Tuesday, April 30, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt nine)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

The two people we sent to see Flynn were accomplished, seasoned agents. After the interview, they came back to my office and described it to a small group of us. They said that Flynn had a very good recollection of events, which he related chronologically and lucidly. They did not feel he showed any outward behavioral signs of deception. He did not appear to be nervous or sweating. Not looking side to side. Displayed none of the mannerisms commonly associated with dissembling or lying. They said he related his comments in what appeared to be a very credible fashion.

However, what he said was in absolute, direct conflict with the information that we had.



Monday, April 29, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt eight)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

And also because people on the Hill were consumed by other distractions, such as Benghazi. Yes, still. Benghazi. Over a period of four years there were eight separate full-scale congressional investigations of the attack. The last one was conducted by the House Select Committee on Benghazi, chaired by Representative Trey Gowdy, of South Carolina. That committee’s appointment and hearings made big news for a long time; the next month, when the FBI collaborated with Defense on the capture of Ahmed Abu Khatallah, a ringleader of the Benghazi attack, the news seemed to come and go in a week. (In 2018, Khatallah was sentenced to twenty-two years in prison for his role in the attack.) The first Benghazi investigation, by the House Intelligence Committee, was just ending its second year of work when Jim Comey was sworn in as the new FBI director. That first committee’s report found no evidence of a cover-up, no evidence of wrongdoing by the president or the secretary of state, and no evidence that the Obama administration’s conflicting statements about the cause of the attack had been intentional. The findings of the next seven investigations of Benghazi revealed little more. I continued to be called to testify and brief Congress on Benghazi throughout those four long years. There were weeks when ISIS was posting videos to YouTube of Americans being beheaded, and I was being called to the Hill to testify about Benghazi yet again.

Americans have freer access to more information than at any other time in the history of our country. What happened when we were let loose on that landscape of possibility? People raised their voices, louder all the time, and the boundaries of the landscape we had known wore down as volumes rose. The country started seeming like a village in a folktale under a spell, where the more the people see, the less they know.



Sunday, April 28, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt seven)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

Based on these signals, and on my knowledge that senior staff from other agencies would be in the briefing, I decided that I would delegate the job. The briefers returned to the Hoover building when the meeting was over, and one of them came to my office to tell me how it went. This is standard practice. Briefings to any president are assiduously prepared, with oversight from the director as needed, and if the director is not present, the senior official in attendance comes back to the director to report. This is because, in normal circumstances, the president would provide direction—assign us a task, request more information, or ask questions that the director should be aware of.

But when this official came into my office, where a number of us had gathered, he was dumbfounded. I remember asking, How did it go? and watching him shake his head in response, then explain that the briefer on the dachas spoke for no more than a few minutes. For practically the whole rest of the meeting, the president talked nonstop. That day, North Korea was on the president’s mind. North Korea had recently conducted a test of an intercontinental ballistic missle, potentially capable of striking the U.S.—Kim Jong-un had called the rest a Fourth of July “gift” to “the arrogant Americans.” But the president did not believe it had happened. The president thought it was a hoax. He thought that North Korea did not have the capability to launch such missiles. He said he knew this because Vladimir Putin had told him so.



Saturday, April 27, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt six)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

In the first few briefings with Sessions, conversations necessarily covered a lot of basic material. Jim Comey was the FBI director, and he began at the beginning. Described the differences between the Sunni and Shia practices of Islam. Explained which terrorist groups lined up with which religious philosophies. During the PDB, Comey and Sessions would have religious discussions: wide ranging, even free flowing. As a double major in chemistry and religion, Comey was well positioned to engage the AG on the groups we tracked and the religions they followed. Sessions believed that Islam—inherently—advocated extremism. The director tried to explain that the reality was more complicated. Talking about religion was Comey’s way of trying to connect with Sessions on terrain familiar to them both.

Leading the Justice Department is one of the biggest responsibilities a person can have in this country. Getting up to speed on intelligence, and categorizing it properly in memory, is a basic part of the job. Sessions did not compartmentalize the new knowledge he acquired. He would say, I saw in the paper the other day . . . and then would repeat an item that we had briefed him on a few days earlier, intelligence from the PDB. Sessions was confusing classified intelligence with news clips. It was an early sign that this transition would be more challenging that we expected.



