By Lambert Strether.
Readers, my head cold seems to be on the downslope, oh joy. Anyohw, I started on-time today, then thought I would have my feeds one last look… –lambert
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Bindloss Campground, Hanna, Alberta, Canada. With some faraway geese.
In Case You Might Miss…
- Possible Democrat strategies against DOGE.
- The notion of “racial capitalism” decried..
- Hole punches.
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
Trump Administration
“Hegseth commits to Pentagon passing clean audit within 4 years” [The Hill]. • Big if true. It would take DOGE to do it. How’s that going?
“Where’s the Real Power Nexus? How Does the Opposition Get To It?” [Josh Marshall, Talking Points Memo]. “I’ve made this point a few times in passing in other posts. But as events develop I wanted to explain it succinctly and with emphasis. Democrats are out of power and have very few actual levers to impact what’s happening. Yelling is important. Driving opposition in what is ultimately a battle for public opinion is important. Contesting everything through the courts is important. But there is only one hard lever of power currently available: that’s the help the White House needs from Democrats on a budget and the debt ceiling. This morning explainer from Punchbowl makes clear why that help is essential. It’s not just helpful. It’s essential. The GOP majorities are simply too small, especially in the House. The GOP is simply too fractious. This is the one area where it isn’t a matter of yelling as loud as you can when no one actually has to listen, or working through a decidedly hostile judiciary. Trump needs this. It’s not a matter of working out a deal with Mike Johnson. Trump needs this help and there’s only one place to get it. It’s a not a discussion with John Thune or Mike Johnson. Only with Trump. I had been somewhat pessimistic about what I was seeing from congressional Democrats on this front. But starting yesterday they began to change their tune and started saying explicitly that the budget and debt ceiling were a key lever for them in handling the situation. That’s real progress. But I think the terms need to be sharpened a lot. The standard should be no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops.” • Well, here I am quoting Josh Marshall with approval. It’s a funny old world.
“Taking DOGE to Court Is a Doomed Strategy” [Ken Klipperstein]. “The war against DOGE is shaping up to be the same as the frenzied and ultimately unsuccessful takedown of Donald Trump that we saw in Russiagate and the January 6 investigations. The parallels are eerie, with Democrats alleging an illegitimate government takeover by DOGE (Department of Government Efficiency) headed by Elon Musk. Even more bizarre is their adoption, literally verbatim, of MAGA rhetoric like ‘Stop the Steal.’ After weeks of confusion the party strategy finally emerged this week, expressed in accusations that DOGE was not in compliance with records laws and procedures. There’s plenty to criticize about Trump’s chaotic DOGE-led war on government, but the hunt for some kind of broken rule that will invalidate the whole thing hasn’t worked in the past and won’t now. For one, a senior U.S. intelligence official tells us that neither the FBI nor the intelligence community are investigating Musk and company for any unlawfulness. Trump has apparently granted DOGE officials security clearances, including top secret.” And: “Instead of making a plainspoken case to the public about how DOGE could negatively affect their daily lives, Democratic leaders conducted astroturfed ‘demonstrations’ in front of USAID, Treasury and other government shrines this week. They adopted the conspiratorial tone of the MAGA opposition to the Democrats that they have been so contemptuous of in the past. ;’An unelected shadow government is conducting a hostile takeover of the federal government,’ Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said of DOGE in a press release on Monday. The statement might as well have been written by Alex Jones on January 6, 2021. It was jarring coming from the Democratic Party’s highest ranking official, a bespectacled 74 year old with reliably vanilla politics.” And: “It all reminds me of the Mueller investigation, when political journalists who had never covered national security suddenly peppered their articles with acronyms like ‘SIGINT.’ There’s lots to criticize about DOGE. I certainly have, publishing as many of its boneheaded memos as I can find. But instead of focusing on the substance — what it is actually doing, its gaping exemption for the national security state, and so on — Democrats instead are focused on obscure matters of process. “Did DOGE submit Form 18-7.4?” is a question almost nobody outside of Washington cares about. Nor should they.” • All true, though stops somewhat short of the Courts (i.e., the Federalist Society’s court (hat tip, these same process Democrats)).
“A Constitutional Crisis?” [New York Times]. “The president can’t shut down agencies that Congress has funded, yet that’s what Trump did, with Elon Musk’s help, to the U.S. Agency for International Development. The president can’t fire inspectors general without giving lawmakers 30 days’ notice, but Trump dismissed 17 of them anyway. Congress passed a law forcing TikTok to sell or close, and the courts upheld it, but Trump declined to enforce it. ‘The president is openly violating the law and Constitution on a daily basis,’ said Brendan Nyhan, a political scientist at Dartmouth College.” The Constitutional remedy is impeachment, but the Democrats used that one up already with trivial and butchered efforts. Ah well, nevertheless.
“Congressional Democrats denied entry to EPA headquarters” [Axios]. “A group of House and Senate Democrats said they were denied access to the Environmental Protection Agency’s headquarters in Washington, D.C. It is the third time this week that Democratic lawmakers were blocked from an agency that has been targeted by President Trump and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.” • Lesson of Occupy: Take and hold ground (although I don’t know the legalities here, the Executive Branch denying entry to the Legislative Branch seems a little sketchy). Of course, the lawmakers liked footsoldiers. Putting aside the possibility of pink pussy hats from the Northern Virginia suburbs, I have long though that DC residents — aside from the Northwest, of course — might have been usefully organized into cadres of sans culottes. One wonders if “shrinking government” will have direct material impact on non-Northwest portions of Washington, DC.
A union stirs:
New: CPFB Union names three DOGE “minions” that were spotted in the internal staff directory last night pic.twitter.com/7T5RdMDD5O
— Matt Berg (@mattberg33) February 7, 2025
* * * “DOGE follows longtime Musk pattern — and turns attention to Social Security Administration” [Semafor]. “The Social Security Administration is an upcoming focus of the Department of Government Efficiency, a source with knowledge of its work told Semafor, and one person involved in DOGE is currently preparing to work with the agency that provides benefits to the elderly and disabled…. Those involved and familiar with DOGE, however, say they’re not confused about their mission: They’re empowered to slash government spending and remodel agencies to fall in line with the president’s agenda. What’s more, they appear undisturbed by the drama they’ve caused….. Notably, the views among DOGE supporters differ when it comes to where to draw the line: The first of the three people with knowledge of its work told Semafor the ‘entire federal government’ is up for grabs. The second person suggested the line would be drawn at areas affecting national security and initiatives providing direct benefits. Ernst said ‘it’s quite possible’ every part of the government will face scrutiny at some point. While Musk has mentioned a goal of cutting $1 trillion from the federal government, the group isn’t operating with many specific targets or end goals. ‘It’s going to depend on what we find,’ the second person said. ‘There’s going to be reworks across the government, every agency.’ Moving quickly with a sledgehammer mentality is seen within DOGE as the only way to enact successful change, as all three sources familiar with the group put it.” And: “‘What President Trump and Elon Musk and this entire administration is trying to do is make our bloated bureaucracy in Washington run like a profitable business,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said on Fox News this week.” • Which is nuts, because government is not and should not be run like a business — and if it should turn out to be, every profitable deparment will immediately shart enshittifying itself to compete with the departments. Interestingly, DOGE ends, supposedly, by the midterms, so both — or all — sides are equally aware of the election calendar.
“Here at DOGE, We’ve Streamlined Every Aspect of America’s Collapse” [McSweeney’s Internet Tendency]. “I promise, America will soon be the Cybertruck of countries—uglier than you could have imagined, built for rich chuds, borderline inoperable, and on fire.”
* * * “Afternoon of Day Seven of the Trump-Musk Treasury Payments Crisis of 2025: Treasury Secretary Bessent’s Lawlessness & Sorry Readers- Read and Write Code Still Seems in Play” [Nathan Tankus, Notes on the Crises]. “The wording of the court order for Marko Elez to have ‘read only’ access is ambiguous. Specifically it says: Mr. Marko Elez, a Special Government Employee in the Department of the Treasury, as needed for the performance of his duties, provided that such access to payment records will be ‘read only’ [emphasis added]. Records are data which means that a cynical government lawyer may approve ‘read and write’ access for code on the grounds that Marko Elez is only barred from modifying or adding new data to payment records directly rather than indirectly through editing source code. The plaintiffs position would of course, correctly, claim that ‘read and write code access’ is a violation of this order as written. Nevertheless, the possibility is extremely concerning. And remember— ‘read only code and data’ access is still ‘catastrophic.’ All this comes as CNN and other outlets confirm that some of the worst case scenarios I was worried about are true.” And Elez is supposed to be gonzo, but “A source familiar with the situation says: ‘My inclination on any type of question like this is that [Elez] has more access, not less and whatever access he doesn’t have, he’s trying to get.'”
“America This Week, Feb 7, 2025: “The Big Store: Politico, USAID, and Managed Reality” (podcast) [Walter Kirn, Matt Taibbi, Racket News]. • Not sure why Kirn and Taibbi think that DOGE’s write access to OPM’s personnel and the Fiscal Office’s payment data isn’t a story, but they clearly think it’s not (or else they would cover it). On the bright side, no cheerleading for Bhattacharya’s horrid new venture!
