By Lambert Strether.
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Indian Springs WMA, two-track road, Washington, Maryland, United States. “Adult male Brown Thrasher singing from lower branches of a Sycamore tree near the road.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Court filing: Who’s in charge at DOGE? If not Musk, who?
- Ed Zitron: “The Generative AI Con.”
- The value of note-taking.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
DOGE
“Declaration of Joshua Fisher” (PDF) [State of New Mexico, et al., v. Elon Musk, in his official capacity, et al., United States District Court for the District of Columbia]. Fisher is director of the White House Office of Administration. Amazing stuff:
A few days ago, we showed how Trump’s Executive Orders establishes DOGE teams as a Bolshevik-style parallel structure to existing goverment agencies. And now we learn that DOGE has nobody in charge? No “service administrator”? Bolsheviks, but no Lenin? Or does Fisher know who the extremely transparent DOGE’s boss is, but he’s just not telling us? Certainly President Trump believes Musk is in charge:
Well, this is awkward. https://t.co/M2QfO8w5q0
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) February 18, 2025
So who is in charge of DOGE? Big Balls?
“Who’s in charge of DOGE? Not Elon Musk, White House says” [Politico]. “The technical designation does not mean Musk is not, for all practical purposes, the key decision-maker for DOGE, which has been staffed full of his allies and may still ultimately be fueled by his influence in the White House. Musk has eagerly touted DOGE’s work, described his influence over its operations and appeared alongside Trump to talk about its mission. Trump himself has credited Musk with leading DOGE. ‘I’m going to tell [Elon Musk] very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education,’ Trump said in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. ‘He’s going to find the same thing … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military.’ But the Fisher filing suggests a technical degree of separation that raises new questions about accountability for DOGE’s operations — a breakneck effort that has alarmed federal employees and raised fears about data breaches in some of the federal government’s most closely guarded databases.” • Recall once more (cited here) Madison’s fundamental architectural principle for devising checks and balances: “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” And I wrote: “[T]he President’s actions in creating DOGE and setting it in motion run counter to Madison’s principle; ‘places’ [offices] are unclear, hence interests are unclear, hence checks are unclear, hence ‘interior structure of the government’ is out of whack.” Here we have a place (“Services Administrator”) with no “man” in it. And yet that Service is putatively auditing the Federal Government! It’s extraordinary.
“DOGE’s ‘Nerd Army’ Is Breaking the Government by Threatening to Snitch to Elon” [Rolling Stone]. “When security officials, for instance, at several departments and agencies have responded that they need to check to ensure these young Musk allies have proper clearance to view sensitive databases, DOGE staff have routinely erupted in fury. Some have told these security officials that if they don’t give them what they want immediately, they’ll call Musk’s cellphone and give him the officials’ names — and have the richest man in the world call and yell at them, or get them reprimanded or fired. ‘Do I need to call Elon?‘ one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month, a source familiar with the exchange tells Rolling Stone. This has happened repeatedly since the dawn of the second Trump administration — at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury Department, at the Office of Personnel Management, and elsewhere. It has become a cruel punchline within the federal bureaucracy, four sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, that ‘some child’ from the DOGE team ‘will threaten to call Elon Musk, if you don’t do what the child wants,’ as one federal career official describes it. So far, it’s working.” • DOGEbags indeed. And they seem to know who their boss is. Why doesn’t the White House?
“The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes” [TechDirt]. Excellent article. This caught my eye: “If the Justice Department’s declaration is true and Elon really isn’t running DOGE, then federal employees should immediately stop bowing down to these threats. After all, why would anyone need to worry about a call from someone who (according to the DOJ) has no official role or authority over the DOGE team? In fact, given this declaration, shouldn’t security officials be asking DOGE staff who actually has the authority to override their security protocols? (Good luck getting an answer to that one.)?” • It might be fun if some clever lawyer turned this into a lawsuit.
* * * * * * “Elon Musk’s wrecking ball” [Ed Luce, Financial Times]. Ed Luce is Ed Luce, so there’s nothing readers don’t already know, but this sentence caught my eye: “Take nothing at face value.” • In the pages of the FT! Everybody in the DOGE flexnet — the bent squillionaires, the “old heads”, the feral/incel engineers — lie like they breathe. No, that’s not fair. It takes no audacity to breathe. For example–
“No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits” [Wired]. “Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a ‘cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old.'” Cursory is right. More: “While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets. Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies. COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it. Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the ‘Convention du Mètre.’ These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150. That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115. However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from ‘the Social Security database’ to X, writing that ‘the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!’ The figures suggested that over 10 millions people aged over 120 were collecting benefits…. The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.” • Dealing with Elon is like dealing with Ukrainian propaganda. It’s really good propaganda, it comes in great volume, and its amplified by an army of bots and shills. Also, any hint of DOGEbags messing with Social Security gives me the creeps. As it should you, no matter your age. NOTE: My recollection is that Elon’s first series of lies was based solely on Social Security records aged 150, for which Wired — only an actual Social Security maintainer could give definitive evidence — gives an account. Elon then embarked on a second series of lies with additional records, showing other out-of-band values. The following gives an account for both campaigns (Occam’s razor slicing toward the datatype side rather than the fraud side, it seems to me).
