The Anti-MAGA Hat Goes Global

The Anti-MAGA Hat Goes Global (NYT)

[ed. Got one. Making America Germany Again (MAGA) is old hat these days. In other news, see also: Review: Clooney, Fair and Balanced, in ‘Good Night, and Good Luck’; At ‘Good Night’ Opening, the Stars Came Out for Clooney; and, Being George Clooney Is Harder Than It Looks: (NYT). George Clooney for president? Hey, if we're going to vote for TV characters, why not? He'd be on the top of my list.]

“We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. … We will not walk in fear, one of another. We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason,” Murrow said in his attack on McCarthy, which came a few months before the lawyer Joseph Welch uttered his “Have you no sense of decency?” line during the Army-McCarthy hearings." (...) 

[ed. For those who don't know or remember, Roy Cohn was McCarthy's lawyer and Trump's mentor.]

***

Re: George Clooney:

People may think he’s a nepo baby, but he’s not really. It was a long, hard climb. When he got to Hollywood, he was a driver for Rosemary Clooney and her coterie of singers. “They would call themselves ‘broads,’” he said. “They would drink tall glasses of vodka. They were really tough and mean and raunchy. And when they got up to sing, they were unbelievably gifted.”

When people tell him it looks like it comes easily to him, he said, “It comes easy because I work really damn hard. Part of the art of doing what we do for a living is, it’s supposed to look easy.” (...)

“I believe that whole idea of the arc of history bending toward justice, and I know it doesn’t feel that way right now,” he said. “I think there are always these pendulum swings. The first Trump election was, I believe, a result of eight years of a Black president.”

As for Trump’s 2024 election, he said: “The Biden administration was terrible at explaining that we’re a world economy, where we were actually doing better than all the other G7 countries. They were bad at telling the story because their messenger was not working at his best, to say the least.” 

[ed. My favorite GC movie... The Descendants.]

Paul Simon

[ed. Why deny the obvious, child..]

Manufactured Chaos

Musk and seven DOGE staffers—all of them men—appeared on Fox News Thursday, where the world's richest person called the Trump administration's crusade to eviscerate the federal government under pretext of improving efficiency "the biggest revolution in the government since the original revolution" in 1776.

The DOGE staffers repeated unfounded claims that Social Security is riddled with fraud; that in some cases, 40% of calls to the Social Security Administration phone center are fraudulent; and that millions of people aged 120 and older are registered with SSA.

Acknowledging that DOGE's wrecking-ball approach to government reform is getting "a lot of complaints along the way," Musk said: "You know who complains the loudest, and with the most amount of fake righteous indignation? The fraudsters." (...)

Responding to what she called Musk's "absurd claim," Nancy Altman, president of the advocacy group Social Security Works (SSW), said Friday that "the truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."

"It is Musk and DOGE who are inviting in fraudsters," she continued. "Scammers are already rushing in to take advantage of the confusion created by DOGE's service cuts."

Critics have denounced the Trump administration for sowing chaos at SSA and other federal agencies by planning to lay off thousands of workers, slash spending, and implement other disruptive policies. Cuts in SSA phone services were reportedly carried out in response to a direct request from the White House, which claimed it is simply working to eliminate "waste, fraud, and abuse."

"The truth is that Social Security has a fraud rate of 0.00625%, far lower than private sector retirement programs."

This "DOGE-manufactured chaos," as Altman calls it, has already led to the SSA website crashing several times in recent weeks and hold times of as long as 4-5 hours for those calling the agency.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) on Thursday noted that while it would be clearly illegal for President Donald Trump and DOGE to cut Social Security benefits without congressional authorization, there are other ways for the administration to hamstring the agency.

Referencing a new in-person verification rule that was delayed and partly rolled back this week, Warren said:

Say a 66-year-old man qualifies for Social Security. Say he calls the helpline to apply, but he's told about a new DOGE rule, so he has to go online or in person. He can't drive. He has trouble with the website, so he waits until his niece can get a day off to take him to the local office, but DOGE closed that office, so they have to drive two hours to get to the next closest office. When they get there, there are only two people staffing a 50-person line, so he doesn't even make it to the front of the line before the office closes and he has to come back. Let's assume it takes him three months to straighten this out, and he misses a total of $5,000 in benefits checks, which, by law, he will never get back.

"This scenario is a backdoor way Musk and Trump could cut Social Security," the senator added. "That's what I'm fighting to prevent."

Democratic lawmakers and others argue that the Trump administration's approach is "a prelude to privatizing Social Security and handing it over to private equity," as Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said earlier this week.

"Improving Social Security doesn't start with shuttering the offices that handle modernization, anti-fraud activities, and civil rights violations," the senator asserted. "It doesn't start with indiscriminately firing or buying out thousands of workers, and it doesn't start with restricting customer service over the phone and drawing up plans to close field and regional offices."

by Brett Wilkins, Common Dreams |  Read more:

Image: Fox "News"

[ed. Making government deliberately dysfunctional. Actually, it would be scarier if they actually believed they were making it better.]

Steve Rattner on Just How Bad Things Will Get Under Trump’s Tariffs

In this episode of “The Opinions,” the deputy Opinion editor Patrick Healy and contributing Opinion writer, investor and economic analyst Steven Rattner break down how President Trump’s “reciprocal tariffs” are already shaking the global economy — and it hasn’t even been 24 hours. (...)

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Patrick Healy: I’m Patrick Healy, deputy editor of New York Times Opinion. And this is The First 100 Days, a weekly series examining President Trump’s use of power and his drive to change America.

Trump’s trillion-dollar hike on imports has sent shock waves across the globe. As one professor of trade policy told The Times, “Trump has chosen to blow up the system governing international trade.”

Today, I’m joined by Steve Rattner, a contributing writer for Times Opinion. Steve’s the former head of President Barack Obama’s auto industry task force, which got him nicknamed the car czar. And he’s also a financier on Wall Street who knows what the business community thinks about Trump.

Steve, thanks for being here.

Steve Rattner: Thanks so much for having me, Patrick.

Healy: These are broad and big tariffs: 10 percent across the board, except Canada and Mexico, but also 34 percent on China, 24 percent on Japan, 46 percent on Vietnam, 32 percent on Taiwan and, of course, 25 percent on auto companies. The market started off Thursday down sharply. What’s on your mind about the new tariffs and what matters most about them?

