'Gen Z' favorite sweeps to victory in Nepal election

Teens celebrate secondary-school
graduation in Lalitpur. A youth
movement toppled the Nepali
government in September 2025.

Kathmandu, March 14—Rapper turned politician and Gen Z champion, "pugnacious" 35-year-old Balen Shah will be the next prime minister of Nepal.

This is an update to The Savory Tort Photo Essay, Kathmandu quiets for watershed election day (Mar. 5, 2026). (All photos by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

Shah's party won an outright majority in the Nepali House, which selects the prime minister, with 182 of 275 seats. (Read more at Al Jazeera.)

The victory comes six months after a self-described "Gen Z" protest movement toppled the government in Nepal in a mix of peaceful and violent demonstrations.

However much this sea change is identified with discontented youth, a coalition diverse in age, geography, and socioeconomic status is pinning high hopes on the incoming Shah administration.

A dry spell has accumulated smog in the Kathmandu valley.

Anecdotally, traveling in central Nepal in Kathmandu, Bhaktipur, Lalitpur, and more rural Nagarkot, I found no one unsupportive of the new regime. Many persons, young and old, shared their elation over the election result before I could ask.

Issues on the minds of voters are no surprise. People I spoke to a week after the election expect Shah to improve access to education and employment.

Secondarily, younger voters want to see improved infrastructure as a means to facilitate economic development. Older voters were prone to mention healthcare and social welfare, especially for persons unable to work because of age or disability.

Those secondary issues are related. Youth have left remote farming communities in search of economic opportunity in the capital region or abroad. The migration and brain drain undermine the tradition of multigenerational habitation and care for the elderly.

With Mr. Tamang Friday.

Kedar Tamang's life experience is illustrative. Tamang left his native farming community for Kathmandu, where he earned a master's in political science and built a career in tourism. A past president of the Tourist Guide Association of Nepal, Tamang balances a demanding work regimen in a scrappy field with care for an elderly parent and two teenage sons, not to mention pleas for aid from extended family in the capital and back home.

Tamang hopes Shah will effect development to make Nepal a world destination and leading player among non-aligned nations. But disillusioned by past regimes in Nepal's short democratic history, and cognizant that even renowned democracies such as America fail to meet their people's basic needs, Tamang mitigated his optimism with believe-it-when-I-see-it caution.

Kathmandu residents told me they saw substantial improvements in services and infrastructure when Shah served as mayor of the capital. Now the Nepali people hope he can deliver on a vastly greater scale.

Kathmandu quiets for watershed election day

 A Savory Tort Photo Essay

A usually busy intersection in the Thamel tourist district is nearly vacant.
Rickshaws offer transport with most taxis and busses banned. 

Kathamandu, March 5—The streets of Kathmandu, the capital of Nepal, were strangely quiet and low-key festive today, as the country voted in the first election since "Gen Z" protests brought down the government in September. (All photos by RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

(UPDATE, March 14: 'Gen Z' favorite sweeps to victory in Nepal election.) 

Voters queue at a polling place in Kathmandu.

The Army was visible throughout the city, along with a smaller presence of metro police, especially where people queued at polling places. Most businesses are closed, private motor vehicle traffic is banned, and a 9 p.m. curfew is in effect.

Democratic graffiti adorns a school wall.

Despite the fear of unrest that prompted the heavy security, people turned out to walk the streets with their families, smiling as they greeted neighbors. The mood is not jubilant, but neither is it tense. The election is coinciding with the Holi holiday.

A major thoroughfare is nearly deserted.

Of the soldiers I saw on the streets, most looked bored, and some laughed together. The BBC reported one minor incident at a rural polling station east of Kathmandu, where an argument resulted in assault on an election official. Police restored order after firing a shot in the air.

A recreational field, though outfitted for football, draws cricketers.

The capital city was not so serene when protesters toppled the government in September 2025. Seventy-seven people were killed in the unrest, including 22 protestors. Government buildings, including the Supreme Court and Kathmandu district courts, were attacked and burned.

The rides at Ferris Wheel Funpark are still. 

Protestors described themselves as "Gen Z" in a country in which more than half the population was born in the 21st century. The protest movement was remarkable for having been largely coordinated online, especially on the Discord platform. Discord's organization and posting permission system made it resistant to government surveillance and control.

Burned in the 2025 protests, the old Supreme Court building stands vacant.

Partly triggering the protests was a government attempt to shut down communication and social media outlets, including Google's YouTube, and Meta's WhatsApp and Facebook. The government alleged the shutdown was part of a plan to impose online service taxes. But the move followed swirling allegations on social media of government corruption.