“1875 Social Security rumor” [Keith Thompson, GIthub]. “Musk didn’t directly say that payments were being made to people who are 150 year old, but that’s almost certainly what we were supposed to infer. In response to this, it was claimed to be a result of a feature of the COBOL programming language, that supposedly specifies 1875-05-20 as a base date, used to mark an unknown date. This is not the case; the COBOL standard does not refer to 1875. But this false explanation spread quickly through both social media and news outlets, being reported by Rachel Maddow among others. Another alleged explanation is that that date is specified by ISO 8601, the standard that gave us the YYYY-MM-DD date format.” And as far as payments go:
“There was an audit in 2023 by the SSA Inspector General about number holders over the age of 100 with no record of death on file. They identified just shy of 19 million. They were able to find death certificates and records for a couple million, but most couldn’t be verified. But here’s the important part that Musk is omitting: Of the 19 million over the age of 100 without a verified death record, only 44,000 number holder accounts were actually drawing social security payments. That means only 44k people aged 100+ still collecting SS, which is a more logical situation.”
“Statistically, it is reasonable there are 44K people older than 100. It represents .013% percent of the population which is in line with the 100+ populations in the UK, France and Germany.”
And:
The critical importance of domain knowledge can never be overstated when it comes to data scientific research. You’ll never get good (and truthful) results if you don’t have a deep understanding of the intricacies of the specific data sets under investigation. And, those of us who’ve done this for a while know that pretty much every data set (especially those that live in databases whose ages are measured in decades) tend to have boatloads of “interesting” aspects that make straightforward analysis challenging at best.
(I found the Github gist by starting at this Stack Exchange thread. I’m still waiting for a real data analyst smarter than me to explain it to me like I’m give, but the bottom line is that Musk screaming fraud is a lie, and his motive for doing so should be questions).
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC February 10 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC February 15 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC February 8 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data February 14: | National [6] CDC February 13: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens February 17: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 8: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| ★ Positivity[9] CDC January 27: | ★ Variants[10] CDC January 27 |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 25: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 25: |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) A little uptick.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.
[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.
[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.
Stats Watch
Manufacturing: “United States NY Empire State Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NY Empire State Manufacturing Index surged 18.3 points to +5.7 in February 2025, easily surpassing market expectations of -1 and signaling a slight rebound in business activity across New York State. New orders and shipments saw moderate growth, while employment levels declined.”
Housing: “United States NAHB Housing Market Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index in the US fell to 42 in February 2025, the lowest in five months, compared to 47 in January, and below forecasts of 47, dragged down by concerns on tariffs, elevated mortgage rates and high housing costs. The gauge measuring current sales conditions fell four points to 46, the component measuring sales expectations in the next six months plunged 13 points to 46, and the gauge charting traffic of prospective buyers posted a three-point decline to 29.”
Manufacturing: “Judge gives Boeing and DOJ another month to negotiate 737 Max fraud plea” [FlightGlobal]. “Boeing and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) have received an extra month to negotiate a possible revised guilty plea by the company to federal fraud charges related to certification the 737 Max. US federal judge Reed O’Connor has delayed to 14 March a deadline by which Boeing and the DOJ must update the court about their efforts to reach a deal that would head off a trial, according to a 17 February court order. The company and DOJ had previously been required to submit an update by 16 February. But both requested an extension, citing the recent administration change in Washington.”
Manufacturing: “Boeing’s Air Force One program could be delayed until 2029, or later, White House official says” [Reuters]. “The Air Force One program may be further delayed until 2029 or years later, a senior administration official said, citing supply chain issues and changing requirements, after the White House said the project failed to deliver a new plane on time over the weekend. The delays are frustrating, but not much can be done to speed delivery, the official told Reuters, noting that Boeing faced problems getting components since some manufacturers had gone out of business. Some requirements for the aircraft had also changed, given evolving potential threats, the official said.”