* * * “The Government’s Computing Experts Say They Are Terrified” [The Atlantic]. “Elon Musk’s unceasing attempts to access the data and information systems of the federal government range so widely, and are so unprecedented and unpredictable, that government computing experts believe the effort has spun out of control. This week, we spoke with four federal-government IT professionals—all experienced contractors and civil servants who have built, modified, or maintained the kind of technological infrastructure that Musk’s inexperienced employees at his newly created Department of Government Efficiency are attempting to access. In our conversations, each expert was unequivocal: They are terrified and struggling to articulate the scale of the crisis…. The four experts laid out the implications of giving untrained individuals access to the technological infrastructure that controls the country. Their message is unambiguous: These are not systems you tamper with lightly. Musk and his crew could act deliberately to extract sensitive data, alter fundamental aspects of how these systems operate, or provide further access to unvetted actors. Or they may act with carelessness or incompetence, breaking the systems altogether. Given the scope of what these systems do, key government services might stop working properly, citizens could be harmed, and the damage might be difficult or impossible to undo. As one administrator for a federal agency with deep knowledge about the government’s IT operations told us, ‘I don’t think the public quite understands the level of danger.’ Each of our four sources, three of whom requested anonymity out of fear of reprisal, made three points very clear: These systems are immense, they are complex, and they are critical.” • Thsi is a very good IT account:
Me editing the Treasury database by hand pic.twitter.com/ZOl31Yf87f
— SwiftOnSecurity (@SwiftOnSecurity) February 7, 2025
You can argue that this image represents “the level of danger”; worse, if anything, due to “youthful folly” by DOGE’s programmers, who started, after all, on Inauguration Day. However, you could also argue, as we did yesterday, that DOGE in fact had insider access well before the Inaugural, which could be equally dangerous, just in a different way.
* * * “USAID and Security State Clan Wars” (excerpt) [Yasha Levine, Weaponized Immigrant]. ” USAID was not created for philanthropy. It was created to extend American power through softer non-military means: pacification through propaganda, off-the-books violence, and bribery abroad. I guess some call this bribery ‘assistance’… The agency was set up in 1961 under President Kennedy in order to administer aid programs that fostered economic and social development in foreign countries. It sounded nice on paper. In reality, the agency became a powerful force in America’s global pacification efforts, interfacing directly with ARPA and covert CIA programs. USAID quickly developed a reputation for brutality and bloodlust: it trained death squads, schooled foreign police departments in effective torture techniques, set up opium running operations to finance covert rebel activity in Laos…The agency also became a laboratory for capitalist-friendly neoliberal economic reforms that were supposed to supplant local left-wing demands for wealth redistribution without actually doing anything to change the underlying power structures of society. (In one more recent example Chrystia Freeland’s uncle (yes, from the notorious Nazi collaborator family) worked for USAID to privatize farm land in Ukraine…and then parlyed this experience to start his own agribusiness investment firm in Ukraine.” • I’m not seeing a lot of foreign governments weeping over USAID’s demise, possibly because they feel less likely to be overthrown?
Don’t be a dick
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 5, 2025
That said, this kind of indiscipline is pervasive among Democrats. Remember when they butchered keeping an NLRB seat in Democrats hands, through the same sort of stupidity (from Ro Khanna, ironically enough).
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!
Transmission: Bird Flu
“The US Is Not Ready for Bird Flu in Humans” [Scientific American]. The deck: “Bird flu is infecting more people than we think. We need to stop it now before a new pandemic begins.” And: “Right after President Donald Trump took office, amid the flurry of executive orders and agency upheavals, the administration told the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention not to release any reports or communications until one of Trump’s people could take a look at them. Among the many reports not released that week was a study on how many veterinarians had gotten bird flu…. This virus is versatile. This virus is mutating. And it is surely infecting more people than we think. Sure, the risk of a human epidemic is still considered low. (Sound familiar?).” • I am so, so sick of pervasive Red State/Blue state posturing in Scientific American. There’s more than enough blame to go around.
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC January 27 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC January 18 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC January 25 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data February 6: | National [6] CDC January 31: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens February 3: | Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 1: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| ★ Positivity[9] CDC January 20: | ★ Variants[10] CDC January 20 |
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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
Employment Situation: “United States Unemployment Rate” [Trading Economics]. “The US unemployment rate dipped by 0.1 percentage point to 4.0% in January 2025, marking its lowest level since May and coming in just below market expectations of 4.1%. The number of unemployed individuals declined by 37,000 to 6.85 million, while employment edged up by 2,234 to 163.9 million. Additionally, the labor force participation rate rose to 62.6%, and the employment-population ratio increased to 60.1%.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 42 Fear (previous close: 41 Fear) [CNN]. One week ago: 40 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 7 at 1:51:37 PM ET.
Gallery
René Magritte pic.twitter.com/g9A8QVJ5p4
— Impressions (@impression_ists) February 6, 2025
Hole punch (2):
This is Colossal: “The story of these photographs begins in 1935, when Roy E Stryker, the head of the Information Division of the Farm Security Administration (FSA), undertook a photographic project that commissioned famous American photographers such as Russell Lee, Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans to photograph farmers and farmland during the Great Depression. The FSA aimed to encourage poverty-stricken Americans to partake in self-sustaining programs where they could gain farm loans to buy seeds, equipment, livestock, and partake in homestead schemes which provided both education and healthcare. The project was to demonstrate the results of financial assistance that the FSA offered, in addition to outsourcing images of America life during this time. Each photographer was given specific directives, for example, ‘farmer dumping milk at home,’ ‘worried farmer,’ or ‘federal government shot.’…. Stryker deployed a specific editing process where himself and his assistants would choose photographs they believed were true to the brief; the other images were rendered unsuitable and punctuated with a hole puncher. These ruthlessly ‘killed’ photographs were left unpublishable. Today the found works appear to have black discs floating upon them, a visual mark of rejection which accidentally focus the viewer’s attention.
“The Wrong Durée: The Politics of Cedric J. Robinson’s Racial Capitalism” [nonsite.org]. I knew this was a Nonsite story from the headline alone, because who else? (The headline is a horrid but fully justified pun on Braudel’s “Longue durée.”) I’m leaving this here mostly as a marker, though I’m sure it’s a thorough and elegant stomping, Adolph Reed-style. But if you want to grab a cup of coffee, have at it! However, for the political context: “[Roibinson’s’ notion of racial capitalism has been widely embraced by academics and intellectuals, including Robin Kelley, Michael Dawson, Ibram X. Kendi, Michelle Alexander, Jodi Melamed, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, and Angela Davis, among others. Moreover, the spirit of racial capitalism has suffused mainstream discourse from the New York Times’s celebrated but empirically flawed 1619 Project, which proffered a race-centric creation story of the United States, to the liberal pop cultural fixation on racial wealth disparities born out of the postwar homeownership regime, best represented in the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates and academics like Richard Rothstein, among many others. Robinson’s notion of racial capitalism was even evoked in health disparities discussions of the American Medical Association during the early stages of the novel coronavirus pandemic.” And: “In the face of racial capitalism’s newfound popularity, sociologist Loïc Wacquant has lamented that we might expect ‘a crisply enunciated informing a set of clear claims about the nature of race, the logics of capitalism,’ but ‘one searches in vain for this clarification.'” • Ha ha, ouch [wince]. This is relevant today because all these people are shortly going to lose funding in the assault on NGOs (especially, I would think, the 1619 Project). Any effort to rescue them should, in my view, be resisted.
“You Can’t Post Your Way Out of Fascism” [404 Media]. “Many of my journalist colleagues have attempted to beat back the tide under banners like “fighting disinformation” and “accountability.” While these efforts are admirable, the past few years have changed my own internal calculus. Thinkers like Jean-Paul Sartre and Hannah Arendt warned us that the point of this deluge is not to persuade, but to overwhelm and paralyze our capacity to act. More recently, researchers have found that the viral outrage disseminated on social media in response to these ridiculous claims actually reduces the effectiveness of collective action. The result is a media environment that keeps us in a state of debilitating fear and anger, endlessly reacting to our oppressors instead of organizing against them…. So what is the alternative? If we log off, what exactly are we supposed to do instead? How are we supposed to get information without constantly raising our antennae into the noxious cumulonimbus cloud of social media?… Trusted information networks have existed since long before the internet and mass media. These networks are in every town and city, and at their core are real relationships between neighbors—not their online, parasocial simulacra.” • IOW, mutual aid. I would argue, however, that the blogosphere, by it structure, prevented much of social media’s enshittification — one reason Big Tech decapitated it.
