Signalgate : Violating National Security In Order to Violate Rights Dr. Timothy Snyder Thursday 27 March, 2025 A  familiar risk to a rule-based republic, such as our own, is when the government claims that it must violate our rights in the name of national security. In Signalgate, we face a novel challenge: a government that brazenly risks national security in order to preserve its ability to repress its citizens. We see that traditional problem in the deportations to the Salvadoran gulag. We are told that the government knows who is a terrorist; that we must trust their judgement; and that we must accept their actions. The reasoning, as always, is that there is some kind of exceptional situation -- an "invasion" in this case. If we accept that the government gets to decide what is exceptional, the exception then just becomes the rule. This works psychologically, because we can choose to believe (even though it is usually not true) that we the non-arrested and the non-deported are being made more safe. But in the Signalgate scandal, we encounter something more chilling: our government is openly compromising our national security, the better to violate our rights. Its position is that it is worth risking the lives of soldiers abroad in order to be able to persecute civilians at home. Let me explain. On Saturday 15 March, high officials of Musk-Trump conducted a group chat on the messenger app Signal about a bombing of Yemen, including a reporter. Jeff Goldberg, placed in one of the oddest situations in journalistic history, replied on March 24th with a restrained factual account of what happened on the chat before he removed himself. The White House and its allies confirmed that all of this happened, but denied that it was of any significance. With this new scandal, we have tipped over into something different: compromising national security in order to preserve a tool which is used chiefly to violate the rights of Americans. To see what is novel and what is threatening, let us pause for a moment on the traditional gambit of claiming that we must sacrifice one good thing (freedom) to get another good thing (safety). Musk-Trump is invoking "national security" as a reason why it need not share the facts about its deportation actions with judges, and more broadly as an argument as to why it can deport anyone at any time without due process or indeed any justification at all. The claim here is the old-fashioned one: we must trade rights for security. And the outcome is also the traditional one: if we buy this argument, we lose both. If anyone can be deported at any time for no reason, then we are obviously not only less free but also less secure, as individuals and as a nation. In a constitutional republic, such as our own, freedom and security alike are grounded in the rule of law. In a rule-of-law state, we can count on the government not apprehending us and deporting us without due process of law and without providing some justification. This practical dignity of our bodies is called habeas corpus, which means that authorities must provide a justification to a court for taking control of your physical body. Logically and historically this is at the foundation of our entire tradition of rights. The individual body comes first; the government must have a good legal reason to confine it. From this logic, as it strengthened from the Magna Carta eight hundred years ago, to the first English writs of habeas corpus four hundred years ago, to the American Constitution, emerges a usefully liberating skepticism about government purposes. Authorities will always find reasons not to take the individual seriously, and, if permitted, will conspire among themselves to confine our bodies and make us unfree. For this very reason, we have a number of laws, such as the Federal Records Act, whose purpose is to make sure that we know what our government is doing. It is not just that we want them to have a reason for seizing our bodies. It is that we want to be able to head off the kind of government that would plot to do such a thing for tyrannical reasons. This logic of freedom and tyranny is why government officials, such as those on the Signal chat, are required to record their interactions. Michael Waltz, who initiated the conversation, had the Signal messages set to self-delete. This is a violation of the Federal Records Act and other applicable laws, whose underlying purpose is to protect people from a conspiring government. And so Waltz's action is suggestion of a troubling pattern. Signalgate is shocking on its own. But it is perhaps even more troubling when we begin to understand why the people on the chat were using Signal to make and implement policy. They were risking national security by doing so. But this was worth it to them, apparently, because Signal allows them to deny the rights of Americans. Let's be clear about the national security problem. For most of us, Signal is a safe platform, and I don't mean to discourage its use by private citizens. But it is specifically forbidden for high government officials to make policy on that platform, because it is less secure that the appropriate government devices. It appears that some of the participants in this Signal chat were highly vulnerable to phishing attacks, since their numbers were publicly available. We know that Russia is trying to hack Signal – although if the Russians had that data, they would not need to do any very complicated hacking. It is possible, on Signal, to inadvertently add a participant in a group chat or a conversation without knowing who that person is. On government platforms that cannot happen. And then, on Signal, it is possible to go on and share crucial information about, for example, a planned or ongoing military operation, which is exactly did take place on March 15th. Whatever one thinks about a given military operation, it is hard to disagree that it is better, at least for the Americans involved (the surviving relatives of dead Yemeni civilians might have other views), if the plans are not broadcast around the world before they are implemented. The use of Signal suggests the use of personal phones, which some of the participants have more or less admitted (Tulsi Gabbard refused to say; Steve Witkoff, trying to head off the charge that he was using his personal phone inside the Kremlin, admitted to having joined the chat on it after leaving Russia). And the use of personal phones opens a whole new set of vulnerabilities, including the rather widespread Israeli app Pegasus. But here's the point: the authorities knew of these risks to national security, and thought that they were worth taking, and for a reason. I suggest that this reason is that Signal chats provide American authorities with cover to plan the violation of human rights. It is important to understand that the risk is systemic. We know about this one instance of the use of Signal and about the one leak. But other leaks have almost certainly happened already. We know about this particular occasion because the inadvertently-added individual happened, by a wild chance, to be a highly responsible reporter who wrote about the incident in a highly responsible way. The assumption that Jeffrey Goldberg is the only person who was inadvertently added to a national security group, just because he is the only case we know about, is unsustainable. So the people on the group chat were breaking the law, and they were breaking their own departments' rules, they were ignoring advisories from their own departments, and they were endangering national security. The information that they were sharing, had it gotten into the hands of anyone who has not a highly-responsible reporter, could have compromised not only that attack in particular, but US methods in general. It could also have served as the basis for blackmailing American officials. Indeed, for all we know, information that has been leaked on previous Signal conversations, or on other platforms on personal phones, could be the basis for blackmailing American officials right now. But the use of Signal and personal phones appears nevertheless to be the norm in Musk-Trump. Indeed, the administration has given no sign that this would change. From the content of the group chat, it is clear that Signal (and, again, likely on personal phones) is the default way that Musk-Trump high officials communicate with one another. This group chat explicitly referred to another one. There was a protocol at the beginning of this chat, which seemed familiar to everyone. It involved adding people whose Signal numbers were known, as if this were a standard procedure. No one during the chat wrote anything like: "hey, why are we using Signal?" The reason that no one did so, most likely, is that they all do this every day. Using Signal enables American authorities to violate the rights of Americans. Signal is attractive not because it is secure with respect to foreign adversaries, which it is not, but because it is secure with respect to American citizens and American judges. The autodelete function, which Mike Waltz was using, violates the law. But what is most essential is the purpose of that law: to protect the rights of Americans from their government. The timed deletion function allows American officials to be confident that their communications will never be recorded and that they can therefore conspire without any chance of their actions being known to citizens at the time or at any later point. Everyone on that group chat, including the Vice-President, the Director of National Intelligence, the National Security Advisor, and the Secretary of State, knew that what they were doing was against the rules, the guidance, and the law. But they were doing what they were doing, I would suggest, for a reason: precisely because it allowed them or their colleagues to compromise the rights of Americans. In other words, it was worth risking the lives of American soldiers abroad in order to have the opportunity the violate the rights of American civilians at home. Making soldiers unsafe is apparently a price worth paying to make the rest of us also unsafe. If Signal is used for the most sensitive national security discussions, it is reasonable to ask whether it is also used in discussions about sensitive matters of domestic policy – for example in the discussions of deportations to the Salvadoran gulag or in plans for targeting other individuals. If this is correct, then consider this: when the government contemplates deporting you, it will be doing so on an app that allows those discussions to be secret, not from foreign adversaries, but from you and from judges. And that, it would appear, is why Signal is being used – and will be used. Judge James Boasberg is presiding over the El Salvador deportation case. He will now also preside over the Signalgate case, in which the chat participants are accused of violating the Federal Records Act. It is a curious juxtaposition, to say the least: in the one case, the government is unpersuasively invoking national security to keep secrets; in the other, it is openly violating national security in order to preserve the capacity to keep secrets. I think the two cases are linked, not only conceptually, but also technologically. They show both kinds of arguments for authoritarian rule, the traditional and the novel. But most likely they both involve the use of Signal. Perhaps the judge will take the opportunity to inquire. Even as the Musk-Trump people continue to say that we must sacrifice our rights for national security, they are also starting to say that they find it worthwhile to violate national security in order to have the tools that allow them to violate our rights. In Signalgate, we see the shift from the conventional excuse for authoritarian practices to an open embrace of tyranny for its own sake.

< World Premiere > ELLIOTT CARTER : String Quartet No. 2 Friday 25 March, 1960 – Juilliard School, New York The Juilliard String Quartet Associated Music Publishers, Inc., 1961 Winner of the 1960 Pulitzer Prize in Music, the NY Music Critics Award 1960, and the International Rostrum of Composers Award (UNESCO), 1961 “My 'Second String Quartet', commissioned by the Stanley String Quartet, was begun in August, 1958, and finished in May, 1959. In it, the four instruments are individualized, each being given its own character embodied in a special set of melodic and harmonic intervals and of rhythms that result in four different patterns of slow and fast tempi with associated types of expression. Thus, four different strands of musical material of contrasting character are developed simultaneously throughout the work. It is out of the interactions, combinations, cooperations, and oppositions of these that the details of musical discourse as well as the large sections are built. Up to the end of the second movement (Presto scherzando) the various facets of each instrument’s character are presented quite distinctively. After that, in the third and fourth movements (Andante espressivo & Allegro), there is a growing tendency to cooperate and exchange ideas, while, in the cadenzas, opposition between the solo and accompanying instruments grows. The 'Conclusion' returns to the state of individualization of the first part of the work.” — Elliott Carter