Friday, April 26, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt five)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

Obama believed the War on Terror had led the U.S. in the wrong direction. Like many Democrats (and many others), he believed the use of “enhanced” interrogation techniques, such as waterboarding, amounted to outright torture and had compromised our values as a nation. He also believed that forms of interrogation that fell short of “enhanced” were ultimately more effective. Many Republicans, but by no means all, saw the War on Terror from a different angle. They believed all terrorist suspects, including U.S. citizens, should be treated as enemy combatants—with no rights or constitutional protections. They believed the military and the intelligence agencies should use whatever interrogation methods they thought would get results. The ends justified the means.

Three days after Obama’s inauguration, he signed Executive Order 13491—“Ensuring Lawful Interrogations”—which established a task force to evaluate the federal government’s interrogation and detainee-transfer policies. The next document he signed, Executive Order 13492, ordered the closure of the detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay. The first policy documents of the new administration, these orders became choice targets for Obama’s political opponents. Most congressional Republicans would not have cared if the executive orders had been blank, or filled with Holy Scripture. As Obama’s first forays into counterterrorism policy, these orders were bound to be condemned for political advantage.



Thursday, April 25, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt four)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

In the summer of 2006 I moved out of organized crime and into counterterrorism. My first case was the London airliner plot. A bunch of young terrorists had learned how to make bombs out of easily available household products. The airliner plot is the reason why, today, when you get on an airplane, all your liquids, aerosols, gels, creams, and pastes have to fit inside a quart-sized plastic bag. The key word for understanding this case—its plain facts and its larger significance—is “components.”

The terrorists had devised a way to break down the components of explosive devices so that they could elude detection at airports by airport security and then reassemble the devices once an airliner was aloft. My unit and I gathered intelligence from the British investigation and tried to determine if any Americans were involved. Coordinating the various services—the FBI and CIA; British intelligence and others—required learning how to share information seamlessly. This case also brought me face-to-face for the first time with the man who succeeded Louis Freeh as FBI director, Robert Mueller.



Wednesday, April 24, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt three)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

The fingerprints of the vory were turning up in America with growing frequency. We chased leads on Russian gangsters sent to New York to “organize” the rackets in the city. We followed leads about young Russian players in the National Hockey League who were being extorted by gangsters back in the homeland. One of the kingpins we were tracking, Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov, concocted a scheme to guarantee a gold medal for the Russian pairs figure skaters in the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. The fix worked. The Russians were awarded the medal, but after the ensuing scandal about the judging, the members of the second-place team were awarded duplicate gold medals, too.

Vadim Thomas, one of the best investigators on our squad, pitched the figure-skating case to the Southern District of New York—known as the Sovereign District of New York, because the U.S. attorney’s office there has a lot of power and does not shy from using it creatively. Tokhtakhounov was indicted and arrested by Italian police on charges of conspiracy to rig the competition. For months the FBI worked with the Italians and with Interpol to get him extradited. Before long, word came to the squad that a Russian oligarch had pledged two hundred million dollars to get Tokhtakhounov out of jail. Next thing we knew, his release was ordered by the Italian Supreme Court. He was gone, in the wind, back to Russia, where he has been living openly. (And from there, he allegedly continued to run criminal enterprises in the United States. In 2013, Tokhtakhounov was indicted for money laundering in connection with an illegal gambling ring that operated out of Trump Tower. Several months after this indictment, Tokhtakhounov was a VIP guest at Donald Trump’s Miss Universe contest in Moscow.) We’ve never had a chance to get him again. In the scheme of things, the evident corruption behind a figure-skating medal may seem trivial. But for me and for a lot of guys on our squad, this was a critical turn of events.



Tuesday, April 23, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt two)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

Let me state the proposition openly: The work of the FBI is being undermined by the current president. He and his partisan supporters have become corrosive to the organization. In public remarks and on social media, he has continued to beat the drum about the “lies and corruption going on at the highest levels of the FBI!” On Twitter alone, Trump has identified the FBI with the “Deep State,” the pejorative term he uses to refer to professional public servants who conduct the nation’s business without regard to politics; he has called Jim Comey “a terrible and corrupt leader”; he has called the investigation of Russian interference in the elections and possible ties with his campaign “perhaps the most tainted and corrupt case EVER!”; and he has referred to two of the investigators on the Russia case, themselves, as “a fraud against our Nation,” “hating frauds,” and “incompetent and corrupt.” His insults have emboldened legions of goons to push further. Even mainstream news outlets have been unable to refrain from trafficking in destructive clickbait, juxtaposing the terms “FBI” and “corruption” in headlines over stories ostensibly covering “both sides” of the brawl that now passes for argument. TRUMP SUPPORTERS SAY MCCABE FIRING EXPOSES FBI CORRUPTION—that’s not Breitbart, it’s USA Today.