“The Power of Naming” [Language Log]. ” information theory is the mother of all factoids. Why would one call it that? Because there is no such thing, only the following phantom utterance that is ubiquitous: ‘Shannon’s information theory.’… The name stuck, suggesting in the minds of innocents something so deep and epochal that it might even shed light on Mozart. Shannon 1948 is the big example of how of data and information have been confounded for 3/4 of a century…. Here is a rough‑and‑ready demonstration of how different they actually are: “Go.” ←That’s just data, but place it in a context, and a layer of information now “rides on it” (or floats above it, on a different plane) such that this is conveyed: “Go to the store now before it closes”; or this: “Fly now to Hiroshima and drop the bomb.” True, in shop‑talk and hallway conversations, a database developer or data‑comm engineer might toss the terms data and information around as if one believed them to be interchangeable….. As for an actual Theory of Information, we must wait for a superintelligent computer to produce it since that task is far beyond human ability. And once coughed up, it will be so lengthy as to require several lifetimes to read it, and in any case, largely incomprehensible to us.”
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 CS:
CS writes: “Some fungi and flowers from NW MT to top up your supply of plantidotes, We have hundreds of these photos, but are lousy photographers, hopefully some will be OK for your purposes.” Oh, I don’t know. I like this composition. However, there may be things about fungus photography that I don’t know. Readers?
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Apologies in advance, but a question for the Commentariat.
Has anyone else been experiencing noticeable delays in their mail delivery lately? Not just “on the street where you live,” but also from out of town. Not necessarily Amazon packages, but all packages in general.
Thank you for your indulgence.
Yes. This past month or so the main nearby big city regional mail routing station seems to be having lots of delays. Based on my package tracking information, the mail arrives at routing station in a timely manner, and then gets caught in some kind routing in/out loop, where it doesn’t actually leave the station for the next destination for 2 or three days. This started with the big snow storm last month and usps weather days. That was understandable. Are they still catching up from that event?
Hard to understand why the delays are still happening. One recently mailed package was caught in that nonsense loop for over a week. Very strange. Broken sorting machines? Too few usps employees. Glitch in the software? Still catching up from the big January storm? Who knows?
adding: if this is still wide spread, not just my area’s regional routing station, then I’ll start to wonder if this is an unannounced ‘stress test’ of the system to find out how much the Postal Board of Governors can get away with reducing services before people start making noise.
This isn’t a foily comment. One way we determine whether or not to keep live and online things like old server systems or central programs is by quietly switching them off and seeing how soon and how many people complain. That’s a good gauge for measuring how important and useful still are the deliberately switched off things: things like old dial-up fax machines, servers running near obsolete programs, etc.
Perhaps the current “deconstruct the administrative state” Republicans in charge of the USPS through commander DeJoy have quiet instructions or inspiration to degrade service and keep degrading it until the public can be made ready for abolition of the USPS and the privatization of those parts of it worth privatizing. ( And letting the other parts and services disappear entirely and for good).
Yes, it takes 10 days for a letter to go from St Joseph Missouri to Sacramento, Ca. 165 years ago.
And also today, quite often. Everything old is new again. The mailcoach stop in my town is always busy. The horses worn and thirsty. / ;)
Is that where the term “pony up” comes from?
Per your example, that was “Express” mail. The regular mail went by “Sail Mail” around the Horn.
Either way, your observation bears the Stamp of Approval. (I would have said ‘Seal of Approval,’ but who wants to run afoul of those radical terrorists from PETA?)
Mailing paper payments any more via the USPS feels like playing the lottery…or rather using that formerly popular gadget toy…the omnipotent Magic 8 ball! Mailing that on the 25th, a Saturday in January…guessing 1+ weeks for the distance haul to Las “Lockbox” Vegas….
Will it arrive in time? Ask again later.
Did it finally clear…it’s the one thing that mattered and so yes that once a year fee is done until 2026..
From them that pays my pension:
From Wikipedia:
Make of this what you will.
yes. for months.
so much so that i reluctantly went with direct deposit for my tiny lil pension check(i prefer paper).
i asked one of the post office chicks(whom ive known for 30 years) what was up.
she said that everything from or to here…even mail that stays in town…goes through a sorting facility in abilene.
and the USPS privatised it years ago(ie: before dejoy)…and whatever company that is is so, so shitty to work for that they have major problems keeping staffed.
hence the glacial delivery of mail.
so enshittification, so gop types can point to USPS and say, “see?! gubmint dont work!”.
uh oh….
Under B, in January 2024
Postal Service announces 30 more consolidations
https://www.savethepostoffice.com/postal-service-announces-30-more-consolidations/
and under T, December, 2024 post-election
Trump revisits plan to privatize USPS, a first-term goal that didn’t go far
https://federalnewsnetwork.com/agency-oversight/2024/12/trump-revisits-plan-to-privatize-usps-a-first-term-plan-that-didnt-go-far/
So, consolidate and privatize. Dems consolidate, GOP privatizes. It really is a uni-party.
Dems do plenty of privatizing, too. They don’t advertise it as a universal social good, but they do it.
I’ve noticed this beginning in November. A letter from PA to FL previously took 3 days; at present, it takes 7. From PA to CA previously took 5 to 7 days; at present 10 to 14. Mind, my “previously” covers the past year or two. A few years ago, a letter from PA to FL took 2 days and to CA, 3 days.
I have co-workers who are required to send manufacturing samples to clients via priority mail; these packages have been taking 7 – 10 days to reach the clients.
The USPS is a joke! 8 days for a letter to go 40 miles. Lost packages and packages that spend a never ending time floating from distribution center to distribution center. I couldn’t think of a better agency for DOGE to cut down to size. There is zero excuse for the bad service.
Cutting it down to size is why the service is so bad.
There has been a bipartisan Congressional effort to hamstring the post office in order to justify routing business to for profit private delivery services, and it has been going on for decades – prefunding pensions for 75 years, cutting branches, etc. Trump appointed a privatizer as postmaster general in his first term which is when things really started to get bad, and of course Biden didn’t even make an effort to replace the guy.
Just one more thing that we used to be able to do as a society, and now can’t, because capitalism.
It’s an obsolete service with most things arriving via digital sources. I get mail maybe twice a week at most and there aren’t any more catalogs or ads to support the cost of the service.
Cut mail delivery to every other day and cut 1/3 of the employees. They are useless to begin with and seem to lose more mail than they deliver,
There is ZERO reason to have a mail service that big anymore.
If it’s privatized you can bet the rural areas will be left out due to being unprofitable. There is every reason to have a mail service this big. It has a Congressional requirement to deliver to every Postal Address. Private companies have no requirement to take on unprofitable routes. Places like flyover and rural and small towns. They are still part of the country. The Post Office is literally a lifeline for many households.
Here in Hawaii USPS is the preferred parcel delivery service, unless you can afford the huge cost of express services. The flat-rate boxes in particular.
Nothing of any significance I get comes from digital sources. Everything comes via US mail. And I hope to keep it that way. The internet is inherently insecure now, will get worse, and really should have been shut down and sent back to the engineers for redesign at least a decade ago. I hate the idea of corporations being allowed to force people to use the internet for anything, just so they can fatten their profits while exposing my data to every bad actor out there. The internet is spam, scams, and surveillance. Nothing vital should depend on it.
“Useless” employees?!? Besides the services postal workers provide, the post office is one of the essentials for building and maintaining a community, for fostering a civil society. The longtime mail carrier where I grew up was known by everyone, sang in the church choir on her day off. On a practical level, the post office allows the government to inject money into communities via wages, and post office jobs are among the better blue collar jobs out there. They’re the fertilizer that allows communities to grow.
I’d like to live in a civil society rather than some libertarian, everyone for themselves, survival of the biggest * , dystopian free for all.
Solidarity, brother.
Imagine if the US mail was totally privatized. And those mail corporations can charge you any price they like to deliver your mail and there was nothing that you could do about it. And there would be a patchwork of corporations having contracts for certain regions to deliver mail while none of them would bid for rural areas as who can be bothered? So it would work as well as the internet does throughout America right now.
Be careful of what you wish for – you just might get it.
Mail addressed with different in-network or out-of-network delivery charges.It works so well with HMOs. Yeah, I bet someone has thought of that.
If a letter was mailed from New York to LA, would it have to pay transit fees for every one of those new mail networks between those two cities?
Like “Robber Barons” on the Rhine. Extracting a piece of the action from every cargo that passes by.
It sounds about right for our Neo Crypto-feudal Overlords.
you don’t have to imagine what a privatized post office is like. Just read this from the Netherlands:
“Somewhere in the Netherlands a postwoman is in trouble. Bad health, snow and ice and a degree of chaos in her personal life have left her months behind on her deliveries. She rents a privatised ex-council flat with her partner and so many crates of mail have built up in the hallway that it’s getting hard to move around. Twice a week one of the private mail companies she works for, Selektmail, drops off three or four crates of letters, magazines and catalogues. She sorts and delivers the fresh crates but the winter backlog is tough to clear. She thinks her employers are getting suspicious. I counted 62 full mail crates stacked up in the hall when I visited recently.”
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v33/n09/james-meek/in-the-sorting-office
Are you new here?
S’ok. We take, and take on, all kinds. Long as they behave themselves, according to our esteemed hosts and moderators.
Are you from DOGE?