Tech: “The Generative AI Con” [Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?]. “This isn’t the early days of shit. The Attention Is All You Need paper that started the whole transformer-based architecture movement was published in June 2017. We’re over two years in, hyperscalers have sunk over 200 billion dollars in capital expenditures into generative AI, AI startups took up a third of all venture capital investment in 2024, and almost every single talented artificial intelligence expert is laser-focused on Large Language Models. And even then, we still don’t have a killer app! There is no product that everybody loves, and there is no iPhone moment!” • Well, Ed? How about the government? (Note I am not suggesting that whatever DOGE’s little schemers have in mind will be better than our current experience; worse, if anything, because you’ll never ever reach a human.)
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 44 Fear (previous close: 46 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 38 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 14 at 6:59:56 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes down one on Food Supply. “The lack of activity has downgraded this category” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 180. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • This is a tough crowd. Surely Trump’s first month brought the Rapture closer?
Gallery
Plus ça change…
In the town of Novgorod, they sometimes come across preserved birch bark. People used this bark to write on, including Onfim! Archaeologists have found 17 pieces of bark marked with his homework. But what do these inscriptions reveal? A young boy who disliked school! 2/ pic.twitter.com/04FPOVkFvH
— Dr Hugh Thomas (@hughs_news) February 16, 2025
Musical Interlude
Reaction is where we’re at, for sure:
Which works two ways:
The Workplace
“The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach” [Scott Smitelli]. • The workplace…
Especiallly for any DOGE-adjacent readers (full thread):
And:
News of the Wired
“Why can’t we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?” [Guardian]. “Ironically, for parenting influencers who post about elaborate holidays in the name of creating ‘core memories’, the early events that children retain can be surprisingly mundane – ‘things that most parents would never reminisce elaboratively about’, [Prof Elaine Reese at the University of Otago] says. ‘The classic example from my own research is a child who remembers seeing a worm on the footpath one time.'” • Hmm.
Contact information for plants: Readers, feel free to contact me at lambert [UNDERSCORE] strether [DOT] corrente [AT] yahoo [DOT] com, to (a) find out how to send me a check if you are allergic to PayPal and (b) to find out how to send me images of plants. Vegetables are fine! Fungi, lichen, and coral are deemed to be honorary plants! If you want your handle to appear as a credit, please place it at the start of your mail in parentheses: (thus). Otherwise, I will anonymize by using your initials. See the previous Water Cooler (with plant) here. From AM:
AM writes: “December 29, 2024 in Roger Williams Park. 50 degree air + ice on pond = fog. Not the most attractive tree, but atmospheric nonetheless.”
Readers: Water Cooler is a standalone entity not covered by the annual NC fundraiser. Material here is Lambert’s, and does not express the views of the Naked Capitalism site. If you see a link you especially like, or an item you wouldn’t see anywhere else, please do not hesitate to express your appreciation in tangible form. Remember, a tip jar is for tipping! Regular positive feedback both makes me feel good and lets me know I’m on the right track with coverage. When I get no donations for three or four days I get worried. More tangibly, a constant trickle of donations helps me with expenses, and I factor in that trickle when setting fundraising goals:
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Some details about Musk’s ongoing work with the NRO and plugging SpaceX further into the Deep State in using Starlink as part of a surveillance system. This started well before the election, but I do think it helps put more things in context.
China and Russia working to develop anti-satellite tech looks smarter and smarter.
What will future generations think when they dig up coins like this Maltese 2 Euro?
The “non-Elites strike back”. Boaty McBoatface southern Europe style. Apparently some people refuse to accept this assuming it’s a crude forgery but it is very real and becoming collectible.
If they dig up the 2 Euro Plautus coin, they will decide that there was a year 0.
2016’s face there looks uncannily like Trump.
>AM writes: “December 29, 2024 in Roger Williams Park. 50 degree air + ice on pond = fog. Not the most attractive tree, but atmospheric nonetheless.”
Maybe not an interesting tree to some, but certainly an interesting photo. Thanks.
Moi thinks it’s attractive. Put snow on the ground and it’s a Casper David Friedrich painting.
It’s like there should be someone from hundreds of years ago walking out of the fog. Like a character from Outlander or a colonial time period person. Spooky. Super photo!
The Witch (2015) trailer (2:30) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iQXmlf3Sefg Still gives me the creeps.
Looks like a dead ash tree. Plenty of them here!
Hmmm. I’m wondering if Dr. Hugh Thomas is being helpfully obtuse or just engaging in plain old self-censorship.