Rattner: Well, first, this is the most extraordinary trade war, if you want to call it, that we have conducted since the 1920s and into the 1930s, ending in the famous Smoot-Hawley tariffs. And ever since World War II, other countries in the world, including China, have been working to reduce tariffs. Why are they trying to reduce tariffs? Because we all learned in Economics 101 that trade is good, that if somebody else can make something cheaper and better than you can, you let them make that, and you make something else that you can do better or cheaper. And on that basis, we’ve had this period of essentially unparalleled prosperity since World War II, and trade has played a meaningful role in that.

Another example, more recently, is the fact that we had so little inflation from the great financial crisis until Covid because the price of goods, which are the things that can more easily move across an international barrier, were coming down in price or at least not going up in price. And they kept our inflation at a very, very low level, and they made things cheaper and better for so many Americans who are out shopping at Walmart or wherever they go.

Healy: I don’t know if Trump took Econ 101, but what does he believe? What does this say about his vision, either the economy or America and the world or something else?

Rattner: I have to assume he took Econ 101, because he went to Wharton.

Healy: That’s probably true.

Rattner: But I think he may have gone into some time warp or something and ended up in a 19th-century class on economics, because back then they taught you what we call mercantilism, that countries’ goal was to accumulate gold. They all wanted more gold, and so therefore, you wanted to have trade surpluses, and therefore tariffs were high, and trade barriers were high. But we’re not in the 19th century anymore. We’re in the 21st century.

Trump doesn’t have a lot of core beliefs, in my opinion. As you watch his antics and you watch over the years — and you’ve watched him for many, many years — he used to be a Democrat, he was pro-choice, he was this, he was that, and now he’s suddenly a hard-right Republican. But the one constant in his life has been this mercantilist view about trade, and therefore we do have a large trade deficit. He believes it’s because other countries don’t trade fairly. As I’ve indicated, there are other reasons for it, and so this is how he responds.

Healy: I’d put it a little differently. I’d say he really believes in walls, in keeping out the invaders that he likes to talk about, in keeping in what he thinks he can do in terms of manufacturing in business. But this idea that the global economy, markets can work in a world where America turns into Fortress America or Trump’s America — can that work in some way on America’s behalf? I still like to think that Trump is not trying to send the markets crashing and send the economy into recession, but I don’t know.

Rattner: I don’t think you’re going to find many economists who think this can work. And so let’s take a couple of the pieces.

First of all, even if other countries stop sending us their clothes, their furniture, their iPhones, whatever, we can’t make that stuff here. We do not, any longer, have the physical infrastructure to make it. You’d have to go out and build lots and lots of factories in order to replace that. Businesses are not going to do that, because they don’t believe in their heart that these tariffs are permanent. They believe that everyone will realize how bad they are and maybe after the next presidential election or whenever, they’ll get removed. And so it can’t work. It won’t work. But simply what this is going to mean is that you’re going to pay 20 percent more for your iPhone or something like that the next time you go to buy one.

Healy: He seems to think that he can get these businesses that you’re talking about to somehow do things, that they’re going to start reshoring jobs or building factories, that somehow he can just sign an executive order with his big penmanship and the economy is going to react in a certain way. But things don’t work that way.

Paul, Weiss might make a deal with him. Columbia University might make a deal with him. But it’s not as if the global economy has an address in Lower Manhattan and he can just sign an order and make them build a fleet of factories.

What is it that he doesn’t either understand about the economy, or is it not about understanding? It’s about projecting some kind of command and control authority.

Rattner: That’s a good question. First, I don’t think he understands how the economy works, but I think his end game here is that he hopes and expects that all these other countries are going to keel over and change their tariffs, change their nontariff barriers, and he’ll be able to declare victory.

Remember, one thing about Trump is he’s a deal guy. “The Art of the Deal,” his first book — his whole life has been around deals, and everything with him is about power. Do you have more power than the other guy? Can you outnegotiate the other guy?

Remember that famous moment in the Oval Office with President Zelensky a few weeks ago, when JD Vance started that whole spat and Trump kept turning to Zelensky and said, “You have no cards. You have no cards”? Because in Trump’s mind, it’s all a negotiation. Do I have more cards than he has, or does he have more cards than I have? Trump thinks that these tariffs are his cards, and he’s going to use them to bring these countries to heel.

I don’t think he believes in his heart — and he may say different things — that the end game here is we’re suddenly going to start making all the stuff that other people make and not import them and become Fortress America. I think in his heart, he believes that this is just another deal, another negotiation, and he will win it.

Healy: We’re in Atlantic City, baby. We’re at Trump Casino.

Rattner: Remember, they went bankrupt, so it didn’t work out so well for that.

Healy: That cards idea — that really is part of my theory about how Trump uses power. You mentioned other countries. Are they going to fall in line? What do you think will happen there?

Rattner: I don’t know. To tell you the truth, we’re in uncharted waters. The response to his tariffs so far — remember, he put tariffs on Mexico, Canada. Cars have already been done. The response has been more retaliatory than conciliatory, particularly from places like Canada and China.

So far, I think, the attitude of these other countries has been, “If we match him tit for tat, eventually he’ll back down.” They’re thinking about their cards, too. I’m not sure that’s where this ends. The sheer magnitude of what he did is so enormous that I think you will see countries not coming and begging, but I think you’ll see them trying to reach out and say, “OK, what would it take to get this to reverse?”

Healy: Where does American leverage come into this, though? Because I would imagine, if I’m Donald Trump, I think I am the biggest dog on the porch. Everybody else — allies and adversaries alike — has to deal with me. Who cares if they trust me? Who cares if they trust America?

Is Trump onto something there? Does America have more leverage in the economy than it’s ever even used, and now he’s pushing the bayonet in and seeing how far he can go in making deals?

Rattner: America has certainly had a fair amount of leverage. You can call us the best house in a bad neighborhood, if you want. We still are this incredibly strong economy relative to other countries.

Our economy is about to get a lot less strong because of these tariffs. But as we sit here today, we’re obviously at the center of innovation, A.I., biotech, our military. We are certainly the world leaders, but we’re not omnipotent, and these other countries have come a long way.

The E.U. is now reasonably united, and they think, and China thinks, they are not a baby sister anymore. They are equal to us. So I don’t think the right approach to these people is to bully them and say, “Yeah, I’m the guy, and you have to do what I say.” I don’t think that’s going to work. But that’s the road we’re going down.

