Posts Tagged ‘sewage’
“The call is coming from inside the house”*…
As the old proverb goes, “we become what we hate.” In this post, two examples of groups adopting practices they had decried in their enemies.
First, from the fetid ocean of political finance: it’s been pretty obvious for some time that the Trump Administration and the Republican party at large have embraced the doctrine of “honest graft” (and here and here and…). What is perhaps less obvious is the extent to which that impulse has affected (infected?) their approach to campaign finance per se (and here).
But, as Stanford professor Adam Bonica demonstrates, greed is an equal opportunity vice…
The digital deluge is a familiar annoyance for anyone on a Democratic fundraising list. It’s a relentless cacophony of bizarre texts and emails, each one more urgent than the last, promising that your immediate $15 donation is the only thing standing between democracy and the abyss.
The main rationale offered for this fundraising frenzy is that it’s a necessary evil—that the tactics, while unpleasant, are brutally effective at raising the money needed to win. But an analysis of the official FEC filings tells a very different story. The fundraising model is not a brutally effective tool for the party; it is a financial vortex that consumes the vast majority of every dollar it raises.
We all have that one obscure skill we’ve inadvertently maxed out. Mine happens to be navigating the labyrinth of campaign finance data. So, after documenting the spam tactics in a previous article, I told myself I’d just take a quick look to see who was behind them and where the money was going.
That “quick look” immediately pulled me in. The illusion of a sprawling grassroots movement, with its dozens of different PAC names, quickly gave way to a much simpler and more alarming reality. It only required pulling on a single thread—tracing who a few of the most aggressive PACs were paying—to watch their entire manufactured world unravel. What emerged was not a diverse network of activists, but a concentrated ecosystem built to serve the firm at its center: Mothership Strategies.
To understand Mothership’s central role, one must understand its origins. The firm was founded in 2014 by senior alumni of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC): its former digital director, Greg Berlin, and deputy digital director, Charles Starnes. During their tenure at the DCCC, they helped pioneer the fundraising model that now dominates Democratic inboxes—a high-volume strategy that relies on emotionally charged, often hyperbolic appeals to compel immediate donations. This model, sometimes called “churn and burn,” prioritizes short-term revenue over long-term donor relationships.
After leaving the DCCC, Berlin and Starnes effectively privatized this playbook, building a business around the party’s most aggressive tactics and turning an internal strategy into a fundraising powerhouse for the Democratic Party—or so it might seem on the surface.
They became the operational heart of a sprawling nexus of interconnected political action committees, many of which they helped create and which now serve as their primary clients. These are not a diverse collection of grassroots groups; they are a tightly integrated network that functions primarily to funnel funds to Mothership. Their names are likely familiar from the very texts and emails that flood inboxes: Progressive Turnout Project, Stop Republicans, and End Citizens United to name a few.
The relationship between the firm and this network is cemented by blatant self-dealing. The most glaring example is End Citizens United. In 2015, just one year after founding their consulting firm, Mothership principals Greg Berlin and Charles Starnes also co-founded this PAC. It quickly became one of their largest and most reliable clients, a perfect circle of revenue generation that blurs the line between vendor and client.
The core defense of these aggressive fundraising tactics rests on a single claim: they are brutally effective. The FEC data proves this is a fallacy. An examination of the money flowing through the Mothership network reveals a system designed not for political impact, but for enriching the consultants who operate it.
To understand the scale of this operation, consider the total amount raised. Since 2018, this core network of Mothership-linked PACs has raised approximately $678 million from individual donors. (This number excludes money raised by the firm’s other clients, like candidate campaigns, focusing specifically on the interconnected PACs at the heart of this system.) Of that total fundraising haul, $159 million was paid directly to Mothership Strategies for consulting fees, accounting for the majority of the $282 million Mothership has been paid by all its clients combined…
… After subtracting these massive operational costs—the payments to Mothership, the fees for texting services, the cost of digital ads and list rentals—the final sum delivered to candidates and committees is vanishingly small. My analysis of the network’s FEC disbursements reveals that, at most, $11 million of the $678 million raised from individuals has made its way to candidates, campaigns, or the national party committees.
But here’s the number that should end all debate:
This represents a fundraising efficiency rate of just 1.6 percent.
Here’s what that number means: for every dollar a grandmother in Iowa donates believing she’s saving democracy, 98 cents goes to consultants and operational costs. Just pennies reach actual campaigns…
For all of the details, and an explanation of why the Party looks the other way: “The Mothership Vortex: An Investigation Into the Firm at the Heart of the Democratic Spam Machine,” from @adambonica.bsky.social.