Our Tech Broverlords : The False Prophets of the Unfolding Cypher punk Distopia Greg Fish Sunday 23 March, 2025 If there’s a word we need to bring back into the common vernacular to describe what we hear most today, it’s “technobabble.” Usually, it’s what writers with no background in science or technology — and no desire to learn anything about either — cram into a character’s dialog to make them sound clever or justify some absurd plot twist. Your dilithium and kyber crystals for warp drives and light sabers. Your naquadah to power the Stargate. And your Hyperloop to revolutionize transportation. And with the ascent of the Trump 2.0 administration, angry and confused voters have been asking questions about why a random billionaire is allowed to decide how funds approved by Congress are to be distributed, despite the law very clearly saying this is not allowed, and if they do get a response, it’s usually in the form of a stream of weird claims, outright lies, quietly retracted puffery, and condescending technobabble. For example, according to President Musk’s DOGE, Social Security — which the GOP he purchased at a deep discount this year has been desperate to dismantle since the day it was established — is paying out millions to 150 year olds. Of course, if you ask anyone familiar with the COBOL programming language, that’s just a default date for entries that are no longer active and nothing more. Same goes for his angry claim that the government doesn’t use relational databases and SQL scripts to manage data in those databases, to the surprise of those who did government contracting or are employed by government agencies. (I personally wrote thousands of lines of SQL scripts to support just one aspect of ACA implementation for a state agency.) This was followed up by one of his foot soldiers claiming that he’s trying to analyze Social Security data using PostgreSQL, which is, yes, the exact kind of database Musk claimed the government doesn’t use. He then went on to claim he fried his hard drive processing just 60,000 entries, which is beyond bizarre since anything under a few million entries is considered a very easily manageable table, and I’ve processed billions of rows before without frying any drives and computers. Granted, it took me all day and required fairly specialized code, but it really isn’t anything crazy for today’s comp sci professionals. So, basically, Musk unleashed a bunch of woefully unqualified people to examine very important software, processes, and policies they know little to nothing about, and as they show their whole asses to the entire planet, they puff out their chests and try to tell us that we’re too dumb to understand just how insanely clever they are, and to try and prove it, they unleash a torrent of panicked verbal diarrhea mixed with comp sci jargon and call actual experts who call them out on it various slurs. You see, Musk and his fellow tech bros, as well as their beloved guru Curtis Yavin are not geniuses with deep thoughts or amazing expertise, writing complex, thoroughly researched essays after decades of research. They can’t even make computer jokes that aren’t utterly befuddling nonsense. They’re professional verbal onanists making billions by dazzling people with cryptic bullshit, or in Yavin’s case, just write stuff that makes tech billionaires happy. And this extends to the alleged ultimate grand plans of the tech broligarchy: to more or less dismantle the United States and turn it into a loose network of corporate city states ran by executives and their AI models, a plan supposedly conceived by the evil genius of the aforementioned Yavin. Here’s the thing, however. Yavin’s plan, embraced by Musk and the rest of the Pay Pal Mafia, is not clever, or new, or original. The guy just read Snow Crash, watched Ghost In The Shell, and decided “yes, I want to be a bad guy in a cyberpunk dystopia!” and then wrote it down in a blog he passed off as some grand insight into the future. If all of this stopped on a hack’s derivative blog, it would almost be funny. But the fact that it didn’t, and men with power to shape government policy think this is a great idea is absolutely terrifying if you know what cyberpunk actually is. In case you don’t, my friends Trace Dominguez and Julian Huguet over at the That’s Absurd, Please Elaborate Podcast podcast came up with a brilliant description of cyberpunk. It’s having access to technology that allows you perfect recall of every important and cherished memory. But if you miss a monthly payment, then you lose access to said memories, and the only way you can get them back is to pay up. Yeah, that is indeed dystopian. This is why so many cyberpunk stories focus on the outcasts, criminals, and forgotten who are trying to better their lot until they simply reach and breaking point to try and rebel against the oppressive and abusive system by hijacking some aspect of its technical prowess for themselves. They never really win, and in many cases, their endings are far from happy. But that’s not the point. It’s that to them, rebellion becomes what gives their lives meaning as they rage until the almost certain dying of the light. It’s a genre of science fiction created by writers who loved the idea of the future and exploring the frontiers of technology, but were also worried about what it could do in the hands of greedy sociopaths, organized crime, or malicious governments. In every story, the takeaway is simple and straightforward: advanced technology and the vast amounts of money and power it brings has serious consequences, especially if it’s in the hands of those with no empathy or morality. Which, well, kinda fits our new Tech Broverlords perfectly, doesn’t it? And it also shows exactly why categorizing them as “out of control nerds” misses the mark because they’re not nerds. They’re business tycoons cosplaying as nerds who understand the culture, the lingo, the tech, but in reality, they haven’t a fucking clue, doing the political equivalent of running around a Star Wars convention flashing the Vulcan salute, greeting actual, befuddled fans with “may the force be prosper!” and meeting their confused glares with angry rants about how any real fan totally knows how the Kaylons sieged the Death Star on the forest moon of Pandora. So, that’s where we’ve ended up. Drowning under a tsunami of technobabble from a bunch of businessmen who once took a couple of coding classes when I was still but a wee radioactive toddler, cosplaying as tech geniuses while dragging us into what I can only describe as the Temu version one of the worst case scenarios in sci-fi they love but can’t wrap their sparse smattering of brain cells around, and so they think it totally rules to be the bad guys in a cold, cruel technological dystopia. But hey, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you watched Edgerunners and Pyscho Pass, read Altered Carbon, and thought “holy shit, serfdom with terabit wi-fi, total surveillance, and robot parts of questionable providence and efficacy crammed into and attached to me regardless of my consent sounds awesome!” Though, if that is your stance on the subject, I would ask that you consider that the people trying to do that to you are even remotely qualified for the job …

< World Premiere > BELA BARTÓK : Violin Concerto No. 2, BB 117 Thursday 23 March, 1939 – The Concertgebouw, Amsterdam Amsterdam Concertgebouw Orchestra, cond. Willem Mengelberg Zoltán Székely, Violin