Novgorod wasn’t just any old town. Novgorod was the center of the Republic of Novgorod, although you wouldn’t exactly learn that from Thomas’s thread:
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1891250391217512560.html
Wikipedia’s quick intro: “The Novgorod Republic (Russian: Новгородская республика, romanized: Novgorodskaya respublika) was a medieval state that existed from the 12th to 15th centuries in northern Russia, stretching from the Gulf of Finland in the west to the northern Ural Mountains in the east. Its capital was the city of Novgorod. The republic prospered as the easternmost trading post of the Hanseatic League, and its people were much influenced by the culture of the Byzantines,[3] with the Novgorod school of icon painting producing many fine works.[4]”
One can see why Vladimir Putin famously had to go on about Russian history, because Tucker Carlson wouldn’t have known Novgorod and Pskov from the Wisconsin Dells.
Evidently, Dr. Hugh doesn’t know what he is writing about. Or he’s being coy. We wouldn’t want to talk about one of the kernels of Russia, a center of early Russian culture, and a republic (in a country that is supposedly addicted to autocrats).
And the delightful Onfim is so important that he gets his own entry in Italian Wikipedia:
https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onfim
I guess the Anglophone world might have trouble understanding mischievous Russian kids, when it is so much easier to assume that Russians are descended from orcs.
There’s something fishy about not acknowledging Onfim’s world.
Is this in the right place?
Lambert Strether: See the twiXt you reposted above from Hugh Thomas with the birchbark homework and the drawings by Onfim.
I went over to Thread Reader to go over the whole post, and I found Thomas taking down and avoiding the Russian content. Onfim was Russian. It seemed, errrrr, curious.
I do enjoy and appreciate the “micro-history.” Carlo Ginzburg also focuses on daily life and the letters and artifacts and beliefs of the regular folk. Always enlightening.
Yet I also insist on context.
Oops!
File under AI, from Charles Hugh Smith:
Automation Institutionalizes Mediocrity
https://www.oftwominds.com/blogfeb25/automation-mediocrity2-25.html
”
With the customers corralled, the incentives are to algorithmically optimize mediocrity, as mediocrity is the most profitable optimization possible.”
TLDR: Process over judgment.
It’s the implementation standard for the rules of neoliberalism (because markets; go die).
Only processes can be automated, not judgment. My hunch is that Gödel is involved: to paraphrase his theorem, any general formal system admits propositions that are undecideable within it and hence process will always come up short at some point and require judgment, I.e. something that cannot be adduced from existing precepts of the system.
We haven’t talked about train derailments in a while. Well, we have another. Didn’t see much national coverage but here is some local. This happened about a week ago in Attica, Ohio. Norfolk & Southern railroad. Wasn’t a large derailment (can’t find the number of cars but if I remember right it was around a dozen) with only two cars leaking. FTA;
The below link to a local paper gives some information on all the safety issues N&S are doing. Or should I say, they say they are doing.
Wheel cause of derailment in Attica
I live about 20 minutes away and this is my local paper. Without that I might not have heard about it.
Thanks!
> Tech: “The Generative AI Con” [Ed Zitron, Where’s Your Ed At?].
>> This became a little less exciting a month ago when DeepSeek released its open source “r1” model
DeepSeek. Oh yeah! Hadn’t seen so much reference in the last week. I take that to mean interested parties are quietly leaving the bag for someone else. Rather like Javier and Hawk Tuah’s ventures, but with abouts 1% of US GDP invested, it takes awhile to extract.
Janet says we’re at the ‘Smash and Grab’ phase. ‘Break things’ = ‘Smash’. I know you’re not supposed to be able to predict Black Swans, but come on. ‘The Collapse of Complex Societies’ was published in 1988, and the Berlin Wall fell the next year. Tainter reset the goalposts a bit with his response to that, I think that shelling parliament while the majority of calories are coming from backyard gardens looks pretty shaky to me, but my point is just how far are we from the Seneca cliff (‘ruin is rapid’)?
A good question is ‘So what?’ For one: In the U.S., it now matters a lot more which state you live in. And, it’s all sea foam on the big wave.
I have added orts and scraps, with links that make DOGE even DOGEier than first thought. Enjoy!
re: “DOGEier.” Dry, very dry. / ;)
Bull DOGEier
Remember DOGE spelled backward is E GOD!!
Put set of longhorn steer horns on the front end and you’d have a Texas bull DOGEier. / ;)
“A few days ago we showed how Trump’s Executive Orders established DOGE teams as a Bolshevik style parallel structure to existing government agencies.”
I would argue that this initial interpretation may be closer to the truth.
Branko Milanovic has recently maintained in “Trump, the state and the revolution,” (Substack, Nov 15, 2025) that the Trumpist revolutionaries (including Musk and DODGE) are in the process of dismantling the present managerial state apparatus. He states that “…The last such revolutionary change in the U.S. was done by FDR in the 1930s, it included smashing the old state, creating a new one and endowing it with a multitude of new functions…if you have a revolutionary movement that movement in order to survive has to smash the old state apparatus and create a new one.”
