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" You see this in the tornado videos on YouTube. The wife sticking her head out the door screaming at her husband,” Hey, git your ass inside!’” Finally, I asked: a liberal or a conservative? Eighty-three and a half percent of Beckham County had voted for Donald Trump. What did that say about their ability to survive a tornado? The liberal has the advantage of trusting the government’s warning, said Hank, but the conservative has advantages, too. It depended on what kind of conservative he was, they decided. If he was a radical individualist, he was a bad risk: you’d bet on the liberal to survive. But if the conservative belonged to a strong social network—a church, say—he might hear a tornado warning, and trust it, before it was too late. “What you need is one person inside the network who is a trusted source, who trusts the government,” said Hank. You need Lonnie Risenhoover. "
― Michael Lewis , The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy
116
" 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 businesses 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 "
― Michael Lewis , The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy
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" One day in his new job he was handed the budget for the Department of Agriculture. “I was like, Oh yeah, the USDA—they give money to farmers to grow stuff.” For the first time, he looked closely at what this arm of the United States government actually does. Its very name is seriously misleading—most of what it does has little to do with agriculture. It runs 193 million acres of national forest and grasslands, for instance. It is charged with inspecting almost all the animals Americans eat, including the nine billion birds a year. Buried inside it is a massive science program, a large fleet of aircraft for firefighting, and a bank with $ 220 billion in assets. It monitors catfish farms. It maintains a shooting range inside its DC headquarters. It keeps an apiary on its roof, to study bee-colony collapse. There’s a drinking game played by people who have worked at the Department of Agriculture: Does the USDA do it? Someone names an odd function of government (say, shooting fireworks at Canada geese that flock too near airport runways) and someone else has to guess if the USDA does it. (In this case, it does.) "
― Michael Lewis , The Fifth Risk: Undoing Democracy