Monday, April 22, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe, excerpt one)

from The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump by Andrew G. McCabe:

The embedded assumption of all these superlatives piled up in the future tense seemed to be: The Bureau was a mess. If he believed that to be true—and it was not—then I bore a good part of the responsibility. Why, then, was he flattering me? He spent most of this meeting spewing stock phrases he often uses—You’re great, you’re terrific—all of which rang hollow. I knew that he had been aware of me since 2016, when he referred to me in terms that were not flattering at all. My wife, Jill, had run unsuccessfully for a seat in the Virginia state senate back in 2015, and she had received money, as other candidates did, from the state Democratic Party and from a political action committee run by the Democratic governor at the time, Terry McAuliffe, a friend of Bill and Hillary Clinton’s. Because the following year I was involved in the FBI’s email investigation, the president during the campaign decided to allege that I had been bribed to look the other way. He tweeted a headline from The Wall Street Journal that insinuated as much—CLINTON ALLY AIDED CAMPAIGN OF FBI OFFICIAL’S WIFE—and on the campaign stump expanded the insinuation into a conspiracy theory, in which Clinton directed McAuliffe to make campaign donations to Jill as a quid pro quo. So I was disregarding all of his You’re great, You’re terrific verbiage, letting it flow past, like the blather it was.

Then he said, Your only problem is that one mistake you made. That thing with your wife. That one mistake.



Sunday, April 21, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt thirteen)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

A few of them, however, were there to argue. An older woman in sunglasses, with a black scarf around her head, told Zhuang he should get a job. She asked him where he was born, reminding him that he wasn’t really American. He had forgotten, she was suggesting, that he was Chinese.

Zhuang lost his temper. “How much money are you getting to come here?” he yelled at her. “Do you dare say it?! You don’t dare! I am Zhuang Liehong! I am from Wukan Village! No one paid me to be here!”

With his phone, he started filming the crowd of people around him. Some hid their faces behind red binders that they were carrying or put on sunglasses. Some tried to knock the phone out of his hands. He, in turn, spewed a string of harsh words into his amplifier, yelling at the woman, yelling at the apathetic smoking men and the WELCOME sign across the street.



Saturday, April 20, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt twelve)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

When Karen switched churches, again on a recommendation, she found herself in another big conference room. The plump Chinese preacher worked himself into a lather, his face reddening, his voice growing pitchy. Then with no warning, the man leaped out of Mandarin into some other language. At the time, she guessed it was Italian. She wondered what happened. And then someone explained to her that the man had been inspired by God. He was speaking in tongues. A few weeks later the church invited another pastor, a white man, to come and talk to the congregation. He worked up to the same lather, speaking quickly in English, but instead of switching languages, he invited sick people up to the front of the room. He would heal them, he said, by putting his hands on them. To Karen, sitting in the back of the room, the performance was a relief. It wasn’t just Chinese people who were afflicted by this brand of insanity.



Friday, April 19, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt eleven)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Old Lin was the only one among the protest organizers who had previous experience in village governance. He knew how to organize people, although he described himself as a simple man who likes to keep to himself. “How the stomach feels is real,” he once told me, nearly a year after the election. “Everything else is illusion.”

Lin had worked as a cadre—a low-level official in the Communist Party—in the village from 1969 to 1974 after serving as a soldier in the People’s Liberation Army. Lin was appointed to serve as a village leader under Xue Chang, the man who would go on to steal most of Wukan’s land. The pair did not get along, and Old Lin left quickly. He was one of the first people to leave the village and go into business, opening up a grocery store and then going into clothing manufacturing. He had done well for himself. His relative wealth, people theorized, would make him a virtually incorruptible village leader.