Set back from the road and begun already in 2021,
a new Supreme Court building is 85% complete.

Online coordination resulted in real-world assemblies, some peaceful and some violent, and boycotts of schools. The protests might have been sparked by the online shutdowns, but youth anger had reached a boiling point over reported corruption, nepotism, and lack of economic opportunity. 

A medical student in Kathmandu won't vote because his hometown is 16 hours away.

Youth unemployment surpassed 20%, while the national economy was increasingly propped up by fees and remittances derived from emigration, rather than domestic development. Stories of "Nepo Kids," elite youth with political connections flaunting wealth, meanwhile went viral online, stoking resentment. 

The "Supreme Court Annex," foreground, hosts court staff presently;
the new court building rises behind.

Prime Minister K.P. Sharma Oli was forced to resign in September. In the absence of a working government, the Army took control. Despite some violent clashes, the Army did overall maintain the peace and sought to restore civilian leadership.

The Nepali Bar Building:
Lawyers are helping to restore case files lost in the protests,
including 20,000 files of past and present Supreme Court cases

The military command negotiated with protesters, and as a result, former Supreme Court Justice Sushila Karki was installed as interim prime minister, pending the present elections. Though 73 years old, Karki is highly respected by conservative government supporters and youth protestors for her independence and relative political neutraliity.

Army Headquarters, Kathmandu:
The Army worked to restore civilian government after the protests.

Now voters are choosing 275 representatives for the national House, and its composition will determine the next prime minister and the social and economic direction of the country. 

Amid the 2025 protests, a football friendly between Nepal and Bangladesh
at Dasharath Stadium was canceled.

The ousted Oli is in the running. Some voters are uneasy about the instability on display in September and see a conservative choice as a return to normalcy.

A mural outside Dasharath Stadium depicts Nepali prowess
in a wide range of sports and games.

Oli faces a colorful challenger in Balendra Shah, a once rapper and structural engineer turned politician, and, until he resigned in January, mayor of Kathmandu. The Shah campaign features rap lyrics that bemoan corruption and unemployment, resonating with youth. If 35-year-old Shah outperforms Oli in the election, the result will be viewed as a sea change for Nepal.

In Thamel, election news blares from the wall in a restaurant.

A third candidate with youth appeal is Gagan Kumar Thapa, president of the Nepali congress. Though 49 years old, he has a history of activism and presents as a less volatile option than Shah, who is known to be prickly and ornery toward media.

Though many voters want reform, there is disagreement about how best to accomplish it. Conservatives fear that the youth movement and Shah in particular might be so hellbent on economic improvement as to be willing to cede democracy to incompetence, or worse, authoritarianism. A strand of the protest movement did suggest restoration of the monarchy.

Of the vast slate of candidates up for election, many are first-time politicians, and a third are party independents. For voters' part, a million people, in a country of 29.6 million in sum, have registered to vote for the first time. 

At the same time, there are logistical as well as political challenges to representative democracy in Nepal. The country is three and a half times the size of Switzerland and covers famously mountainous terrain with relatively few roads. In fact, the lack of highway and transportation infrastructure as a prerequisite to economic development is on the youth movement's list of complaints. Ballots must be transported in places for hours by foot and helicopter.

Meanwhile, archaic voting laws require people to vote in their home towns, even if they have long relocated for work. One of the reasons for relative quiet in Kathmandu is that 800,000 people, according to a BBC estimate, have left the city to vote.

In Kathmandu today I met a medical student who had not voted. His hometown is 16 hours away, he said, and he could afford neither the trip nor the time away from studies.

Despite logistical challenges, the Nepali election chief told the BBC that he expects to report results no later than March 9.

Belan Shah's "Nepali Political Rap" at YouTube

Small-town Star Trek museum teaches American cultural history, limits of fan fair use in copyright law

I have the con at the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour, Ticonderoga, N.Y., Oct. 2025
(all photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

The sleepy town of Ticonderoga, nestled between Lake Champlain and Lake George in upstate New York just south of the Adirondacks, is the unexpected home of a treasure of American history. 

I don't mean the historic Fort Ticonderoga of the American revolutionary era. 

The Star Trek Original Series Set Tour offers visitors an incomparable experience in television history and a lesson in intellectual property law along the way.

Though the transporter was conceived to save money on
prop shots of shuttle landings, it still cost (1966) $600
per effect per person. That's one reason why red shirts
didn't beam down unless they had, let's say, business on
the planet. Regular-cast shots could be recycled. The
platform circles were made with glass from old spotlights.
It's wild to see close up how clever prop crew were with
what they had on hand.