The Congres -both parties – and pres admins – both parties have been trying to break the USPS for a very long time, starting with the unreachable financial hobble of requiring the USPS to prefund employees health care benefits for 50 years, until 2056, prepaying now for the healthcare benefits of future employees not yet hired, something no other pension fund has ever required. This immediately put the USPS in a financial hole and became the whip for Congress and both parties and the Board of Governors to use to demand more and more cuts, higher cost, worst service, until such time as the public would welcome privatization as a solution. (It won’t be. See what happened in England – which eventually sold it entire mail system to a European billionaire.) But, oh look, a fattening healthcare prepaid pot of money that could be used as an enormous slush fund in privatized hands, imo. (See the first PE takeovers and sell-offs in the 1980s.)
Fixing this requires revoking the 2006 Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, or PAEA. USPS has long maintained that PAEA’s pension pre-funding requirements “contributes significantly to postal losses.”
https://www.truthorfiction.com/is-usps-losing-money-because-of-a-2006-pension-law/
However, both parties act in a way to push the USPS to greater insolvency and toward privatization. And there is that big pot of prepaid health insurance premium fund.
Standing between a politician and a big pot of money, (if I may be so crude), is like standing between a charging bull and a cow in season.
https://www.truthorfiction.com/is-usps-losing-money-because-of-a-2006-pension-law/
‘See what happened in England – which eventually sold it entire mail system to a European billionaire.’
Yeah, I remember that. They sold the Royal Mail for about half it’s real value, some rich buddies of the government came in to snap it up and straight away it doubled in value. Ka-ching!
Be sure to recognize and
thankcurse the late, unlamented Feinstein and her marital partner in crime, Blum. Their paws were all over that USPS action, pausing only to grab loot from transacting the newly redundant post office locations. All legal the way Washington has been.Oh yeah. From 2012. During the O admin.
” Thanks to his wife, Senator Feinstein, Blum’s real estate firm CBRE won contracts from the FDIC to handle the state’s residential foreclosures at above market rates, despite the firm’s weak track record in the field. As part of the nationwide threat to public services, the closing and selling off of California’s historic post offices have been contracted out to none other than Mr. Blum’s own CBRE, allowing him to profit from the public’s great loss of priceless buildings and works of art housed in them. ”
https://www.berkeleydailyplanet.com/issue/2012-11-30/article/40566
What doubly maddening in regards to the USPS, is 1/3rd of the bipartisan laws passed these days in Congress are the renaming of post offices.
You complain about how long a letter takes to get a short distance (something I’ve complained about as well), and then follow up with “let’s cut their funding.” When the error of that is pointed out you pivot to “well, most stuff is electronic now anyways.” Then why are you complaining about physical mail? Do you care about it or not? DeJoy is the one who started the current gutting of our Postal System, under Trump the first time, then continuing under Biden. You should be supporting the post office and demanding the rebuilding of the service, not asking for further cuts.
Yes. Part of it is the loop flora describes (and I started getting hit by that in late summer, antedating storm impacts). Part of it IS that between my location and the couple nodes our mail goes through, winter weather HAS been badly timed/severe. And, yes: paychecks from across the country, packages fr Amzn’s Vegas center, et al.
Package from a company I order from regularly used to get here in 3 days. Last time it took 10. The staff at my local post office are looking stressed out.
I order some stuff that is challenging for USPS to handle. Whenever possible I try to get their side of the shipping story so I can compromise on what they have to do and what I can do to make the shipping work. I now ask that some of my shipments be held at the county distribution location for pickup as the delivery driver is swamped enough and I don’t want the packages mishandled.
UPS just canceled their contract with Amazon saying USPS can have ALL of Amazon’s business from now on.
USPS is already woefully understaffed and seems to be imploding. A friend watched her delivery get shipped same day and then sit at a sorting center for three days before being delivered. I don’t think they can handle the volume of mail they’re processing. I’ve had property tax checks not delivered and everyone I know has a similar story.
There is DeJoy in Madville,
For the mighty Louis has struck out.
Yes, it’s been happening for a while now and getting worse.
I deal with payments, and have noticed checks being delayed for a few years now.. Sometimes we don’t receive them for 6-8 weeks after the date written on the check. Just dealt with one of our best customers who normally pays us by check within a week of being invoiced. I contacted them when I saw an invoice that was several weeks old, they confirmed the check had been mailed over a month before but never cleared the bank, so they put a stop payment on it and sent a new one. After all that, the first check that was no longer any good showed up the next day, and the new check a couple days after that. Thanks post office!
My folks live in a rural area, and their mail delivery has been spotty for a while now after a long time driver retired after several decades. Then lately I have noticed at our own house that some days no mail is delivered to anyone on the street. This is in a suburban area where the postman comes onto the porch and drops off in a mail slot, and is supposed to pick up outgoing mail at the same time. Over the last two or three months, I’ve noticed our outgoing mail is not being picked up on a daily basis.
A few months ago a friend mentioned they had voted early and I asked whether they dropped of the ballot or mailed it in. He said he had talked to his daughter who worked at the post office and she told him that service was so bad he’d better drop it off in person or it might not get there on time, which he did.
Definite widespread crapification going on.
“Christmas” cards from the US to Italy (one from a friend, one from my State Senator who I can’t vote for) have taken about 2 months. In the past we would have blamed the Italians, but not any more.
gk:
Sì, sì, sì. At this point, I still write letters to my U.S. friends and family, and I can hardly tell what is being delivered and what goes into eternal delay. And you are right, it doesn’t seem to be the Poste Italiane that are making the mess.
Time was when the Poste Italiane was a bad joke. When I was over in Italy in the early 80s I heard a story – unverified – about a guy who took charge over one part of it to deal with the enormous backlog of mail. So he had it all dumped into one pile and set it on fire. No more backlog but the Italians were furious.
Yes. Deliveries have been getting noticeably slower, and at an increasingly slower pace.
An anecdote I feel I must leave here is that a First Class letter I submitted at the window of our local post office to be delivered to a P.O. Box at the same post office was eventually delivered four days later. The delay was apparently because before getting into the local P.O. Box the letter had to first be sent to a sorting facility in a city two hours away, only to be sent back again to be delivered. Our modern postal system automation and efficiency in operation!
Sometime back in the fall, I sent a gift voucher for some cheese to the WSU creamery here in WA state. By car, it’s about 75 miles from Spokane, where I live. Normally I receive my cheese within a week. This time, it was about 7 weeks, and I had given up.
Today, I was speaking with my sister in Seattle, and she was telling me that dues payments she makes monthly were taking at least a month before they were posted and her checks cashed. She said this has happened the last 3 or 4 times she sent checks.
Maybe it’s time to make this an election issue in the 2026 midterms. It seems like a stealth destruction that been in progress for a while. Maybe it’s time to make some noise come election time. And not noise in favor of privatization. / my 2 cents
Saint Luigi Goes Postal!
As is often the case, ambrit, you crack me up!
I agree with you, flora; however, I’m not sure there enough people who care about the postal service to raise a stink (witness the poster upthread). I don’t hear anything from the people around me about this issue. And the poor people are understandably focused on kitchen table issues rather than the undermining of the postal service.
One can hope, though.
This is a result of Postmaster DeJoy consolidating mail processing into a few large facilities rather than smaller closer ones. One of my senators is after him. Georgia is one of the worst states for mail delivery now because of the Palmetto mail facility.
https://apnews.com/article/louis-dejoy-postmaster-postal-mail-jon-ossoff-73284ac15539bdb9923a6280b38ffb0a
https://www.yahoo.com/news/wild-video-shows-mail-machine-193901583.html
wow. omg. This is a bipartisan issue. This is a Main Street issue.
> Has anyone else been experiencing noticeable delays in their mail delivery lately
It’s the neoliberal playbook:
Seems to be working.
The Post Office is under the jurisdiction of the Congress. This raises the question of whether or not anti-corruption measures would apply.
Is the Post Office a canary in our coal mine?
What fascinates is the popular illusion that electronic media can fully replace older, objective physical reality media, such as newspapers and samizdat. All electronica is dependent on a steady supply of electricity. There is the chokepoint that any competent revolutionary would focus their actions on.
Stay safe.
Sorry to have forgot, but those are very pretty Art Nouveau fungi.
The composition and depth of field are added benefits for the visual arts aficionados.
Big Laughing Gym?
Fungi condos, duplexes, when might a triple decker appear? :)
I’m completely with the idea of logging out of the socials.
One area that could have a bit of a resurgence in information sharing is radio and print. Lots of printing presses gathering dust in warehouses.
And just deleting them. Many of the apps have become oddly greedy lately. I had to delete Ticketmaster from my mobile devices because it was constantly trying to get permission to open any and every link. It didn’t matter what permissions I had given it. It didn’t matter what setting I maintained in the app. Any link that came up would result in a request to open it using the Ticketmaster app. I tried the remedies suggested on the web for the problem and none of them worked. So I just deleted the dumb thing until I need it again.
I was saying that to a friend yesterday…about the social media.
And to your suggestions of the old printing presses Go really old school for the ways information used to be distributed with those printed matters.
Church
Legion and VFW halls.
Union Halls
The Grange.
Bowling leagues
Golf leagues.