Healy: We don’t know what will happen in the next few hours or days, but that’s part of the problem for businesses, right? The uncertainty can be devastating. You’re deep in the world of finance and the economy. Based on your private conversations, how are business leaders, global leaders, dealing with the uncertainty of the new tariffs? Are there any specific stories or comments that you can share with us that you’re hearing?

Rattner: Yeah, let me put it in a little bit of a very recent historic context. The business community was very much behind Trump in this election not because they love the guy but, frankly, because they really detested the Biden administration.

And so they welcomed Trump. They welcomed DOGE. They don’t understand Washington. They don’t understand how to manage a federal bureaucracy, but they all believed there was a lot of fraud, waste and abuse, and so they thought all that was great.

The tariff stuff they are not on board for. None of them, really. In fact, even the auto companies — who you would think, “OK, great” — were saying: This is a pretty dumb move. And so they are very, very unhappy about this. They are very unwilling to speak out publicly because they know what’s going on with the law firms. They know what happens when you get on Trump’s bad side. So they’re holding their tongues.

Healy: When you’re a business executive or investor, is your attitude about the president, whoever the president is, that just going along for the ride is something that you have to fundamentally be reacting to or be on a defensive posture with? Or is there a point where a president is enacting policy that you have to stand against or you have to figure out some way to speak out against?

Rattner: No, the business community generally does not think it’s just along for the ride. They spend a gazillion dollars on lobbyists up and down K Street in Washington to try to have things come out the way they want them to come out. The Business Roundtable, the National Association of Manufacturers, all these trade organizations, they’re in the White House. They’re in the executive branch. They’re up on the Hill every single day trying to lobby for their interests.

This president is different. They do fear him because of his demonstrated willingness to retaliate in ways that are just completely off the field, in terms of following any norms, any rules, any ethics, about how he’ll retaliate. And so they’re very reluctant, so far, anyway, to speak out publicly. Privately they are deeply, deeply disappointed in the direction that this is going. (...)

Some institutions, including Goldman Sachs, have raised their recession probability. I think Goldman Sachs, before yesterday, was at 35 percent. I would be closer to 50 percent. I think at the very minimum, we’re in what we called, back in the ’70s, stagflation, where you have both inflation and not a lot of growth or no growth. And Trump has been saying: OK, you know, it’s fine. I don’t mind that, because it’s going to be better on the other side.

It’s like if the doctor gives you some medicine, makes you feel worse for the first 24 hours and then you’re better. That’s kind of what he’s claiming is going to happen here. But I don’t know anybody who believes that.

Healy: We had Bill Clinton in the early ’90s talking about shared sacrifice. You’ve had presidents who have created a narrative about America that can convince a lot of voters that there’s another side, that we have to have some short-term pain to get to long-term gain. (...)

Rattner: If you go back to your Clinton analogy, Clinton said what you said: Shared pain, sacrifice, we’ll get to the other side. In the meantime, he got wiped out in the 1994 midterm elections. But then we did get to the other side, and the economy was unbelievably strong in those last five or six years of Clinton’s term, and it all worked out well because he had sane policies. His policies, actually, of shared sacrifice were for a goal and the right means to achieve that goal. This is craziness. And there’s not going to be another side here that’s going to make people say, “Oh, yeah, the guy’s actually a secret genius.”

Healy: Joe Biden and Donald Trump are very different. But I don’t think either man understood how little tolerance Americans have for short-term pain. They don’t like it. They hate inflation. Americans hate inflation. And if you come in, especially, promising on Day 1 that everything is going to be turned around and then not only you don’t deliver it, but you put on these tariffs that just rattle the markets more and more and more, I don’t think a lot of Americans are going to look at this and say, “This is a president who knows what he’s doing.”

by Patrick Healy and Steve Rattner, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Chip Somodevilla/Getty

[ed. FWIW - I imagine this will quickly devolve into an exit strategy that allows him to claim a few minor wins, declare victory, and carve out or phase in massive exemptions and reductions over some short period of time. The distraction factor alone, affecting other programs and tax breaks he's planning, will not be worth it. Or, maybe he'll use this excuse: Senators introduce bipartisan bill to give Congress more power over tariffs (The Hill).]

Jose Ramon Domingo ‘89

via:

Suddenly Old, Suddenly the Other

On the Unfamiliar World of Aging

All at once and much to my surprise, I am old. I did not expect it, and it is not what I expected. The world in which I worked, struggled, dreamed, and loved now regards me quite differently than it did even ten years ago. Abruptly, I’m one in a large minority that is often ignored, frequently disdained, and regularly segregated.

From the point of view of children, adolescents, and adults in general, I am no longer completely part of the world on the go. I am no longer a part of social groups in which I had a place. People dear to me decline precipitously and die. Familiar coffee shops, stores, parks, landmarks are gone.

We now know we are subjects completely of time and change. Customs, fashions, beliefs, truths, even the future, all these have changed. It becomes clear in old age that we will not be establishing a stable way of existing in space or time. Navigating this altered world requires circumspection. By aging, it seems, we become exiles.

And this is not simply an outer experience. I now find myself estranged from the person I was accustomed to being. My body and senses weaken, become unreliable in unforeseen ways, fall subject to illness, and require more attention simply to continue a reasonable level of function. My world is marked by loss and uncertainty.

My thinking, feeling, responding, imagining seem somehow unfamiliar. This is not how I thought of myself or my future. Things are no longer in my control. My life has become strangely unrecognizable. My world, my self are less stable, less secure. I have, even to myself, become somewhat “other.” 

Everything is more intensely transitory. But as the world becomes more distant and out of control, I begin to see patterns I had never imagined or only dimly sensed. Situations, objects, places, people become, moment by moment, very deeply to be cherished, valued; loved, not in spite of being impermanent, but because we are only together for this moment.

It is like watching clouds move across the sky. Colors become more vivid, momentary smells more intense, sudden sounds abrupt. Temperatures and textures, memories, ideas, gestures appear, vanish, and only briefly detach themselves from the flow of sensoria. Other worlds, it seems, are waiting to show themselves.

***

My long-suffering piano teacher, Mr. Klaus Goetze, would sometimes play for his students, and one afternoon he performed Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat, No. 31, Op. 110. I was 17 and had already heard many of Beethoven’s more popular sonatas in concert and on recordings, but nothing prepared me for what I heard him play. It changed my life in a subtle way, and now, some sixty years later, it has returned to inspire how I think about growing older.