Star Trek in a Small Town 

I've written many times about the relevance of Star Trek to American law and public policy from the civil rights era to today. The Set Tour is the passion project of Star Trek superfan and Ticonderoga native James Cawley, an Elvis impersonator by trade. Cawley is someone who deeply appreciates Trek's cultural importance and has played a role in ensuring that the franchise survives and lives up to its legacy.

Inside the inconspicuous shell of a former Family Dollar in downtown Ticonderoga, Cawley has recreated the Desilu Studios set of the original Star Trek series of the 1960s in astonishing detail, down to the illuminated, colorful "gumdrop" buttons of starship Enterprise control panels.

Little survived from the original 1960s set. At that time, creators still thought about television productions as one-off broadcasts. Syndication was known, but shows were not yet designed for it. Moreover, few critics would have picked Star Trek, a curious experiment in sending Wagon Train to space, as a show that would stand the test of time. 

In fact, Star Trek's perceived ephemerality became a challenge in reconstructing the set, a Set Tour guide explained. The original series had no script supervisor in charge of continuity, mostly because no one expected viewers would see a Star Trek episode for a second time to notice details. A prop that was a scary alien computer in one episode was gently repurposed to be an Enterprise control system in another. Budgets were thin, too, so prop supervisors were ingenious recyclers.

Cawley long collected the few artifacts and set fragments that remained. In the early 1990s, he worked his way into an assistantship with legendary costume designer William Ware Theiss, then working on Star Trek's reincarnation in The Next Generation. Theiss had, and gave to Cawley, discarded blueprints of the 1960s set, as well as original series uniform patterns. Cawley found his calling and embarked on recreation of the set with excruciating attention to detail.

Sickbay: My guide was terrific, knowledgeable and full of lore.
Here the medical scanner is CGI, but in the 1960s, a grip was
needed just to move the little white indicators up and down
from behind the wall.

A Golden Age of Fan Fiction 

Homage to the past, though, was not Cawley's sole design. In the early 20-aughts, he became the founding producer and "Captain Kirk" star of a Star Trek fan production, New Voyages, later known as Star Trek: Phase II. The highly regarded fan franchise published online 10 episodes from 2004 to 2016, and many original series talents contributed to the show, such as writer David Gerrold and actors George Takei (Hikaru Sulu), Walter Koenig (Pavel Chekov), and Grace Lee Whitney (Janice Rand).

That's where things get interesting from the intellectual property perspective.

Star Trek brand owners Paramount, CBS, and Viacom—their corporate relationships shifted over the years—had mixed feelings about Star Trek fan productions. There were many, though none besides New Voyages had fixed sets.

When Star Trek's popularity waned, fan fiction kept the franchise alive in public imagination. As long as fan projects were not for profit, the corporations were content to look the other way, even striking an agreement at one time with New Voyages. But when Paramount, et al., were on the verge of a new Star Trek TV or film project, they tightened the reins.

The corporate equivocation, in tandem with a committed and creative fan base, allowed Star Trek fan fiction to thrive in a way that is uncommon in the American entertainment space. Nevertheless, corporate indulgence started to wane after J.J. Abrams took the helm of the 2009 film Star Trek and revitalized the franchise. 

 The recreation of Engineering is two stories high, as was the
original after it was augmented for Original Series season 2.
The warp core is about 12 feet deep but looks deeper
because of a forced-perspective design to fool the camera.

Copyright Showdown

Things came to a head in 2015. Alec Peters, an actor in Phase II, raised money and excitement around a new fan-film project, Star Trek: Axanar, teased by a compelling 2014 short, Prelude to Axanar (IMDb). With advances in technology, the production quality of fan films was by then quite good. Paramount meanwhile was closing in on 2016 release of a new feature film in the reboot universe, Star Trek Beyond, and a new TV series, Star Trek: Discovery, was slated for launch in 2017. In the last days of 2015, Paramount sued Peters and the Axanar project for copyright infringement.

The copyright case, and to a lesser extent the trademark case, on fan fiction is really open and shut. Profitable or not, the take-offs are not permissible without license by the rights-holder. There is a fuzzy line at the outer boundary of copyright, where protection of creative product gives way to "the scènes à faire doctrine." But it's not that fuzzy.

Law school learning on copyright impresses on students that eligible works must be "fixed in a tangible medium of expression." That does not mean, however, that only that which is committed to print or film is what is copyrighted.

Fictional facts and storylines also may come within copyright protection. Thus, the estate of Anne Rice can claim copyright over the story of a young vampire who shacks up with the master who turned him, adopts a vampire child, and later gives a tell-all interview. But the scènes à faire doctrine ensures that copyright does not remove mere tropes from the public domain. The Rice estate cannot claim copyright infringement in all stories about blood-sucking, undead creatures who cannot tolerate sunlight.

