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Portland and Seattle, the two major cities of the Pacific Northwest, are already linked by Amtrak, a major interstate highway, a pair of sizable international airports, and several private bus services. Naturally, area politicians would like a high-speed rail line too.

The idea has been floating around for a while. In 2010, the governors of Oregon, Washington, and California and the premier of British Columbia endorsed high-speed rail as part of their “2030 Vision” for the “mega-region.” But in December of last year, a Washington Department of Transportation study cast some cold water on the idea. A regional bullet train, the report concluded, would cost an “astronomical” $24–42 billion to carry just 1.9–2.6 million riders by 2035—a figure the normally pro-rail Seattle Transit Blog called “too low to warrant such a large investment.”

Undeterred, Washington Gov. Jay Inslee has called for a more comprehensive study. A bill now working its way through the Washington state House would spend another $3.6 million examining the idea.

Supporting these efforts on the ground is Cascadia Rail, an activist group formed last month. It’s pushing for a whole high-speed rail network running from Eugene, Oregon, up to Canada, with a separate connector line out to Spokane, Washington.

“Our goal is clear: a safe, fast, high capacity connection between Cascadia cities,” the group declares, replete with a rallying cry of “WE. DESERVE. FASTER.”

Cascadia Rail’s model is the Seattle Subway coalition, which helped convinced some 56 percent of Seattle-area voters to support a $54 billion Sound Transit 3 expansion of the city’s light rail and rapid bus transit lines. It had a little help: The entire Seattle political establishment endorsed the idea, as did engineering firms, building trade unions, and major corporations with large Seattle workforces, such as Amazon and Microsoft—all of whom gave generously to the campaign.

Some media outlets, such as the Portland station KOIN and the urban policy website Next City, have raised safety concerns about high-speed rail after three people died in a December Amtrak derailment near Dupont, Washington. The line had been built with some $180.7 million from High-Speed Intercity Passenger Rail Program.

Cascadia Rail spokesperson Matt Glazewskis waved away such concerns in an interview with KOIN. “We would actually have an exclusive right of way on tracks that are built for high-speed rail,” he said, “and you wouldn’t have to worry about freight train traffic or crossing busy roads.”

That was certainly the vision for California’s high-speed rail project, which when first proposed was supposed to zoom between San Francisco and Los Angeles in less than three hours on its own track. Now the project is making use of existing rail lines, meaning that when complete it will putter along at largely conventional speeds. The stark contrast between the promises and reality of California’s rail project—which just last month announced a “worst-case scenario” $2.8 billion cost overrun—should serve as a cautionary tale for advocates of high-speed rail.

As should the experience with other rail projects closer to home. Seattle’s Lynnwood project—a 8.5-mile light rail extension being built by the regional Sound Transit agency—announced in August that it would be overshooting its $2.1 billion budget by some $500 million.

Far from grappling with these realities, the region’s high-speed rail supporters are trumpeting only the rosiest of projections: 30-minute travel between Seattle and Portland, $400 billion in new economic development, a thriving tourist industry in Spokane. It’s a pleasant vision. It’s not a realistic one.

It’s not just the Second Amendment in the left’s crosshairs.

A. Barton Hinkle writes:

Many progressives have long believed America would be a much better place without the Second Amendment. These days, some of them seem to think we’d also be better off without the First.

That might sound like an exaggeration. But it’s hard to square the First Amendment with a recent proposal in The New Republic: “Ban Facebook Before Elections.” And yes, the headline accurately represents the text:

“If fake news truly poses a crisis for democracy,” writes Jeet Heer, “then it calls for a radical response. Instead of merely requiring greater transparency of social media and empowering the courts to ban users and websites… perhaps governments should outright ban Facebook and other platforms ahead of elections.

“A model for this already exists. Many countries have election silence laws, which limit or prohibit political campaigning for varying periods of time ranging from election day alone to as early as three days before the election. What if these laws were applied to social media? What if you weren’t allowed to post anything political on Facebook in the two weeks before an election?”

View this article.

By now you’ve probably heard about the Russian model trapped in a Thai jail who claims to have hard evidence of Russia meddling in America’s elections. Over the past week, Nastya Rybka’s story has been broadcast by major media outlets such as CNN and The New York Times—and largely received like just another gratuitous twist in the MAGA plotline, another pretty young thing who claims to have dirt on Donald Trump and has every reason in the world not to be trusted.

Rybka may turn out to know nothing at all about Trump, Russia, and election influence. But in theory, at least, she has a plausible claim to having obtained relevant dirt.

She left a trail of evidence of her 2016 affair with Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska—a Vladimir Putin ally and Paul Manafort business associate—across Instagram, Periscope, and YouTube. These posts led Russian journalists to discover that Deripaska had been visited on his yacht off Norway by a high-ranking Russian official, and led Russian authorities to threaten to shut down YouTube and Instagram if they didn’t remove reports on this. And the Russian official was far from the only important figure that Deripaska met while Rybka was around, she says.