Beethoven wrote this music when he was fifty years old; he was completely deaf, often very sick, and would die five years later. The order by which the sonata progressed was familiar, but its inner impulse was strangely austere, full of unfamiliar longing, searching, finding unsuspected ways forward, touching on new and unique kinds of resolution.

Emotional changes and shifts of keys moved in ways both surprising and deeply moving. In the third and final movement, the grammar contained elements one could never have anticipated (a single note repeated eighteen times, a chord repeated ten times); the sorrow and resolution seemed to emanate from a vast and unfamiliar expanse on the edge of silence.

It was not just the notes, but the space from which they emerged, where they reverberated and in which finally they ended that was transformative. Nothing has ever erased the shock of being drawn into a terrain of such intensity, depth, possibility, and loss. Looking at Beethoven’s life when he wrote this may provide some context for the piece but does not explain how he achieved this.

Beethoven was an almost unbearable person: willful, extravagantly self-absorbed, angry, inconsiderate, demanding, harsh, often close to feral. As Lewis Lockwood has put it: “Two elements of Beethoven’s domestic life run through his last ten years like persistent motives from one of his major works: isolation and obsessiveness.” (...)

His hearing had deteriorated almost completely. Deafness constricts our sense of ambient space; putting one’s fingers in one’s ears makes this loss evident. Space behind and to the sides pulls in. This creates a compressed dimension of inner space and could only have intensified Beethoven’s retreat into himself and the inwardness of his music. Lockwood writes:

The further decline in Beethoven’s health moved in tandem with his increasing psychological withdrawal and deepening anxiety. Here the emotional and intellectual demands that he made on himself expanded and deepened as he composed the last piano sonatas, the Ninth Symphony, the Missa Solemnis and the last quartets.

Throughout the 1820s, Beethoven’s health became even more unstable. He was afflicted by rheumatic fever, bowel complaints, jaundice, and inflammations in his eyes. Newspapers reported that his closest friends were concerned for his survival. There were times when he was barely recognizable.

In early 1820, at the same time when he was composing Piano Sonata, Op. 110, he went for a long walk along a canal towpath outside of Vienna and made his way to a canal basin at Ungerthor. He had eaten nothing, was exhausted, confused, and disoriented; he began to look through the windows of houses near the path.

He was so erratic and so shabbily dressed that the residents became alarmed and called the police. He proclaimed loudly to the officers that he was Beethoven, but he looked so much more like a beggar that he was not believed.

They locked him up and held him until a nearby music teacher named Herzog, hearing about the unfortunate prisoner, came to look. He told the officers that this was indeed the famous composer. They gave him some clean clothing, food and ordered a cab to take him home.

by Douglas J. Penick, LitHub |  Read more:

Image: Getty via

Tax Revenue Could Drop by 10 Percent Amid Turmoil at IRS

Senior tax officials are bracing for a sharp drop in revenue collected this spring, as an increasing number of individuals and businesses spurn filing their taxes or attempt to skip paying balances owed to the Internal Revenue Service, according to three people with knowledge of tax projections.

Treasury Department and IRS officials are predicting a decrease of more than 10 percent in tax receipts by the April 15 deadline compared with 2024, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to share nonpublic data. That would amount to more than $500 billion in lost federal revenue; the IRS collected $5.1 trillion last year. For context, the U.S. government spent $825 billion on the Defense Department in fiscal 2024.

“The idea of doing that in one year, it’s hard to grapple with how meaningful of a shift that represents,” said Natasha Sarin, president of the Yale Budget Lab and a senior Biden administration tax official.

The prediction, officials say, is directly tied to changing taxpayer behavior and President Donald Trump’s rapid demolition of parts of the IRS. Senior tax agency officials issued detailed warnings about those outcomes to the incoming Trump administration before the president took office, according to records obtained by The Washington Post.

The administration has moved to fire nearly 20,000 agency employees, specifically targeting new hires in taxpayer services and enforcement divisions. It’s already dismissed more than 11,000 workers at the agency, though some of their statuses are unclear pending fast-moving court cases. (...)

The IRS publishes weekly filing season reports that show the number of returns received and how officials are processing refunds. Those reports show the IRS has received 1.7 percent fewer returns this year compared with the same point in the 2024 filing season.

That percentage is narrower than the projected decrease in total receipts. But the agency also makes more detailed, nonpublic revenue projections based on IRS measurements of scheduled payments from already filed returns and outstanding balances relative to similarly situated taxpayers in previous years.

Those calculations take into account the number of filers who have paid their balances or are owed refunds, those who have scheduled payments by the April 15 deadline, those who have taken extensions, and measurements of annual noncompliance. That gives the agency deeper insight on the amount filers are paying.

The IRS also has separate measurements of business tax receipts. Corporations must pay first-quarter estimated tax on April 15.

“The thing that I think is really alarming is if this data ends up telling a story about how this filing season is evolving, and you’re seeing it happen in real time,” Sarin said. 

by Jacob Bogage, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Annabelle Gordon/For The Washington Post
[ed. We shall see. I've been hearing this chatter too. Personally, I'd never think of digging a financial/credit/legal hole for myself on the basis of current politics. See also: IRS Predicts DOGE Lost Half a Trillion Dollars for the USA (TPM):]

The Post reports today that the IRS’ internal projections estimate that the DOGE-driven disruptions to the IRS since the inauguration are on track to have reduced tax receipts by more than $500 billion by April 15th. This, to be clear, is not a final tally. It’s not April 15th yet. It’s a projection based on historical data, the number of people who’ve filed, paid owed amounts of tax, etc. It’s worth taking a moment to put this number into some context in case half a trillion dollars doesn’t do it for you. Non-defense discretionary spending is the cost to fund the U.S. government once you take out mandatory spending (mostly Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid) and the cost of the U.S. military. For 2023 that number was $917 billion. So that’s most of the stuff we think of as the government, apart from those payment programs and the military. In other words, in about eight weeks DOGE managed to lose the U.S. government — more or less light on fire — more than half of what goes to all non-defense discretionary spending.

Losing Taiwan Means Losing Japan

The United States could bounce back from the fall of Taiwan to Communist rule. It would have far more dire consequences for Japan. Consider this post a short, informal primer on why this is so.

