Weekend Reading
What fresh hell is this? #Incompetence #Corruption
“While the two men’s falling out was perhaps predictable, the public spectacle of it when it happened offered a bit of Schadenfreude for their critics, and even some of their supporters, who had tired of the chaos the two had sown since the beginning of the year. But others see a darker side to the episode. The Guardian’s Blake Montgomery wrote, ‘Perhaps the loser is democracy itself rather than Musk.’ Political scientist Abe Newman also lamented what their spat, but also their prior relationship, means for U.S. democracy, saying it highlights how the country now operates more according to the power and egos of wealthy individuals than through institutions. The Trump-Musk fight, he wrote, ‘signals how far US economy/politics has deviated from rule of law. We have entered a world in which rich people are not just donors but seek to steer the government.’ I agree with Newman, with one caveat: As with many things that Trump takes to extremes, this is by no means a recent development. Just as presidential power has long been a function of what is politically possible rather than legally permissible and U.S. policy toward its allies has long been uncomfortably coercive, the centrality of wealth in U.S. politics and governance under Trump is more a sign of continuity than change. The falling out between the world’s richest person and the world’s most powerful person only underscores this point. Take the federal government’s relationship to financial elites. The U.S. Treasury has repeatedly bailed out corporations and financial firms, even those engaged in risky lending, when episodes such as the 2008 financial crisis and before that the 1980s Savings and Loan crisis threatened to devastate the economy and, in turn, the political prospects of U.S. elected leaders. These protective measures even extended to financial firms investing abroad, such as the Federal Reserve’s efforts to save the Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund from insolvency during the East Asian Financial crisis in the late 1990s. One could go back even further. The U.S. government relied on J.P. Morgan to save the banking sector—and the U.S. economy—during the 1908 financial crisis. The captains of industry and robber barons of the late 19th and early 20th centuries—a historical period during which America, according to Trump, was at its greatest—wielded great influence on U.S. politics and policy.” (Paul Poast/WPR)
“For forty-five years, Tehran’s Shiite theocracy has heralded its political system as a model for all predominantly Muslim countries—and even beyond. ‘We should try hard to export our revolution,’ Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini declared, in 1980, after ousting the last of several Iranian monarchies that had endured for two millennia. ‘We shall confront the world with our ideology.’ It was the core of his government’s strategy to overtly and covertly build a network of allies—dubbed the Axis of Resistance—to serve as frontline buffers against Israel, its regional rival. In 2004, I interviewed King Abdullah II, the Sunni leader of Jordan’s Hashemite dynasty, who warned about an emerging “crescent” of Shiite powers that began in Iran and extended through Iraq, into Syria, and ended in Lebanon. The Middle East—dominated for centuries by Sunni monarchies, tribal sheikdoms, and autocracies—was being transformed by this Shiite arc, he told me. The rivalry between Sunnis and Shiites, who are a minority in the Muslim world, dates back to a dispute over political leadership after the Prophet Muhammad died, in the seventh century. It intensified after Iran’s Revolution. The international story of this year may be the collapse of Iran’s alliances. In Syria, the sadistic Assad dynasty, in power for more than a half century, has been ousted by Sunni rebels. (The Assads are members of the Alawite sect, an offshoot of early Shiite Islam.) As the rebels advanced on Damascus, Tehran abruptly pulled out its Revolutionary Guards and Basij paramilitary forces, which had been deployed to prop up President Bashar al-Assad. ‘Some expect us to fight in place of the Syrian Army,’ the commander of the Revolutionary Guard Corps told Iranian media. ‘Is it logical for the I.R.G.C. and Basij forces to take on full responsibility while Syria’s Army merely observes?’ Several Iranian generals have been killed in Syria since 2014, the most recent one in November. Tehran also shuttered its Embassy and evacuated four thousand citizens on emergency flights. The Iranians ‘certainly weren’t willing or able to come to Assad’s rescue,’ John Kirby, the White House national-security communications adviser, told me. ‘And in the aftermath of his departure, it’s clear to us that they are reëvaluating—I think is the best way to put it—their presence in Syria.” (Robin Wright/TNY)
“Is this ‘one and done’, or just the opening wave? This is an important question and one that is difficult to answer until a more detailed post-strike assessment is carried out. This will also depend on the scope of Israeli objectives. If there was a critical target which was not sufficiently destroyed, it may require a re-attack. It is worth noting that in his statement about the attack, the Israeli Prime Minister noted that ‘the operation will continue for as long as necessary, until the mission of repelling the existential threat looming over us is accomplished.’ Additionally, a statement by the Israeli Defence Force notes that ‘dozens of IAF jets completed the first stage that included strikes on dozens of military targets, including nuclear targets in different areas of Iran.’ The mention of a first stage tends to indicate that the Israeli attacks are not yet over. We might be in for a long campaign here.” (Mick Ryan/Futura Doctrina)
