by one or two more pieces, they’re going to want every cent they can from the new guests at the table.

What are the next steps?

The NBA owners — the Board of Governors — are scheduled to meet before the end of the regular season, potentially as early as next week. While it’s unclear if expansion will be addressed, the Celtics situation progressing at least opens up the topic for potential conversation. It could be the topic is held for after the season. Last year, the Board of Governors met during NBA Summer League in Las Vegas in July.

Whenever the topic is broached, it won’t be a rubber stamp. There is likely to be significant debate among the owners as to whether now is the time to expand, especially with some concerns about the talent pool and how adding one or two more teams could impact the bottom line for some teams. In other words, some owners may have to be convinced that expansion is worthwhile for themselves and the league.

by Tim Booth, Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Erika Schultz/The Seattle Times
[ed. The Celtics got sold? For $6.1 billion? Wow. That's like selling the Green Bay Packers or something. Reading all this I wonder, when did sports get so complicated (and mercenary)?]

Matteo Mancuso

[ed. Awesome talent.]

“You’re killing us,” guitarist Al Di Meola said when he first heard Matteo Mancuso. “It would take two, three lifetimes to catch up with him.”

Steve Vai reached the same verdict: “I was pretty stunned when I heard Matteo…..It’s just a new level.” “I’ve never seen anything like it,” enthused Joe Bonamassa.

Sicilian guitarist Mancuso first got attention via a viral YouTube video. He was 17 at the time, but had already been playing professionally for five years. Yet he didn’t release a full studio album until 2023, around the time of his 25th birthday. (HB)

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