Ian Easton explains the PLA’s view:

The Course Book on the Taiwan Strait’s Military Geography is a restricted-access PLA manual, used to teach senior officer seminars in Beijing… This source [informs] readers that Taiwan is a chokepoint of great utility for blockading Japan. The Taiwan Strait, it notes, is a Japanese maritime lifeline that runs from Europe and the Middle East, and based on PLA studies, Japan receives 90 percent of its oil imports, 99 percent of its mineral resources, and 100 percent of its nuclear fuel needs from ships that travel across these sea lanes. In total, 500 million tons of Japanese imports pass by Taiwanese waters each year, with 80 percent of all Japan’s container ships traveling right through the Strait, the equivalent of one Japanese cargo ship every ten minutes. Consequently, these waters will, “directly affect Japan’s life or death, its survival or demise.”

PLA intentions and plans for a conquered Taiwan are made plain in another internal document, The Japanese Air Self Defense Force, a handbook studied by mid-career officers at the PLA Air Force Command College in Beijing. The stated purpose of the text is to help Chinese pilots and staff officers understand the strengths and weaknesses of their Japanese adversaries. Buried amidst hundreds of pages of detailed maps, target coordinates, organizational charts, weapons data, and jet fighter images are the following lines:

As soon as Taiwan is reunified with Mainland China, Japan’s maritime lines of communication will fall completely within the striking ranges of China’s fighters and bombers…Our analysis shows that, by using blockades, if we can reduce Japan’s raw imports by 15-20%, it will be a heavy blow to Japan’s economy. After imports have been reduced by 30%, Japan’s economic activity and war-making potential will be basically destroyed. After imports have been reduced by 50%, even if they use rationing to limit consumption, Japan’s national economy and war-making potential will collapse entirely…blockades can cause sea shipments to decrease and can even create a famine within the Japanese islands. 

The first PLA document Easton quotes here has the statistics slightly wrong: the larger part of Japan’s energy imports travel to the south of Taiwan through the Bashi channel, in the Luzon strait. To get a sense for what those shipping lanes look like, here is a map of A.P Moeller-Maersk, Mediterranean Shipping Co. and CGM SA’s Japan bound shipping routes:

The Luzon Strait, you will notice, also runs directly adjacent to Taiwan. Chinese control of Taiwan would—in event of conflict—force Japanese shipping out of the South China Sea entirely. This in itself is not a death blow: at some cost, sea traffic that now passes through Malacca and runs adjacent to Taiwan could be rerouted through the Sunda Strait and up the east coast of Mindanao. I am sure someone in Japan must have calculated the likely economic costs of rerouting Japan-bound traffic this way (or in a more extreme circumstance, replacing Middle Eastern energy supplies with North American ones) but I have not yet seen any actual numbers. But given alternate sea lane possibilities, I doubt clearing Japanese shipping out of Taiwanese waters entirely would be enough to threaten Japan with “famine.”

But the problem posed by Chinese control of Taiwan is not really limited to the shipping that passes through the Taiwan and Luzon Straits. Navalists like to talk about what they call the “First Island Chain,” a group of islands that keeps the PLA Navy and PLA Air Force hemmed into the East and South China Seas. These islands include the Philippines Archipelago, Taiwan and the Pescadores, the Japanese Archipelago, and the Ryukyu Islands, which are Japanese territory. Here is a map of that last group:

In times of peace there is little to stop Chinese naval and air forces from crossing out into the Pacific as they wish, but in times of war things will be different. Over the last few years the Japanese have been quietly stocking these islands with anti-ship and anti-air missile units; were war imminent these deployments would grow. It is very difficult to imagine a significant number of Chinese commerce raiders slipping out to prey on Japanese shipping outside the Taiwan Strait as long as they have to slip between hostile Japanese and Taiwanese island bastions. It is very easy to imagine this if the Taiwanese side of the equation is no longer hostile to Chinese forces.

This is true for several reasons. One of the more interesting ones involves submarines. Look again at the image at the top of this post; that is a seafloor depth map of the West Pacific. You will notice that the water east of the first island chain is much deeper than the water west of it. This has very practical implications for submarine warfare. The prime reason the Chinese built their most important submarine base in Sanya is because it allows the submarines harbored there to slip into the deeper waters of the South China Sea where detection is far more difficult. For China, this is the cornerstone to a credible seaborne nuclear “second strike.” If the Chinese had direct access to the western Pacific—the kind of access possession of Taiwan would give them—their nuclear armed submarines could roam freely across the globe. It would also make detecting and tracking submarines tasked with commerce raiding far more difficult.

The loss of Taiwan would also put to question Japan’s ability to hold and defend the Ryukyu islands altogether. Yonaguni, at the tail end of the Ryukyu chain, is less than 70 miles away from Taiwan’s east coast. That is almost one fourth the distance between the island and the Chinese coast (approx. 250 miles), and one fifth the distance between the island and Okinawa (330 miles). Okinawa itself is closer to Taiwan’s north coast (approx. 370 miles) than it is to the Japanese Archipelago proper (approx. 480). If Taiwan were in hostile hands, Japan would be fatally vulnerable to an island hopping campaign that would rob it of the ability to control its near sea lanes.

Taiwan is the keystone of China’s naval containment. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the ability to keep the PLA Navy hemmed up against their own coast line. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses control of its most important supply lanes. Lose Taiwan, and Japan loses the extended island chain defense system that protects its home waters.

Japanese naval leaders understand this. They always have. It is why the Imperial Japanese Navy insisted upon Taiwan’s annexation in 1895, and it is why Taiwan contingencies have been an important part of the Self Defense Force’s thinking since the 1950s. They understand—even if most Japanese civilians do not—that the loss of Taiwan would give the Chinese incredible leverage over Japan.

There are some who believe that America could retreat from the defense of Taiwan while keeping the rest of its alliance system in the Far East intact. This is a fantasy. An argument to retreat from Taiwan is an argument to fatally undermine the defense of Japan. In truth, it is an argument to retreat from East Asia. That argument can be made, but I would prefer to see it made openly.

by Tanner Greer, The Scholar's Stage |  Read more:

Images: Wikimedia.org

Thermosolar power plants are seen outside the city of Dunhuang, in northwest China. Also called “solar concentrators,” these plants use heliostat mirrors to focus the sun’s thermal energy on molten salt flowing through a central tower, which circulates into storage tanks and is used to produce steam and generate electricity. The larger circular array seen here is 1.7 miles wide (2.7 km), contains 12,000 mirrors and can displace 350,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide emissions every year. Also seen in the bottom-right are parabolic trough collectors, another method of solar thermal collection.

40.073657°, 94.432896°

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Fidencio Fifield-Perez - The Garden (2023)

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Trump Is Promising a Manufacturing Renaissance. Is That Even Possible?