Pitchers and Catchers Moe Berg The Atlantic September, 1941 I. Baseball men agree with the philosopher that perfection — which means a pennant to them — is attainable only through a proper combination of opposites. A team equally strong in attack and in defense, well-proportioned as a unit, with, of course, those intangibles, morale, enthusiasm, and direction — that is the story of success in baseball. Good fielding and pitching, without hitting, or vice versa, is like Ben Franklin’s half a pair of scissors — ineffectual. Lopsided pennant failures are strewn throughout the record books. Twenty-game winners or .400 hitters do not ensure victory. Ne quid nimis. Ty Cobb, baseball genius, helped win pennants early in his career, but from 1909 through 1926, his last year at Detroit, he and his formidable array of hitters failed — they never found the right combination. Ed Walsh, the great White Sox spitball pitcher, in 1908 won forty or practically half of his club’s games, to this day an individual pitching record, but alone he couldn’t offset his own ‘hitless wonders.’ Walter Johnson the swift, with over 400 victories, waited almost twenty years before his clubmates at Washington helped him to a championship. Every pennant winner must be endowed both at the plate and in the field. Even Babe Ruth’s bat, when it loomed largest, couldn’t obscure the Yankees’ high-calibre pitching and their tight defense in key spots. With all the importance that hitting has assumed since the Babe and home runs became synonymous, I note that Connie Mack, major-league manager for almost half a century, household name for strategy wherever the game is played, still gives pitching top rating in baseball. A Walter Johnson, a Lefty Grove, a Bob Feller, cannon-ball pitchers, come along once in a generation. By sheer, blinding speed they overpower the hitter. Johnson shut out the opposition in 113 games, more than the average pitcher wins in his major-league lifetime. Bob Feller continues this speed-ball tradition. We accept these men as pitching geniuses, with the mere explanation that, thanks to their strong arms, their pitches are comparatively untouchable. When Walter Johnson pitched, the hitter looked for a fast ball and got it; he looked — but it didn’t do him much good. Clark Griffith, then manager of the Washington Club, jestingly threatened Walter with a fine any time he threw a curve. ‘Griff’ knew that no variation in the speed king’s type of pitch was necessary. But what of the other pitchers who are not so talented? Many times a pitcher without apparent stuff wins, whereas his opponent, with what seems to be a great assortment, is knocked out of the box in an early inning. The answer, I believe, lies in the bare statement, ‘Bat meets ball’; any other inference may lead us into the danger of overcomplication. The player himself takes his ability for granted and passes off his success or lack of it with ‘You do or you don’t.’ Call it the law of averages. Luck, as well as skill, decides a game. The pitcher tries to minimize the element of luck. Between the knees and shoulders of the hitter, over a plate just 17 inches wide, lies the target of the pitcher, who throws from a rectangular rubber slab on a mound 60 feet, 6 inches distant. The pitcher has to throw into the area with enough on the ball to get the hitter out — that is his intention. Control, natural or acquired, is a prerequisite of any successful pitcher: he must have direction, not only to be effective, but to exist. Because of this enforced concentration of pitches, perhaps the game’s most interesting drama unfolds within the limited space of the ball-and-strike zone. This pitcher toes the mound; action comes with the motion, delivery, and split-second flight of the ball to the catcher. With every move the pitcher is trying to fool the hitter, using his stuff, his skill and wiles, his tricks and cunning, all his art to win. Well known to ball players is the two-o’clock hitter who breaks down fences in batting practice. There is no pressure; the practice pitcher throws ball after ball with the same motion, the same delivery and speed. If the practice pitcher varies his windup or delivery, the hitters don’t like it — not in batting practice — and they show their dislike by sarcastically conceding victory by a big score to the batting practice pitcher and demanding another. This is an interesting phenomenon. The hitter, in practice, is adjusting himself to clock-like regularity of speed, constant and consistent. He is concentrating on his timing. He has to coördinate his vision and his swing. This coördination the opposing pitcher wants to upset from the moment he steps on the rubber and the game begins. The very duration of the stance itself, the windup and motion, and the form of delivery are all calculated to break the hitter’s equilibrium. Before winding up, the pitcher may hesitate, outstaring the notoriously anxious hitter in order to disturb him. Ted Lyons of the Chicago White Sox, master student of a hitter’s habits, brings his arms over his head now once, now twice, three or more times, his eyes intent on every move of the hitter, slowing up or quickening the pace of his windup and motion in varying degrees before he delivers the pitch. Cy Young, winner of most games in baseball history, — he won 511, — had four different pitching motions, turning his back on the hitter to hide the ball before he pitched. Fred Marberry, the great Washington relief pitcher, increased his effectiveness by throwing his free, non-pivot foot as well as the ball at the hitter to distract him. II. In 1884, when Connie Mack broke in as a catcher for Meriden, Charlie Radbourne — who won 60 games for Providence — could have cuffed, scraped, scratched, finger-nailed, applied resin, emery, or any other foreign substance to, or spit on the two balls the teams started and finished the game with. ‘Home-Run’ Baker, who hit two balls out of the park in the 1911 World Series to win his nickname, — and never more than twelve in a full season, — characterizes a defensive era in the game. During the last war it was impossible to get some of the nine foreign ingredients that enter into the manufacture of our baseball. To make up for the lack of the superior foreign yarn, our machines were adjusted to wind the domestic product tighter. In 1919, when the war was over, the foreign yarn was again available, but the same machines were used. The improved technique, the foreign ingredients, Babe Ruth and bat, conspired to revolutionize baseball. It seems prophetic, with due respect to the Babe, that our great American national game, so native and representative, could have been so completely refashioned by happenings on the other side of the world. The importance of the bat has been stressed to such an extent that, since 1920, foreign substances have been barred to the pitcher, and the spitball outlawed. The resin bag, the sole concession, is used on the hands only to counteract perspiration. The cover of the ball, in two sections, is sewed together with stitches, slightly raised, in one long seam; today’s pitcher, after experimentation and experience, takes whatever advantage he can of its surface to make his various pitches more effective by gripping the ball across or along two rows of stitches, or along one row or on the smooth surface. The pitcher is always working with a shiny new ball. A game today will consume as many as eight dozen balls instead of the two roughed and battered ones which were the limit in 1884. With the freak pitch outlawed and the accent put on hitting in the modern game, the pitcher has to be resourceful to win. He throws fast, slow, and breaking balls, all with variations. He is fortunate if his fast ball hops or sinks, slides or sails, because, if straight as a string or too true, it is ineffective. The ball has to do something at the last moment. The curve must break sharply and not hang. To add to his repertory of balls that break, the pitcher may develop a knuckle ball (fingers applied to the seam, knuckled against, instead of gripping the ball), a fork ball (the first two fingers forking the ball), or a screw ball (held approximately the same as an orthodox fast or curve ball but released with a twist of the wrist the reverse of a curve). The knuckle and fork balls flutter through the air, wavering, veering, or taking a sudden lurch, without revolving like the other pitches; they are the modern counterpart of the spitball, a dry spitter. The pitcher studies the hitter’s stance, position at the plate, and swing, to establish the level of his natural batting stroke and to detect any possible weakness. Each hitter has his own individual style. The pitcher scouts his form and notes whether he holds the bat on the end or chokes it, is a free swinger or a chop hitter. He bears in mind whether the hitter crowds, or stands away from the plate, in front of or behind it, erect or crouched over it. Whether he straddles his legs or strides forward to hit, whether he lunges with his body or takes a quick cut with wrist and arm only, whether he pulls a ball, hits late or through the box — all these things are telltale and reveal a hitter’s liking for a certain pitch, high or low, in or out, fast, curve, or slow. To fool the hitter — there’s the rub. With an assortment at his disposal, a pitcher tries to adapt the delivery, as well as the pitch, to the hitter’s weakness. Pitchers may have distinct forms of delivery and work differently on a given hitter; a pitcher throws overhand, three-quarter overhand (which is about midway between overhand and side-arm), side-arm, or underhand. A cross-fire is an emphasized side-arm pitch thrown against the forward foot as the body leans to the same side as the pitching arm at the time of the motion and delivery. Not the least important part of the delivery is the body follow-through to get more stuff on the pitch and to take pressure off the arm. Having determined the hitter’s weakness, the pitcher can throw to spots — for example, ‘high neck in,’ low outside, or letter high But he never forgets that, with all his equipment, he is trying to throw the hitter off his timing — probably the best way to fool him, to get him out. Without varying his motion, he throws a change-of-pace fast or curve ball, slows up, takes a little off or adds a little to his fast ball. III. Just as there are speed kings, so there are hitters without an apparent weakness. They have unusual vision, power, and great ability to coördinate these in the highest degree. They are the ranking, top hitters who hit everything in the strike zone well — perhaps one type of pitch less well than another. To these hitters the pitcher throws his best pitch and leaves the result to the law of averages. Joe DiMaggio straddles in a spread-eagle stance with his feet wide apart and bat already cocked. He advances his forward foot only a matter of inches, so that, with little stride, he doesn’t move his head, keeping his eyes steadily on the ball. He concentrates on the pitch; his weight equally distributed on both feet, he has perfect wrist action and power to drive the ball for distance. Mel Ott, on the other hand, lifts the front foot high just as the pitcher delivers the ball; he is not caught off balance or out of position, because he sets the foot down only after he has seen what type of pitch is coming. With DiMaggio’s stance one must have good wrist action and power. With Ott’s, there is a danger of taking a long step forward before one knows what is coming. But Mel does not commit himself. Rogers Hornsby, one of the game’s greatest right-hand hitters, invariably took his position in the far rear corner of the batter’s box, stepped into the pitch, and hit to all fields equally well. Ty Cobb was always a step ahead of the pitcher. He must have been because he led the American League in hitting every year but one in the thirteen-year period 1907–1919. He outstudied the pitcher and took as many positions in the batter’s box as he thought necessary to counteract the type of motion and pitch he was likely to get. He adapted his stance to the pitcher who was then on the mound; for Red Faber, whose spitball broke sharply down, Cobb stood in front of the plate; for a curve-ball left-hander, Ty took a stance behind the plate in order to hit the curve after it broke, because, as Ty said, he could see it break and get hold of it the better. For Lefty O’Doul, one of the greatest teachers of hitting in the game, there are no outside pitches. Left stands close to the plate; his bat more than covers it; he is a natural right-field pull hitter. Babe Ruth, because of his tremendous, unequaled home-run power, and his ability to hit equally well all sorts of pitches with a liberal stride and a free swing, and consistently farther than any other player, has demonstrated that he had the greatest coördination and power of any hitter ever known. Ted Williams, of the Boston Red Sox, the only current .400 hitter in the game, completely loose and relaxed, has keen enough eyes never to offer at a bad pitch; he has good wrist and arm action, leverage, and power. Jimmy Foxx, next to Babe Ruth as a home-run hitter, steps into a ball, using his tremendous wrists and forearms for his powerful, long and line drives. These hitters do not lunge with the body; the front hip gives way for the swing, and the body follows through. The game is carried back and forth between the pitcher and the hitter. The hitter notices what and where the pitchers are throwing. If the pitcher is getting him out consistently, for example, on a curve outside, the hitter changes his mode of attack. Adaptability is the hallmark of the big-league hitter. Joe Cronin, playing manager of the Red Sox, has changed in his brilliant career from a fast-ball, left-field pull hitter to a curve-ball and a right-field hitter, to and fro through the whole cycle and back again, according to where the pitchers are throwing. He has no apparent weakness, hits to all fields, and is one of the greatest ‘clutch’ hitters in the game. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. IV. Like Walter Johnson, Lefty Grove was a fast-ball pitcher, and the hitters knew it. The hitters looked for this pitch; Lefty did not try to fool them by throwing anything else, but most of them were fooled, not by the type of pitch, but by his terrific speed. With two strikes on the hitter, Lefty did throw his curve at times, and that, too, led almost invariably to a strike-out. In 1935, Lefty had recovered from his first serious sore arm of the year before. Wear and tear, and the grind of many seasons, had taken their toll. Now he had changed his tactics, and was pitching curves and fast balls, one or the other. His control was practically perfect. On a day in that year in Washington, Heinie Manush, a great hitter, was at bat with two men on the bases. The game was at stake; the count was three balls and two strikes. Heinie stood there, confident, looking for Lefty’s fast ball. ‘Well,’ thought Heinie, ‘it might be a curve.’ Lefty was throwing the curve more and more now, but the chances with the count of three and two were that Lefty would throw his fast ball with everything he had on it. Fast or curve — he couldn’t throw anything else; he had nothing else to throw. Heinie broke his back striking out on the next pitch, the first fork ball Grove ever threw. For over a year, on the side lines, in the bullpen, between pitching starts, Lefty had practised and perfected this pitch before he threw it, and he waited for a crucial spot to use it. Lefty had realized his limitations. The hitters were getting to his fast and curve balls more than they used to. He wanted to add to his pitching equipment; he felt he had to. Heinie Manush anticipated, looked for, guessed a fast ball, possibly a curve, but Lefty fooled him with his new pitch, a fork ball. Here was the perfect setup for outguessing a hitter. Lefty Grove’s development of a third pitch, the fork ball, is the greatest example in our time of complete, successful change in technique by one pitcher. When a speedball pitcher loses his fast one, he has to compensate for such loss by adding to his pitching equipment. Lefty both perfected his control and added a fork ball. Carl Hubbell’s screw ball, practically unhittable at first, made his fast ball and curve effective. Lefty Gomez, reaching that point in his career where he had to add to his fast and curve ball, developed and threw his first knuckle ball this year. Grove, Gomez, and Hubbell, three outstanding left-handers, — Grove and Gomez adding a fork ball and a knuckle ball respectively to their fast and curve balls when their speed was waning, Hubbell developing a screw ball early in his career to make it his best pitch and to become one of the game’s foremost southpaws, — so you have the build-up of great pitchers. At first, the superspeed of Grove obviated the necessity of pitching brains. But, when his speed began to fade, Lefty turned his head. With his almost perfect control and the addition of his fork ball, Lefty now fools the hitter with his cunning. With Montaigne, we conceive of Socrates in place of Alexander, of brain for brawn, wit for whip. And this brings us to a fascinating part of the pitcher-hitter drama: Does a hitter guess? Does a pitcher try to outguess him? When the pitching process is no longer mechanical, how much of it is psychological? When the speed of a Johnson or a Grove is fading or gone, can the pitcher outguess the hitter? We know that the pitcher studies the strength and weakness of every hitter and that the hitter notes every variety of pitch in the pitcher’s repertory; that the big-league hitter is resourceful, and quick to meet every new circumstance. Does he anticipate what the pitcher is going to throw? He can regulate his next pitch arbitrarily by the very last-second flick of the wrist. There is no set pattern for the order of the pitches. Possible combinations are so many that a formula of probability cannot be established. He may repeat the fast ball or curve ball indefinitely, or pitch them alternately; there is no mathematical certainty what the pitch will be. There is no harmony in the pattern of a pitcher’s pitches. And no human being has the power of divination. But does this prevent a hitter from guessing? Does he merely hit what he sees if he can? Is it possible for a hitter to stand at the plate and use merely his vision, without trying to figure out what the pitcher might throw? The hitter bases his anticipation on the repertory of the pitcher, taking into account the score of the game, what the pitcher threw him the last time at bat, whether he hit that pitch or not, how many men are on base, and the present count on him. The guess is more than psychic, for there is some basis for it, some precedent for the next move; what is past is prologue. The few extraordinary hitters whose exceptional vision and power to coördinate must be the basis for their talent can afford to be oblivious of anything but the flight of the ball. Hughie Duffy, who has the highest batting average in baseball history (he hit .438 in 1894), or Rogers Hornsby, another great right-hand hitter, may even deny that he did anything but hit what he saw. But variety usually makes a hitter think. When Ty Cobb changed his stance at the plate to hit the pitcher then facing him, he anticipated not only a certain type of motion but also the pitch that followed it. He studied past performance. Joe DiMaggio hit a home run to break Willie Keeler’s consecutive-games hitting record of 44, standing since 1897, and has since carried the record to 56 games. In hitting the home run off Dick Newsome, Red Sox pitcher, who has been very successful this year because of a good assortment of pitches, Joe explains: ‘I hit a fast ball; I knew he would come to that and was waiting for it; he had pitched knucklers, curves, and sinkers.’ Jimmie Foxx looks for a particular pitch when facing a pitcher — for example, a curve ball against a notorious curve-ball pitcher — and watches any other pitch go by. But when he has two strikes he cancels all thought of what the pitcher might throw; he then hits what he sees. Jimmie knows that if he looks for a certain pitch and guesses wrong, with two strikes on him, he will be handcuffed at the plate watching the pitch go by. Hank Greenberg, full of imagination, has guessed right most of the time — he hit 58 home runs one year. Just as Lefty Grove perfected control of his not-so-speedy fast ball and curve, and added the fork ball to give him variety, so even the outstanding hitters have to change their mode of attack later when their vision and reactions are not quite so sharp as they used to be. V. The catcher squatting behind the hitter undoubtedly has the coign of vantage in the ball park; all the action takes place before him. Nothing is outside his view except the balls-and-strikes umpire behind him — which is at times no hardship. The receiver has a good pair of hands, shifts his feet gracefully for inside or outside pitches, and bends his knees, not his back, in an easy, rhythmic motion, as he stretches his arms to catch the ball below his belt. The catcher has to be able to cock his arm from any position, throw fast and accurately to the bases, field bunts like an infielder, and catch foul flies like an outfielder. He must be adept at catching a ball from any angle, and almost simultaneously tagging a runner at home plate. The catcher is the Cerberus of baseball. These physical qualifications are only a part of a catcher’s equipment. He signals the pitcher what to throw, and this implies superior baseball brains on his part. But a pitcher can put a veto on a catcher’s judgment by shaking him off and waiting for another sign. The game cannot go on until he pitches. Every fan has seen a pitcher do this — like the judge who kept shaking his head from time to time while counsel was arguing; the lawyer finally turned to the jury and said, ‘Gentlemen, you might imagine that the shaking of his head by His Honor implied a difference of opinion, but you will notice if you remain here long enough that when His Honor shakes his head there is nothing in it.’ (Judges, if you are reading, please consider this obiter.) One would believe that a no-hit, no-run game, the acme of perfection, the goal of a pitcher, would satisfy even the most exacting battery mate. Yet, at the beginning of the seventh inning of a game under those conditions, ‘Sarge’ Connally, White Sox pitcher, said to his catcher, ‘Let’s mix ’em up; why don’t you call for my knuckler? ‘Sarge’ was probably bored with his own infallibility. He lost the no-hitter and the game on an error. Of course, no player monopolizes the brains on a ball club. The catcher gives the signals only because he is in a better position than the pitcher to hide them. In a squatting position, the catcher hides the simple finger, fist, or finger-wiggle signs between his legs, complicating them somewhat with different combinations only when a runner on second base in direct line of vision with the signals may look in, perhaps solve them, and flash back another signal to the hitter. Signal stealing is possible in many ways. The most prevalent self-betrayals are made by the pitcher and catcher themselves. Such detection requires the closest observation. A catcher, after having given the signal, get sets for the pitch; in doing so he may unintentionally, unconsciously, make a slight move — for example, to the right, in order to be in a better position to catch a right-hander’s curve ball. But more often it is the pitcher who reveals something either to the coaches on the base lines or — what is more telling — to the hitter standing in the batter’s box. The pitcher will betray himself if he makes two distinct motions for two different pitches — as, for example, a side-arm delivery for the curve and overhand for the fast ball. A pitcher may also betray himself in his windup by raising his arms higher for the fast ball than for the curve. In some cases his eyes are more intent on the plate for one pitch than for another. Usually the curve is more difficult to control. If a pitcher has to make facial distortions, they should be the same for one pitch as for another. A pitcher covers up the ball with his glove as he fixes it, to escape detection. Otherwise he may reveal that he is holding the ball tighter for a curve than for a fast ball, or even gripping the stitches differently for one than for the other. Eddie Collins, all-time star second baseman, was probably the greatest spy on the field or at bat in the history of the game. He was a master at ‘getting’ the pitch for himself somewhere in the pitcher’s manipulation of the ball or in his motion. This ability in no small part helped make him the great performer that he was. Ball players would rather detect these idiosyncrasies for themselves, as they stand awaiting the pitch, than get a signal from the coach. The coach, on detecting something, gives a sign to the hitter either silently by some move — for instance, touching his chest — or by word of mouth — ‘Come on,’ for a curve. But this is dangerous unless the coach detects the pitches with one hundred per cent accuracy. There must be no doubt. Many times, in baseball, a club knows every pitch thrown and still loses. The hitter may be too anxious if he actually knows what is coming, or a doubt may upset him. And there is always the danger of a pitcher’s suspecting that he is ‘tipping’ himself off. He then deals in a bit of counter-espionage by making more emphatic to the opposition his revealing mannerism to encourage them, only to cross them up at a crucial time. The whole club plays as a unit to win. The signs that the pitcher and catcher agree on reflect the collective ideas, the judgment of all the players on how to get the opposition out. Preventing runs from scoring is as important as making them. The players know how the pitcher intends to throw to each opponent. They review their strategy before game time, as a result of which they know how the battery is going to work, and they play accordingly. The shortstop and second baseman see the catcher’s signs and get the jump on the ball; sometimes they flash it by prearranged signal to the other players who are not in a position to see it. The outfielders can then lean a little, but only after the ball is actually released. He is a poor catcher who doesn’t know at least as well as the pitcher what a hitter likes or doesn’t like, to which field he hits, what he did the last time, what he is likely to do this time at bat. The catcher is an on-the-spot witness, in a position to watch the hitter at first hand. He has to make quick decisions, bearing in mind the score, the inning, the number of men who on the bases, and other factors. Pitchers and catchers are mutually helpful. It is encouraging to a pitcher when a catcher calls for the ball he wants to throw and corroborates his judgment. The pitcher very seldom shakes a catcher off, because they are thinking alike in a given situation. By working together they know each other’s system. Pitchers help catchers as much as catchers do pitchers. One appreciative catcher gives due credit to spit-baller Red Faber, knuckle-baller Ted Lyons, and fast-baller Tommy Thomas, all of the Chicago White Sox, for teaching him, as he caught them, much about catching and working with pitchers. Bill Dickey, great Yankee catcher, will readily admit that Herb Pennock taught him battery technique merely by catching a master and noting how he mixed up his pitches. Ray Schalk, Chicago White Sox, and Steve O’Neill, Cleveland Indians, were two of the greatest receivers and all-round workmen behind the plate in baseball history. Gabby Hartnett and Mickey Cochrane stood out as hitters as well as catchers, Mickey being probably the greatest inspirational catcher of our time. The catcher works in harmony with the pitcher and dovetails his own judgment with the pitcher’s stuff. He finds out quickly the pitcher’s best ball and calls for it in the spots where it would be most effective. He knows whether a hitter is in a slump or dangerous enough to walk intentionally. He tries to keep the pitcher ahead of the hitter. If he succeeds, the pitcher is in a more advantageous position to work on the hitter with his assortment of pitches. But if the pitcher is in a hole — a two and nothing, three and one, or three and two count — he knows that the hitter is ready to hit. The next pitch may decide the ball game. The pitcher tries not to pitch a ‘cripple’ — that is, tries not to give the hitter the ball he hits best. But it is also dangerous to overrefine. Taking the physical as well as the psychological factors into consideration, the pitcher must at times give even the best hitter his best pitch under the circumstances. He pitches hard, lets the law of averages do its work, and never second-guesses himself. The pitcher throws a fast ball through the heart of the plate, and the hitter, surprised, may even take it. The obvious pitch may be the most strategic one. The pitcher may throw overhand to take full advantage of the white shirts in the bleacher background. Breaking balls are more effective when thrown against the resistance of the wind. In the latter part of a day, when shadows are cast in a stadium ball park, the pitcher may change his tactics by throwing more fast balls than he did earlier in the game. The players are not interested in the score, but merely in how many runs are necessary to tie and to win. They take nothing for granted in baseball. The idea is to win. The game’s the thing.