“The ICE raids in Los Angeles were the first step in Trump’s goal to impose martial law and consolidate his power. This is hardly far-fetched. Even Congresswoman Laura Friedman said that the other day. Trump thinks he’s above the law—and doesn’t have to comply with federal court orders and can keep US congresspeople from inspecting ICE facilities, even though they have the legal right to do so. Trump’s invasion of LA is also the result of his revenge against California for voting against him and his strategy of demonizing American cities and states run by Democrats. He is using LA as a test case of whether he can get away with stifling peaceful protest and militarize our cities with calls for ‘law and order.’ He assumes that most white Americans agree with his racist attitude toward immigrants (whom he has said ‘poison the nation’s blood’) and will let him get away with it … The timing of these ICE raids is no accident. The federal raids—which Trump is likely to expand to other cities—are meant to divert public attention from Trump’s ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ to cut Medicaid and other essential programs in order to give a huge tax cut to the super-rich …” (Peter Dreier/Public Seminar)
“OK, so beyond just trying to verify information and footage, there've also been a bunch of reports about misleading AI-generated videos. There was a TikTok account that started uploading videos of an alleged National Guard soldier named Bob who'd been deployed to the LA protests, and you could see him saying false and inflammatory things like like the fact that the protesters are ‘chucking in balloons full of oil,’ and one of the videos had close to a million views. So I don't know, it feels like people have to become a little more adept at identifying this kind of fake footage, but it's hard in an environment that is inherently contextless like a post on X or a video on TikTok … I mean, it's been interesting because Elon Musk famously laid off a large portion of the content moderation team at X, formerly Twitter. He also stripped away some of the content moderation rules that the company had spent years weighing and putting in place and debating internally. And as we've had big news events play out in real time, the kind of thing that Twitter was made to do, big earthquake, war, protests, whatever it is, these moments where previously you would've seen everyone flock to X to figure out what was going on, you still see people doing that same behavior, but the ability to ascertain what is actually going on on that platform has declined so much in recent years. There is good information, but it's intermixed with all of this horrible, bad, false information, and it's really hard to tell what is what … I mean, it's been interesting because Elon Musk famously laid off a large portion of the content moderation team at X, formerly Twitter. He also stripped away some of the content moderation rules that the company had spent years weighing and putting in place and debating internally. And as we've had big news events play out in real time, the kind of thing that Twitter was made to do, big earthquake, war, protests, whatever it is, these moments where previously you would've seen everyone flock to X to figure out what was going on, you still see people doing that same behavior, but the ability to ascertain what is actually going on on that platform has declined so much in recent years. There is good information, but it's intermixed with all of this horrible, bad, false information, and it's really hard to tell what is what.” (Zoe Schiffer and Laura Fager/WIRED)
“The Sudanese army retreated from the Libya-Egypt-Sudan border triangle area, it said on Wednesday, a day after it accused forces loyal to eastern Libyan military commander Khalifa Haftar of an attack alongside the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces. Sudanese soldiers, largely from former rebel groups aligned with the army, had patrolled the area. Sudan's military, which is fighting against the RSF in a civil war, accuses the RSF and Haftar's forces of using the corridor for weapons deliveries. The area is close to the city of al-Fashir, one of the war's main frontlines.” (Reuters)
“One of Jane Austen’s many mind-bending skills was her ability to wrest so much drama from a world that was, by present-day standards, almost unfathomably static. Austen’s novels are preindustrial time capsules from an era before even trains, gas lights, or telegraphs—the first in a stampede of inventions that transformed nineteenth-century life and are vividly present in the work of many novelists emblematic of that century. Born in 1775, a year before American Independence, Austen has preserved for us an epoch when indoor illumination required candles, remote communication took place by messenger or mail, and locomotion meant walking or engaging at least one horse—more if, like Emma’s protagonist and namesake (and indeed every woman in that novel), you didn’t ride, and needed a carriage to travel any distance. Austen’s fourth published novel is the most physically constricted of her works, which makes it also the most virtuosic. Unlike Austen’s other protagonists, Emma Woodhouse never spends a night away from home. That home is in fictional Highbury, “a large and populous village almost amounting to a town,” whose sixteen-mile distance from London might as well be six hundred. There is no sense of change in Highbury—neither past nor immanent; sociological nor technological—but rather of generations quietly living out their lives. The action occurs mostly indoors except for two group outings—one to pick strawberries and another to picnic nearby. The men move about more freely, coming and going on horseback, but the women mostly stay put, and Emma is especially stationary. She seems never to have traveled in her life, and remarks at one point that she hasn’t seen the ocean. The causes of Emma’s insularity are structural.” (Jennifer Egan/The Paris Review)