[ed. No.]

President Trump’s imposition of tariffs on a scale unseen in nearly a century is more than a shot across the bow at U.S. trading partners. If kept in place, the import taxes will also launch an economic project of defiant nostalgia: an attempt to reclaim America’s place as a dominant manufacturing power.

In the postwar heyday of American manufacturing, which endured into the 1970s, nearly 20 million people once made their living from manufacturing. The United States was a leading producer of motor vehicles, aircraft and steel, and manufacturing accounted for more than a quarter of total employment.

By the end of last year, after a fundamental reordering of the world economy, manufacturing employed about 8 percent of the nation’s workers.

Now, the country is wealthier than ever. Yet the economy looks, and feels, quite different — dominated by service work of all types, both lucrative and low-wage. Industrial hubs in the American interior have often withered, leaving many strongholds of Mr. Trump’s base on the economic fringes. (...)

An expansive cohort of economists and business leaders remain deeply skeptical of the tariff campaign, however, and of its ability to reverse the decades-long drop in manufacturing employment — a decline with various global causes and unclear domestic remedies in an age of factories dominated by robotics.

While disagreement about Mr. Trump’s prescription for America’s manufacturing decline is widespread, few experts dispute his general diagnosis — echoed by a new breed of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance — that deindustrialization caused a sort of pain that went unnoticed for too long.

A paper published this year by M.I.T. details the impact that the surge in imported Chinese goods at the dawn of this century had in the following years. It finds that while heartland regions hit hardest by this “China Shock” have rebounded somewhat, the individual workers whose jobs were affected have not.

Since the late 1970s, a powerful stew of forces has led to the offshoring of many factory jobs. As U.S.-based multinational corporations matured, executives and activist shareholders realized that they could often increase production at lower wages overseas, enabling higher profits and reduced prices for domestic consumers.

State and federal policymakers, frustrated by testy battles with labor unions in that era of inflation, often supported such adaptations by globalizing firms.

Over the years, the relatively high value of the U.S. dollar has made goods produced by exporters generally more expensive. And the nation’s trade deficits — in which American consumers buy more things from abroad than the value of things American producers sell abroad — are also a function of affluence.

But the economic story of the American 21st century has also been shaped by the deliberate pursuit of freer trade in the hope of lower prices, with the knowledge that doing so would put U.S. manufacturing employment at risk.

About 20 million people made their living from manufacturing in the heyday of U.S. manufacturing, which peaked in the 1970s. By the end of last year, manufacturing made up only about 8 percent of total employment.

“The funny thing about finance and economics is that we don’t really advance or learn anything over time, we just cycle through the same things, over and over, in different ways,” Brent Donnelly, the president of Spectra Markets, a market research firm, argues. “We vilify mercantilism and lionize free trade but are forced to rethink these religions when income inequality shatters social cohesion and decades of unreciprocated tariff cuts create an unlevel playing field.”

The Biden White House tried to remedy these socioeconomic dilemmas with a carrot-style approach to industrial policy. It sought to promote labor union empowerment across all sectors, but especially manufacturing, by backing groups like the United Automobile Workers in old industries and subsidizing new industries like green energy, with made-in-America qualifying provisions.

That approach — which will at least partly live on through the investments it spurred in the early 2020s and subsidies passed by Congress — was cut short in November. Now Mr. Trump’s style of industrial policy, based on the import tax “stick” of tariffs, is on the clock. (...)

But Mr. Setser says he still views tariffs as more of a targeted, defensive tool than one meant to address a chronic job loss.

“In most cases,” he argued, “the end result of tariffs is that it doesn’t solve a trade deficit, it just means you trade less, you import less, you export less, the overall deficit doesn’t typically change.” (...)

That’s partly because despite a boom in manufacturing construction, modern factories simply do not need as many workers as they used to.

by Talmon Joseph Smith, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times

[ed. I'd also add: killing green new energy funding/technologies (our most promising new manufacturing industries); more robotics and AI disruption just around the corner; time and logistics of replacing factories and workforces given the length and depth of retaliatory tariffs and associated economic and investment uncertainties. Oh, and undermining worker's unions, and defunding academic and industry R&D. We're not going back to the future. See also: 'Batsh*t Crazy' Trump Tariffs Should Be Seen as $7,000 Tax Hike on Workers, Says Economist (CD).]

When I’m 84

The world still needs Ringo Starr.

Let’s start with something that I’m not proud of but feels important to disclose up front. Last spring, I was interviewing Ringo Starr at the Sunset Marquis hotel, in West Hollywood, when I committed an embarrassing breach of journalistic ethics: As we were wrapping up, I asked Starr if he would pose for a photo with me.

“Or is that grossly unprofessional?” I asked, trying to come off as sheepish and apologetic.

Starr smirked.

“No, no, everybody’s unprofessional,” he said. “Don’t feel special.”

He moved next to me and flashed a compulsory peace sign as his publicist snapped our photo. “Everybody does it,” she said, and then handed me a white “peace and love” bracelet as a parting gift. Starr flashed another peace sign—a double this time.

Okay, end of disclosure. From here on, this will be a sober and detached treatment of a seminal figure in the history of popular music. (Also: The photo can be viewed on my Instagram.)

Ringo Starr is 84 years old and has lived quite an extraordinary life. I realize I am late to this story.

He is among the most scrutinized, fetishized, analyzed, and catechized people in history. I admit to feeling out of my depth, if this was not already clear. Usually, I write about politics. I am not accustomed to interacting with Beatles. As opposed to, say, congressmen.

That first day I met him, Starr had a new record to promote—a solo record, it still feels necessary to say. I had been granted a brief slot on his schedule around the release of Crooked Boy, a four-track collection that features the Strokes’ guitarist Nick Valensi. Starr had a packed interview dance card, with a procession of podcasters, YouTubers, and other species that didn’t exist when he and his Liverpool mates first started doing this, back when America’s chief influencer was Ed Sullivan.

Starr greeted me with a light fist bump, in keeping with his hypervigilance about avoiding germs.

“You might be one of the most-interviewed people in the world,” I felt the need to say.

“I am,” he confirmed.

I wondered how I could make this interesting. “Well, just make it short,” Starr suggested, as we headed out onto the patio adjacent to his suite.

“So, how short?” I asked. “Like, three minutes, two minutes?”