To put that in Star Trek terms, anyone is free to write a story about a human-led inter-species alliance of space-faring civilizations that explores the galaxy and maintains uneasy relations with warlike enemies. But the closer the author gets to a San Francisco-headquartered federation of planets with warp-drive starships, transporters, phasers, and emotion-averse characters with pointy ears, the more the risk of copyright infringement. The line is fuzzy, but it's not wide.

The problem for fan fiction always is that the stories fans want to tell are the stories that explore the boundaries of the established narrative, the existing fictional universe, and ideally, of the recognizable characters in it. That's exactly what copyright does not allow. 

Many scholars have argued for more expansive interpretation of fair use to allow for fan creativity in the presence of clear disclaimer. There's a whole book about the problem of fan fiction in historical and multi-national perspective by California Western Law Professor Aaron Schwabach. The last chapter of Schwabach's book is titled tellingly, "Fanfic: The New Voyages."

Archivist and professor emeritus in cinema studies at NYU, formerly at UCLA, Howard Besser made the case as to Star Trek in particular, besides other popular properties, such as Harry Potter, that the public commons should be larger. He called out corporate owners such as Viacom and Paramount for overreach with unjustifiably aggressive cease-and-desist letters.

But the fact and law remain, protection of fan work that plainly takes place in the same universe as copyrighted works, even when disclaiming ownership and avoiding recognizable names of fictional places and characters, and omitting trademarked titles, still is a non-starter. The analysis is of the totality. Nena may invoke Captain Kirk passingly in "99 Luftballons," but a fan film in the Star Trek universe treads too far.

The Treaty of Axanar 

It was no surprise, then, that the federal court in Paramount Pictures Corp. and CBS Studios, Inc. v. Axanar Productions, Inc. and Alec Peters refused the defendants' motion to dismiss in May 2016. The case over Axanar was careening toward a jury trial, the parties arguing heatedly over evidence and jury instructions, when suddenly, in the third week of January 2017, Paramount and Peters settled.

Out of the Axanar settlement came a remarkable new document, which articulated and still states the boundaries around what Paramount and CBS will tolerate in Star Trek fan fiction. The guidelines stated severe new limits, including:

• The duration of a fan production is limited to 15 minutes, or one story in two parts for 30 minutes, "with no additional seasons, episodes, parts, sequels or remakes."
• The work may not have "Star Trek" in the main title and must be subtitled, "A STAR TREK FAN PRODUCTION."
• No Star Trek content content may be used, and Star Trek-recognizable costumes and props must be official Star Trek merchandise.
• No creator or actor ever employed in a licensed Star Trek production may work on the project, and no one working on the project may be paid.
• A production must be non-commercial with a budget from fundraising limited to $50,000.

Described by fan fiction enthusiasts as "draconian," the new guidelines made impossible the production of projects fans had come to love. It seemed that no film such as Axanar could proceed. Serial projects such as Phase II had to call it quits. The golden age of streaming Star Trek fan fiction was over.

Prelude to Axanar
movie poster
(presumed ©; illustrative use)

Axanar Fal-Tor-Pan?

Yet, for better or worse, the Paramount-CBS guidelines were far from the last word on Axanar. Secret arbitration over money raised for Axanar followed the 2017 settlement. In 2023, Paramount sued Peters in California Superior Court in Los Angeles, alleging that he never stopped raising money for an Axanar film, and asking the court to affirm the outcome of the arbitration. 

Peters did not appear, and the court entered Paramount's desired order in February 2024. Rights-holder copyright consultant Jonathan Bailey, founder of CopyByte, wrote about the case for his Plagiarism Today. Fans follow developments around Peters and Axanar in the public Facebook group page, AxaMonitor.

Meanwhile, production on Axanar most definitely continued. Six days after Paramount had its way in court in Los Angeles, Axanar wrapped filming on its set, Jonathan Lane reported on his Fan Film Factor. Peters himself gives monthly updates on Axanar on YouTube. 

In the October 2025 Axanar update, posted on October 17, Peters reported on post-production progress on the latest installment of Axanar, to follow Prelude. He referenced the lawsuit, thereby suggesting that subsequent "episodes" (not "films") might comply with the Paramount-CBS guidelines. If that's what he meant, then a single episode of Axanar cannot exceed 15 minutes, shorter than Prelude's 21 minutes, and there can be only two. Yet Peters described Prelude as mere "proof of concept." Confirming Paramount's 2015 fears, Peters said that Prelude was designed to demonstrate that a fan work could be of such high quality as to be technically indistinguishable from an official studio product.