GEORGE ROCHBERG : Concerto for Violin & Orchestra (The final “Definitive 2002” Version) Sunday 17 March, 2002 – Saarbrücken, Germany Saarbrücken RSO, cond. Christopher Lyndon-Gee Peter Shepperd-Skærved, Violin solo Theodore Presser Company, 2007 “... a representative example of the synthesis of his free tonal style that Rochberg characterizes as “hard romanticism”, with a more lyrical, elegiac, “tonal” manner; indeed it is this opposition that primarily articulates the dramatic structure of this powerful work.” — Christopher Lyndon-Gee

< World Premiere > CHRISTOPHER BROWN : To Musick, Sing!, Op. 82 (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir & soli) Wednesday 17 March, 1993 Dorset County Museum, Dorchester, England Clare College Choir, cond. Timothy Brown Texts: Thomas Traherne, Robert Herrick, Sir John Davies, William Barnes

< World Premiere > FRANK MICHAEL BEYER : 'Et resurrexit' für 12-stimmigen Chor oder 12 Solostimmen Sunday 16 March 2003 – Berlin Rundfunkchor Berlin, cond. Simon Halsey Boosey & Hawkes / Bote & Bock, Berlin, 2002

< World Premiere > PATRICK BURGAN : Stabat Mater (for unaccompanied SSAATTBB choir & soli) Saturday 16 March, 1996 Auch (France), Festival "Eclats de Voix" Les Eléments, cond. Joël Suhubiette Editions Jobert (JJ1741-7)

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

< United States Premiere > RALPH VAUGHAN WILLIAMS : Symphony No. 7 'Sinfonia Antartica' Thursday 16 March, 1953 Chicago Symphony Orchestra, cond. Raphael Kubelik

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Das Jahr (for unaccompanied SATB div. choir) Sunday 16 March, 1941 – Berlin Chor der Berliner Kirchenmusikschule, dir. Gottfried Grote Texts: Josef Weinheber Schott Music GbmH & Co., 1941 (ED 2913)

'Ain't I an Athlete' : 'Protecting Women's Sports' Has Never Been About Protecting Black Women Dr. Brigitte Burpo Contraband Camp Friday 14 March, 2025 It’s an old playbook with new opponents. Black women athletes are often criticized as too aggressive, too strong, too much of everything except what white and sexist sports culture deems acceptable. Their bodies are analyzed, their confidence is seen as threatening, and their strength deemed suspicious. Now, the same people performing moral outrage over these supposedly “masculine” Black women are the loudest voices insisting that the fewer than 10 of the 510,000 student-athletes in the NCAA who identify as trans will ruin women’s athletics with claims that they have an unfair advantage. Because, suddenly, the category of "woman" must be firmly defended — when it’s politically convenient. It is not a coincidence that the newfound mass media interest in women’s sports, increased commercialization of such and the new anti-woke era have created a salty roux for the recipe of oppressing trans women athletes through policy and baseless scrutiny — scrutiny that will likely increase for all female athletes, particularly for Black women and girls. Last month, a day after the Trump administration signed an executive order banning transgender women and girls from participating in female sports, the NCAA Board of Governance voted to update the participation policy for transgender student-athletes limiting competition in women's sports to student-athletes assigned female at birth. The NCAA’s swift policy shift reinforced the administration’s exclusionary stance and tapped into a much older and more insidious narrative, one that has long been used to police the boundaries of womanhood in sports. The fight over who belongs in women’s sports has always been more than just an issue of fairness. Per usual, it’s about power, control and exclusion. At this point, Black women athletes could write the playbook on being scrutinized, excluded and policed in sports because we’ve seen this game before, and it’s getting old. From Althea Gibson to Serena Williams, and Flo Jo to Sha’Carri Richardson, every generation brings a new excuse to tell Black women we’re too much to handle. And now, the same tired rhetoric is being recycled to justify excluding trans women, under the guise of “fairness” and “protecting women.” But if fairness was really the concern, we’d be talking about equal pay, equal media coverage and how women’s sports are underfunded. But instead, we have white men “protecting” women who never asked for nor needed to be protected. Society loves to celebrate strength, resilience and competitiveness when it comes in the form of white women athletes. Billie Jean King is rightly celebrated as a trailblazer for women’s sports and was praised for her ability to defeat Bobby Riggs in the renowned “Battle of the Sexes” in 1973. She was aggressive and unrelenting, and in the eyes of American sports media, these were considered virtues. Contrast that with the treatment of Black women athletes who break barriers. Serena Williams spent much of her career battling perceptions that she was too muscular and aggressive to be fully embraced by mainstream narratives in the way that her white counterparts were, despite being one of the greatest tennis players in history. WNBA player Brittney Griner has also faced scrutiny for being too masculine and fighting perceptions that she’s a man. While white women are celebrated for their strength and intensity, Black women’s success comes with an asterisk, a lingering question of whether they really deserve to be here. It is clear that strength is only acceptable in women when it doesn’t challenge the status quo. When Black women excel, bigotry fights back. In 2018, World Athletics introduced new testosterone regulations that were framed as necessary for maintaining a level playing field, but in fact, it overwhelmingly impacted Black women from the Global South, including Caster Semenya, Francine Niyonsaba and Margaret Wambui, all of whom were banned from competing in their events unless they underwent hormone-suppressing treatment to lower their testosterone levels for six months. These women were not taking performance-enhancing drugs nor were they trans. They were simply born with hormone levels that fell outside of an arbitrarily determined “acceptable” range for womanhood. The idea that Black women and girl athletes are “too masculine” and the claim that trans women athletes are “not real women” come from the same place — a covert fear of women who do not fit neatly into the narrow, white and delicate box of femininity that our society loves to celebrate. Black girls are hypersexualized while simultaneously critiqued if they’re not feminine enough as athletes. There is a shrinking box of what it means to be feminine if you are a Black girl who plays sports, and policies that narrowly interpret those terms of femininity do not help. The argument of "protecting women" has also been wielded as a weapon to justify racism and sexism in the United States for a long time. It was this very dogma that led to the murder of Emmett Till in 1955, when the original “Karen,” Carolyn Bryant, falsely accused him of making advances toward her. The same argument of protecting women fueled countless lynchings and domestic-racial terrorism, all in the name of defending white womanhood from perceived threats. While white women were being placed on pedestals in need of defense, Black women were never afforded the same shield. Sojourner Truth asked a very germane question in 1851 when she delivered her iconic speech, “Ain’t I a Woman?” When Black women are torn down, ridiculed and denied opportunities because they do not fit a white mold of femininity, where is the outcry for protection? The truth is that “protecting women” has never been about protecting all women. It is and has always been a mask to uphold white supremacy while enforcing Eurocentric gender norms. Today, Black and trans women athletes alike are reminded yet again that the shield was never meant for them.

< World Premiere > ERNST PEPPING : Passionsbericht des Matthäus (for unaccompanied SATB-SATB choir) Saturday 10 March, 1951 – Leipzig, Germany Thomanerchor Leipzig, dir. Günther Ramin Bärenreiter Verlag, 1950 (BA2276) https://tinyurl.com/23cn8t4a

Musk Doesn’t Understand Why Government Matters The Editorial Board New York Times Saturday 8 March, 2025 Elon Musk’s life is a great American success story. Time and again, he has anticipated where the world was headed, helping to create not just new products but new industries. His achievements, from his pioneering role in online payments to the construction of SpaceX’s satellite network to the mass production of electric Teslas, have made him the world’s wealthiest man. But Mr. Musk’s fortune rests on more than his individual talent. He built his business empire in a nation with a stable political system and an unwavering commitment to the rule of law, and he built it on a foundation of federal subsidies, loans and contracts. Mr. Musk’s companies have received at least $38 billion in government support, according to an analysis by The Washington Post. NASA has invested more than $15 billion in SpaceX; Tesla has collected $11 billion in subsidies to bolster the electric car industry. Now, as an influential adviser to President Trump, Mr. Musk is lawlessly tearing down parts of the very government that enabled his rise. As the head of an agency he conjured and named the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, Mr. Musk has suspended billions of dollars in spending and discarded thousands of scientists, regulators and other government workers. Brandishing a chain saw during a recent appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference, he shouted: “This is the chain saw for bureaucracy. Chain saw!” Mr. Musk claims that the government is a business in need of disruption and that his goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency. And he’s right: The federal government is often wasteful and inefficient. Taxpayers, business owners and recipients of federal benefits all know the frustration of navigating the federal bureaucracy. There are huge opportunities, in particular, for the government to make better use of technology. But DOGE is not building a better government. Instead, its haphazard demolition campaign is undermining the basic work of government and the safety and welfare of the American people. Mr. Musk directed the firing of nuclear safety workers, necessitating a frantic effort to rehire them just days later. He ended federal funding for Ebola monitoring, and despite his subsequent acknowledgment that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on Ebola, it still has not been fully restored. The government at Mr. Musk’s behest has disrupted cancer research, delayed work on transportation projects and sought to close the agency established after the 2008 financial crisis to protect consumers from being robbed by banks. Even worse is that Mr. Musk, with Mr. Trump’s support, has demonstrated a disregard for the limits that the Constitution places on the president’s power. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump insist that voters want change. DOGE’s slogan is “The people voted for major reform.” But in their campaign to shrink the federal government, Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump have defied laws passed by Congress, and they have challenged the authority of the federal courts to adjudicate the legality of their actions. Mr. Trump recently referred to himself as a king and then insisted he had been joking, but there is no ambiguity in his assertion of the power to defy other branches of government. It is a rejection of the checks and balances that have safeguarded our nation for more than 200 years. Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump are not trying to change laws; they are upending the rule of law. Even where Mr. Musk’s actions have remained within the bounds of the law, he has shown little understanding of the differences between business and government. Mr. Musk built his rocket company, SpaceX, by repeatedly launching rockets that failed until he learned how to launch rockets that worked. Even now, the company often conducts experiments that fail, and Mr. Musk has argued, compellingly, that “if things are not failing, you are not innovating enough.” But managing the nation’s air traffic control system or its Social Security payment system requires a different calculus. Businesses can take risks in pursuit of profit because it’s OK if they fail. Americans can’t afford for the basic functions of government to fail. If Twitter stops working, people can’t tweet. When government services break down, people can die. While governments are often guilty of inefficiency, it is in the public interest to tolerate some inefficiency when the alternative is a breakdown of basic infrastructure. “I think we’re just moving a little too fast,” Representative Rich McCormick, Republican of Georgia, told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in late February after constituents booed him at a town-hall meeting. He suggested the Trump administration should pause to think before acting. “We’re moving really, really rapidly, and we don’t know the impact.” Mr. Trump, responding to similar concerns from members of his administration, reportedly said at a cabinet meeting on Thursday that cabinet secretaries would be in charge of future cuts in their departments and that Mr. Musk would be restricted to an advisory role. But it remains to be seen whether that will happen. Our system of government is obdurate by design. It is stable even by comparison with other democracies, many of which are governed by parliamentary systems in which the results of a single election can sharply shift public policy. In the United States, where power is divided among three coequal branches of government, it is relatively rare for one political party to gain such sweeping power for any period. The stability of the nation’s laws, and of the government’s role, has caused frustration throughout American history. It is also a kind of secret sauce, facilitating the private-sector investment and risk taking that are the wellspring of the nation’s prosperity. That stability is now under assault. The United States has experienced a marked increase in political volatility and even political violence, most notably in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election and in the assassination attempts against Mr. Trump. The World Bank’s index of political stability ranked the United States in the 66th percentile of all nations in 2013. By 2023, it had dropped into the bottom half of the rankings. Research has shown that even small declines in political stability can deliver enduring blows to economic growth, mostly by discouraging investment. In a chaotic environment, like post-Brexit Britain or Mr. Trump’s America, entrepreneurs are less likely to pursue big ideas, and investors will hesitate to make long-term commitments. DOGE, of course, is merely one way that Mr. Trump has increased instability, along with his flurry of executive orders purporting to rewrite environmental policy, the meaning of the 14th Amendment and more; his on-again-off-again tariffs; and his inversion of American foreign policy, wooing Vladimir Putin while disdaining longtime allies. Mr. Musk has made clear that he holds caution in contempt. But the president, whose power Mr. Musk is wielding, should listen to those in his party who are raising concerns about Mr. Musk’s methods and priorities. There are already signs that the chaos is hurting the economy. Inflation expectations have risen; stock prices have tumbled. Americans like to take risks; to do so, they need a government that is steady and reliable.