“You can have the whole three!” Starr said, and then punctuated his sentence, as he punctuates many of his sentences, with a dry and devilish giggle. Four quick “hah”s jackhammered in succession. He tends to speak in quips, toggling between his two dominant modes, seen-it-all sarcasm and glib nonchalance.

Born Richard Starkey, he became Sir Richard Starkey when he was knighted in 2018. I asked his excellency whether I should address him as “Ringo” or “Richard” (or “Richie,” as intimates call him). “You’ll call me Ringo, because I don’t know you,” he said. “A-hah-hah-hah-hah.”

“My family don’t call me that,” he added.

After a few minutes, the publicist started gesturing in my direction. I feared this was the universal “wrap it up” sign, but no, false alarm (she was just trying to get a photographer’s attention). “This is longer than three minutes, you know,” Starr took the opportunity to observe, affecting a sneer. Or maybe he was not affecting it.

Starr looks remarkably well maintained for his age. This is a testament to the preservative power of his fitness regimen, strict sobriety, a vegetarian diet, and lots of hair dye. He is also one of those rare figures whose face has been such a fixture of our cultural lives for so long that his actual, three-dimensional presence in front of you elicits a double take. Is this the genuine cargo or some wiry wisp of a Ringo impersonator?

It feels perfectly suitable to describe him as “looking exactly like Ringo Starr” and expect to be understood. He has the shaped beard, the little red shades, and a peace-sign pendant on a necklace. He appears just as he has in countless pop-art pieces and wax museums, and that Simpsons episode in which Starr, playing himself, turns out to be Marge’s artistic muse.

Everyone scurrying in and out of Ringo’s suite looks famous, or almost famous. They include a swarm of well-wishers and maybe some actual friends whom Starr has gotten by with a little help from. I was struck by how Starr’s presence arouses giddiness even in other rock stars. Valensi told me that when people hear that he worked with Starr, they tend to transform into elated teenagers. “Everybody who I tell that to is just so phenomenally either excited for me, or is baffled, and kind of questioning, How did that happen? ” he said. “My wife and my mom, and my sisters, and even close friends who are musicians—everybody just kind of wants to know what the whole thing was like.”

People who spotted Starr moving through the Sunset Marquis kept shouting out “Peace and love” at him. This of course has been Starr’s personal mantra, greeting, and aloha for most of his post-Beatles decades.

“Peace and love, peace and love,” Starr said back to a cluster of onlookers, sounding cheerfully bored. At one point, I watched Starr pause and puff out his cheeks into an ostentatious deep breath. I imagine that’s one of the hassles of immortality: It tends to go on forever.

I have always been a Ringo guy. This was true long before the Fab Four were reduced to an antique duo of Starr and Paul McCartney, now 82. Starr had seven straight top-10 singles after the Beatles broke up, and those early solo tracks were among the first pop songs I remember hearing on the radio when I was a kid. “It Don’t Come Easy” was released in 1971, when I was 6, and played in heavy rotation on the local pop station, WRKO-AM, Boston. It was one of my first favorite songs.

Starr always seemed like the friendliest and most life-size of the four Beatles. The others felt less accessible than the droopy-eyed drummer with the cartoon-cowboy name and childlike tunes. Ringo was yellow submarines and octopus gardens, the mascot little brother, despite being the eldest Beatle, and the best at flittering above the feuds that afflicted the trio of geniuses around him.

Starr was the fastest to comic relief and most averse to pretension in any form. “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés,” he says in Richard Lester’s 1964 comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, after a stagehand has accused Starr of being “rather arbitrary” for not letting him touch his drum kit. I latched on to this line immediately. In high school, when certain highfalutin friends would try out their fancy SAT words, I would tell them, “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés.” (Admittedly, this itself was rather arbitrary on my part.)

“He’s the most sympathetic of all the Beatles,” T Bone Burnett, the legendary producer and guitarist, told me. When I spoke with him, Burnett had just produced a new Starr record, a country album called Look Up, which came out in January and has since become one of the biggest hits of his solo career. “Nobody has generated more goodwill than Ringo,” Burnett added. “Not a single person in the world.”

by Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Dina Litovsky

Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins

On Wednesday, President Donald Trump announced the US was imposing reciprocal tariffs on a small collection of Antarctic islands that are not inhabited by humans, as part of a global trade war aimed at asserting US dominance. The Heard and McDonald Islands, known for their populations of penguins and seabirds, can only be reached by sea.

Trump announced the countries now subject to tariffs in a Wednesday press conference, using a poster as a prop. Additional countries—including the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are, incidentally, not countries—were listed on sheets of paper distributed to reporters.

One of the sheets claims that the Heard and McDonald Islands currently charge a “Tariff to the U.S.A.” of 10 percent, clarifying in tiny letters that this includes "currency manipulation and trade barriers." In return, the sheet says that the US will charge "discounted reciprocal tariffs" on the islands at a rate of 10 percent.

The islands are small. Their reported 37,000 hectares of land makes them a little larger than Philadelphia. According to UNESCO, which designated the islands as a World Heritage Site in 1997, they are covered in rocks and glaciers. Heard Island is the site of an active volcano, and McDonald Island is surrounded by several smaller rocky islands. The islands are home to large populations of penguins and elephant seals.

by Caroline Haskins and Leah Feiger, Wired | Read more:
Image: Inger VanDyke/Getty
[ed. These are not serious people (except when it comes to screwing up government, the economy, and U.S. corporate supply chains worldwide). Other tariffs include: Aruba, Turks and Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Lesotho, Fiji, Ethiopia... : Here's every country facing reciprocal tariffs announced by Trump on 'Liberation Day' (Yahoo Finance).]

Should You Blow Up Your Life?

My friend Leila came to me the other night with an urgent question. Should I blow up my life? she wondered. Am I delusional? What if I regret it?

Below are some of the things I talked about with Leila (not her real name, obviously) over tea and ginger cake. These thoughts come from my own life and from the lives of many women who have written me since All Fours came out, as well as the conversations I had while writing it. Please give your own advice to Leila in the comments. Feel free to speak to the complications of children, financial dependency, etc. – we are making big decisions in an unjust, difficult world. This post could be a nice place for women to go when they are having this feeling. (Note: Leila is married to a man so these are slanted a bit that way but most should be applicable to everyone.) (Also this is heavily biased; Leila already had a lot of people telling her to stay and work it out.)

• I do believe (and I tell this to my child) that romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to "lifelong" in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length. But knowing the right length is profound, letting relationships change and perhaps even come back as friendships, that is very meaningful. My very best man-friend was once my worst boyfriend.