The ultimate extent of Peters's fealty to the guidelines is unclear. I wonder whether he regards them indeed as mere "guidelines"—like the 1976 copyright fair use guidelines that, in my opinion, courts have too often misapplied as hard lines. In the October update, Peters talked about beta testing a new fundraising website. I wonder further whether he's exceeded the cap of the guidelines. He encouraged fan financial support at the Axanar website.

There was really only one corridor for every corridor shot.
Signs and wall fixtures could be changed, and it curved
(behind camera here) for an illusion of more space.

A New New Voyage

The Axanar debacle in 2016 left Cawley in an awkward spot. His one-of-a-kind set reconstruction had little remaining practical use for filming after Phase II folded. Yet adoring fans would bask in the extravagance of the work. He conceived of the Set Tour. Still, without official imprimatur, he would risk legal jeopardy by opening to the public. 

Cawley invited Paramount execs to Ticonderoga to have a look. No doubt, they were skeptical going in. But, at least as a Set Tour guide told the story, the execs were so impressed with Cawley's loving attention to detail that they agreed to license the Star Trek name. Thus, the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour is not, as I had first suspected, a trademark infringement flying under the radar in tiny Ticonderoga. Set Tour tour guides will not volunteer information about Phase II or other fan productions. Whether they're just playing it safe, or that was an agreement with Paramount, I do not know. But guides will answer questions about Phase II if asked.

The Star Trek Set Tour has a deceptively modest exterior.

To Cawley's credit, he always played ball with Star Trek owners. Remember, it was New Voyages that reached an express understanding with Paramount, before Axanar came along. Cawley came by the 1960s set plans honestly, by all accounts, while working for Theiss on the official franchise. And the Captain Kirk of eight New Voyages episodes even scored a cameo as a bridge officer in J.J. Abrams's Star Trek. The Set Tour has hosted original series cast members as guest tour guides. The original Captain Kirk, ninety-four-year-old William Shatner, is expected back in November 2025.

There is, by the way, a USS Ticonderoga in Star Trek, though accounts differ over whether the name is a nod to Cawley, American history, a real-life Ticonderoga, or all of the above. Five U.S. Navy ships have borne the name Ticonderoga, including an aircraft carrier that distinguished itself in World War II and the Vietnam War. In the 1970 epic war film Tora! Tora! Tora!, the Essex-class Ticonderoga served as a set for the slightly smaller Yorktown-class aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6, not the later, nuclear-powered Enterprise carrier built in 1961). A great many other Navy carriers lent their names to Star Trek starships, including the Lexington, Saratoga, and Yorktown in The Original Series.

I had a (phaser) blast of a good time at the Star Trek Original Set Tour earlier this month. On my way home from the American Society of Comparative Law annual conference in Montreal, walking through a wonderland of Gene Roddenberry optimism about humanity's future was a welcome antidote to Professor James Q. Whitman's gloomy prognosis for rule of law in the United States.

Set Tour visitors get a turn in the captain's chair amid Cawley's breathtaking recreation of the classic bridge of the starship Enterprise. Ironically in revolutionary-historical Ticonderoga, amid relics from an imaginary future, I've never felt more a part of American history.

(All photos RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.)

The Set Tour has tons of artifacts, including ship models, props, and uniforms. Some of the props are recreations, but made so well that they were used in throwback, time-travel episodes, such as Deep Space Nine's 30th anniversary "Trials and Tribble-ations"—besides fan shows such as Phase II.

Make space for public lands, right to recreate

Beaver Dam State Park

Different people feel differently the pinch of the federal government shutdown in the United States. 

(All photos from Nevada in August 2025, except T.R. Birthplace; all photos by RJ Peltz-Steele, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.) 

I'm fortunate not to depend on the federal government for my paycheck. I'm saddened for the steadfast government clerk trying to make ends meet, and nothing I write here means to diminish that anxiety. Professionally, I've been disappointed to see the work of the federal Freedom of Information Act Advisory Committee paralyzed. The committee comprises some heroic public servants in federal agencies.

Theodore Roosevelt Birthplace
National Historic Site,
N.Y., June 2025

On the purely personal front, what hits me hardest is to see the closure of public lands, such as parks and museums. I treasure these places where the public can find education, recreation, and respite. Maybe because I'm an academic, I don't much distinguish among the three. So much of our public dialog in America is preoccupied with how we work. But it's on public lands that Americans live.

As a libertarian, I'm wary of public lands. But I'm not a great, or "pure" libertarian. I have always been what I call a "moderate" libertarian—I've been called a "bad" libertarian—because I do not believe that the private sector is the answer to all problems. I rather believe that being a libertarian is about being thoughtful: making an informed decision at the threshold of any given problem as to whether the problem is better addressed by society as a composition of independent private actors—the presumption—or by society as a collective.