Thursday, April 18, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt ten)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

The cost of passage to the United States varies widely depending on geography, age, and luck. Karen’s cost only a fraction of what some pay. In Fujian, where huge numbers of people left for the United States in the 1980s and ‘90s, U.S. visas were more difficult to obtain. Visa officers were more suspicious of travelers coming from Fujian, more willing to turn down applications, and human traffickers in the region could charge as much as eighty thousand dollars for their services. In the 1990s, it was not unusual for an immigrant from Fujian to make a months-long journey by boat. But after boats repeatedly proved uncomfortable and dangerous, they slowly fell out of fashion. In 1993 a boat called the Golden Venture sank in very public fashion off a Far Rockaway beach in New York, and a report issued by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1996 described repurposed fishing boats as “in danger of sinking,” their human cargo “packed into hot, poorly ventilated, and confined spaces.” Today Fujianese are more likely to travel first to Mexico or Canada and to make their way secretly over the border.

For hopeful working-class immigrants from other parts of China—from Henan or Guangdong, for example—the options are cheaper and more obtainable. Some, like Zhuang and Little Yan, manage the feat of arriving and staying in the United States by simply joining a tour group. Others pay agencies to help with their applications. Older people will apply for tourist visas, making their case with false documents, provided by their agent, that attest to the applicant’s steady employment or property holdings in China. Younger people will apply for student visas, enrolling in schools in cities or towns scattered across the Midwest, many of them switching their plane tickets after the fact and flying straight to New York.



Wednesday, April 17, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt nine)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

The standoff ended on December 21, and negotiations began. According to the villagers present, the deputy press secretary agreed, in the meetings, to release the village leaders still held in jail—including Zhuang—and to drop all charges. He agreed to return Xue Jinbo’s body and to launch an investigation into his death. The surviving twelve members of the negotiating council were given the authority to govern the village until an election could be organized in February or March. It was the first time in modern Chinese history that a protesting village had won this kind of compromise. Online, Western observers and hopeful Chinese activists spoke, tentatively, of a “Wukan Model.” Villagers started considering whether they wanted to run for election.

Zhuang had not been there for the barricade. He had spent twenty-one days in the Guangzhou prison, and by the time he got out, the siege of Wukan was over and his friend was dead. The village had won. Zhuang found it was possible to feel elated and brokenhearted all at once. He figured it was simple luck that while Brother Xue had been beaten, he had escaped unscathed. Maybe Brother Xue had run into a particularly sadistic prison guard. Maybe someone had paid the other inmates to rough him up and things got out of hand. Torture, in Chinese prisons, wasn’t unheard of. The Guangdong deputy party secretary had agreed to investigate Brother Xue’s death, but nothing would come of it. Zhuang, and Xue Jinbo’s family, would never find out what happened. Zhuang supposed that Brother Xue had sacrificed himself for the dream of what Wukan Village might one day be—its orchards restored, waters clear, and its villagers free and unified. He did not worry, yet, that the dream had died in that prison alongside Brother Xue.



Tuesday, April 16, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt eight)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Nationwide, more Chinese people apply for and attain asylum every year than any other group. Every years Chinese asyless outnumber those from the next three nations (Guatemala, El Salvador, and Egypt) combined. For a working-class Chinese immigrant with no existing family in the United States, asylum is one of the only pathways to citizenship. And yet for the most part, Chinese asylum seekers have avoided New York’s ecosystem of legal aid services; Zhuang and Little Yan’s path was rare. Spanish, Arabic, and French speakers are common at aid organizations, but when I began inquiring on behalf of Zhuang, I found very few pro bono lawyers available who spoke Mandarin. Chinese immigrants, instead, had created a network of their own. In Flushing, the signs cluttering the sidewalk included multiple offices for immigration lawyers. People exchanged their lawyers’ phone numbers while lingering around employment offices or waiting for customers in nail salons.

Asylum claims from China are so successful, in large part, because of the specific trypes of persecution Chinese citizens face. To be granted asylum in the United States, an individual must prove that he or she faces persecution based on race, religion, nationality, political opinion, or social group. The persecution must have been carried out by government forces or else involve violence the government is unable to prevent. Immigrants fleeing gang violence in Honduras or El Salvador are hard-pressed to fulfill all these requirements—it is difficult to prove that the violence is targeted and that governments are doing nothing to prevent it. In Chinese asylum cases, however, the government is typically behind the persecution.



Monday, April 15, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt seven)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

In 1882 the United State decided, for the first time in its history, to place a blanket ban on a single ethnic group. The Chinese Exclusion Act put into place a ten-year moratorium on any new working-class immigration from China. It denied naturalization for any Chinese person already living in the United States and required anyone leaving the United States with the intention of returning to obtain a “certificate of return.” In 1888 another measure would cancel all the certificates of return, stranding nearly twenty thousand people.