How American Mainstream Media Eats Away at Our Empathy Greg Fish World of Wierd Things Sunday 16 February, 2025 Americans tend to be a weirdly optimistic and nihilistic bunch at the same time. We’re convinced that things will eventually be better. But also that nothing will really change, and every politician is absolutely useless and doesn’t care about us. In times of need, our government will move mountains to save us. But it’s also a huge, useless waste of our money filled with incompetent goobers only interested in self-enrichment. We are one country, one people, and anyone can become an American. But it’s every person for themselves and no one owes you anything. In other words, modern day American political ideology is a mishmash of oxymorons spoken with absolute conviction. And few institutions do more to reinforce this while doing tremendous damage to our social framework than our mainstream media. Its addiction to negative spin to get clicks and eyeballs, absolute, total moral apathy and insistence on finding two sides to any story, even if one of the sides is fundamentally wrong or actively malicious, encourages us to see the absolute worst in each other at all times, and feel as if nothing is certain. As a result, we’re constantly stressed out, see the world around us as collapsing, all efforts to fix it as hopeless, struggling to find objective reality as our information tools now lie to us for profit, so as we hear more and more unhinged tales, terrible opinions, and see corruption and sociopathic excess laughed off by millionaire pundits, it starts to sap our empathy. And once that happens, societies are at risk of splintering as its members either can’t cooperate, or refuse to. If helping others is for losers and suckers, if everything you try is “bad, actually” or is not good enough, if when you talk about giving people opportunities or making things more fair there’s an instant backlash, if the very people you want to help after they ask for your help only spit in your face, yell slurs at you, make death threats, and wish for horrible things to happen to you while rallying around hate-mongering sociopaths… What’s the point in caring anymore? Why even bother to help? Why not just sit back with a stiff drink and watch the world crumble? Of course, that’s a bit of an oversimplification. A few experts will argue that splintering into groups that have polarized, radical views can be thought of as a form of empathy as we defend those close to us, right or wrong, following our tribal instincts. Some say that instead of being empathetic, we should be compassionate. In other essays, social scientists say that too much empathy can leave us too paralyzed to make difficult but necessary decisions. Researchers who specialize in group psychology, disinformation, and propaganda are ringing the alarm bells as every possible sign of deep societal trouble is now going off at the same time. A country that couldn’t unite over a common enemy like COVID, an apolitical, faceless virus which is impossible to debate about the economy, or tax cuts, or its thoughts on education and history, has a dire problem. The last pandemic was a force of nature, an equal opportunity killer and maimer. That more often than not we fought each other instead of the virus, is beyond disconcerting. Now, we can debate whether it’s the place of scientists or popular science writers to wade into politics. But social science is inherently political. It’s quite literally the study of how we work in groups and organize to survive, create culture, and carry ourselves forward. To not comment on something as basic as “our country refuses to work with itself during a crisis, or solve real problems” requires either extreme privilege, blissful ignorance, or craven cowardice, or some unholy mix of all three. And one thing that is not in dispute is that functional societies believe that “everyone for themselves” is a terrible idea and any civilization worth its salt helps those down on their luck or who haven’t been born with money, access, and connections so they can also have the means and desire to contribute to the greater good. When those in power refer to helping the unfortunate improve their lot in life as “giving handouts to lazy bums” and attack all public works and acts of goodwill as a waste, you know the society in question is in trouble. And things get even worse when public discourse in said society fails to push back on this parasitic and sociopathic rhetoric. How to Perpetually Poison the Well There are two rules of American legacy media. The first is that thanks to 40 years of relentlessly working the refs, any political development must be framed around GOP approved talking points. This is why Trump’s nonsensical rants are edited and cut to make him sound somewhat coherent, and interviews with Biden and Harris tended to circle around hard hitting questions like “Donald Trump said you’re stupid and wear ugly shoes. What’s your reaction to that?” Republicans are good at the border, the economy, and the military, Democrats are bad at everything, and if you thought that they did something good, just wait, you silly little libtard, the NYT politics desk will explain to you why lowering inflation and soaring job numbers are actually terrible news. No matter what Democrats actually say during an appearance on the campaign trail, they’re running on trans woke DEI CRT LGBT-BBQ, while no matter what comes out of a Republican’s mouth, their campaign is all about freedom, America, mom, baseball, and apple pie. That is The Official Narrative™ and it is not to be questioned by the unwashed rabble who don’t understand how difficult it is to be a journalist. If you disagree with any of that, then you must be a sweaty conspiracy theorist in their underwear from mom’s basement. At least according to NYT’s editors on social media. To do otherwise is to risk rabid shrieks of “bias,” although said shrieks will come anyway. And yes, trust me, all of this is relevant and we will circle back to it shortly. But first, let’s talk about the other important rule. Every American voter is the second coming of both Einstein and Newton, and when they cast a vote, they sit down at their kitchen tables with a custom quantum supercomputer which uses algorithms that can summon Laplace’s Demon to calculate every possible outcome of every mark on their ballot. Whatever their decision is cannot be questioned. If you don’t understand why they voted the way they did, you cannot criticize their choice. The only explanation is that you simply can’t comprehend their infinite wisdom. By the way, any important conversation or decision always happens at a kitchen table according to politicians. Dining room? Doesn’t count. You live in a studio? Ha! Get out of here. It’s impossible for you to have a serious discussion. Are you debating current events and their impact on your wallet in your living room? Get your ass in that kitchen immediately. These are kitchen table issues so use the appropriate forum, dammit! In the meanwhile, actual voters think that Obamacare and the ACA are two completely different things and they can’t wait to get rid of that stupid Obamacare bullshit to just get their ACA. They believe that foreign aid is a quarter of the federal budget when it’s around 1% or so. They think NASA commands another quarter of the budget, when in fact, it hovers around half a percent. And every year at tax season, they demand a full breakdown of how their tax money is being spent only to diligently ignore a few million charts showing where every dollar goes. For all the rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth about President Musk and his Itty Bitty Gooner Squad dismantling the government, the number of Americans who think that Washington DC steals $6.8 trillion a year, pays out two million freeloaders in their pajamas $200,000 for nothing, then sets the rest on fire is far from trivial. They really do believe that Republicans are “finally fixing this stupid mess” through the power of bald eagle screeching and… I don’t know, mom’s apple pie served on an AR-15? And yes, I’m trying to make all this at least somewhat amusing to lighten the mood a bit, but this is an untenable situation. A democracy — and yes, a republic is a type of democracy, like Honey Nut Cheerios is a type of cereal — relies on informed, caring, empathetic voters to make decisions for the good of an entire society over the long term. As the Greek proverb goes, civilization grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they’ll never sit. Our old men? They’re selling the seeds for golf clubs and pickleball lessons. When a public is treated as both simpletons with the attention span of a goldfish with ADHD and fed red-baiting anachronisms and rage bait instead of actual news, but also as transcendent, infallible oracles whose words we may not understand but must follow, bad things were guaranteed to happen. Things that require empathetic adults in the room to fix. But these adults have now hit levels of caretaker fatigue that were once thought to be utterly impossible, and are so out of fucks, the ones they gave over the past year were borrowed as they’ve ran out of their own long ago… The New Red Scare, Same as the Old Red Scare What’s happening today in American government has a precedent. Not only that, but we’re technically doing the same thing Republicans did in 1953. After painting pretty much the entire bureaucracy as communists trying to destroy the nation with FDR’s New Deal — because as we all know, first, you start caring for your fellow Americans, next you’re in a collective farm after the government takes everything you own — the party’s loudest and most regressive demagogues unleashed an ideological purge of the rank and file that affected the nation for decades. That’s right folks, McCarthyism is back, and it’s not even remotely veiled. It’s just that instead of “are you a communist spy?” the question that the next House Un-American Activities Committee will ask is “do you support DEI initiatives?” before declaring that the very notion that someone other than a late-middle aged white man can be in any position of expertise or authority is “Cultural Marxism.” Meanwhile, rational adults will look at retrograde reprobates who never got over the end of Jim Crow and segregation re-litigating the 1960s and asking how this helps us deal with modern problems. As in the ones from this century. Like more intense and frequent storms from climate change, antibiotic resistance, losing pace with science and technology worldwide, or woefully outdated infrastructure and urban planning. They will listen to the very people who elected said retrograde reprobates being left without a pot to piss in while the billionaires they claim to hate and want to see paying their fair share get more tax cuts, and how they’re losing the family farm, how their life is getting more and more expensive with no relief, and how it feels as if the world has left these people behind and ignores them. The adults will then offer to help. To enact far reaching programs break up our current oligopolies, forcing businesses to compete and lower prices. To build more housing to lower the insane, and yet still rising costs of putting a roof over one’s head. To expand the current public healthcare system to everyone, with private health insurance being an extra add-on or benefit, like in virtually every other wealthy, industrialized nation. To build more public transit to improve mobility. To invest more in education, science, and technology other than predatory middleman apps. To clean up air and water, and launch lucrative, job-creating green energy projects. And the pundits in the media will sneer at these adults with a dyspeptic grimace and accuse them of being utopian dreamers untethered from reality at best, claim they’re trying to destroy the country at worst, or just laugh in their faces. Meanwhile, the very people they’re trying to help turn to them and say “fuck you commie scum, I hope you die and we can use your grave for target practice.” Repeat this for about a quarter century as things continue to get worse and worse for the people actively making the choice to hurt themselves and the rest of the country in what increasingly seems like a murder-suicide pact, and you can probably see why as of late, the adults in the room are no longer wiping the spittle off their faces to still roll up their sleeves and help where they can anyway. Instead, their response — to the shock of millions — is “okay, cool, fuck you too, don’t call me when you’re finding out after fucking around.” That is the sound of their empathy dying. Because while we tend of think of people as either being kind and empathetic or not, empathy is a finite resource. All of us have a different degree of empathy and compassion we can offer, but can only give so much until we’re burnt down to a cinder and simply cannot bring ourself to care anymore. If we’re being abused while we do it, there’s even less empathy we can muster. At some point, we are no longer trying to help our fellow citizens, we are enabling our own abusers who believe that their rightful place in the universe is with their boot on the necks of anyone not exactly like them or actively groveling before them. We have realized as a society that we have been at this point for a very long time now. And we no longer want to be enablers.