A vexing problem for libertarians is the tragedy of the commons, which arises when competing private individuals, acting in their own interests, will intolerably deplete a resource that the society as a collective requires. The environment is often raised as paradigmatic example. Any one private actor is incentivized only to cut down the trees, or use fresh water. But society needs there to be trees and fresh water, saved from depletion.

Selected public lands in Nevada, besides state parks

American society is heavy on libertarianism—the "Wild West" ethos has long outlived western settlement—but maintains its own delicate balance of liberty and collectivism. The duplexity was embodied by President Theodore Roosevelt, whose reconstructed childhood home I visited in New York in the summer. Roosevelt, a nature enthusiast, was a rugged individualist, and also is credited with founding the very notion of U.S. national parks, which today are widely regarded as a crown jewel of federal government purpose.

All 27 Nevada state parks

Pure libertarians respond to the tragedy of the commons by insisting that the private sector can handle it. The tree cutters ultimately will stop cutting trees, or farm more trees, because they want to keep cutting trees. Water consumers will not use all of the water, because eventually, they will suffer thirst. A slightly watered down take on pure libertarianism makes room for non-governmental public interest organizations to manage collective resources. But there's no place for government.

My Nevada drive
(excluding two national parks
I visited previously)

I find these responses strained and unconvincing. If we destroy the glaciers of Glacier National Park because corporations want to commodify the pure waters, or because wealthy people want to land helicopters on them and take home souvenirs, there's no restoring a natural glory that took 170 million years to form.

If the planet bakes while we wait for the trees to regrow, then the private-sector experiment has failed in a profound and irreversible way. If we run out of fresh water while we wait for innovation to perfect desalinization, then millions might die, and only a few persons with inherited wealth might survive. I wouldn't call that a socially optimal outcome. 

The problem with the purely individualist approach is that it assumes infinite time, perpetual capacity for resource renewal, and indifference to human suffering in the meantime. That sounds to me like a recipe for humanity's self-extinction.

"Citizen Science Station,"
Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument

Public lands are an easy call for me, even as a libertarian. I would like to live in a world in which everyone has access to recreational opportunities, and everyone has a chance to see the inexplicable glory of the creation that fills the earth.

Writing about nuclear weapons in September, I mentioned the time I spent in the summer exploring public lands in Nevada. I visited all 27 Nevada state parks, and a great many other public lands as well: local, state, and federal. Local and state parks fortunately carry on while the federal government is shut down.

I am grateful for all these places, local, state, and federal, and the people who steward them.

One fun thing I happened upon in Nevada was a "Citizen Science Station" at the Tule Springs Fossil Beds National Monument. There, a bracket is mounted on a pole, prepared to receive a smartphone, so that passersby can take a photograph of the terrain. Images can then be uploaded to Chronolog.io, which partners with the National Park Service. The collected images are then compiled into a time lapse series (below, at end), which users can enjoy and study. I contributed an image (Aug. 7, 2025).

Notwithstanding so much natural beauty and the participatory excitement of the Citizen Science Station, I found memorable something else I saw at Tule Springs, a different kind of socially minded contribution from the private sector:

Go see the natural wonders of Nevada, including fossils and fossil beds. See them before the pure libertarians cart them off to private museums, where no doubt they'll be best cared for.

Durango Loop Temporary Trail at Chronolog

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Protestors burn transit stations in Madagascar capital; is American frustration so different?

Protests over lack of water and electricity turned violent late last week in Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the government responded with tear gas, rubber bullets, and a curfew.

(UPDATE, Oct. 14, 2025: Madagascar President Rajoelina has fled the country, and the military has assumed control of government, purporting alliance with protestors.)

I know about the crisis because of friends with family there. I have not seen the story on American TV, which I mention with anxiety over endangered media heterogeneity. You can read more about the protests at, e.g., Reuters (UK), TRT Afrika (Turkey), RFI (France), WION (India), Al Jazeera (Qatar), and if you dig for it, the AP (US).

I was in Antananarivo, known locally as "Tana," in July. The people there could not have been more gracious and welcoming.

At the same time, socioeconomic tension was plain. That's not unusual in African cities, but in Tana, by plain, I mean that there were troubling and unavoidably visible signs of increasingly worrisome economic inequality. 

