NEW: Guest article by Fred De Fossard of the Prosperity Institute: "Explained: The Afghan Migrant Scandal And Coverup Shaking Up Britain"

Previously on PolicySphere Articles:

→ Analysis: How The Trump Administration Can Take Over The Ivy League

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Have you heard of the screwworm fly?

This sounds like something out of a nightmare film? And yet it's real. The screwworm fly lays eggs in the open wounds and mucus membranes of living animals (pets, cattle…humans); the eggs then hatch into maggots which eat the animal alive. This horrifying beast plagued people and livestock in the tropical and subtropical regions of the Americas for centuries.

However, in the 1950s, thanks to the ingenuity of American scientists and the effectiveness of American institutions (remember when we had those?) they were eradicated from the Continental US: they developed the "sterile insect technique," which involves breeding screwworm flies, sterilizing them with radiation, and then releasing them. Because the female screwworm fly mates only once, if she mates with a sterile male the eggs she lays will not produce offspring. Countless of these sterile flies were released into the Darien Gap, the narrowest point linking the North and South American continents, essentially creating an invisible but very robust barrier (build the wall!) which prevented screwworm flies from pushing into North America, thereby saving countless lives and making entire regions of the US and Central America suddenly safe for cattle raising.

But now it's back. The fly has appeared in Central America in November 2024, and by March 2025 there were hundreds of confirmed cases in Mexico.

Why? The failure of complex systems seems to be the answer.

Like most insects, the screwworm fly reappears seasonally. So the whole operation must be renewed every year. During the 1980s, eradicators released 500 million flies per week. There is one "fly factory" in Panama, but it can produce "only" 100 million flies per week. There are many arguments about who's to blame but, as the blogger Polimath details, laziness and institutional incompetence seem to be the main culprits. As we learned with pandemics, it is much harder to put toothpaste back in the tube than to just keep it there.

The fly eradication effort cost $15 million per year, an absolute pittance compared to the many billions of dollars of additional economic activity in agriculture enabled by the eradication (not to mention, again, the lives saved). Now it looks like it will take many years, and 50 times that amount, to get back to the status quo we once enjoyed in blissful ignorance.

Policy News You Need To Know

#AmericanInnovation #HigherEd — A few weeks ago we told you about Palantir's "American Tech Fellowship," which would be a set of people recruited from diverse (as in, actually diverse, not "diverse") backgrounds regardless of formal academic credentials, and trained to be at the leading edge of AI. Well, they're now in, and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar announced that "more than 500 applied" and "thirty-eight were chosen," and they are "an elite crew: former combat medics, fighter pilots, electricians, MBA defectors, and much more." Very interesting! We hope to learn more!

SEE ALSO: How The Trump Administration Can Take Over The Ivy League

#Telecoms #Space — FCC Chair Brendan Carr announced a set of reforms to facilitate what's known as "Ground-Station-as-a-Service (GSaaS)." This is a business model where a single facility on earth connects to multiple satellite systems in space. This is potentially a big deal, because with GSaaS, instead of every satellite operator building their own expensive ground stations, they can use a shared global network of stations. With GSaaS, satellite operators can share ground infrastructure and pay based on usage, rather than building and maintaining their own satellite ground stations. This would make it much easier for space startups to get off the ground (pun very much intended).

SEE ALSO: Brendan Carr's "Build America" Agenda And The Future of MAGA Governance

#DOGE #USAID #NPR — The rescissions bill has passed the House, it will now be signed by the President and become law.

PREVIOUSLY: Why The Senate Should Vote For The Rescisions Bill

#Energy — At R Street, the excellent energy analysts Philip Rossetti and Kent Chandler examine the OBBBA's repeal of electricity subsidies, particularly from the standpoint of carbon emissions. They conclude, very sensibly in our view: "Given the large volume of expenditure for wind and solar subsidies now slated for repeal, it makes sense that emissions will increase. But we caution against analyses that project large emission increases, as for those analyses to be correct, wind and solar technologies would have to be cost-ineffective without the subsidies—something we don’t believe to be true."