Furthermore, one of the most insightful ideologues of the Trump revolution, N.S. Lyons, has also recently argued in “American Strong Gods,” that “…As Carl Schmitt noted earlier in the twentieth century an elemental impulse of liberalism is “neutralization,” and “depoliticization,” of the political–that is, the attempt to remove all fundamental contention from politics out of fear of conflict, shrinking politics to mere managerial administration. This excising of the political from politics was at the heart of the post-World War II project.”
No more.
> I would argue that this initial interpretation may be closer to the truth.
As opposed to?
A shell game adding to the Schroedinger’s DOGE aspect of the whole thing.
SchroeDOGE?
Dear IM Doc (or any other readers),
You mentioned in yesterday’s cooler that “flu” cases are very high. Well, I remember that during the Covid epidemic (remember that, when it was called an epidemic?) doctors would routinely say “Don’t call it Covid”. “We can’t bill for Covid”. They wanted to call it asthma, nasal congestion, chest congestion, migraines, blood clots, etc.
Could this wave be Covid?
As an elementary school teacher, I would get a flu about once every 5 years, kids and such. Now I’ve had “the flu” 3 times in one year.
We are having very very little COVID right now. But we are absolutely deluged with Influenza A. This is mainly the H3 variety. These are tested and confirmed positive. We have to report each and every one to the health department.
What am I noticing this time around?
Patients are much sicker. Hospitalization is a very real thing with this. Almost every single patient had their flu vaccines this fall. I am not going to get into that right now. But this I will say – the problems with what we have been doing and saying are now obvious to all – it is PROFOUNDLY REFRESHING to remind my students and everyone around me – you do not get to denigrate or yell at people with respiratory issues because of their vaccine status……what was going on the past 4 years is absolutely demonic and I am so glad we have returned to some state of normalcy where all can see that the flu vaccines do not really do a whole lot. I am starting to see the young docs put down the judgement crap and really have had a change of heart. Epidemics like this current flu thing tend to do that. I tell them all the time – Please do not ever let yourselves fall into this trap again. We are physicians – it is our sworn duty to take care of all – no matter what med they may or may not have taken or what they have done to themselves. It is one of the worst ethical breaches in the history of medicine to go on TV and denigrate people. It has caused the entire world to have a very jaundiced eye towards all of us. It is now going to fall to your generation to earn the trust again. So do it. Especially after the Dr. Birx show on Piers Morgan yesterday. Exactly what early treatment were you opining about, Dr. Birx, that should have been given to COVID patients? AND you are now admitting that the vaccines never did anything to stop infection or transmission – AND ACTUALLY LAUGHING ABOUT IT – so what happened to all of my patients who were fired after the mandates – what do you tell them Dr. Birx?
The 3 COVID admissions we have had in our hospital since JAN 1 have all been vaxxed/boosted – and all been co-morbid.
And yes – there are multiple things going on right now as far as infectious disease. Not the least of which is mycoplasma – which is capable of producing a very very prolonged illness. This is very subtle, and the testing is very unreliable, so it is important to have a seasoned clinician who can really tell the difference between all of these things. There is an antibiotic, zithromax, which can really help this and take a lot of time off the illness……but again the doctor really needs to have experience.
Thankfully, the CDC seems to be back on its game at this point. I am getting all kinds of communications and help every day in emails. And from my state Health Dept. This was absolutely not happening during COVID – they were too worried about vaccine breakthrough bad news among many other things – and is a welcome relief.
Are you testing? Assuming your immune system is functioning normally such that you would have at least temporary immunity lasting months or longer, flu three times in one year seems rather unlikely. Given the number of respiratory pathogens floating around: flu, RSV, Covid, various common cold viruses, you might consider Hickam’s dictum:
P.S. I am not a doctor.
It seems like it is flu because they’re testing and it is coming back flu, or at least in the charts that I’m seeing, for example on page 2 of Walgreens, they have all “respiratory” viruses: RSV, SARS-CoV-2, and both Flu types. And the latter is spiking visibly, but SARS2 is not.
Or here is for NC:
https://covid19.ncdhhs.gov/dashboard
This however is “symptoms”. Which is:
There is a third way!
Human Meta Pneumono Virus (HMPV) has been raging through the UK this winter. It feels like a “light” flu if you are lucky (two days in bed, a week of ambulatory lassitude, coughing and inappetence in my case) or like being steamrollered with flu if you are unlucky (my spouse’s week off work and six weeks of post-viral fatigue and respiratory insufficiency; sane for our farm manager).