Sunday, April 14, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt six)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Men fled China, going wherever there was work. They traveled to Peru to harvest the bird guano that was a popular and expensive fertilizer in Europe. They found their way to Cuba and worked on sugar plantations. In America they became refugees and coolies, a cheap labor solution in the aftermath of the Civil War. Drawn to San Francisco by the Gold Rush, they took over gold claims that other miners had abandoned, in locations where the work was particularly hard or the gold scarce.

Most of the laborers fleeing China paid for their journey to the United States by way of a credit-ticket system. Agents would pay for their passage to California, later to be reimbursed with interest. A network of Chinese middlemen recruited immigrants from China for big U.S. companies. In San Francisco, family-based associations opened halfway houses close to the port, offering new arrivals a place to sleep, eat, and bathe. In exchange, the clan organizations required immigrants to pay a fee before leaving town. Deals were made with shipping companies to ensure that any laborer who had yet to pay down the debt he had incurred for passage to the United States would not be allowed return passage to China.



Saturday, April 13, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt five)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Then someone had asked Tang if he owned the idea of democracy. “Is it yours, or does it belong to everyone?” He conceded the point. There was no reason to insist that the first party was the only one or even the best one. So he rented an office and started holding weekly meetings. Every Tuesday he talked about China’s history and read the biographies of activists still in jail to a crowd of people sitting in folding chairs. On the final Tuesday of every month, he led his group to the corner of 42nd Street and Twelfth Avenue, across from the Chinese consulate. Tang’s party planted itself there, to serve as a reminder that dissent still existed.

In 2014 Tang’s protests faced frigid winter weather. The wind came up the Hudson River from the sea, whistling through the moorage of a retired World War II aircraft carrier—the Intrepid—just past 42nd Street. It would bend around the corner of 12th Avenue and force its way through sweaters, coats, and mittens. Protesters took turns holding up the banners, letting their hands thaw, then freeze, then thaw again. Tang would speak into a megaphone, and every once in a while the crowd would pick up a political chant, their voices carried off by the wind. Snow piled up on the sidewalks, and people stomped their feet against the cold.



Friday, April 12, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt four)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

New York City has the largest Chinese population of any city in the United States. Immigrants from China make up the second-largest (after immigrants from the Dominican Republic) and fastest-growing immigrant group. The city has no single Chinatown. If you take the term in its most expansive sense—designating an enclave of Chinese immigrants—there are several. In each neighborhood the working class built upon the ones that came before it. Manhattan’s Chinatown came first, settled by immigrants from southern China. Nearly a century later, after immigration restrictions had been imposed and then loosened, people from Fuijan came en masse, thousands of people traversing the globe on airplanes and rickety boats to sneak over borders and onto New York’s beaches and docks.

When, in the 1990s, the influx of Fujianese found Manhattan too crowded, they moved along the N train into the Brooklyn neighborhood called Sunset Park. They kept their ties to Manhattan through dollar vans and easy train access, traveling back to the old neighborhood to look for jobs and visit lawyers.



Thursday, April 11, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt three)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Flushing, in the centuries that followed the Quaker agitation, had been reinvented as a horticultural center full or orchards and nurseries, then was transformed once again by the enormous ash heap on the edge of the neighborhood. The ash heap, in turn, was transformed to make way for the 1939 World’s Fair, and then, in 1946, the park served as the temporary headquarters of the newly formed United Nations.

Neither the ash nor the nurseries lent themselves, particularly, to the formation of a Chinese community. The UN, on the other hand, did. Taiwanese diplomats made their homes in the neighborhood. And over time, that handful of anchor families attracted other immigrants from Taiwan—people who were more likely to speak English than they were Cantonese and who, as a consequence, felt unwelcome in Manhattan’s Chinatown. For the most part, these early immigrants were educated. They had money or the means to make it. They invested in real estate and opened restaurants. When immigrants came from other parts of China—places where they spoke Mandarin rather than Cantonese or Fujianese—Queens beckoned. By 2014 the U.S. Census Bureau estimated there were more than two hundred thousand Chinese people living in the borough.



Wednesday, April 10, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt two)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

Flushing, Queens, lies at the end of the number 7 train, under the shadow of a giant metal globe that someone, in 1964, named the Unisphere. It was mounted atop a rehabilitated ash heap, a trash pile so notorious that it was the likely inspiration for the “Valley of Ashes” described in The Great Gatsby, lying along the road from West Egg to New York City. The Unisphere was the crowning structure of the 1964 World’s Fair. Lights were placed to indicate capital cities, and circles of steel around it represented orbiting satellites, an intended tribute to “man’s achievement on a shrinking globe, in an expanding universe.”



