How to Build a Hurricane-Proof House | The Future of Critical Raw Materials | From Battlefield to Homefront, and more

From Battlefield to Homefront: Leveraging Military Innovation for Civilian Emergency Response  (Mike Rodgers, HSToday)
Civilian emergency response constantly faces evolving challenges. In situations where every second counts and lives are at stake, what better source of innovation and efficacy than military techniques employed in high-stakes environments around the world? The current landscape of emergency response is fraught with complexities and uncertainties, from natural disasters to mass casualty incidents. However, advancements developed by the military were born out of conflict and rigorously tested under extreme conditions. These validated principles from abroad can be reshaped into agile and efficient solutions that transform how we handle civilian emergencies at home.

How Simplifying Crisis Management with Venn Diagrams Can Save Lives  (Dan Stoneking, HSToday)
Life is complicated.  A crisis is complication on steroids.  And yet, too often we make them even more complicated than necessary.  We can solve most of that with the Serenity Prayer, “…grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference….”  Unfortunately, in my experience, most folks don’t pause in the middle of a crisis to reflect on that philosophy, analyze it under the current situation, and apply outcomes. 
Since imagery empowers text and concepts, a few Venn Diagrams can be baked into emergency management strategic communication plans, be taught to the entire organizational team (not just strategic communicators), and even be printed and posted around the operation center as constant reminders of simplicity and focus.
Venn Diagrams are named for English logician John Venn (1834-1923) of Cambridge, who explained them in his book “Symbolic Logic” (1881).  While logisticians embraced them in the early 1900’s, it was not until the 1960-s when they began a rapid level of use up to today.  Venn applied Boolean algebra to improve visual reasoning.  The diagrams are used to represent relations between entities, concepts, classes, or more generally to present information.
Venn’s research was complicated and evolutionary.  But the result is simple.  People understand them, digest them, and process them quickly, even when they do not know what they are called.  They have become ubiquitous in textbooks, art, work presentations, and even humorous memes.   Why?  Because they work.

We Still Don’t Know What to Do with the Endless Stream of Trump Lies  (David A. Graham, The Atlantic)
As I wrote back in 2019, Trump is a master of what the philosopher Harry Frankfurt called “bullshit.” As a technical term, this is speech that might be false, but deception isn’t the main point. The bullshitter “does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.”
The stream of bullshit, in the Frankfurtian sense, remains one of Trump’s most potent tools. On the one hand, reporters can’t quote Trump’s false comments without caveat; on the other hand, the time spent debunking statements that were never designed to be true anyway distracts from important, fact-based conversations about actual problems.
Any Trump appearance has more in common with a comedy set than with a typical political speech. As in a comedy routine, listeners don’t necessarily expect everything he says to be strictly true. Hasan Minhaj learned that a comic can get into trouble when his fans believe that he is strictly telling the truth and he is not, but Trump’s fans are not so fastidious about facts. They are taking him seriously, not literally.

How to Build a Hurricane-Proof House  (Chris Baraniuk, Wired)
They couldn’t sleep. A hurricane was lashing their brand-new house with a torrent of wind and rain. Deborah Rodriguez and her husband were miles away, snuggled up in a hotel bed, but they could watch the drama unfold in real time: Their smartphones were connected to their home security cameras. The couple, from St. Petersburg, Florida, along with their kids and pets, had evacuated ahead of Hurricane Idalia last August.
Rodriguez stared at her phone screen. She was confident that her house had been built to a high standard—that it was designed to withstand exactly this kind of onslaught. But she wondered. Poring over the shadowy, shuddering footage of debris swirling around her garden in the dark, would she see a section of roofing come down? Siding fly off towards the street? Part of her wanted to look away. But the part that said “watch” was winning.
More than 30 million US homes, with a combined value of $8.5 trillion, are at risk from hurricanes. This year’s Atlantic hurricane season, which has just begun, is forecast to be the most active ever recorded. Tragically, some people—perhaps many thousands—stand to lose their homes in the face of savage winds and catastrophic storm surges. Residents of the Caribbean, and now the US, have already endured Hurricane Beryl, the earliest storm in an Atlantic hurricane season to be classed as a Category 5.