Finally!! Someone mentions HMPV and I thank you for it. I don’t think it’s limited to the UK this winter, it looks to be raging through at least one smallish town in Kentucky where I live. I came down with it New Years Eve as did five other people that I know of on my street and others I know around town. Unhappily, I’m in the unlucky category as I’m after a full month and a half still dragging with this. The thing I noticed we all have in common is that we are all over sixty.
My doctor’s office is probably where I caught it when I was in for something else at the end of December. Front desk person said there was some “mystery” illness going around that tested negative for Covid, RSV or the flu but the symptoms had characteristics of the aforementioned viruses. A number of them in the doctor’s office had also caught it. I mentioned HMPV and she agreed it sounded like a match. At that point, I’d had my symptoms a full month when I went in to pay the bill. That was at least two weeks ago, and I’m only barely beginning to feel better. My interaction with the doctor’s office was not confidence inspiring sadly.
Everyone was so helpful. I appreciate all of you (2 days later).
Peace ~ Bsn
“Why can’t we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?” When I was born in 1948, we lived in an apartment above my father’s garage at the Bay Shore, NY LIRR train station. I remember reaching my arms up to be held so I could see the steam engine as it pulled into the station. We moved from that apartment just after my first birthday.
I remember various things. My metal stroller. My sandals. Swallowing a penny when I still slept in a crib. My parents’ big fight when I was two that led to their divorce, which they both confirmed as accurate when I was an adult. Playing in Washington Square. I remember Truman campaigning on Second Avenue and my mother voting for Henry Wallace.
Been on sabaticalifornia, dude.
Skied the calm before the storm and then was caught in the great indoors of our rental digs in Mammoth as 5 feet of snow fell in a little over a day, forcing our mutual hands as it were to complete a 1,000 piece jigsaw puzzle, which turned out to be 63 pieces short, so we consigned it to the fire-be gone!
I’m barely tech savvy enough to turn a computer on, and have spent a fortnight figuring out where that DOGE will hunt, and its implications, Bizarro World FDR…move fast, break a nation.
In this case as in the Mississippi Bubble which laid France low, it was a foreigner who caused things to come a cropper, Elon filling in for John Law.
> In this case as in the Mississippi Bubble which laid France low, it was a foreigner who caused things to come a cropper, Elon filling in for John Law.
A foreigner + complaisant Bourbons….
Any update from the NC writers or NC Covid Brain Trust on “nasal rinse” as another “swiss cheese layer” as a Covid/Long Covid prophalyctic/mitigation? Does the current understanding per research papers and physicians’ observation suggest that this is a worthwhile practice? If yes do you recommend some specific nasal rinse SKU(s) that can be purchased OTC retail (physical or internet) here in Murica? Thx & Cheers!
For the past two years, I have used a 1% iodine nasal spray during / after air travel or attending crowded events. [Knocking wood], I have had the longest streak of my life without even a mild cold. The brand name is Nasomin.
Best and cheapest nasal rinse: 1/2 table salt, 1/2 baking soda. The baking soda makes the salt tolerable. Put 1 1/2 tsp of this mixture in about a pint watering can, then fill it with warm water. The temperature matters!. Tip it into the nose. Suck the liquid over the soft palate and spit it out in backward “sips”…
Works great for me. It’s called “Jala neti” and is an ancient Indian practice. It takes about 5 minutes every night (I keep a container of the dry ingredients in the bathroom). That and my trusty KN-95 mask are my preventives.
Re: Doge and the Social security databases.
The story moved on to this tweet from Elon yesterday :
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!
Maybe Twilight is real and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security”
I don’t know how to post tables in here. He groups the number of not FALSE entries in decade size buckets, 0-10, 10-20, etc …100-110 all the way to 350-360. So it works out that there are 12.5 million entries with age 120+, there’s even a 1000 entries with age field greater than 220 and has death field set to FALSE. Clearly there is a lot of crap in the databases.
Bear with me regarding the process Doge seem to be following. In the data science lifecycle they are at the stage of ‘exploration data analysis’. Here you just go thru databases collected and ‘explore’, doing things like what values a field can have, how many NULLs there are, how many with spaces …
30 years ago I wrote and used a set of SQL scripts/ programs that I set off overnight to do this exploration and I’d come back next morning to a nice set of reports. For the last 15 years big companies buy off the shelf software for this.
During this data exploration you come up with absurdities. One laughed about it internally, sometimes I’d inwardly seethe, but bearing in mind seniority, humiliating the developers AND their bosses, one just quietly put the crap aside.
Not Elon !
Worse , he clearly wants the non-cognoscenti to infer that these 12 million or so 120 + aged people are getting paid real money. And many have, from malice or innocence.