Tuesday, April 9, 2019

the last book I ever read (Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers, excerpt one)

from Patriot Number One: American Dreams in Chinatown by Lauren Hilgers:

At the tail end of his plan, the point at which it trailed off into a haze of hard work, success, and prosperity, was Flushing, Queens. Zhuang had carried out his scheming largely online, and had been wise enough to realize that New York City was too large a place to approach uninformed. He had skimmed through online discussion boards and squinted his one nearsighted eye at photographs. Manhattan’s Chinatown, he decided, would be too dense and urban for his village sensibilities, and in the center of the city, real estate would most likely be expensive. Flushing, on the other hand, had become the destination of choice for most working-class immigrants from Mainland China. He looked up photos and saw a clutter of signs in Mandarin. He saw restaurants, driving schools, supermarkets, and even a sign for the Democratic Party of China. He made up his mind that this, at least temporarily, would be his destination in the United States.

Flushing, as far as Zhuang understood it, was a new, more modern kind of Chinatown. It was dominated by the working class, the result of an influx of new immigrants from new parts of China—inland and northern provinces that had little history of exploration or emigration overseas. Flushing wasn’t controlled by the family-based patronage systems that had once ruled Manhattan’s Chinatown or by the human smugglers who had brought in tens of thousands of Fujianese in the 1990s. It was a neighborhood where people would speak Zhuang’s language and the food would suit his palate. There would be opportunities for work and a community of activists who would respect him. He would make friends, explore the neighborhood, and plan his next steps from there.



Monday, April 8, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt twelve)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

In the weeks after the Elk City tornado, Lonnie Risenhoover toured the damage with various government officials. A man from the Federal Emergency Management Agency came through to determine who was eligible for disaster relief. While driving the man around Elk City, Lonnie spotted Miss Finley. Her house was a ruin and her barn was gone: surely she was eligible for relief. Lonnie stopped so the FEMA guy might speak with her. “You know,” said Miss Finley, “for the last ten years I prayed for a tornado to come and take that barn. I didn’t think it would take the house, too.” She seemed to think her reasoning self-evident. The FEMA guy said he didn’t understand: Why had she been praying for a tornado to take her barn? “Every time I pull out of the driveway I’m looking at that red barn,” she said. “And every time I pull into the driveway I’m looking at that red barn.” At which point Lonnie asked the FEMA guy if he was ready to leave. He wasn’t. He was still puzzled: Why did it bother the woman to look at her red barn? “That barn,” said Miss Finley, “is where my husband committed suicide ten years ago.”

And so you might have good reason to pray for a tornado, whether it comes in the shape of swirling winds, or a politician. You imagine the thing doing the damage that you would like to see done, and no more. It’s what you fail to imagine that kills you.



Sunday, April 7, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt eleven)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

But Kim wondered about the wisdom of their new ambition. “It’s hard to talk to dead people about the decisions they made,” she said. “It’s one of the challenges we have. But I was trying to ask what they would do if they’d had more time.” She interviewed survivors in Alabama and Mississippi and came away with a startling insight: time might be beside the point. It wasn’t that people who had apparently ignored the government’s alerts had been oblivious to them. “They were all aware of the warnings,” she said. “It isn’t that people wantonly disregard warnings. It’s that they think it won’t hit them.” The paper Kim subsequently coauthored pointed out that people associate “home” with “safety.” This feeling was reinforced each and every day that nothing horrible happened inside of it. People acquired a “false confidence that they would not be hit.” Some inner calculation led them to believe that, if it’s never happened here, it never will.

The people who had failed to seek shelter in the way that, say, a meteorologist thinks they should have done had one thing in common: they lived in homes that had never been struck by a tornado. They inhabited a region prone to tornadoes; they had lived through many tornado warnings; but right up until 2011 they themselves had been spared a direct hit. They offered Kim lots of explanations for their immunity to catastrophic risk. They claimed that tornadoes never crossed the river they lived on, for instance. Or that tornadoes always split as they approached their town. Or that tornadoes always followed the highway. Or that tornadoes never struck the old Indian burial grounds. People who lived on the west side of a big city felt more exposed than people on the east side: they believed buildings offered protection. A lot of people seemed to believe that hills did, too. “Where tornadoes go is totally random,” Kim said. “The steering winds are in the upper atmosphere. But people are not thinking of the forces of the atmosphere. They are thinking of their place on the ground.” Psychologists have long known that people see patterns where none exist. Londoners during the Blitz felt they’d deduced the targets of German bombers by where the bombs had fallen, when the bombs had been dropped randomly over the city. Americans routinely made the same mistake with the weather.