Second, consider the case of Texas, a state that used to hate lawsuits, the nanny state, and the film industry. As Christopher Hooks reports, it’s learned from the Golden State to embrace all three as a means of cultural influence. After unpacking the state government’s turnabout from tort reform to encouaging rise of private enforcement of laws through fines and lawsuits and it’s shift from it’s prior rejection of government nutritional and health guidelines, Hooks looks at Texas’ new push to become a seat of film and television production…
… Beneath the long-standing contempt for California and its tyranny was, apparently, a fair bit of envy. On no issue was this more obvious than the expensive package of film incentives the Lege passed this year—$300 million to refund movie and TV productions for money spent in the state.
Most lawmakers who supported the package doubtless did so because of a general positive feeling about the arts, or just because Matthew McConaughey came to the Capitol to lobby for it. But implicit in the way some lawmakers talk about the baleful influence of the California-centered movie industry—currently in a state of near collapse because of AI and the streaming revolution—is a belief that it represents a malign channel of cultural control and coercion by liberal Hollywood elites. In writing the incentives, Texas lawmakers seemed to be asking: What if we had that power instead?
Texas is likely to attract many additional TV and film shoots with this new money. Some productions will come specifically to take advantage of the bill’s Texas Heritage Project funding, a pot of money set aside and controlled by the governor’s appointees to fund projects that promote “family values” and portray “Texas and Texans in a positive fashion.” A cynic might blink twice and wonder if the governor just gave himself a propaganda fund.
The subtext of the bill is probably more important. The state has already in the recent past revoked film incentives from a movie, 2010’s Machete, because state officials disapproved of its message. Future films made here will likely aim to avoid the watchful eye of state lawmakers. The Legislature seems to be embodying the favorite idea of a profoundly influential Californian, Andrew Breitbart, who reminded conservatives at every possible opportunity that “politics is downstream from culture.” It’s perhaps true, but it’s also the kind of thing you think up when you’ve lived in Santa Monica for too long.
After ten years of a governor who has vowed to keep West Coast ways from our pleasant shores, the state is awash in tech exiles. Big money and a strong executive dominate the Legislature more than ever before. Republicans in the House have turned into granola-eating health food obsessives while trial lawyers are on the ascent. The lieutenant governor spends his days entertaining movie stars. Close your eyes, and you can almost imagine you’re U-Hauling down the 405…
Becoming your enemy: “Right-Wing Lawmakers Are Trying to California Your Texas,” from @hooks.bsky.social in @texasmonthly.bsky.social.
Yet another bizzaro flip: “Welcome to the age of Hard Tech” from @taylorlorenz.bsky.social.
* from When a Stranger Calls
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As we try to appreciate the ironies, we might recall that it was on this date in 2008, that a tour bus belonging to the Dave Matthews Band dumped an estimated 800 pounds (360 kg) of human waste from the bus’s blackwater tank through (grated surface of) the Kinzie Street Bridge in Chicago onto an open-top passenger sightseeing boat sailing in the Chicago River below. Roughly two-thirds of the 120 passengers aboard the tour boat were soaked.
More here.
“Most things are never meant”*…
Protein-packed diets add excess nitrogen to the environment through urine, rivaling pollution from agricultural fertilizers…
In the U.S., people eat more protein than they need to. And though it might not be bad for human health, this excess does pose a problem for the country’s waterways. The nation’s wastewater is laden with the leftovers from protein digestion: nitrogen compounds that can feed toxic algal blooms and pollute the air and drinking water. This source of nitrogen pollution even rivals that from fertilizers washed off of fields growing food crops, new research suggests.
When we overconsume protein—whether it comes from lentils, supplements or steak—our body breaks the excess down into urea, a nitrogen-containing compound that exits the body via urine and ultimately ends up in sewage… the majority of nitrogen pollution present in wastewater—some 67 to 100 percent—is a by-product of what people consume…
Once it enters the environment, the nitrogen in urea can trigger a spectrum of ecological impacts known as the “nitrogen cascade.” Under certain chemical conditions, and in the presence of particular microbes, urea can break down to form gases of oxidized nitrogen. These gases reach the atmosphere, where nitrous oxide (N2O) can contribute to warming via the greenhouse effect and nitrogen oxides (NOx) can cause acid rain. Other times, algae and cyanobacteria, photosynthetic bacteria also called blue-green algae, feed on urea directly. The nitrogen helps them grow much faster than they would normally, clogging vital water supplies with blooms that can produce toxins that are harmful to humans, other animals and plants. And when the algae eventually die, the problem is not over. Microorganisms that feast on dead algae use up oxygen in the water, leading to “dead zones,” where many aquatic species simply cannot survive, in rivers, lakes and oceans. Blooms from Puget Sound to Tampa, Fla., have caused large fish die-offs…
If it’s not one thing, it’s another: “Eating Too Much Protein Makes Pee a Problem Pollutant in the U.S.,” from Sasha Warren (@space_for_sasha) in @sciam.