Now I have no idea if they are or not. To find out I’d have looked for a Last paid date field and done a two dimension table of age v last paid date each in suitable buckets.
At another level , I’ve known Elons hype re Tesla for a long long time. Until , admittedly, it came good. So Id definitely say , in a projects early days when it’s Elon, consider the source.
There’s a guy / prof Justin Wolfers who has been tweeting rebuttals. It’s worth following him. Mind you he looks at the official social security administration reports and everything is hunky dory per him and them , but to rephrase Mandy Rice-Davies of Profumo scandal fame ‘theybwould say that wouldn’t they”.
Having a look at the subject, shows clearly the constrains for valid dates:
Social Security was introduced in 1935.
To be eligible for benefits one had to
pay in at least 40 quarters, that’s 10 years
be at least 65 years old
This means the first regular beneficiaries of social security payments were 65 in 1945, aka of the 1880 cohort. Virtually noone participating in this system can be born before 1880. Anyone older will not most likely not be a beneficiary, and anyone younger (aka still paying in) will be, well, younger.
So add another 5 years for wiggle room and we end at a nice round 1875 as earliest year for any birthday to be recorded.
A perfect rational base for a date entry, isn’t it?
From Lambert’s stack exchange link. Makes sense to me
Thanks for this.
It’s really scalding me that Elon lies, and lies, and lies about the data, and implies there’s trillions of dollars wasted on Social Security. There isn’t, but if he persuades enough people he’s right, a “Grand Bargain” will cut those trillions out, screwing a lot of people very badly. I would also guess that there won’t be a way to recover from the debacle, because whatever system the DOGEbags install won’t have a concept of rollback.
DOGE DOESN’T UNDERSTAND THE DATA because they have neither the time, the expertise, nor the desire (government being by definition illegitimate) to do so.
Some kind of train wreck is coming, but I have no confidence that our wonderful Democrats can or will explain it (since after all, everybody across the political class accepts that government is like a household, and once you accept that, what Elon is saying makes sense).
On the debate about 1875 and COBOL: there are untyped languages and strongly typed ones and varieties in between.
I started computer programming in 1966 on a 16K memory machine, in assembler language. So being introduced to COBOL was a huge step forward. You could do cool things like “MOVE A TO B” instead of looping through and moving character by character: which led to the common error of miscounting, and moving too much or too little, with catastrophic results (well, just bugs really, but you felt really stupid).
Assembler was untyped, it was just named cells of memory and code. COBOL is weakly typed: we had numbers and characters and NO dates.
What that meant was we basically treated dates as a string of characters, and the comments on the Substack piece mentioned many varieties of formats. It was your choice, COBOL just knew you had a string of numeric characters, and people (NOT COBOL) had various standard conversion utilities to convert formats.
So what happened when there was no data available for BIRTH-DATE? You made stuff up. There were all sorts of standards and releases of COBOL, but nothing forced you to handle this a particular way, though your own company might have such standards. So the debate about 1875 is interesting, and some companies might very well have done it that way. Or you could leave it blank or filled with zeros or whatever worked for you. This naturally led to lots of interoperability issues.
My speculation on Rasputin is that once he says something, he absolutely will not back down, so when his flunky comes with the 175 year old social security recipient, he jumps on it. And then won’t back off. This seems different from Trump, who will bloviate extreme stuff, and then change the subject to something else. As an engineer I used to ignore such wackos: apparently we are all going to get to know them much better.
Don’t think there’s been much here about Vance’s Munich speech last week which some consider to be very important.
Taibbi/Kirn here on the censorship aspect
https://www.racket.news/p/atw-livestream-tonight-at-8-pm-et7-9e9
And Alastair Crooke–who says he once worked at the EU–on the FP angle. Crooke thinks the EU poobahs are trying to use Ukraine to create a foreign policy unity that doesn’t really exist and never has.
https://conflictsforum.substack.com/p/its-trump-and-putins-world-now
Vance sure seems more presidential than Pence, or any other VP I can think of.
Tangential: it’s curious to me how little he features in the Dogebaggers bonfire of the sanities, despite being very much the SV VC creation himself. His hands appear to be staying clean.
Trump and Vance seem to model themselves after the Bush-Cheney Presidency where the Veep was an actual active member of the government team rather than just a place holder like Mike Pence was in Trump’s first Presidency.
On reflection Cheney/Bush is a good reference. Which of them was driving the bus?