#Medicaid #Healthcare #Rurality — Speaking of the OBBBA, one of the oft-expressed fears is that its reforms to Medicaid will gut rural hospitals. However, in a new issue brief at the Manhattan Institute, Chris Pope gives us hope: these reforms can be an opportunity for positive change. His diagnosis is fairly simple: "Efficient hospital care requires substantial economies of scale, which makes it difficult for rural facilities to compete on cost or quality of care." Therefore, in order to not be dependent on the public dole, emergency hospitals should refocus on emergency care, which has been difficult because of "weak administrative capacity and poor access to capital." And so, "in order to support the transition, Congress should permit isolated rural hospitals to claim three years of lump-sum payments up front, in return for a five-year commitment to provide emergency care."

#AmericanManufacturing #Defense #Deftech — Arresting headline from the FT: "US trade representative pushes defence start-ups to fill manufacturing gap."

#TaxPolicy — Jack Salmon of Mercatus has a good article with examples from New York and Massachusetts showing why millionaire taxes don't work.

#TheConstitution — We try not to cover politics, but this is broader than politics because it touches at the heart of the American Constitutional system: there is growing emerging evidence that large numbers of Joe Biden's Presidential pardons were not at all decided by him, but by staffers, and then signed by Autopen. This seems like an unprecedented constitutional crisis.

#VibeShift — Steve Stewart-Williams, an evolutionary psychologist, shares ten new findings from studies on wokeness.

Friday Essays

"Construction Physics" is an excellent publication put out by our friends at the Institute for Progress which does something deceptively simple but thoroughly fascinating: explain, really well, how (big, complicated) things are built. This week, Brian Potter tells us about the history of the Chinese shipbuilding industry, which went from nowhere in 1975 to the world's biggest by 2010.

Most punditry you see about Gen Z and The Yoof is usually on some theme of doom and gloom: mental health crisis! Smartphones! Porn! They can't read a book! At The New York Times, Jessica Grose gives us a welcome dose of optimism: "Dozens of conversations with members of Gen Z have convinced me that the most prominent aspect of their generational character is that they’re small-c conservative. This is frequently misunderstood as politically conservative (…). But what I mean is that they’re constitutionally moderate and driven by old-fashioned values. It might be hard for us to recognize just how wholesome Gen Z is, or what that represents for America’s future."

If you've seen a college campus recently, or know who "Zohran Mamdani" is, you know that left-wing antisemitism is dangerously on the rise. If you have social media, however, you have probably been exposed to right-wing antisemitism. But it's not just trolls on X (many of whom are based in Pakistan, by the way). There is a moment afoot to rewrite the history of the 20th century. While seemingly-offensive ideas and vigorous debate should always be encouraged, it's also normal to wonder. At The Free Press, Rebeccah L. Heinrichs warns about "The Right's 1939 Project."

At The New Atlantis, Debora L. Spar and Aryanna Garber notice something frightening: "From the Industrial Revolution to the pill to AI girlfriends, technology is unbundling what used to be marriage’s package deal." And so, they ask: "Does Marriage Have A Future?"

On his Substack, the Emmy-winning producer John Allen Wooden, whose son has recently entered 7th grade, has unburdened himself of a very funny, very insightful rant about the nightmare of…Chromebooks in middle school. “Girls and boys alike brazenly played web games with the sound on – from Tetris and Bejeweled knockoffs to multiplayer basketball and first-person shooter murder orgies – filling the room with an almost casino-like ambient symphony of bloops, bleeps, and muffled explosions.”

At Commonplace, the great essayist Helen Andrews reports on the sad decline of the teen summer job, which she views as a uniquely American, egalitarian tradition, a decline which is largely driven by immigration. In the process she interviews several other writers about their fond memories of working summers.

What if archaeology were to disappear?… This seems like a strange question. But it's not so strange, argues Ben Landau-Taylor at Palladium Magazine. The "massive empirical-theoretical project" of "systematically analyzing ancient artifacts and sites to figure out what past societies were like" is not at all an obvious endeavor. In fact, it is virtually unique to modern Western civilization (and was pioneered by the French). And it is already declining. "Serious archaeological work occurs only where it is politically and ideologically convenient," he writes. More and more regulations, driven by ideology or other concerns, are throttling archaelogical work. "In the United States, the ​​Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act gives federally recognized Native American tribes substantial power to veto or censor archaeological investigations, which is often used to block research that holds the possibility of contradicting a tribe’s mythology or complicating their claim to land." And if archaeology does disappear, it's not at all impossible that it just might never be invented again.

At The Republic, the journal published by the Palantir Foundation, the ever-philosophical Titus Techera ponders what means, in our present moment, the relationship between technology and the political.