* Philip Larkin, “Going, Going” (in High Windows)
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As we deliberate on our diets, we might recall that it was on this date in 1888 that Theophilus Van Kannel received a patent for the revolving door, a design that came to characterize the entrances of (then-proliferating) skyscrapers and that earned him induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. But lest we think him “all work,” his other notable invention was the popular (at least in the early 20th century) amusement park ride “Witching Waves.”
“The longer I live the greater is my respect for manure in all its forms”*…
Two crucial and interconnected resources—human feces and arable soil—face crises of mismanagement…
… the problem of how to deal with our “dark matter” has plagued humanity for millennia. As soon as people stopped moving around in pursuit of prey, the stuff began to pile up. Neolithic farmers may have had no idea of germ theory, but they were smart enough to know they didn’t want to live next to—or on top of—their own shit. They dug pits or ditches out in their fields to serve as open-air toilets. As the number of people living in close quarters grew, pits no longer sufficed. People turned to more sophisticated waste-disposal methods, usually involving water.
…
Sewage treatment plants… manage, by and large, to keep raw sewage out of waterways, and this has mostly eliminated outbreaks of cholera as well as typhoid. But the practice of washing nutrients down the drain remains as big an issue as ever.
Of all the nutrients we’re redistributing, probably the most significant is nitrogen. It’s difficult for plants—and, by extension, plant eaters—to obtain nitrogen. In the air, it exists in a form—N2—that most living things can’t utilize. For hundreds of millions of years, plants have relied on specialized bacteria that “fix” nitrogen into a compound they can make use of. When people started farming, they figured out that legume crops, which harbor nitrogen-fixing bacteria in nodules on their roots, replenish soil. Manure and human waste, or “night soil,” also provide nitrogen for plants.
When synthetic fertilizer was invented, in the early twentieth century, the world was suddenly awash in nitrogen. This enabled people to grow a lot more food, which, in turn, enabled them to produce a lot more people, who produced a lot more shit. Via our wastewater treatment plants, we now introduce vast quantities of nitrogen into coastal environments, where it’s wreaking havoc. (Fertilizer runoff also contributes to the problem.)
…
Jo Handelsman, a plant pathologist who runs an interdisciplinary research center at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is also interested in “dark matter.” Handelsman, however, uses the term to refer to soil. And the problem she’s concerned with is not that we have too much of the stuff, but too little. “The plight of the world’s soils is a silent crisis”… Agriculture requires rich soil, but most modern practices are, unfortunately, terrible for it…
From the estimable Elizabeth Kolbert (@ElizKolbert) and @nybooks: “The Waste Land.”
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As we go back to basics, we might recall that it was on this date in in 1874 that Lewis H. Latimer received his first patent (U.S. Patent 147,363), for an improved water-closet for railway cars.
Latimer went on to develop an improved process for manufacturing carbon filaments for light bulbs, to write the first book on electric lighting, and to invent an evaporative air conditioner, a forerunner of today’s systems.
“Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die”*…
Further to Wednesday’s almanac entry on America’s first independent municipal sewer system…
Sometime in mid to late January, researchers from MIT plan to gather around a manhole on Portland Street in East Cambridge, dressed in plastic disposable biohazard coats and gloves. Each hour over the next 24, working in teams of two over four-hour shifts, they’ll sink a tube into the muck and pump one to two liters of sewage water into a plastic container. The container will be put into a cooler and taken to the nearby lab at MIT run by Eric Alm, a computational microbiologist. Alm’s lab will analyze all 24 of these sludgy samples to see what viruses and bacteria they hold; meanwhile, a vial of each sample will be sent to another lab to be analyzed for biomarkers (molecular or cellular flags for things like diseases and drugs, legal and illegal ).
These researchers—who include architects, computational biologists, designers, electrical and mechanical engineers, geneticists, and microbiologists—will be testing an idea that’s attracting interest around the world: namely, that sewage can tell us important things about the people who excrete it. Already, research has shown that sewage can reveal illicit drug usage, the presence of influenza, the poliovirus and other pathogens, and the state of community health. So far, however, none of this has been tested in our local waste systems, other than some proof-of-concept sampling done in Boston. That has led to this first formal effort by scientists and public health officials to get a sewage snapshot of the people of Cambridge…
Get to the bottom at “What does Cambridge sewage say about residents? MIT plans to find out.”
* Mel Brooks
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As we hold our noses, we might recall that it was on this date in 1594 that Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus was first performed (by Sussex’s Men at The Rose). Titus‘s premiere is the first performance of a Shakespeare play of which there is precise record (though confident deduction dates other plays’ performances earlier); it was recorded in Philip Henslowe‘s diary. It is also the only Shakespeare play for which a contemporary illustration survives, the work of a drawing master named Henry Peacham.
The Peacham drawing (c.1595)
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