Saturday, April 6, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt ten)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

After Trump took office, DJ Patil watched with wonder as the data disappeared across the federal government. Both the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of the Interior removed from their websites the links to climate change data. The USDA removed the inspection reports of business accused of animal abuse by the government. The new acting head of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, Mick Mulvaney, said he wanted to end public access to records of consumer complaints against financial institutions. Two weeks after Hurricane Maria, statistics that detailed access to drinking water and electricity in Puerto Rico were deleted from the FEMA website. In a piece for FiveThirtyEight, Clare Malone and Jeff Asher pointed out that the first annual crime report released by the FBI under Trump was missing nearly three-quarters of the data tables from the previous year. “Among the data missing from the 2016 report is information on arrests, the circumstances of homicides (such as the relationships between victims and perpetrators), and the only national estimate of annual gang murders,” they wrote. Trump said he wanted to focus on violent crime, and yet was removing the most powerful tool for understanding it.

And as for the country’s first chief data scientist—well, the Trump administration did not show the slightest interest in him. “I basically knew that these guys weren’t going to listen to us,” said DJ, “so we created these exit memos. The memos showed that this stuff pays for itself a thousand times over.” He hoped the memos might give the incoming administration a sense of just how much was left to be discovered in the information the government had collect. There were questions crying out for answers: for instance, what was causing the boom in traffic fatalities? The Department of Transportation had giant pools of data waiting to be searched. One hundred Americans were dying every day in car crashes. The thirty-year trend of declining traffic deaths has reversed itself dramatically. “We don’t really know what’s going on,” said DJ. “Distracted driving? Heavier cars? Faster driving? More driving? Bike lanes?”



Friday, April 5, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt nine)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

In 2004 Rick Santorum, a senator from AccuWeather’s home state of Pennsylvania and a recipient of Myers family campaign contributions, introduced a bill that would have written this idea into law. The bill was a little vague, but it appeared to eliminate the National Weather Service’s website or any other means of communication with the public. It allowed the Weather Service to warn people about the weather just before it was about to kill them, but at no other time—and exactly how anyone would be any good at predicting extreme weather if he or she wasn’t predicting all the other weather was left unclear.

Pause a minute to consider the audacity of that maneuver. A private company whose weather predictions were totally dependent on the billions of dollars spent by the U.S. taxpayer to gather the data necessary for those predictions, and on decades of intellectual weather work sponsored by the U.S. taxpayer, and on international data-sharing treaties made on behalf of the U.S. taxpayer, and on the very forecasts that the National Weather Service generated, was, in effect, trying to force the U.S. taxpayer to pay all over again for what the National Weather Service might be able to tell him or her for free.



Thursday, April 4, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt eight)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

Alexander had first assumed that the scandal was that Wilbur Ross was hiding money from the U.S. government. But after pressing the Department of Commerce to fill in the giant holes in Ross’s story, he realized that Ross had misled Forbes. For thirteen years.”I went back in the files,” said Alexander. “We [at Forbes] had [initially] counted the money that belonged to his investors in one of his funds as his own money. I was stunned that anyone had let that slide. He lucked into a way to be on the list, without deserving to be on the list. But once he gets on the list, he lies. For years.” The Forbes reporters were accustomed to having rich people mislead them about the size of their wealth, but nearly all of them had been trying to keep their names off the list. “In the history of the magazine only three people stand out as having made huge efforts to get on, or end up higher than they belonged,” said Alexander. “One was [Saudi] Prince Alwaleed. The second was Donald Trump. And the third was Wilbur Ross.”

The scandal wasn’t that Wilbur Ross was hiding two billion dollars from the government, but that he’d never had the two billion dollars in the first place. Alexander wrote up his findings, after which, he says, “I got a bunch of calls from people who had worked with or for Wilbur Ross, to say how happy they were the truth finally came out.” The former number-three man at Ross’s old firm, who had worked with Ross for twenty-five years, spoke on the record. “Wilbur doesn’t have an issue with bending the truth,” he said. This was the man Trump had chosen to guard the integrity of the data on which our society rests.