PTA
Any one of the dozens of organizations I’ve missed.
All the stuff people did before we all got electronic devices in our hands.
Organizing “off the grid”.
The only way to go really.
posting found on reddit . . . ” Tesla sales plunge throughout Europe.”
https://www.reddit.com/r/europe/comments/1ijy027/tesla_sales_plunge_through_europe/
Die Tesla die. Die Tesla die. Die Tesla die. ( could be a new chant or words on a sign).
Now, how to get Tesla to die throughout ” blue America” . ( Since buying a Tesla will be a sign of supporting Trump, Tesla sales will rise more than ever throughout Trump Country).
I live in Blue America. One of my patients is a Tesla salesman. He made on offhand remark to me the other day that sales have never been higher. Owning a Tesla is bad enough – all of the other options on the table from other companies are simply not tenable for all kinds of various reasons. For awhile, I saw all kinds of Rivian vehicles around – that is really drying up. Apparently they are true 150K disasters.
If the PMC among us want to virtue signal over that issue, it is right now Tesla or nothing.
I have also learned the hard way that reddit is not really a source of reliable information. Sometimes they are onto something – most of the time it is not.
Reddit is dead Internet theory come to life. It’s mostly bots lying on behalf of Team Blue, Ukraine, or that middle eastern battleship that most not be named. It makes me so annoyed that the reddit links keep getting spammed here. There is not a lot of overlap in the Venn diagram of NC readers and Reddit front page enthusiasts.
Not front page, but r/Stupidpol is cool
Re Reddit: Obscure hobbyist subreddits are still fairly decent. I’ve come to assume that anything with any popularity is 90% bots and astro-turfing (and astro-turfing bots).
Sales in California crated in Q4 according to Wolf Richter:
https://wolfstreet.com/2025/02/03/tesla-sales-got-crushed-in-q4-in-california-its-largest-us-market-non-tesla-ev-sales-jumped-to-a-record-ice-vehicle-sales-dipped/
Do Tesla drivers get special instruction on not using turn signals?
Or, more generously, do the interiors overwhelm drivers and confuse them when changing lanes? /s
Rivian is doing fine around here. Remember, they have the contract for Amazon delivery vehicles too.
As far as the PMC using Tesla to virtue signal, Wolf Richter shared some data that in the True Blue state of California, Tesla sales have nose dived and all other EVs are selling well. Especially Toyota’s RAV4 model.
Totally agree that Reddit is a silly place. It is useful when you’re trying to suss out software issues that the likes of Microsoft or Google refuse to acknowledge.
These are good points and good warnings. Thanks all.
I am reading here and there that electric cars made in China are better than electric cars made outside China.
But does that mean engineeringly and fabricationally better? Or does it just mean hipper, groovier and cooler from a digital game addict’s point of view? Are there controls all fingers-on manual, as in sticks, knobs, dials? Or are they touch-screen? Are they more or less touch-screen than the electric cars coming from America and Europe?
( In general, having a fleet of touch-screen controlled DDDTs ( Distracted Driving Death Traps) on the road will make driving even worse and more dangerous than it is now. It is less likely than ever that I will ever buy a car.)
I have long though that DC residents — aside from the Northwest, of course — might have been usefully organized into cadres of sans incomes. One wonders if “shrinking government” will have direct material impact on non-Northwest portions of Washington, DC.
~~~~~~~~~
Changed a word…
The clog is on the other foot now? Or are we waiting for the other clog to drop?
It gives a whole new meaning to the term “foot soldier.”
Sabotday in the park
I think it the 4th of July
I don’t know. The city and many in it are still reeling from the effects of WFH as well as the request to return to the office. Traffic is awful now despite fewer people commuting. The Metro is materially worse than pre-2020 too.
The people who are suffering the most were suffering before the pandemic shutdown. They continue to suffer even as their ranks swell. There’s still a number of consultancies looking for connected people to hire. As government is shredded they will be valuable employees because they know how things used to work. I expect we’ll see some downward mobility from those who code and professional bureaucrats. But most will be just fine materially.
I expect their anger will be assuaged by the coming bonus season.
Have yet to hear anything from DOGE or SecDef/HS that affects Ft McNair, Navy Yard, Eighth & Eye or JB Anacostia-Bolling/USCG HQ.
Re. the John Marshall quote; it is entirely conceivable that the more “radical” parts of the Trump coalition would be perfectly comfortable with a collapse of governmental function. “Rugged Individualists” need a good SHTF regime in which to shine. No matter the fact that very few of them have ever experienced true hardship. The real “survivalists” I have met tend to be quiet and do their work in the shadows.
Stay safe! Hope for the best and prepare for the worst.
Yes, imagine if we were hit with real inflation-not this mamby pamby 30% the Feds do declare is more akin to their 3% target, but the real deal as written by Maxwell Johnston over on the links page.
Most every American would be a pauper, Presto!
And if you aren’t a “suvivalist’ are you a deadalist?
aye!
lol.
those morons will crumple like a wet paper bag.
i, however, with my poverty and useless eater status reliably updated, will muddle through, as always.
i do wish the derned tax return would arrive…for to shore up a few things(new seed order to fluff out the seed vault with new dna, labor to get the Big Greenhouse covered finally, etc.).
and itll suck to suddenly go without tobacco, coffee and beer(!!!!)…but im otherwise sanguine.
in my experience with randian libertardians, they are all talk…and generally seem to literally live in their parents’ basement or garage.
caint hunt, or skin a sheep or maintain a garden…on and on.
i’ll use any that wander out here as feed for the chickens.
hence an adage:”those who yell the loudest about the uselessness of others, are more than likely themselves quite useless”.
We’re going to have to start calling you “Amfortas the Autark.”
> in my experience with randian libertardians, they are all talk…and generally seem to literally live in their parents’ basement or garage.
Symbol manipulators, in other words, whose lives in their parents’ garages have not prepared them for real power in the real world.
You asked about Democratic strategies????
Please look at this link for an opinion piece by the Queen Bee of DC Dems in the Washington Post this week……
Notice the byline – Trump’s second term is all about curtailing government’s power and reach.
I spit my coffee out when I read that yesterday AM.
My question is – —- My Facebook feeds from my DNC and PMC friends are full of all kinds of memes and comments about “Orange Twitler”, fascist, Nazi, etc. They spent most of the Harris campaign calling any and all opponents Nazis, Trump has been Hitler since he walked down the golden staircase.
How can one be a fascist/Hitler/Nazi – at the same time they are “all about curtailing government’s power and reach.” ??? This is the very definition of being mutually exclusive concepts.
I would think the first “Democratic strategy” should be to hire people to write their opinion pieces and narratives who are not midwits. Writers who seem to have a clear idea of political science and history. This writer, Ruth Marcus, either has no idea what she is talking about or possibly is having cognitive dissonance from the narrative about Trump over the past 8 years. It leads informed readers to the conclusion that the Dem-leaning opinion writers are just pulling at straws and making shit up as they go along. My other favorite is screaming about young kids at the helm – from the same people who were ramming Greta Thunberg and the Parkland Five ( David Hogg et al) down our throats for the past decade. How many months did Rachel Maddow feature the Parkland Five on her show after the shooting preaching to us about gun control? It is truly laughable to see the sudden turnaround. I am led to the conclusion that one of the signs of a collapsing society is when “It is OK for our side to do it – but you are a demon from hell for doing the same thing” approach to literally everything takes hold.
In medicine we call this schizophrenia. And it is not a good look. If we want to talk about strategies – maybe we should start there. I really miss Molly Ivins and Mark Shields.
We have always been at war with East Asia. Propaganda relies on the memory hole.
Lambert upstairs talks about what a broken record the Dems are. A new party pleez……
Or, to be harsh, there’s the reason the WaPo is/was known as “Pravda on the Potomac.” The WaPo’s op-ed page is a good indicator of what the intel community wants the public to believe. Does Marcus herself believe any ot this. Who knows? She just writes it as her editors require, imo. / ;)
from 2003, by William Greider.
Washington Post Warriors
A generation ago, when I worked at the Washington Post, the right-wing fringe occasionally referred to us as “Pravda on the Potomac.” We reporters were amused but also rankled.
https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/washington-post-warriors/
> “Pravda on the Potomac.”
I phrase I was either the coiner of, long long ago, or adjacent to. Its companion is ‘Izvestia on the Hudson.”
An extravagant claim.* Besides I seem to recall you insisting it was Izvestia on the Potomac ignoring the alliterative necessity.
*Wasn’t it Billmon? Or maybe Michael Smith.
Certainly adjacent and early, as I said.And you’re wrong on alliteration. Can you really imagine me arguing against alliteration?
Well that was a loooong time ago. I do think Billmon used to use it as a catch phrase. By NC standards Billmon was a short timer.
You are the very model of a modern moderator. / ;)
*applause*
I always defer to Pravda on the Hudson and Izvestia on the Potomac and samizdat on the NC
Speaking of whom, I miss Billmon. I keep wondering what he might say about things today.
What little I see of the DNC/Democratic party strategy is, to be honest, pathetic. And they keep talking about maybe “rebranding” to include economic issues. Maybe. Rebranding.