The Unipole in Twilight  (ustin Logan, Independent Review)
Foreign policy in the United States is like polo: almost entirely an elite sport. The issue rarely figures in national elections. The country is so secure that foreign policy does not affect voters enough to care much. No country is going to annex Hawaii or Maine, so voters are mostly rationally ignorant of the subject. The costs of wars are defrayed through debt, deficits, and the fact that the dying and dismemberment happens in other people’s countries. Moreover, the dying and dismemberment of Americans are contained in an all-volunteer force that is powerfully socialized to suffer in silence. Unlike on abortion, the environment, or taxes, elites in both parties mostly agree on national security. Given rational ignorance among the public and general consensus among elites, voters rarely hear serious debates about national-security policy. Their views are mostly incoherent and weakly held.
The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001 (9/11) raised the salience of foreign policy. They rocketed President George W. Bush from 51 to 90 percent popularity in the span of fourteen days. Bush used the wave of approval to pursue an expansive war on terrorism. The United States invaded Afghanistan in October and began planning to attack Iraq. On Bush’s coattails and with national-security activism the central theme, Republicans made sizable gains in the 2002 midterm elections. On March 19, 2003, the United States invaded Iraq.
The Iraq War immediately blossomed into a costly disaster. The mission in Afghanistan crept from killing terrorists and punishing those who harbored them into an ambitious nation-building effort that became the longest war in American history. Thousands of American troops were killed, tens of thousands were gravely wounded, and thousands of American contractors were killed. Hundreds of thousands of innocent foreigners perished. The wars cost more than $6 trillion, and the meter is still running.
New bureaucracies sprouted, including the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. The United States set up a global archipelago of “black sites” where it tortured suspected terrorists. The National Security Agency indiscriminately vacuumed up Americans’ electronic communications without legal authorization, then tried to hide this invasion of privacy from the public.
The administrations of Barack Obama and Donald Trump pledged to de-emphasize the Middle East in American foreign policy and pay more attention to China. In 2011, Obama announced a “pivot to Asia,” which was quickly rebranded as a “rebalancing” after Middle Eastern countries complained to Washington that they felt marginalized. What wound up happening was something closer to incoherence; the United States kept several fingers stuck in the Middle East pie, while turning toward and puffing up its chest at China. President Obama regime-changed Libya and intervened in the Syrian civil war. Trump kept U.S. troops in Syria, ramped up the drone wars, and ordered the assassination of Iranian general Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s most prominent military commander, while he was on a visit to Iraq.
Although many observers may think of the twenty years from 2001 until now as a pivot from a costly effort to reengineer the Middle East to a focus on containing China, the truth is more prosaic. In fact, defense planners had had their eyes on China since the 1990s. Throughout the global war on terror, the central defense-procurement decisions were still being made on the basis of assuming security competition with a major power such as China. There was never an effort to expand the ground forces to the size at which they could hope to decisively win the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Pentagon dramatically expanded the base defense budget, adding a new line item called “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO), which were funds earmarked for the wars. This helped the government obscure the costs of their policies (Friedman 2016). In this sense, much of the base budget remained dedicated to suppressing major powers. The OCO budget served as a war budget on top of the defense budget. Overall defense spending nearly doubled from 2001 to 2009.
In the absence of major international or domestic constraints, policy can become extravagant. The period from 2001 to the present represents a promiscuous waste of money, lives, and diplomatic attention, for which almost no one in charge of the policy has paid serious consequences. The implications of this waste are even more severe if the worst-case assumptions about China’s growing power that enjoy consensus in Washington are correct. Policies whose costs can be avoided, defrayed, or hidden are likely to be oversupplied.