The Putinization of America Garry Kasparov The Atlantic Friday 28 February, 2025 We are barely a month into the second presidential term of Donald Trump and he has made his top priorities clear: the destruction of America’s government and influence and the preservation of Russia’s. Unleashing Elon Musk and his DOGE cadres on the federal government, menacing Canada and European allies, and embracing Vladimir Putin’s wish list for Ukraine and beyond are not unrelated. These moves are all strategic elements of a plan that is familiar to any student of the rise and fall of democracies, especially the “fall” part. The sequence is painfully familiar to me personally, because I marched in the streets as it played out in Russia at the start of the 21st century. With ruthless consistency, and the tacit approval of Western leaders, Putin and his oligarch supporters used his fair-ishly elected power to make sure that elections in Russia would never matter again. Of course, American institutions and traditions are far stronger than Russia’s fragile post-Soviet democracy was when Putin took over from Boris Yeltsin, who had already done his share of damage before anointing the former KGB lieutenant colonel to be his successor in 1999. But those who dismissed my warnings that yes, it can happen here at the start of Trump’s first term, in 2017, got quieter after the insurrection on January 6, 2021, and are almost silent now. Trump’s personal affinity for dictators was apparent early on. His praise for Putin and other elected leaders turned strongmen, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, was tinged with undisguised envy. No feisty parliament to wrangle. The free press turned into a propaganda machine for the administration. The justice system unleashed against the opposition. Elections staged only for show. What’s not to like? Putin and Russia always held a special place in Trump world, however. Russian intelligence and propaganda worked full-time to promote Trump once he won the Republican nomination to face Hillary Clinton in 2016. WikiLeaks, long in the service of Russian intelligence but still nurturing its old whistleblower image, fed hacked documents to a naively cooperative American media. The Mueller Report makes the degree of cooperation between various Russian assets and the Trump campaign clear—damningly so, despite years of MAGA crying “Russia hoax” because Special Counsel Robert Mueller decided not to prosecute. Trump made Paul Manafort his campaign chair in May 2016, turning the Russia alarm bells into air-raid sirens for anyone paying attention. Manafort was a former fixer for Ukrainian President Victor Yanukovych, who attempted to thwart Ukrainians’ desire to join Europe only to be deposed by the Maidan Revolution of Dignity and forced to flee to Moscow in 2014. Manafort’s recent expertise was mostly in money and reputation laundering. Adding him to the campaign when Trump’s oddly pro-Putin rhetoric (“strong leader,” “loves his country,” “you think our country is so innocent?”) was already drawing attention seemed a little too on the nose: Why double down? From affinity, the campaign tilted into deeply suspicious fealty toward the Kremlin. Manafort’s subsequent plea of guilty for conspiracy to defraud the United States, and Trump’s later pardon, only threw more wood on the raging collusion fire. Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, during President Barack Obama’s second term. It annexed Crimea and entered eastern Ukraine, offering up feeble pretexts about protecting Russian speakers (whom it bombed indiscriminately), Nazis in Ukraine (also, naturally, the Jews running Ukraine), NATO expansion, and so-called Ukrainian separatists. Russia launched an all-out invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022, in the second year of Joe Biden’s presidency, attempting to take Kyiv in what the Kremlin famously planned to be a three-day special military operation. The timing led Trump and his defenders to say that he had been tough on Russia: The invasion would never have occurred on Trump’s watch. Now that the second Trump administration is racing to tick off every point on Putin’s long wish list, the reason for this has become clear. In Trump’s second term, Putin was expecting him to abandon Ukraine, lift sanctions on Russia, create divisions within NATO, and leave Ukraine relatively defenseless before Europe could get organized to defend it. That is, exactly what is happening today. But Trump lost to Biden in 2020, and, entering his 23rd year in power, Putin needed a new conflict to distract from the dismal conditions in Russia. Dictators always wind up needing enemies to justify why nothing has improved under their eternal rule, and once the domestic opposition is eliminated, foreign adventures are inevitable. Putin didn’t expect much resistance from Ukraine or from the West, which he had successfully corrupted, bluffed, and bullied for decades. But then an unlikely hero appeared in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, a former comedian and actor who, it turned out, could perform a phenomenal impression of Winston Churchill under enemy fire. Ukraine’s brave resistance to the supposedly overwhelming might of the Russian military lasted long enough to force the United States and Europe to join its defense, albeit reluctantly and slowly. Three long years have passed. Iranian drones crash nightly into Ukrainian civilian centers; Russian artillery and missiles reduce entire cities to rubble; China supports Russia’s attempt at conquest while hungrily eyeing Taiwan. Three years of documented reports of Russian torture, rape, and the mass kidnapping of children. North Korean soldiers have arrived to fight and die in Russia’s invasion, while NATO nations stand by, letting Ukrainians die in the war NATO was created to fight. Yet somehow Ukraine holds the line while Russia’s military losses grow and its economy wobbles. Once more unto the breach arrives Donald Trump, back in office with more help from the Kremlin—and the inept Democrats—ready to throw his old pal Putin a lifeline. At his side is someone new: the richest private citizen in the world, Elon Musk. (Putin controls far more money than Musk or Trump—do not underestimate how that affects their perceptions of him as the big boss.) With Musk arrives an overused and misunderstood word in the American vernacular: oligarch. Although it’s not a Russian word, post-Soviet Russia popularized its use and attempted to perfect the system it described. In the 1990s, those most capable of manipulating the newly privatized markets became the richest people in Russia. They quickly seized the levers of political power to expand their resources and fortunes, persecute their rivals, and blur the lines between public and private power until they were erased. Putin, a nondescript technocrat, was a useful front for billionaires such as Boris Berezovsky: Putin appeared to be the hard veteran of the KGB, cleaning up corruption—while what he was really doing was bringing it inside, legitimizing it, and creating a mafia state. Oligarchs could bend the knee and profit, or resist and end up in jail or in exile, their assets ripped away. Russian democracy had no institutional memory, no immune system to fight off these attacks. It was like a baby deer hit by a locomotive. The Russian Duma, purged of real opposition, became a Putin cheer squad under the new United Russia party. Judges and the security services fell in line or were removed in purges. Oversight was twisted into enforcement of the presidential will. Economic policy aimed to nationalize expenses and privatize profits, looting the country to line the pockets of a few dozen well-connected oligarchs. Foreign policy also moved out of public view, conducted by billionaires in resorts and on yachts. A flood of Russian money washed over European politicians and institutions. Kremlin troll farms and bots made social media into a national and then global weapon. If all of this is starting to sound a little familiar, welcome to the Putinization of America, comrade! Trump’s deference to the Russian autocrat has become full-blown imitation. Musk’s promotion of Kremlin-friendly candidates in Germany and Romania and his attacks on Ukraine are bizarre but not random. Berezovsky, who elevated Putin to power from behind the scenes, was soon exiled and replaced with more compliant oligarchs. He also met a grisly end—found hanged at his Berkshire mansion at 67—a precedent that might give pause to anyone thinking of risking his business empire to play that gray-cardinal role for the likes of Trump and J. D. Vance. Trump didn’t campaign on cutting cancer research and foreign aid any more than he did on threatening to annex Greenland and Canada or lifting sanctions on Putin’s dictatorship and extorting Ukraine. What these things have in common is that they provoke conflicts with allies, which then allow him to distinguish the truly loyal. Imitation and servility aren’t the same thing. Trump and Musk could attempt to undermine American democracy and create a Russian-style power vertical without kowtowing to Putin or abandoning Ukraine. But they haven’t. And while imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, affinity and envy aren’t enough to explain the abruptness and totality of the Trump administration’s adoption of every Russian position. On Monday, the anniversary of Russia’s all-out invasion, the United States even joined Russia in voting against a United Nations resolution condemning Russia’s war against Ukraine. Ronald Reagan gave a famous speech supporting Barry Goldwater for president in 1964 in which he said, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size … A government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.” As a “Reagan Communist” myself back in the U.S.S.R., I sympathize with those who want to shrink and limit government power. But replacing it with a junta of unaccountable elites—the Putin model—is not an improvement. Cutting bureaucracy isn’t usually associated with despotism and power grabs. We tend to think of wannabe dictators packing the courts and increasing the size and power of the state. But that isn’t what you do when you want to make the government impotent against private power—your private power. The Putin model was to weaken any state institution that might defy him and to build state power back up only when he had total control. But why has Trump made Putin’s agenda his top priority? The GOP has been compliant with every Trump move so far, but a few members still take issue with Trump calling Zelensky a dictator while cozying up to Putin. So why pick fights with his narrow congressional majorities over Russia so early, with such urgency? The same could be asked of Musk’s reckless slash-and-burn tactics with DOGE, which are beginning to provoke backlash as popular programs are cut and job losses pile up, along with lawsuits. We may never know why Trump is so perversely loyal to Putin. We don’t know exactly why Musk went all in for Trump and Russia or what his deep conflicts of interest in the U.S. and China portend. But the urgency of their actions I do understand, and it’s a dire warning. These are not the acts of people who expect to lose power any time soon, or ever. They are racing to the point where they will not be able to afford to lose control of the mechanisms they are ripping up and remaking in their image. What such people will do when they believe that mounting a coup is the lesser risk to their fortunes and power cannot be predicted. There may be a Pulitzer Prize awaiting the person who discovers the answer to the question “Why?” But stopping Putinization—the looting by cronies, the centralization of authority, the moving of decisions into unaccountable private hands—is the vital matter of the moment. Trump admiring Putin is far less dangerous than Trump becoming him. ~

The Atlantic

The Putinization of America

Trump’s deference to the Russian dictator has become full-blown imitation.