I really miss the days when they would interview a guy like Adolph Reed about what could be done to minimize/reduce racism, and his answer was Medicare For All. His basic point is that what is best for poor Black people is also what’s best for poor White people.
What exactly was the strategy behind trying to get into the EPA Building. Let’s say they actually got through the door. What next? An actual sit in? Or a cup of coffee and doughnut in the cafeteria. What was the point of this performative act?
What exactly was the strategy behind trying to get into the EPA Building. Let’s say they actually got through the door. What next? An actual sit in? Or a cup of coffee and doughnut in the cafeteria. What was the point of this performative act?
Insurrection?
(Sorry, I’ll go back to adulting, as my colleagues say.)
If what you describe is reality, I live in Plato´s cave of Germany, which is showing merely the shadows of the fire shining behind your reality. And considering that even your environment appears to wander around in a cave I am not quite sure what that makes Europe…what do they call the shadow of a shadow?
p.s. Something similiar to your distortions is going on domestically here. Today they will have – again – mass demonstrations all over the place (I believe starting 2pm) – against Germany´s rightwing turn and Nazism on the rise.
Lo and behold just a couple of days ago the friends of Bandera held an annual meeting in Kiev to let the President´s Office and the world know a ceasefire is a disgrace. But nobody in the land of Holocaust perpetrators and Holocaust memory cares about us delivering everything short of nukes to a place where 1mn+ soldiers have been killed because of peace being a “disgrace” and death is a cool queer bitch with a swastika tatooed onto her biceps.
And yes, almost all my friends will be there at 2 pm. Do they understand my point? Nope.
And they are among the less indoctrinated. Which shows you that salvation is a concept not very convincing. They won´t understand unless it will hurt really hard and Germany will hit rock bottom. And that might never happen. Since those who go out to protest today are simultaneously the well to do 30%. The rest doesn´t matter. They have no voice. But they will carry the consequences first when this ship will be a wreck. “Snowpiercer”?
> My other favorite is screaming about young kids at the helm – from the same people who were ramming Greta Thunberg and the Parkland Five ( David Hogg et al) down our throats for the past decade.
As usual, Democrat framing on Elon’s DOGE tech boys has been atrocious. Their youth is not the issue. After all, who among was not once young and stupid? I certainly was. This frame might be more appropriate:
(In passing, I would note that Musk is clever and industrious, and so fit for staff. Trump is clever and lazy, so…). I think the DOGE types are stupid and industrious….
The latest (yesterday) from Trumpistan. Jared must really want that beach….makes a weird reference to Schumer.
https://news.antiwar.com/2025/02/06/trump-says-israel-will-hand-gaza-to-us-at-the-conclusion-of-fighting/
Should say since I’ve been promoting Alastair Crooke’s latest column that he tells Judge Nap that it’s almost impossible to know what Trump statements (if any) are serious and which aren’t. Crooke’s belief is that a restart of the slaughter will be in defiance of Trump’s aspirational good guy image. Guess we’ll see.
What we do know is that Trump (and Biiden before him) can put a stop to the slaughter instantly if he chooses to do so.
New Larry Johnson has thoughts on this and also on the spending cutbacks
https://sonar21.com/looks-like-trump-learned-something-from-his-first-term-control-the-money-gut-the-bureaucracy/
I think Johnson’s take is pretty good. Israel hasn’t won anything in Gaza. They’ve killed a lot of Palestinians, yes. But as far as taking and holding ground, they’ve failed.
So if Trump is now changing his story (as he is want to do) such that it will be the responsibility of the IDF to clear out Gaza of those pesky Injuns (oops, I meant Palestinians) the problem becomes evident. What couldn’t be done in over a year of fighting will be done … when?
I can’t help but sense that this whole thing is just magical thinking, or a rocket scientist making plans while not taking into account some important physical force, like gravity.
The mere fact that we’re talking about it instead of focusing on D.O.G.E. or Project Ukraine might have something to do with it, as well.
‘They’ve killed a lot of Palestinians, yes.’ No. We’ve killed a lot of Palestinians, yes. Remember, we’re partnering with the Jewish zionists. Give Americans the credit they’ve earned, and please, write our name in blood 🩸.
Well, that’s a good point.
After some further thought, maybe there is no need for force to evict the Palestinians. At least by the government.
Stage 1 is to offer them voluntary packages to leave, like a Facebook or Google. Pay them.
Next step – just don’t fix anything on Gaza. Let the rubble and ruined infrastructure make life worse. SANCTION any country that tries to step in and offer aid.
(There are no relief agencies working in Gaza now, are there?)
Last step – sell off their land to private investors. The investors can pay private mercs to go in and kill off the last holdouts.
Sorry for the dark thoughts on a Friday.
> The investors can pay private mercs to go in and kill off the last holdouts.
Meanwhile, every Palestinian who walked North with their possessions, their children, their cats, has picked up a shovel, and beside rebuilding homes and public buildings, are digging tunnels, shaping the battlefield for the next event….
Chris Hedges has a great analysis of the current situation:
https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/the-empire-self-destructs
The opening paragraph:
“The billionaires, Christian fascists, grifters, psychopaths, imbeciles, narcissists and deviants who have seized control of Congress, the White House and the courts, are cannibalizing the machinery of state. These self-inflicted wounds, characteristic of all late empires, will cripple and destroy the tentacles of power. And then, like a house of cards, the empire will collapse.”
It’s a brilliant piece of descriptive writing and analysis. However, I don’t track his conclusion at the end on USAID. Hedges seems to make a prima facie case that USAID is evil. It is a tool of empire, used to bribe foreign governments and enslave their local populations so that global corporations can profit.
Then he turns around and says Musk and Trump are bad for trying to kill it. Because it will only make the empire collapse faster … I lost the plot there.
Great analysis, yes, tho’ I’d challenge the statement “The rulers of all late empires, including the Roman emperors Caligula and Nero…”, as the accepted date for the Fall of the Roman Empire is AD 476 while Caligula reigned from AD 37 – 41 and Nero from AD 54 – 68. I’d also argue that the British Empire was not destroyed by ‘self-inflicted wounds’ as described but, rather, was begrudgingly recognised by the PtB as an inevitable consequence of the economic, political and military damage following two world wars and was to a considerable extent proactively managed.
However, and from the outside, watching the application of American Exceptionalism to the task of burning down its own house rather than the houses of others should be hugely entertaining.
To be honest it sounds like he misses the good old days of the Democrats running everything, including the censorship and skulduggery of organizations like USAID, and wants the might of the American Empire to shine on into eternity. Maybe not so much when Biden was cough*running*cough the country but when Obama was in charge of things. The thing is, yeah the Republicans are running things now in their own nutty way but what was it that had ordinary Americans turning out in droves to vote them in? Take a look at IM DOC who was a dyed in the wool Democrat who had been pushed out of their orbit by their antics. Look at Gabbard who was a Democrat rep until not only did her party force her out but pushed her into becoming a Republican. In truth, both main parties are as nuts as each other but it is just different brands. The difference is that the Repubs do some stuff that their base wants while the Dems would rather die as a party before doing so.
” The thing is, yeah the Republicans are running things now in their own nutty way but what was it that had ordinary Americans turning out in droves to vote them in?”
According to my still-dyed-in-the-wool democrat sister, the reason is racism, racism, racism, stupidity, and white male anger.
Somehow, those reasons don’t explain the disparate groups of people who turned out for Trump, but I’ve given up trying to explain this to her. The democrat party is her god, and the NYT is her bible (she claims to be an atheist – little does she know).
Hedges is a great writer generally and an experienced knowledgable man. His doomsaying has however worn me out a bit. When Russia started its “SMO” he started his sermons of total destruction of Ukraine just as Chechnya had been destroyed. Here Hedges was caught by surprise just like the US-imperialists he so much despises. Unexpectedly the Russian High Command tried to do everything to not do just that. So they both had a very limited imagination of what Russia is or could be.
The same people are in power in the USA now as 6 years ago, or 6 months ago, or 6 weeks. It didn´t change into a new form of fascist regime over night. I read everything he offers us thankfully. But less of his seminary rhetorical tradition would help.
Los Angeles County SARS-CoV-2 wastewater numbers
http://publichealth.lacounty.gov/media/Coronavirus/data/index.htm
SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentration as a percentage of the Winter 2023-2024 peak concentration value
1/4/25 24%
1/11/25 24%
1/18/25 25%
1/25/25 20%
This is the first year since the start of the pandemic where SARS-CoV-2 wastewater concentration did not fall sharply immediately after the holidays. The decline has been delayed by three weeks. The good news is that we are only at one- quarter of the level that we were at last year.
A personnel annoyance is that neither Ro Khanna nor Josh Marshall fought for policies I found important during the Biden years, and evidently not during the Obama years, why should I even pay attention to them now? Where were these guys when mere expressions of sentiment for the Palestinian people were being suppressed on campus about the country?
I notice the names Marshall and Khanna and I want to turn away, though I read on because I am asked to.
They fall into the category of “writers” who one studies so as to discern what not to believe.