Rybka now claims to have audio of Deripaska’s conversations that could reveal information about Russia trying to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election. In a video from a Thai police car after her arrest, Rybka says she is “the only missing link in the chain related to Russia and elections in the United States”—a chain that links Deripaska, “Putin, and Trump”—and is “ready to provide” her evidence “to the United States, Europe, or any other country that can bail me out of Thai jail.”

Since Rybka’s story hit the U.S media, many have cast doubt on her claim by virtue of its timing, assuming it nothing more than a ruse to get out of trouble in Thailand. But Rybka—who has said her real fear is being sent back to Russia—was alluding to sensitive geopolitical information before her February 26 arrest.

“In my book ‘Who wants to seduce a billionaire’ there are many facts that hurt influential people of several countries,” Rybka wrote in a February 22 Instagram post. “Some readers have reacted to it skeptically, believing that the book has artistic fiction. But friends, EVERYTHING there is a real story.”

The real story of Nastya Rybka’s involvement in geopolitical intrigue is far weirder than has been widely told and may be more benign than many would assume.

Seduction School Meets Geopolitics

Neither the 21-year-old Moscow model nor her mentor seem to be political people.

Rybka was hired with a cabal of other young models to socialize at one of Deripaska’s yacht parties in 2016. She didn’t know who he was at first, she told the Russian news outlet Алексей Навальный, but was interested in him because he was confident and powerful.

Born in Belarus as Anastasia Vashukevich, Rybka has spent the past several years as a protegee of the pickup artist and seduction coach Alex Lesley. Along with a few others, Rybka and Lesley fly around the world teaching sexual skills and seduction techniques to men and women. Their books (both have authored a few) and social media accounts serve as marketing for these classes, by providing evidence of their prowess at seduction.

But Rybka also seems to vacillate between viewing seduction as a “game” she is playing on poor billionaires and having a real attachment to her “victims.” On Instagram, Rybka portrays herself not as a sex worker or companion-for-hire (as many places have reported) but a model, author, educator, and “huntress” with a passion for sex, travel, and collecting experience, not cash.

She calls herself “the Goldfish”—a nod to her status as a catch for wealthy men who like to go “fishing” for pretty young women—and can be found defending Harvey Weinstein and opining that only a “sexually ill society” attacks “healthy” oligarchs and politicians for “fishing and entertain[ing]…young girls. They give an opportunity to taste their fucking life with them!”

In a series of pre-arrest posts, Rybka details her feelings for Deripaska and her dealings with Progress Party leader (and fierce Putin critic) Alexei Navalny. Navalny revealed Rybka’s affair with Deripaska in early February, as part of a story on Russian Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Prikhodko vacationing on Deripaska’s yacht. He was able to tell the story thanks to audio and images Rybka had previously shared publicly online.

In an interview with Алексей Навальный, Rybka explained that the only reason she posted photos of her and Deripaska together and wrote books about her time with him was as a “seduction technique,” to get his attention, because he had stopped contacting her. Rybka apparently recorded her Deripaska-seduction techniques in a series of three books, though only two have been published so far. A political friend read the second one and said “we’re going to get killed if we publish it,” so they held off, Rybka said.

Her first book “details her training in seduction by sex guru Lesley, whose real name is Aleksandr Kirillov, and subsequent interactions with ultra-wealthy and powerful men,” writes Todd Ruiz at the Thai news site Khaosdenglish, which ran an English-language excerpt from the book in which Rybka explains how she got away with recording Deripaska. The recordings were Lesley’s idea, so they could use her experience to teach about seduction.

In his interview with Алексей Навальный, Lesley called himself a “seduction coach” and said the real story here is not the “political story” but that a girl from a humble roots in Belarus could get this powerful man’s attention and that her seduction methods “worked on the oligarch.”

You can watch these interviews for yourself below, and check out both Lesley and Rybka’s social accounts. Perhaps it’s all part of some bigger and yet untold con. But if their present tales are true, it would mean that in the middle of some sort of loopy pickup-artist pyramid scheme, they managed to unveil potential corruption within Russia and possibly even stumble on something much bigger.

Pleas From Prison

So what’s next for Rybka and Lesley? Both were arrested, along with eight others, in the Thai town of Pattaya last week.

The arrests took place after a raid “while they were giving certificates in sexual skills to 43 compatriots in a Pattaya hotel room,” according to the Bangkok Post. “A police investigation found that a Russian couple, who were among the arrested suspects, had set up an institute for sex science in Thailand.” All were charged with being and working in the country without permission, and Thai immigration police ordered them deported.

Thai authorities say a customer dissatisfied with the course reported them. But in a letter to the U.S. consulate, Lesley has suggested that their arrests and subsequent treatment stem from talking about the information they have on powerful figures in Russia.

In the weeks before being arrested, Rybka’s Instagram had taken a sudden political turn, ever since Navalney’s reporting had thrust her into the spotlight. On February 21, for instance, she complained that Facebook was censoring a video which many say “is the missing link proving Russia’s interference in US elections” and appealed to Americans to “deal with Zuckerberg! Now he decides – to hide or not the important clues for America.”