Antananarivo, Madagascar, July 2025
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

A Tale of Two Cities

Tana from the Radisson gym.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

I used the nicely equipped gym on the eighth floor of the Radisson Blu Hotel in Tana. The room has floor-to-ceiling windows that afford a view of the city from the treadmills. But if one looks straight down from the windows, immediately adjacent to the hotel, there is a residential warren of ramshackle homes. Children play on clay paths between crumbling walls and an open sewer. The neighborhood is right behind a concentration of auto shops, noxious with exhaust and dribbling out the toxic effluents of their work.

Shanty town and auto district adjacent to Radisson. A cable-car line is visible on the horizon.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

In contrast, the Radisson itself is part of a small swanky village that boasts a grocery store, theater, cafes, and gift shops. The village is enclosed by high walls with only one road in from the auto-shop strip. At night, a massive steel door rolls shut to seal off the Radisson village. 

The scene is reminiscent of the fictional town of Woodbury in The Walking Dead, fortified against an incongruent dystopia. Though to reiterate, here, in real life, the souls outside the wall are good people trying to make ends meet. As the sun sets, all but a few local people evacuate the commercial village before the door closes, and then they flow back in with the light of dawn.

Kids play beside a drainage canal behind the Radisson.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Even the walled Radisson village, anyway, is not immune from Tana's socioeconomic troubles, because the utility infrastructure is the same, inside and out. The tap water is not recommended for drinking, and power outages are frequent, if usually short.

Malagasy people generally don't have freezers and shop daily for produce. The cost of appliances would be manageable for many. But the problem would remain the power grid, which is not sufficiently reliable, even in the city, to make home refrigeration cost effective. When the power goes out, most of Tana life hums on without interruption. But the outages paralyze places such as the Radisson village, where devices from refrigerators to televisions to elevators are essential to business.

In bizarre juxtaposition with the motley cityscape, wires are strung across Tana's skies, visible from anywhere. The wires reach from tower to tower and occasionally dip groundward into modern multistory buildings of metal and brick. This is Tana's brand new cable-car system.

I was not surprised to read that protestors last week set fire to "several" of the cable-car stations.

Madagascar and the Monorail 

A cable-car line fills the sky behind the Tana train station.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

 

The motivation for building the cable-car system was ostensibly sound. Tana is plagued by jammed traffic, which is impeding economic development. One of the reasons people crowd into the tight and unsanitary living quarters of the inner city is that they could not otherwise reach their jobs if they moved to better accommodation on the outskirts.

The cable-car lines promise to soar over the cars and trucks, moving people into and out of the city with quiet efficiency. The lines also are built to reach less developed surrounding areas, rather than tracking the congested main highway, thus inducing new suburbs to bloom and alleviating the crisis of housing, besides transportation.

One doesn't have to look hard at the plan, though, to doubt its cost-benefit analysis. To start with, the road congestion is a function of infrastructure failure as much as volume. Though there are some recently constructed traffic circles, most roads are unmarked by lanes, and most city intersections are chaotic tangles with no right of way indicated by signs or signal lights.

One wonders that infrastructure money might have been spent better to bring the existing potholed road system up to standard before stringing cables over head between shiny stations.

Cable cars hang motionless over Tana in July.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Then there are the cable cars themselves. The first time a friend and I had a look at them, I couldn't help but say aloud, "That wreaks of kickback." My friend agreed. We both thought immediately of "Marge vs. The Monorail."

The 198 gondola cars can hold only 12 passengers each and move only so fast. The system is designed to move daily 75,000 people and replace 2,000 cars on the road. That's not nothing, but also not a big chunk of potential commuters relative to the city's population of 3 million. And if one figures that growing suburbs will attract more people to Tana from impoverished parts of the country, the problem of induced demand is compounded.

Though cable cars are touted as a potential boon for urban development, they work best as a discrete-route solution for particular hurdles, such as topography, and as a complement, not a substitute, for proven mass transit systems such as busses and rail cars, both lacking in Tana. A "bus system" exists only insofar as terribly overcrowded minibuses barrel along customary routes. Limited inter-city locomotives rumble over dilapidated tracks.

Is There a Hyena in the Debt Trap? 

It's unclear from government reporting just how much the cable-car system cost Madagascar, but it's a lot. The price tag was supposed to be €152 million. The French government loaned the country €28 from the French treasury and arranged for the rest by private loan from Société Générale. Malagasy voters were not happy about the indebtedness. Moreover, Madagascar committed to fund any cost overruns. Some reports say that the French loans wound up covering only one of the two system lines.

The government's revenue basis to fund cost overruns and pay back the loans also is shaky. Malagasy people have balked at the cost of tickets on the cable-car system, which range from about €0.65 to €1.1. That might be low by western standards, but it's a lot locally. Daily round trips add up to at least €32 per month in a country where the monthly living wage is only €126, and €85 marks the low end of actual-wage estimates.