My sensibilities are not tender. I think Marshall’s argument has merit. That is what matters, and that is why I included it.
‘They fall into the category of “writers” who one studies so as to discern what not to believe.’
Nice; and the reason IM Doc misses a Molly Ivins, a Texan who described herself as being “politically to the left of Lenin.” A reader always knew who Ivins was.
With such a dearth of data, we’ve still got the NC “Respiratory Virus Summary Dashboard”. Can’t copy and paste, because stupid, but typing this out
Last week 19.6% ER visits had respiratory symptoms, increase from 19.2% before. Flu is rising and rising since Jan.
They do still do COVID wastewater. Trending up now, but nowhere near the summer peak.
Wonder how much of this might be H5N1?
I have added orts and scraps. Have a good weekend.
Donald Trump has once again proposed a national sculpture garden that would honor well-known figures of American history, reviving a similar plan he announced during his first presidential term, but which was never built. It’s unclear where the park will be located, how the statues would be commissioned, or who will be commemorated with a statue. In an executive order signed last week, however, Trump said the park should be completed “as expeditiously as possible.”
“I have signed an executive order to resume the process of creating a new National Park full of statues of the greatest Americans who ever lived,” Trump said this week at a gathering of religious leaders in Washington.
Called the “National Garden of American Heroes,” the sculpture garden would be part of a July 2026 celebration of the 250th anniversary of the nation’s founding. It would feature 250 sculptures, one for each year of US history. Trump, according to the executive order, will serve as chair of the project.
https://www.nationalparkstraveler.org/2025/02/trump-announces-plan-build-national-park-american-heroes
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A late stage empire note:
Make ’em all out of cement in lieu of metal, hero or no hero-they all scrap for the same amount.
A good many of the roadside history markers in Cali made out of metal have disappeared as of late, as in they are history.
Well, the pigeons will be happy
I imagine that people like Mitch McConnell would be glancing at themselves in mirrors, thinking how they would look as a statue in the “National Garden of American Heroes.”
They can do as Roman emperors … cut off the head of the precursor’s statue, throw it into the Tiber, and repurpose the torso.
Hey it’s an idea with a recent but unfortunately brief history…South Dakota of course made a natural location, as this now closed park was located to nearby Mount Rushmore…Adding it seems this was preceded by the effort to build them and locate the initial park in Williamsburg, VA. Neither one really flourished I guess.
Presidents Park. A walk among humongous heads and shoulders of all our Presidents…fearless leaders or not, they be here….
https://www.roadsideamerica.com/story/9789
From Cory Doctorow on DOGE: The Fagin Figure
With shoutout to Yves!
Excellent overview.
Corrected link:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/02/07/broccoli-hair-brownshirts/#shameless
We’re tourists who accidentally stumbled into the wrong restaurant in the middle of a shootout between two Mafia Dons.
The Musk-Trump Dons vs. the Swamp Dons. Or maybe the Swamp is a nasty biker gang, and Musk-Trump are Mexican Drug Lords looking to exterminate them so they can get in on their territory and takeover distribution.
Musical Interlude:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J04NXYkUd8c
D.O.G.E. Day Afternoon plot
Based upon a play: ‘The Boys In The Bank’ with a hostage situation and 1 man holding the country at large, and in order to pay for X reassignment urgency, youthful adults nobody has ever heard of are put in charge of the operation.
Chrystia Freeland’s “notorious Nazi collaborator family” is mentioned by-the-by in the excerpt from Yasha Levine’s posting about USAID. Elsewhere, the role of her grandfather as a collaborator during the WWII occupation of Ukraine has been documented in great detail.
Meanwhile, Freeland is one of the two leading candidates to succeed Trudeau as leader of the Canadian federal Liberal party, and in the campaign so far she’s been leaning heavily on her experience in negotiating with Trump 1.0.
But for some reason she hasn’t made the even stronger argument that her family history gives her a ready-made rapport with the true power behind Trump 2.0. After all, Elon Musk also had a Nazi-sympathizer grandfather:
Musk’s maternal grandfather, Joshua Haldeman, moved from Canada to South Africa in 1950 because he liked the newly elected apartheid government.
In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians but which took on overtones of fascism with its uniforms and salutes.
The Canadian government banned Technocracy Incorporated during the second world war as a threat to the country’s security in part for its opposition to fighting Hitler. Haldeman was charged with publishing documents opposing the war and sent to prison for two months.
After the war, Haldeman led a separate political party that among other things promoted the antisemitic forgery the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. When that went nowhere, he moved to South Africa because he said he liked the core National party philosophy of Christian nationalism that Vorster likened to Nazism.
Soulmates!
‘In the 1930s, Haldeman was the Canadian leader of a fringe political movement originating in the US, Technocracy Incorporated, that advocated abolishing democracy in favor of government by elite technicians’
I think that back then there was a movement called the functionalists. Their idea was that people that had the most important function in society should be those who actually ran it. It never went anywhere as so many groups fought with each other who had the most important jobs in society, not recognizing that in a modern industrial society that it was all to interdependent to try this approach.
CONFESSIONS OF A GHOST
I’ve never ghosted a relationship. (what’s that?) But it’s the default for online dating. In apps, before meeting, after, whatever. Anytime it’s not going anywhere, auto-ghost is how it ends.
About ten years ago, on finishing my doctorate, I started to work with community organizations in my college town–to create a farmers market, connect it with local gardens and farms, food processing, to scale up local food production in a push to something like local food sovereignty. We repeatedly had the young people we worked with disappear on us. Not show when they said they would show, not feel compelled to explain (let alone apologize) sometimes just be gone for good.
We can deploy this concept of ghosting to describe affective relationships, but it’s part of a bigger lost sense of accountability, reciprocity, commitment to one’s fellows. And scary. A lot of the time, when you challenge people, they get angry–no one calls anyone out, anymore–and insist that family or (various kinds of) emergency compelled their failures. But feeling unhappy for one’s failures, letting people know. . .
Left organizations used to engage in this practice of self-criticism after every initiative–what did we do right, wrong? Often, you failed; people were demoted or stood down. A kind of Baptist Jimmie Swaggart ethos has taken hold quite broadly where, when accused (really of anything) the person chastized a) starts screaming in angry retaliation, b) denies, and c) if caught red-handed issues an utterly pro-forma mea culpa and heads back to the fray. Nobody feels any shame. I’m tempted to point back to the kind of world that Lasch saw coming, where we all develop superficial notions of ourselves as victims, maybe get these ratified by some professional interest, shrink, whatever, and thus feel justified in poor behavior. I’ve heard a lot of my daughter’s sweet but neurotic friends say things like, “Well, I’m just that way! I’m f*cked up!” (“I’m gonna give vent!”) In fact, we’ve got an entire country full of people with a bottomless, unassuageable resentment that’s the driver of most everything, on both sides of a styrofoam, often quite phony political divide. (Where the content itself has disappeared!) You can sell lots of stuff with it. It comes pretty close to being a perfect, closed system, perpetual in its motion because powered by an anxiety no longer governed, let alone repressed.
Well young people really have no future with Climate. So resentment is understandable. And you still have to capitalist to eat every day. What a waste.
Science is plopping:
Investigating Fraud At The Heart Of Alzheimer’s Research (17 min. audio) Science Friday
“Congressional Democrats denied entry to EPA headquarters”
This is the rubber meeting the road; elected officials and American citizens being locked out of the corridors of their own government. Now we begin to speak openly of a coup, IMO.
I guess the world “coup” doesn’t mean what it used to. I always thought a coup was a government overthrow? How does an elected government overthrow itself? Not that I’m a fan of a lot of this, but, IMHO, calling it a coup is hyper ventilating.
Because the US is supposed to be a constitutional republic, with defined separation of powers. Taking over the Treasury’s payment system by private citizens is an attempt to overthrow Congress’ constitutional power, thus coup.
Heh. The 6 Jan rioters had the wrong building.
Touché!
The coup-not-coup debate misses the point that what we are witnessing is a feud between factions of oligarchs who control our electoral choices. A curse on both their houses. Democracy, if indeed it ever was, is dead or, one might hope, only comatose and subject to revival.
There is a thing called a “palace coup” wherein one part or official takes over the ruling part/official. And yes, taking over the government’s payment system is in effect taken over the government.
So the govt payment system is the “ruling part/official”? I mean it seems to be at times, but that’s not what the constitution says (IIRC). Isn’t the Department of the Treasury part of the Executive branch?
There is a thing called a “palace coup” wherein part or parties of the government take over the ruling part or parties of the government, These are often “bloodness coups”. And yes, taking over the payment system of the government is in effect taking over the government.
> How does an elected government overthrow itself?
An autogolpe?
So supposedly the elected officials were being kept out by private security.
https://bsky.app/profile/davmicrot.bsky.social/post/3lhkkzzxbg22m
Advice to the oppositional electeds: show up with your own private security. Compared to the storming of the capitol, this is some truly weak sh*t.
> Advice to the oppositional electeds: show up with your own private security. Compared to the storming of the capitol, this is some truly weak sh*t.