“Not to steal our President’s ‘vermin’ analogy, but it really is beginning to feel like we are experiencing the fascist version of a bacterial swarming in America. In biology, these events are characterised by rapid mass migration, in which thousands of cells spread collectively to colonize surfaces. The image of armed men tackling and cuffing U.S. Senator Padilla was shocking, but also very similar to so many incidents we’ve witnessed in the past few months. In meeting halls across the nation since Trump Two, we have seen how a single security thug’s twitch activates the movement of six more no-necks to drag away an American exercising his or her First Amendment right to speak. In street protests, a cop’s baton flick triggers a dozen men swinging and kicking at a prone body. This brings deep joy to Trump and his core advisors, the cartoonishly sinister fascist id – Bannon, Stone, Miller – as well as his MAGA cult. Trump Two is an orgy of vengeance celebrated by angry weirdos. Their cartoonish evil has always suggested we passed through a wormhole into a Marvel Comic. Think Roger Stone baring his teeth like a Tasmanian devil during that deposition back in 2020. Or crazy-eyed FBI Director K$H Patel after flogging Trump merch, running the FBI with a testosterone-poisoned right-wing podcaster.” (Nina Burleigh/American Freakshow)
“Researchers from Peking University and the Shandong Institute of Cultural Relics and Archaeology revealed evidence of an ancient matrilineal society at the site of Fujia, near the birthplace of Chinese civilization, according to statement released by Peking University. The discovery is surprising since it is the first early society of its kind identified anywhere in East Asia. Previous excavations at the site have exposed two cemeteries belonging to the Dawenkou culture dating to between 2750 and 2500 b.c. The new study analyzed the ancient DNA of 60 individuals, 14 from the northern necropolis and 46 from the southern one. Every single one of the deceased from the northern cemetery shared the same maternal lineage, as indicated by their mitochondrial DNA that is passed down from mothers. In the other cemetery, 44 of the 46 individuals hailed from another maternal lineage. On the contrary, Y-chromosome data, which is passed down through fathers, determined that the men buried at the site came from a wide range of paternal lines. These results demonstrate that over at least 10 generations, women stayed and lived with their clans throughout their lives while men moved to other communities. These findings seem to challenge long-held assumptions that patrilineal organization was universal among Neolithic societies.” (Archaeology Magazine via Nature)
“In the drama of Hegseth’s January confirmation hearings, it was easy to get distracted by the financial settlement for an assault allegation, by the multitudinous accounts of heavy drinking on the job, by claims of misogyny from both his mother and his sister-in-law, by the fact that Hegseth, while married with three small children, had fathered a child with a Fox News producer who was also married with small children, during which pregnancy he had slept with the woman who later accused him of assault, and thereby miss some straightforward information about his managerial experience. Pete Hegseth had run a nonprofit called Veterans for Freedom for several years, an organization that employed fewer than 20 people, and resigned after alleged financial mismanagement nearly bankrupted the organization. He had run a group called Concerned Veterans for America, which employed around 160 people, and resigned amid allegations of misconduct and, once again, financial mismanagement. In choosing Hegseth, Donald Trump did not choose from the large set of people who had never managed an organization, or the considerably smaller set of people who had managed an organization without incident, but from a smaller still set of people who had managed multiple bureaucracies and resigned multiple times under complex circumstances. The Department of Defense, which oversees 3 million people, is one of the largest employers on earth, comprising the four main branches of the military as well as the National Security Agency and dozens of other agencies of which most people have never heard. Pete Hegseth assumed office on January 25.” (Kerry Howley/NYMag)
“I have no idea how Franklin Roosevelt sounded in ‘normal’ conversation. But the genius of his Depression-era ‘Fireside Chats’ was his presenting them as if he were talking normally, over the radio, with a diverse American audience he addressed as ‘My friends.’ I do know how Gavin Newsom sounds normally. I’ve met him and interviewed him. People who haven’t done that have seen plenty of him on TV—for instance, a dramatic interview with Jacob Soboroff on MSNBC, one night before his speech. The point of this comparison is that Newsom gave perhaps his most important ‘speech’ as if he were just having a talk. The cadence, the word choice, the half-sentences, the absence of formal, oratorical padding (‘And so I say to you.’) or the slightest hint of ‘I know better than you’—it all conveyed an informality that, to me, made it seem both more on-the-scene authentic and more urgent.2 Or that is how it sounded to me — and as I’ll mention in the annotated text that follows.” (James Fallows/Breaking the News)