President Andry Rajoelina, 2019
(ILO via Flickr CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The government has not been forthcoming with data about the project, and no wonder. Malagasy-French businessman Andry Rajoelina has been president since 2019 and held out a technological solution to Tana's legendary traffic woes as a showpiece project. 

Rajoelina's vision has been slow to come to fruition. Plans were sidetracked initially by the pandemic. The French money came only in 2021, and construction began in 2022, with delivery promised in two years. In 2024, the Rajoelina administration inaugurated the cable-car system amid much fanfare and worldwide press. But the system wasn't actually finished then, and operational opening was postponed to 2025. 

On my last day in Tana in July 2025, the cable cars moved, surprising everyone on the ground. The system was not yet open, but was being tested. Buckets of water were loaded into cars to simulate the weight of passengers. The system finally opened in August.

The worst public relations challenge the cable-car system has posed to the Rajoelina administration to date is not its ultimate efficacy, but simply the foreboding physical presence of the empty gondolas hanging motionless over the city. When people are stuck in traffic, or when the power goes out, or when they leave their homes in search of drinkable water, they look up at the network of towers and heavy wires and wonder whether any of that debt and spending will make their lives better.

Don't Look Up 

I'm sometimes guilty myself of a siloed focus on American affairs. And thinking about what's happening in Madagascar makes me wonder whether—when?—the day will come that Americans turn our frustrations into conflagration.

America feels every day less a "developed" country in terms of critical needs such as transportation, healthcare, housing, and jobs. And people struggle more every day to make ends meet, while politicians bellyache over the government supposedly doing too much.

An anecdotal survey: 

Transportation. To travel for work, I have to make the arduous, two-plus-hour trek to the airport via foot, bus, train, and bus again, across slow, unconnected, and overpriced transit systems that my region is lucky to have at all. When I land in Europe, I'll travel about the same distance with one ticket on a rapid, unified transit system in under an hour.

Amtrak is hard at work on "NextGen Acela." But it will only serve the northeast corridor and will top out at 160 mph. Europe hit that mark in the 1970s with trains today running in the 190s. China and Japan have high-speed trains on dedicated lines running at 220 mph. Anyway, "old gen" Acela was a corporate subsidy, as it practically priced out non-business travelers, even before Amtrak introduced predatory dynamic pricing. 

Healthcare. My wife and I saw Trevor Noah deliver his latest stand-up in Connecticut a couple of weeks ago, and he did a long bit on the nonsensical costs and bureaucracies that tyrannize patients in the U.S. healthcare system. Noah was treated for a wrist injury he sustained just before boarding a plane home to New York from his native South Africa. He could have been treated faster and for less out of pocket had he just flown back to a hospital in Cape Town, he only half-joked. 

A Connecticut stage awaits Trevor Noah on September 18.
(RJ Peltz-Steele CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

Most memorable about Noah's monolog to me, besides his trademark storytelling brilliance, was the chorus of audible vocalizations of assent and empathy from the audience, including us, as Noah described the absurdities of hospital billing, from the mysteries of bloated pricing—weren't we promised "No Surprises"?—and picayune itemization of the mundane to the unashamed prioritization of profit over care.

Housing and jobs. My daughter bought a home in Los Angeles this year and has done yeoman, Instagram-hit renovation work herself. But she's looking for a new job to make the mortgage bearable. From her scores of applications, she recently rated an interview in her entertainment-industry wheelhouse. Yet she was one of 54 people interviewed for one low-level position. A form email later communicated regret that she was among the hundreds of unsuccessful applicants. Every American job-seeker knows such woes amid the full-time job of looking for a job, despite the touting of low unemployment by the administrations of both parties.

A measure of wealth inequality, the U.S. gini coefficient was 41.8 in 2025, on a scale from 0, perfect equality, to perfect inequality 100, according to World Population Review (WPR). That's bad for a well developed economy, comparing unfavorably with, for example, western European countries, which score in the low 30s, and Canada, at 29.9. Worse, inequality in the United States is rising over the long term, while it's falling elsewhere.

Our number is, however, on par with Madagascar. Malagasy data are difficult to come by, but WPR estimates a 2025 gini coefficient of 42.5, also on the rise over the long term.

The gini coefficient is a ratio, so it doesn't speak to comparable sums. People in a poorly developed economy might be quicker to disrupt the status quo when their very survival is on the line than people in a highly developed economy who become unable to afford cable TV. 

At the same time, Americans have a temperamental sensitivity to injustice and, even after 250 years, little patience for tyranny.

History is littered with great societies befelled by their own greedy elites.