“Oleg Deripaska told me that all people are corrupt, both the media and the Internet, are all biased, and I can see it now,” Rybka’s post continuted. “The world is ruled by the limited group of people who make decisions for billions! I stand up for freedom of dissemination of information, especially if it concerns the shadow games that can lead to the third world war and the destruction of the earth!” A few days earlier she had posted that “because of the Goldfish, the next world war will be unleashed.”

More marketing hype? Perhaps. But even if that’s all it is, it’s possible Rybka’s game was good enough that people in power believed her.

“We know that Russia made in 1 day some criminal case and asked Thailand to give us to Russia,” Rybka posted to Instagram a few days after her arrest. “They tell that in 3-4 days Russians wait us. Don’t give them us, please USA save us from Russia!”

In a subsequent post that same day, she wrote: “If we go back to Russia we will die in Russian’s prison or they will kill us.”

A U.S. citizen in touch with the group (whom Rybka designated on Instagram as her spokesperson) told me this morning that he was not allowed to visit Rybka and the others today and that he was told he can’t for at least two more weeks because he helped bring in too many journalists earlier this week.

But while it remains to be seen whether any of Rybka’s recordings are actually relevant to Trump’s campaign or the U.S. election, is there anyone who would really be surprised one way or the other at this point? The past two years have been marked by ever-expanding political absurdity, a paradigm shift in geopolitical weirdness. It would be right in keeping with the general tenor of the Trump era if the key to this major geopolitical mystery was found in the Instagram posts of a small-town girl just trying to brag about how she seduced a Russian oligarch.

At six facilities that stretch across the American heartland from West Virginia to southern Texas, workers build more than 1.3 million Toyota cars each year, accounting for more than half of all vehicles sold annually by Toyota in the United States.

Meanwhile, at plants in Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, workers on Harley-Davidson production lines churn out more than 230,000 motorcycles every year. About one in every five of them will be shipped overseas, mostly to Europe and Japan.

One is an Japanese company that has brought jobs and prosperity to Middle America. The other is an iconic American brand that exports the physical embodiment of freedom to the world. Both will be hurt if President Donald Trump goes forward with his plan to impose a 25 percent tariff on all steel imports to the United States, propping up America’s steel industry at the expense of almost everyone else. The Trump administration is also planning to hit aluminum imports with a 10 percent tariff.

Those levies “will adversely impact automakers, the automotive supplier community and consumers as this would substantially raise costs and therefore prices of cars and trucks sold in America,” Toyota Motor North America, the company’s American subsidiary, said in a statement.

It’s not just manufacturers who will be hurt. Tariffs will likely raise prices on all automobiles—indeed, on all products made with steel—setting off a chain reaction that will burn the entire industry.

“Auto sales have flattened in recent months, and manufacturers are not prepared to absorb a sharp increase in the cost to build cars and trucks in America,” says Cody Lusk, president of the American International Automobile Dealers Association. “These proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum imports couldn’t come at a worse time.”

If costs rise and automobile sales continue to decline, that’s nothing but bad news for the hundreds of thousands of Americans employed by auto manufacturers. That would be a major misstep for the president, who has prided himself on bringing jobs—and specifically automobile manufacturing jobs—into the United States.

Big announcement by Ford today. Major investment to be made in three Michigan plants. Car companies coming back to U.S. JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 28, 2017

Meanwhile, the flipside of Trump’s tariff proposal will deal a second blow to American manufacturers already likely to face higher costs on steel and aluminum.

The European Commission outlined a plan yesterday to impose retaliatory tariffs against American-made goods such as bourbon whiskey and blue jeans. Included in the proposal, which was first reported by Bloomberg, would be a 25 percent tariff on motorbikes imported from the United States.

For Harley-Davidson, that means getting hit from both sides at once.

“Import tariffs on steel and aluminum will drive up costs for all products made with these raw materials, regardless of their origin,” the company told the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. “Additionally, a punitive, retaliatory tariff on Harley-Davidson motorcycles in any market would have a significant impact on our sales, our dealers, their suppliers and our customers in those markets.”

The proposed European tariffs have obvious political motivations. Harley-Davidson is based in the home state of Speaker of the House Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), while bourbon whiskey is produced only in Kentucky, home of Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. Both Ryan and McConnell have spoken out against Trump’s tariff proposal this week, but neither has suggested what action, if any, Congress should take to block the administration from starting a trade war.

That trade war would be a potentially catastrophic blow for domestic Harley-Davidson workers. The company has scaled back its American production lines in recent years in favor of opening a new plant in India, where motorbikes are highly sought, to get around a massive import tariff imposed there. Harley-Davidson has plans to open another facility in Thailand for the same reason.

If Trump wants to hasten the demise of an iconic, blue-collar, American-made brand, a trade war would be a good way to do it. And if Trump wants to stop foreign companies like Toyota from investing in American facilities and hiring American workers, a trade war would be a good way to do that too. The administration can prioritize American manufacturing jobs, or it can prioritize economic protectionism; it can’t do both.