Setting the Record Straight on Social Security Kathleen Romig Center on Budget & Policy Priorities Thursday 20 February, 2025 Social Security has broad support across party lines, income levels, and generations. After 90 years, Social Security remains one of the nation’s most successful, effective, and popular programs. The Social Security Administration (SSA) has strict controls over who receives a Social Security number (SSN) and what documentation is required to prove identity, U.S. citizenship, and immigration status. The agency assigns a unique Social Security number to each eligible individual, and it pays a single Social Security benefit to each qualifying individual with a Social Security number. Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present non-citizens may receive Social Security benefits. Social Security’s payment accuracy rate is very high — well over 99 percent — and it has many safeguards against improper payments, including rigorous protocols to stop paying benefits to people who have died. Misinformation and false statements from President Trump and “Department of Government Efficiency" head Elon Musk claiming otherwise are causing confusion and risk undermining a trusted program that is rigorously administered, and which 69 million people currently rely on and nearly everyone will eventually use. Here are the facts. — Social Security Number: What Is it and Who Is Eligible? – The Social Security Administration only provides new or replacement Social Security cards to people who meet strict authentication requirements. Applicants must fill out an application for a Social Security card (SS-5) and take or mail original documents to a local Social Security office for processing. Applicants must provide at least two documents that prove age, identity, and U.S. citizenship or lawful immigration status. Almost all U.S. citizens are assigned Social Security numbers at birth through SSA’s enumeration at birth program. – Some non-citizens with lawful immigration statuses may receive Social Security numbers. To receive a work-authorized SSN, non-citizen applicants must prove that they have a current, lawful work-authorized immigration status (such as lawful permanent resident status, also known as having a green card). Social Security cards issued to non-citizens with temporary work authorization are labeled “VALID FOR WORK ONLY WITH DHS AUTHORIZATION.” To receive a non-work SSN, applicants must prove they are lawfully present in the U.S. (for example, on a student visa) and provide the valid, non-work reason for which they need an SSN. Social Security cards issued to non-citizens without work authorization are labeled “NOT VALID FOR EMPLOYMENT.” People who are without lawful immigration status are not eligible for an SSN. – The Social Security number is a unique identifier, meaning that one number is assigned to one individual. It was designed this way to keep track of each worker’s earnings so that SSA could determine eligibility for Social Security and the benefit amount, which is based on a worker’s earnings. — Social Security Benefits: Who Gets Them and How Are They Calculated?  – Social Security has a payment accuracy rate of over 99 percent. Only 0.3 percent of Social Security benefits are improper payments, which are typically caused by mistakes or delays. – SSA has many safeguards to ensure accurate payments, including strict documentation and eligibility requirements, quality reviews, and regular reviews of medical eligibility for disability beneficiaries and financial eligibility for Supplemental Security Income (SSI) recipients. SSA works with its Office of Inspector General (OIG) to root out rare cases of outright fraud, in which applicants or beneficiaries deliberately falsify information to get or keep undeserved benefits. SSA and OIG team with state and local authorities in Cooperative Disability Investigations to investigate suspected fraud and to prosecute violations of the law. – Only U.S. citizens and some lawfully present non-citizens may receive Social Security benefits. Social Security benefits are based on the earnings on which people pay Social Security payroll taxes. As of 2004, non-citizens must have had work authorization for their earnings to count toward Social Security eligibility and benefits. In addition, the Social Security Act has prohibited the payment of benefits to non-citizens who are not “lawfully present” in the U.S. since 1996. – SSA only pays one Social Security benefit to each qualifying Social Security number holder. A person may receive a Social Security benefit based on their own work history or based on their relationship to a worker — for example, the surviving spouse of a deceased worker. Beneficiaries who are eligible in multiple ways (for example, as both a worker and a surviving spouse) only receive one benefit that is reduced under the “dual entitlement rule,” which caps the total benefit amount at the highest single benefit for which the person qualifies. In no case does the same individual receive multiple Social Security benefits, nor does SSA pay Social Security benefits to people without SSNs. – SSA has rigorous protocols to stop payments to beneficiaries who have died. State vital statistics agencies report deaths to SSA via the Electronic Death Registration system, typically within days. SSA also collects death data from funeral home directors, family members, and financial institutions. Across all sources, the agency receives nearly 3 million death reports each year, preventing over $50 million in improper payments each month. To catch any deaths that may have escaped reporting, SSA regularly checks to be sure its oldest beneficiaries are using their Medicare benefits — if not, they verify that the beneficiary is still alive. And in the extremely rare cases where benefits are paid to people over 100 years old, SSA has a policy to stop payments by age 115. – Only 0.1 percent of Social Security benefits are paid to people over 100 years old. DOGE head Elon Musk has been circulating a table he claims shows Social Security beneficiaries at very old ages, but he is grossly mischaracterizing its contents. These numbers appear to be drawn from SSA’s Numident database, a record of every Social Security number application since the program started. The Numident typically does not contain death dates for people born before 1920 — before Social Security was established and long before electronic records were kept. A 2023 OIG report explains that “almost none” of the people born before 1920 in this dataset are being paid benefits. As a result, SSA explained that adding death dates to these very old records would be “costly to implement [and] would be of little benefit.” ~ https://www.cbpp.org/blog/setting-the-record-straight-on-social-security?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night Thom Hartmann The New Republic Thursday 6 March, 2025 Tuesday night, Donald Trump stood before the nation and, with the full backing of billionaires like Elon Musk, laid the groundwork for the biggest heist in American history—the rapid, systematic destruction of Social Security, disguised as “reform.” We saw the formal announcement of it during Trump’s non–State of the Union address, and the DOGE announcement earlier in the week that 7,000 employees at Social Security are to be immediately laid off—with as many as half of all Social Security employees (an additional 30,000 people)—soon to be on the chopping block. Republicans and their morbidly rich donors have hated Social Security ever since it was first created in 1935. They’ve called it everything from communism to socialism to a Ponzi scheme, which Musk just called it this week (“the biggest Ponzi scheme of all time,” no less). In fact, it has been the most successful anti-poverty program in the history of America, one now emulated by virtually every democracy in the world. But the right-wing billionaires hate it for several reasons. The first and most important reason is that it demonstrates that government can actually work for people and society. That then provides credibility for other government programs that billionaires hate even more, like regulating their pollution, breaking up their monopolies, making their social media platforms less toxic, and preventing them from ripping off average American consumers. Thus, to get political support for gutting regulatory agencies that keep billionaires and their companies from robbing, deceiving, and poisoning us, they must first convince Americans that government is stupid, clumsy, and essentially evil. Ronald Reagan began that process when he claimed that government was not the solution to our problems but was, in fact, the *cause* of our problems. It was a lie then and is a lie now, but the billionaire-owned media loved it and it’s been repeated hundreds of millions of times. Billionaires also know that for Social Security to survive and prosper, morbidly rich people will eventually have to pay the same percentage of their income into it as bus drivers, carpenters, and people who work at McDonald’s. Right now, people earning over $176,100 pay absolutely nothing into Social Security once that amount has been covered. To make Social Security solvent for the next 75 years, and even give a small raise to everybody on it, the simple fix is for the rich to just start paying Social Security income on all of their income, rather than only the first $176,100. But the idea of having to pay a tax on *all their income* so that middle-class and low-income people can retire comfortably fills America’s billionaires with dread and disgust. So much so that not one single Republican publicly supports the idea. How dare Americans have the temerity, they argue, to demand morbidly rich people help support the existence of an American middle class or help keep orphans and severely disabled people from being thrown out on the streets! Which is why Musk and his teenage hackers are attacking the Social Security administration and its employees with such gusto. By firing thousands of employees, their evil plan is to make interacting with Social Security such a difficult and painful process—involving months to make an appointment and hours or even days just to get someone on the telephone—that retired Americans will get angry with the government and begin to listen to Republicans and Wall Street bankers who tell us they should run the system. (This won’t be limited to Social Security, by the way; as you’re reading these words, Trump and Musk are planning to slash 80,000 employees from the Veterans Administration, with a scheme to dump those who served in our military into our private, for-profit hospital and health insurance systems.) The next step will be to roll out the Social Security version of Medicare Advantage, the privatized version of Medicare that George W. Bush created in 2003. That scam makes hundreds of billions of dollars in profits for giant insurance companies, who then kick some of that profit back to Republican politicians as campaign donations and luxury trips to international resorts. Advantage programs are notorious for screwing people when they get sick and for ripping off our government to the tune of billions every year. But every effort at reforming Medicare or stopping the Medicare Advantage providers from denying us care and stealing from our government has been successfully blocked by bought-off Republicans in Congress. Once Republicans have damaged the staffing of the Social Security Administration so badly that people are screaming about the difficult time they’re having signing up, solving problems or errors, or even getting their checks, right-wing media will begin to promote—with help from GOP politicians and the billionaire Murdoch family’s Fox “News”—people opting out of Social Security and going with a private option that resembles private 401(k)s. Rumor has it they’ll call it “Social Security Advantage” and, like Medicare Advantage, which is administered for massive profits by the insurance giants, it will be run by giant, trillion-dollar banks out of New York. While big insurance companies have probably made something close to a trillion dollars in profits out of our tax dollars from Medicare Advantage since George W. Bush rolled out the program, Social Security Advantage could make that profit level look like chump change for the big banks. And, as an added bonus, billionaires and right-wing media will get to point out how hard it is to deal with the now-crippled Social Security Administration and argue that it’s time to relieve them too of the regulatory burdens of “big government”: gut or even kill off the regulatory agencies and make their yachts and private jets even more tax deductible than they already are. This is why Trump repeated Musk’s lies about 200-year-old people getting Social Security checks and the system being riddled with fraud and waste. In fact, Social Security is one of the most secure and fraud-free programs in American history. But Tuesday night was just the opening salvo. It took Bush almost three years to convince Congress to start the process of privatizing and ultimately destroying Medicare. Having learned from that process, odds are Trump will try to privatize Social Security within the year. And he may well get away with it, unless we can wake up enough people to this coming scam and put enough political pressure—particularly on Republicans—to prevent it from happening. ~

Trump and Musk’s Plan to Destroy Social Security Started Tuesday Night | The New Republic