“The Trump administration has awarded a Virginia-based defense contractor a $1.26 billion contract to build a 5,000-bed immigration detention center in El Paso, Texas, reports Bloomberg. The newest—and biggest—facility will be located at the 1 million-acre Fort Bliss Army base, equipped with tents for detention infrastructure and an airport to serve as a deportation hub.”
“”Overwhelmingly, it turns out that the men with the most relationship options (wealthier, higher-social-status men) marry women similar in age to them and with high educational attainment,” writes demographer Lyman Stone in an article published this week for the Institute for Family Studies. “Relationships with large age gaps are more common for low-income men than for high-income men.”
Stone found that, contrary to stereotypes that proliferate online, the wealthier a man is, the more likely it is that his wife has a graduate degree and the less likely it is that there is a considerable age gap between them. Further, high-earning men were mostly married to high-earning women. The average wife of a top 1 percent–earning man also earned over $100,000.
“The simplest explanation for these trends,” Stone wrote, “is that high-earning men who have more romantic options prefer to marry women who are more like a peer. When men have power to influence their mate options, they tend to use that power to find a peer-age woman for companionship and partnership in life.”
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yet there’s a coterie of tweets—and online personalities—devoted to insisting that high-achieving men find high-achieving women repulsive and instead choose to marry from America’s veritable cornucopia of smokin’ hot Applebee’s waitresses.”
“Trump’s team is putting “maximum pressure on everywhere where redistricting is an option and it could provide a good return on investment,” according to a person familiar with the team’s thinking and granted anonymity to describe it.
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a handful of Democratic-leaning states — including California — handed mapmaking power to independent commissions instead of leaving it in the hands of the state legislatures. States where Democrats retain the power to gerrymander, like Illinois and Maryland, have very little room to draw more advantageous maps than their current ones.”
“Republican Gov. Mike Braun remained noncommittal about a mid-decade redistricting push following his meeting with Vice President JD Vance in Indiana on Thursday.
“We covered a wide array of topics. We listened,” Braun told reporters in response to a question about whether an agreement was reached.
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Vance’s visit to the state comes amid a push from President Donald Trump’s team to redraw maps “everywhere where redistricting is an option.” A plan in Texas is already well underway, where Republican lawmakers drew a new map that could net Republicans as many as five Republican-leaning seats, and Democrats in the Lone Star state fled in a last-ditch effort to stop the map from passing.”
The U.S. created a world based on relatively free trade. Most benefited from it. Now Trump is pulling us back from that world, and most people, including most Americans, will be hurt by that.
Having independent professionals in parts of the government who provide key statistics is important for having a better idea of what’s going on in the country. We need these professionals to be independent so we can have a level of trust in the numbers. Trump fires such professionals just because he doesn’t like their outcomes, not because he has a fundamental disagreement with their methods. This is how we go dark in understanding our economy; with our main source of data being controlled by the leader.