Their donors of course. :)
Patrick Lawrence summer upper of the events of the last few days.
https://consortiumnews.com/2025/02/18/patrick-lawrence-trump-2-0-crosses-the-atlantic/
Lawrence like most of us has been struggling with what is really going on with Trump but here he joins others in suggesting that a Trump/Putin detente is the main event. And one might add a side speculation that Trump’s indulgence of the genocidal Bibi is even part of this. If the conflict is really between the America Firsters (very much in the 20th c meaning) and the interventionists then neutralizing the Lobby is a way of keeping the major force behind the latter at bay. Also any attempted admin peace image will be very much disrupted by a restart of mass slaughter in Gaza.
It’s all speculation, but hopeful speculation.
About taking notes during meetings, This can really be important to cover yourself down the track. In my youth I worked at a railway station and an older bloke told me to keep a notebook to record any incident in it. He explained that it was not unknown, for example, to have railway inspectors turn up and ask why when a little old lady fell over on October 16th of two years ago that you did nothing. Whereupon you could whip your notebook out and referring to your notes at the time say that at the time you asked her if she was OK and she replied yes and did not want an ambulance called but just walked away.
Should mention that note taking in meetings reminds me of something from Yes Minister about minutes. That it is wise to see what they actually say before leaving a meeting as they can be written by interested parties to say all sorts of stuff not discussed at that meeting or important stuff omitted. And of course after that meeting, they are now the official record of it.
love the plantidote. reminds me of tarkovskys “the sacrifice”. i read somewhere that tarkovsky could not find a tree decrepit enough, so he had a tree built to his specifications. on the subject of tarkovsky, he & kurosawa spent a lovely evening together watching “solaris”:
https://cinephiliabeyond.org/akira-kurosawa-watching-solaris-andrei-tarkovsky/
Thanks for posting the Bob Marley cuts Lambert – here’s a Lee Perry-produced gem from the Wailers early days:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=if_YvaOxG_g
With regard to the tweets on keeping notes, this additional musical interlude from some of the Midnight Oil crew seems appropriate to share:
Hirst, Moginie & Stuart – The Strongest Memory
Just now saw this:
Jennifer Hamilton, MD PhD @jeneralist@med-mastodon.com
Please share widely, FAST!
According to Washington Post, the federal government is considering shutting down the website where people can request free covid tests (COVIDTests.gov) TONIGHT, Tuesday Feb 18, and destroying millions of unused tests.
Order tests NOW at https://covidtests.gov/ if you’re eligible.
Details at https://wapo.st/42VLGQh
Also, about Social Security: per its website, SSA started monthly payments January 1940; 65 years previous would be 1875 – connection? Also, you can look up people (by name) in the SSA Death Index (available commercially, usually free, probably om genealogical search websites) and find DOB and the person’s SSN. probably too much to ask of a DOGEbag.
With the admins indulgence.
File this under First World Problems?
I use the Yahoo-mail application for my e-mail.
This afternoon, I opened the application and was confronted with the “New and Improved” yahoo-mail application. Roughly speaking, it is a clone of the G-mail system; heavy on the “social messaging” and “advertising” messages.
I made use of the “chat” function, knowing full well that I would be doing battle with an algorithm. Wonder of Wonders! I got a succinct answer right away!
The old Yahoo-mail system has been ‘discontinued.’
It seems that I will be ‘stuck’ with the bulkier and less user friendly system of e-mails from now on.
Oh Frabjous Day! What a wonderful world with such “superior” ‘systems’ in it!
This experience has left me contemplating an old “truth” I heard long ago. “Complexity is not your friend.”
Stay safe. Be Ye of good cheer.
Maybe you need an email “client” instead of browser email. Open source Thunderbird is still available and works with Windows and Linux–not, I think, with Apple. It’s easy to setup and works with a large range of email services including Gmail which no longer accepts some of the older client programs. Check it out.
And stay safe dude.
Thunderbird works on macOS too.
And I second Carolinian’s suggestion.
My wife has a paid-level Yahoo email account and uses Thunderbird POP3 protocol for her mail. Takes a little effort to initially set up the security handshake with Yahoo but that’s a do it once thing.
Rapture index…seems there site admin or whomever updates is lagging on the more current events…Cue a key example….under Globalism: “the Biden administration is essentially all in for globalist pursuits…”.
I can’t be certain as to what else they’re missing. After all we keep having these air flight mishaps and various crashes and also historic flooding events yet again in certain states this past weekend. On the air travel that flight landing upside down or topsy turvy if you will, at the Toronto airport was a real eye opener.
Added for intentional and highly sarcastic effect but it seems more likely, I’ll be having to bear or wear some kind of futuristic mark in say, 2036, that proves I’m a living, breathing US citizen who indeed earned my magnificent stipend via Social Security. Think I’ll go long on Soylent Green.