LW writes: Chile got rid of Pinochet, Syria got rid of Assad.

A link to a long video, perhaps an antisocial post for that reason. Interview with al Sharaa, Syria's new president by two thoughtful if flawed Brits: New President of Syria: Ahmed al-Sharaa

I thought that it was interesting that he mentioned Brazil and Rwanda among countries whose transitions he had learned about. He grew up Golani. Maybe I am too eager for something positive, good words easier than good deeds, but this conversation left me with some hope.

Heebie's take: I'm all for reading hope into anything these days.

Also I did hunt for a transcipt but it appears that the episode hasn't been out long enough.

Mossy Character sends in: Indians become biggest international student group in U.S., surpassing Chinese for first time since 2009

New data released by the State Department in conjunction with the Institute of International Education shows that there are now 331,602 Indian international students in the U.S. (a 23% growth from last academic year), compared with 277,398 Chinese international students (a 4.2% decline).

Huh, interesting. Why?

The change is owed to the lingering impacts of pandemic-era travel restrictions and the U.S. government's changing climate toward China, experts say, as well as the pull of engineering and computer science programs at U.S. universities.

Makes sense. Also I think that India has a larger population than China now, so there's a little of just plain demographics.

I'm worried about my man Drum.

I can barely breathe, and even the slightest exertion gives me chills and gasping

Sounds like he's not in a position to hear that he was wrong about how everyone is overreacting. Despite all that, he's the person whose work I send most often when friends are falling for right-wing bullshit ("no chargers are being built" being the most recent one) or debunking some vapid WSJ trend piece. I hope he recovers well soon.

Josh Marshall has also been very good lately. To Heebie's point, it's such a failure of the media that most people have no idea what's happening to the government.

I know the mainstream media is awful, biased, complicit, etc etc. But I'm really scared that these lawsuits (like the CBS one) are going to turn them all into Fox-style fawning syncophants, the way the tech giants have semi-recently capitulated. Like, Zuckerberg hasn't ever been good, but he still seems to have pivoted hard in the last few months. (I can't even process Musk as a person because I'm so blinded by rage and disgust.)

But anyway: if the media capitulates hard, that seems like a real accelerant to this downward spiral we're on.

Look: your nervous system can't handle being this keyed up, without stop, for the next four years. There has to be an element of sustainability for people within the resistance movement. If you let them steal your joy, you're giving them another win.

So anyway, we recently replaced our toaster oven with this Breville Toaster/Air Fryer. I think this is the first time I've ever purchased The Cadillac of X Category.

I love it so much more than I expected to. Also I finally understand that an air fryer is just an extremely convenient mini-convection oven. I found the phrase "air fryer" to be kind of off-putting, but a quick efficient convection oven is very IN-putting.

What other Cadillacs of X should I start coveting?

NickS writes: A great article by Farrell and Newman (I found their book Underground Empire fascinating and disturbing, and hope to write a short review at some point)

It's hard for politicians and journalists to grasp what Musk and his team are doing, still less to explain it to the public. These efforts involve technical systems that are incomprehensible and boring to outsiders, few of whom even know that the Office of Personnel Management exists, let alone what it does. But even if no one pays much attention to these systems, they are the sinews of government--key parts of the infrastructure that hold the federal state together and manage its relationship to the outside world.

We are highly familiar with such systems and how they can be used. Our academic research, and our recent book, "Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy," explain how the U.S. quietly took control of similar technical systems that hold the world economy together and used them to exercise domination over allies and enemies alike. Now, Musk is seemingly doing to the U.S. government what the U.S. government once did to the rest of the world: refashioning the plumbing of the federal government into a political weapon against his adversaries.

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Politicians have finally begun to respond to the more visibly threatening aspects of this crisis, such as the physical shutdown of the USAID building, but they find it hard to understand why the more arcane seeming takeover of technical systems is so important, let alone to explain it to the public. What they need to grasp--and quickly--is that Musk, and by extension Trump, appear to be trying to turn these technical systems into levers of control. If the two succeed, which is uncertain, they will have an unparallelled political advantage over the months and years to come. Even if they fail, their mistakes may have catastrophic consequences.

...

Control of information systems and the ability to broadcast can generate its own advantages. The academics Pepper Culpepper and Kathleen Thelen have described how platforms such as Uber are politically powerful because of their lopsided communications structures: The platform owners can broadcast their preferred messages to contractors and users, but contractors and users cannot similarly talk to each other. Similarly, coordination among civil servants will be far more difficult in a government where Musk's people can broadcast all-employees messages, but government employees fear that their own communications are surveilled and they may be arbitrarily fired for saying the wrong thing. Musk has used similar dynamics in the past to chill opposition, using his social media platform as a megaphone to discredit his perceived enemies, while those who might disagree with him have no means to effectively challenge his claims.

At least in the short run, as the Trump administration continues its attacks on the administrative state, Musk and his small team will lack the human resources and administrative competence to use these powers in sophisticated ways. The more likely near-term risks are not efficient coercion but accidental calamity, as overconfident engineers in their early 20s mess about and find out. "Move fast and break things" is a terrible basis for widespread administrative reform. On the basis of Musk's Twitter takeover, we can expect "what does this button do?" to rapidly shade into "we can figure out what we need by ripping everything out and seeing what fails." It's when they get to "who cares about bureaucracy anyway: we'll have artificial general intelligence by 2027" that people should really start panicking.

Just as it took decades for the U.S. to really turn the technical systems of the global economy to its purposes, it will take time and tinkering around for DOGE to really begin to fulfill its ambitions. The bad news is that both federal employees and the entire U.S. population will be the unwilling guinea pigs in this vast experiment. The slightly less bad news is that what looks like a government takeover accomplished over a weekend is not yet a machinery of power, and it will take hard, uninterrupted work to make it so. Legislators, lawyers, and ordinary citizens who don't want this hostile takeover to succeed should take every opportunity to throw sand into the works now through politics and protest, while there is still a chance to preserve institutions that--although imperfect--are necessary to the functioning of U.S. society and democracy.

Heebie's take: I think I've commented a few times how much it scares me that this coup is so hard to boil down and explain to a lay person, even if we had a competent media system that was determined to do a good job.

Also I have basically no understanding of how the US did this to the rest of the world! At the link, it says this:

Fifteen years ago, few people outside financial institutions paid much attention to SWIFT, a global system that banks use for messaging, or the "dollar clearing" system, both of which are central to global financial transactions. Everyone used the internet, but only systems administrators and engineers really cared about how it worked. Specialized trade publications might have cared about the global supply chains that allow complex manufacturing to happen, but no one else did. These systems provided the basic institutional infrastructure that made sure money, information, and goods got to where they were supposed to go in an orderly and efficient way.

Now, everybody who reads the news recognizes how important these systems are. The plumbing became political. During the Obama administration, the Snowden leaks revealed how the U.S. had turned the internet into an enormous system for global surveillance--waking people up to the role of dollar clearing and the SWIFT system. But these changes had begun several years before, even if many did not then understand their systemic consequences. Shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, officials in George W. Bush's Treasury Department demanded access to SWIFT, providing them with a "Rosetta stone" to decipher the global financial system. A decade later, the Obama administration used SWIFT and dollar clearing to completely cut Iran out of the global financial system. The first Trump administration tried to use export controls to perform the same gambit in exerting control over semiconductor supply chains, providing the Biden administration with the tools it has used to limit China's ability to train frontier artificial intelligence models.

This only somewhat clears it up for me.