• In the case of a long relationship, you better hope you're not the exact same person you were at the start. And that alone can be reason to leave. You simply know yourself better now, you would not choose that person if you met them now or you perhaps you would choose them all over again but you would describe yourself and your needs much differently in those first dates and: they might not have chosen you. It might have just been a fling if they had known who you really were and what you wanted. (For example: you're really, not just a little, bisexual. You're devoted and consistent but not monogamous. You see yourself primarily as a solo adventurer, not in terms of a couple. Etc.)

• Often there is a new person involved in this crisis. Indeed it is the new person who makes it a crisis, who brings it to a breaking point. Most of the time this new person does not endure but they are still very significant in the story of your life (a friend of mine calls these people crowbars — they get you out.) What I really think is that you are not doing it for this new person, but for this new side of yourself. The new love speaks to this side of you so it seems very tied to them. It’s hard to trust your new side because it has no credit score, no deeds in its name. You don't know how trustworthy or good it is. In fact every instinct and every friend may tell you it's for sure untrustworthy and not good — it's tearing up your home! Home good! New side of you bad! I would generally say: take risks in order to know yourself. (...)

• One friend had an elaborate plan designed to make her leaving the marriage more palatable and understandable to her husband. It involved several lies and I was nodding for a while, it seemed plausible, maybe even kind. But then I remembered something! "Maybe he doesn't need to understand or approve of what you’re doing?" She laughed in horror – it was, after all, a plan to leave him. This is where it gets tricky. Because for a long while you are still a part of him, like trees with entangled roots. So it is very hard to think your desires aren’t dangerous. It feels almost suicidal. The confusion of this probably stops a lot of women in their tracks.

• As you are so busily trying to think of how to not hurt your partner you might consider that a wife who doesn't want to be with him might not be such a great prize. He might be able to do better. And you might want this for him.

• The one person I know who regrets blowing up her long marriage did it very abruptly, with no conversation before, no couples therapy, no period of questioning. She was trying to be a good person: she had fallen in love with someone new and did not want to cheat. The new love did not ultimately work out and the whole thing seemed like madness in retrospect. But when I ask her if she wishes she was still with her long-time partner she says, Not usually. She just can’t believe how black and white her thinking was back then. And some nights she does wonder if she made a big mistake.

by Miranda July, Substack |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. Dissenting opinions: Ladies, Miranda July is Not Your Friend (IFFS); and, Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies (Freddie deBoer):]

"For example, you may remember a now-ancient controversy about whether women “can have it all.” This was a big, meaty, thinkpiece-and-take-generating debate years back. What “having it all” meant was never entirely clear, but the basic debate concerned whether women had to choose between having their careers and raising children/having a family. Of course, the answer to all of these questions depends a great deal on whether the woman and her partner have the socioeconomic flexibility to pay for various kinds of child care; this (correct) observation was often dropped on social media like some kind of gnostic bauble. Some attempted to connect the debate to other flashpoints of modern female identity, like the endlessly-blogged “cool girl” speech featured in Gone Girl. I stayed out of this fray, at the time, but privately I held with those who were pointing out that “having it all” was an unrealistic goal for anyone, not just for women. Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet. (...)

Which brings me to Miranda July and the micro-movement she’s spawned with her book All Fours: convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners, or stop looking for one, and just spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality - and, it seems, by mortality and time, which have conspicuously little presence in all of this. July’s book is a novel and does not advocate for a specific path for women, but her extremely successful newsletter more or less does, and the large online movement July has sparked certainly prefers to embrace the ethos of Just Dump Your Husband Already. This has all been aided by a massive amount of attention from media, both traditional and new - very large presence of Lady Podcasts, mentions in Emily Gould’s newsletter for the Cut, a profound fixation in the New York Times. Here’s Marie Solis with the initial worshipful profile, here’s Alyson Krueger with that classic indicator of social importance, an NYT Style-section trend piece, here’ss Mirielle Silcoff with a charming little bit of football-spiking, protesting against depictions of aging women that make them appear unfulfilled or sexless. (Protesting, perhaps, too much.) We could get into the whole phenomenon here of people being moved to explicitly explain and justify their happiness to others, in the pages of the New York Times no less; you can’t help but wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince. Still, if your wife writes thinkpieces for the Times you might want to keep a close eye on her Pinterest.

As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it."

Starliner’s Flight to the Space Station Was Wilder Than We Thought

As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.

He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.

But what if it was not safe to come home, either?

"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."

Starliner astronauts meet with the media

On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them.

Many of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, "I can't speak to any of that. Nor would I."

So when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4:55 to 5:05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft's propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.

I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.

It's a hell of a story.

Launch and a cold night

Boeing's Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle's first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.

The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.

Sunita "Suni" Williams: "Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, 'Wow, this is going just perfectly.' So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect."

Barry "Butch" Wilmore: "In simulations, there's always a deviation. Little deviations in your trajectory. And during the launch on Shuttle STS-129 many years ago, and Soyuz, there's the similar type of deviations that you see in this trajectory. I mean, it's always correcting back. But this ULA Atlas was dead on the center. I mean, it was exactly in the crosshairs, all the way. It was much different than what I'd expected or experienced in the past. It was exhilarating. It was fantastic. Yeah, it really was. The dual-engine Centaur did have a surge. I'm not sure ULA knew about it, but it was obvious to us. We were the first to ride it. Initially we asked, 'Should that be doing that? This surging?' But after a while, it was kind of soothing. And again, we were flying right down the middle."

After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.

Wilmore: "The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I've never given a handling qualities rating of "one," which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I've never given a one, ever, in any test I've ever done, because nothing's ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn't give a one, but it was pretty amazing."

Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight's second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner's handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.

Williams: "The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm cold.' Butch is like, 'I'm cold, too.' So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he's like, maybe I want mine, too. So we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there."

Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.

Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."

Time to dock with the space station

After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew it was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner's service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four "doghouses" equally spaced around the vehicle.

Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.

Wilmore: "Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."

When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The "R" stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.

Wilmore: "As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we're single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?"

Here things get a little more complicated if you've never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control, he means six degrees of freedom—that is, the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner's four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft's movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.

Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."

The heroes in Mission Control

As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA's Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to fly Starliner. So at this point, the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.

Wilmore: "Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, 'What do you think?' they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control."

From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA's webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.

by Eric Berger, Ars Technica |  Read more:

Image: NASA

[ed. FOD.]