Wednesday, April 3, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt seven)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

It was an open question as to which was more mysterious to a male NASA engineer: outer space or the American female. They appeared to have better data on outer space. They had prepared makeup kits for their space shuttles, for instance, even though Kathy and a couple of the other women didn’t wear makeup. They set out to design flame-retardant one-size-fits-all bras and underpants, until the women explained that the one-size-fits-all approach used for men’s underwear wasn’t going to work with women’s underwear. In the end, the women won the right to buy their own flame-retardant underwear. And how would a woman urinate in space? The engineers worried about that one for a while. The male astronauts had been fitted with condom catheters, but these were always threatening to leak or even burst and obviously wouldn’t work for women. To everyone’s relief, a NASA engineer created an extra-absorbent polymer and worked it into a diaper that could be worn by all. (In the bargain he’d anticipated the baby diapers of the future.)

And of course, the male engineers were seriously worried about what might ensue if a woman had her period in space. “The idea that women might menstruate in orbit drove the whole place up a wall,” said Kathy. “The male world’s response was, Oh, that’s ok. We’ll just suppress their periods. We all looked at each other and said, ‘You and what other army, buddy?’” The engineers finally agreed to pack tampons in the supply kits.The first time Kathy opened her kit she saw that each tampon had been removed from its paper wrapper and sealed in a plastic fireproof case. Heat-sealed tampons. Each plastic case was connected to another. She pulled on the top one and out pops this great long chain of little red plastic cases, like a string of firecrackers. Hundreds of tampons, for one woman to survive for a few days in space. “It was like a bad stage act,” she said. “There just seemed this endless unfurling of Lord only knows how many tampons.”



Tuesday, April 2, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt six)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

As I drove out of Hanford, the Trump administration unveiled its budget for the Department of Energy. ARPA-E had since won the praise of business leaders from Bill Gates to Lee Scott, the former CEO of Walmart, to Fred Smith, the Republican founder of FedEx, who has said that “pound for pound, dollar for dollar, activity for activity, it’s hard to find a more effective thing government has done than ARPA-E.” Trump’s first budget eliminated ARPA-E altogether. It also eliminated the spectacularly successful $70 billion loan program. It cut funding to the national labs in a way that implies the laying off of six thousand of their people. It eliminated all research on climate change. It halved the funding for work to secure the electrical grid from attack or natural disaster. “All the risks are science-based,” said John MacWilliams when he saw the budget. “You can’t gut the science. If you do, you are hurting the country. If you gut the core competency of the DOE, you gut the country.”

But you can. Indeed, if you are seeking to preserve a certain worldview, it actually helps to gut science. Trump’s budget, like the social forces behind it, is powered by a perverse desire—to remain ignorant. Donald Trump didn’t invent this desire. He was just its ultimate expression.



Monday, April 1, 2019

the last book I ever read (The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis, excerpt five)

from The Fifth Risk by Michael Lewis:

The $70 billion program that John MacWilliams had been hired to evaluate was a case in point. It had been authorized by Congress in 2005 to lend money, at very low interest rates, to businesses, so that they might develop game-changing energy technologies. The idea that the private sector underinvests in energy innovation is part of the origin story of the DOE. “The basic problem is that there is no constituency for an energy program,” James Schlesinger, the first secretary of energy, said as he left the job. “There are many constituencies opposed.” Existing energy business—oil companies, utilities—are obviously hostile to government-sponsored competition. At the same time, they are essentially commodity businesses, without a lot of fat in them. The stock market does not reward even big oil companies for research and development that will take decades to pay off. And the sort of research that might lead to huge changes in energy production often doesn’t pay off for decades. Plus it requires a lot of expensive science: discovering a new kind of battery or a new way of capturing solar energy is not like creating a new app. Fracking—to take one example—was not the brainchild of private-sector research but the fruit of research paid for twenty years ago by the DOE. Yet fracking has collapsed the price of oil and gas and led to American energy independence. Solar and wind technologies are another example. The Obama administration set a goal in 2009 of getting the cost of utility-scale solar energy down by 2020 from 27 cents a kilowatt-hour to 6 cents. It’s now at 7 cents, and competitive with natural gas because of loans made by the DOE. “The private sector only steps in once DOE shows it can work,” said Franklin Orr, a Stanford professor of engineering who took a two-year leave of absence to oversee the DOE’s science programs.