“The Trump administration is underwater in 11 out of 12 poll questions related to immigration, deportations, and the LA protests this week. The only poll to come up with positive results for the administration is a YouGov/Economist survey asking whether people approve, broadly, of how Trump is "handling the issue of immigration." At +4, that represents a 3-point decline from the +7 reading in YouGov's poll last week. One event that may impact the polling to come: Late Thursday evening, a federal judge in California blocked Trump’s federalization of the California National Guard … YouGov is not the only firm to show Trump losing ground on immigration. In our Strength In Numbers average of issue approval polls from many different firms, Trump's net approval on handling immigration has fallen from +5.1 to -1.3 over the last week. This represents the fastest decline in his rating since the dip after press coverage of Kilmar Abrego Garcia peaked in April … According to the Post/GMU crosstabs, the more closely Americans are following the news in LA, the less they like the idea of soldiers on city streets. Net approval for Trump's actions is 17 points underwater among the 34% of people who say they are paying ‘a lot of attention’ to the protests, versus +27 among people who aren't.” (G. Elliot Morris/Strength in Numbers)
“The Republicans’ big tent has long included both tax-cutters and deficit hawks, and there’s always been tension between them. Now, in the era of President Donald Trump, the party also has a growing band of working-class voters heavily dependent on government funds and programs. So how do you cut taxes, reduce the deficit and still satisfy those Trump foot soldiers who rely on federal largess, whether they like to admit it or not? It’s almost impossible to do all three things at once. Republicans’ big tax and budget bill passed the House by just a single vote late last month, and only after pitched arguments. Elon Musk, the presidential pal who has fallen out of favor, called the measure a ‘disgusting abomination’ and said the Senate should kill it because it will add trillions of dollars to the national debt. Tax cutters, though, actually would have preferred making some business tax cuts permanent, which would have added to the bill’s cost. Meanwhile, Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley says it will be not only ‘suicidal’ for Republicans to cut Medicaid, but a sign that the party is suffering from an ‘identity crisis.’ As it happens, this struggle is playing out most obviously over healthcare. The budget framework would cut about $900 billion in Medicaid and some other health programs over the next decade, according to the Congressional Budget Office. Some 10.9 million people would lose coverage—a change that strikes directly at some of the working-class voters that Republicans have worked so hard to win over in recent years. One illustration: Of the seven states most dependent on Medicaid funding, four of them—Louisiana, Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia—voted for President Trump, according to an analysis from KFF, a healthcare-policy research organization formerly known as the Kaiser Family Foundation.” (Jerry Seib/News Items)
“Trump has never been forthcoming about his health. There’s a long history of questions about presidents and health. This is not just applicable to Joe Biden and Donald Trump, but they are the two oldest presidents that the country has had. So that becomes a different thing. Biden had an aneurysm decades earlier, and President Trump, the most recent doctor’s note included stuff that read like Trump had written it. When Trump had COVID in October of 2020, he was quite sick, and they were not honest about that. I reported in Confidence Man in the hardcover version that some of the officials in the administration believed if he had not been given the Regeneron monoclonal antibodies as a treatment, that he could have died. That’s scary, how perilous that moment was, and how little real-time information the public had. Trump does not like talking about health, does not like sickness, views sickness as weakness, views hospitals as weakness.” (Maggie Haberman/VF)
“A day after Israel began a massive attack on Iran, however, Mr. Trump’s peace projects are in tatters. The fighting in Ukraine rages on and Mr. Trump appears to have lost patience with efforts to end that war. In Gaza, both Israel and Hamas cling to basic positions they staked out long before Mr. Trump took office. And instead of announcing a new nuclear deal with Tehran, a president who often denounces America’s history of ‘stupid’ Middle East wars is trying to navigate a dangerous conflict between Iran and Israel, the closest U.S. partner in the region. ‘Five months in, Trump is watching prospects of U.S.-mediated negotiations between Russia and Ukraine, the U.S. and Iran, and Israel and Hamas crater. And he’s learning the hard reality that there are severe limits to U.S. influence, power and to his vaunted negotiating skills, especially when you don’t have an effective strategy and aren’t willing to use U.S. leverage to make it succeed,’ said Aaron David Miller, a former U.S. diplomat who worked under six secretaries of state. The results undermine Mr. Trump’s argument that he can solve intractable problems with common sense and hard-nosed savvy while ignoring protocol, shunning experts and dispatching inexperienced envoys — including Steve Witkoff, his friend and fellow New York real estate mogul, who has tried to mediate all three projects. Mr. Trump also appears to be susceptible to conflating flattery and sweet talk from other leaders with a willingness to compromise their interests. President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has praised Mr. Trump for years as strong and brave. But when Mr. Trump pressed him earlier this year for a meaningful compromise of his goals in Ukraine, Mr. Putin brushed him off.” (Michael Crowley and Edward Wong/NYT)