I saw a different video, the dude blocking the door didn’t even have a lan yard, let a alone a hat, and still they allowed themselves to be turned back. Didn’t they game it out?
Game is the right word to use here.
Isn’t the building in question a part of the Capitol Complex, and thus under the aegis of the Capitol Police? Aren’t the Capitol Police directly under the control of the Sergeant at Arms of either the House or the Senate? Where was the Capitol Police Board then during all of this? They should have jurisdiction in this.
See: https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight
RE: “Not sure why Kirn and Taibbi think that DOGE’s write access to OPM’s personnel and the Fiscal Office’s payment data isn’t a story, but they clearly think it’s not (or else they would cover it).”
I haven’t listened to this week’s podcast yet but I do subscribe so l have listened to all the others and read every one of Taibbi’s articles on substack, and have followed him since before he started at Rolling Stone. I very much enjoyed all the financial articles he did for RS, but that wasn’t his focus before RS and hasn’t been as big of a focus since. He really seems to be more interested in free speech and freedom of the press issues these days, and as much as I loved his financial reporting, I can’t really blame him, especially after Biden sicced the IRS on him at his own house(!). I also get the feeling there might be other similar things he isn’t talking about publicly. Because of his current focus, I think he might be more interested in what information comes out when DOGE turns over certain, but definitely not all, government rocks.
And then there’s his relationship with Musk. While Taibbi did show great integrity in not explicitly disclosing his sources for the Twitter files, it’s pretty certain Musk was the source. Then Musk turned on Taibbi due to some supposed competition between substack and twitter that Musk didn’t like. I don’t remember Taibbi going into great detail about the rift and what exactly happened there, but that might be one of the reasons why he isn’t focusing on something that in the past at least would have been in his wheelhouse – Musk is a loose cannon with a potential grudge against Taibbi with government power now at his disposal .
I always admired Taibbi and think his book Hate, Inc. should be required reading, but I find him and Walter Kirn have lost the plot nowadays. Today’s podcast has Walter Kirn saying he’s supporting DOGE and Musk taking over the Treasury payment system because the govt needs to be audited. In other words, he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. (And yes, there’s a ton of govt waste, especially in contracting (I’m looking at you, Musk) and wouldn’t it be great if DOD will finally be auditted. But that’s not what DOGE is doing.) And Taibbi/Kirn go on talking about millions of dollars the govt spends on media, tsk tsk. Millions, seriously, when trillions are at risk either through accident or indent through DOGE access to the payment systems.
Alas, Taibbi seems to have jumped the shark, which is a shame, because when he’s firing on all cylinders [mixing as many metaphors as possible], he can be a pleasure to read.
This book review analyzes his decline, along with that of Greenwald.
That’s a good review. Thanks!
At the risk of being to much of a Taibbi/Greenwald stan, I find the author’s opinion hard to take seriously after this –
“In my view, both Taibbi and Greenwald had eras in their careers where the left could count them as allies. For Taibbi, it came during his ferocious (if somewhat superficial) reporting on finance; for Greenwald it came during the early Bernie era, neatly bookmarked between Bernie’s 2015 campaign launch and the first election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That those eras ended, particularly as they have, is a genuine tragedy.”
I did not find Taibbi’s finance reporting “somewhat superficial” at all. He and NC were my go to spots to understand what really happened when so much of the mainstream press was superficially glossing over the details because it was all supposedly either too boring or too hard to understand for the average reader. And the author must have missed Greenwald taking apart the Bush administration for years before Bernie’s presidential runs came along. I’m so old I remember Greenwald being accused of turning Republican when he would criticize Obama.
> Today’s podcast has Walter Kirn saying he’s supporting DOGE and Musk taking over the Treasury payment system because the govt needs to be audited.
This is beyond foolish; it’s ignorant.
An audit is a formal process; it takes training to do, and there are deliverables. DOGE has neither the personnel nor the capacity to do an audit. The only deliverables we’ve seen are Elon’s tweets.
“Audit” really translates into “muscle and intimidate government officials.” That’s fine if you want to come out on the other side with a government that doesn’t function at all, and although crazy baldheads like Andreessen think that’s just fine, that’s not going to help the working class at all,
What is your opinion of Catherine Austin Fitts saying that 21 trillion dollars has been stolen since 2000 from the Federal Budget. The day before 9/11 Rumsfeld said several trillion is missing from the DOD budget. A college professor of economics had his students investigate and agrees with Fitts. The DOD hasn’t been able to do a decent audit for many decades. Fitts also says that changes in Federal law concerning audits and budgets has made it easier for money to disappear from most any Federal agency without consequences. A trillion here a trillion there and after a while you’re talking real money.
Thanks, Cas. I’m in agreement with you. I particularly noted Kirn’s saying that he couldn’t think of any reason why what the DOGE team is doing in the Treasury payment system is illegal. Everything should be audited, he said. WTF??? Kirn’s now an attorney too? Who knew!
Adding, here’s the Kirn quote:
“I can think of no illegality whatsoever in the auditing of a government this big, on behalf of an elected president. And so, the investigator in me, the person who likes to turn over rocks and see through walls and open closet doors, is just absorbed, fascinated, and compelled and feels that unless we do this, we’re in trouble.”
Adding again another quote from Kirn:
“when I think about the novelty of them [DOGE] finally auditing this government and treasury and places like USAID, I’m willing to give them a lot of running room before I decide that they are the enemies of the people rather than the first friends we’ve had for a long time.”
Well, we may or may not be in a world of hurt by the time Taibbi and Kirn realize they have been snookered. I’m hoping for the “may not” option. I am really troubled that Matt Taibbi is taking this as lightly as he is.
A superficial comment on DOGE.
Back when it first became a thing I wondered about pronouncing the acronym DOGE. Some acronyms don’t get a pronounceable word, like IRS, but many do, like NASA.
The consensus, now, seems to be to say it like “dodge” but with a long O.
Before that I had done my own thinking and liked a two syllable DOG-E, pronounced “doggy” but with a long O. This reminded me of the old cowboy folk song
“Git Along, Little Dogies”
So I tried my hand at new lyrics. One shortcoming in my version is that I used the term DOG-E’s interchangeably for either the hunter or the prey. Oh well, here it is…
======================
“Git It On, Vicious DOG-E’s”
As l walked out one morning in DC,
I spied a musk minion on a mission to hone;
His heart held a throw-back to ideals in spending,
As he approached while singin’ this song,
[chorus] —>
Whoopie Ti Yi Yo,
Git it on viscious DOG-E’s.
It’s peon’s misfortune and none of our own.
Whoopie Ti Yi Yo,
Git it on viscious DOG-E’s.
For you know that austerity will be your new norm.
<—
Early in the spring we will find many DOG-E's,
Name 'em and mark 'em and list all their fails;
Drive out their excess, cut off their funding,
Then throw the bad DOG-E's out or in jail.
[chorus]
Some pols go on spending our money for pleasure,
That our funds can support it, is awfully wrong;
For our coffers we know are long over-drawn on,
So we'll go undo all of their spending that's wrong.
[chorus]
When the Right comes to town, we will hold them accountable,
These bad DOG-E's who's spending must slow;
Round up the offenders, and end their agendas.
These rounded-up DOG-E's must cease the cash flow.
[chorus]
Oh, you all ate the pork from the democrat excess,
"lt's pork, more pork," l heard them cry.
Git it on, git it on, to the rounded up DOG-E's,
There's no pork to be had, 'cept for a wars by and by.
[chorus]
==================================
Original:
GIT ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES
Lyric link:
https://mudcat.org/@displaysong.cfm?SongID=2264
From American Ballads and Folk Songs, Lomax
For any who want to hear the original, there are many versions on youtube that you can find with a search on the title.
> GIT ALONG, LITTLE DOGIES
I kinda like that:
Indeed.
“Elon’s little DOGies.” Works for me.
A 25-Year-Old Is Writing Backdoors Into The Treasury’s $6 Trillion Payment System. What Could Possibly Go Wrong.
Found this a few days ago.
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/02/05/a-25-year-old-is-writing-backdoors-into-the-treasurys-6-trillion-payment-system-what-could-possibly-go-wrong/
They say that age is just a number, and so are the payments.
Over the last 30 days I have kept track of the bad driving I have seen, I drove somewhere on 28 of those days however, with the
exception of driving from Santa Rosa to Sebastopol once a week ( 32 miles roundtrip) these have been short jaunts of 5 miles or less.
On 17 of those 28 days I witnessed dangerous driving.
2 cars coming to a full stop and then running a red light.
1 car making a right turn on a red light across three lanes of traffic.
1 sprinter van blowing through a thoroughly red light.
Two cars driving the wrong way on a clearly marked one way street.
Two cars driving 100 meters or more on the wrong side of the street.
Add a few stop lights run and people driving at an excessive rate of speed in the rain and you get the picture
, risky behavior.
When I look at how Trump and Musk are behaving I get the same feeling, impetuos and extremely risky behavior with no consideration of the potentially devastating consequences.
I strongly suspect that Covid has a role in this, “Important People” don’t have to mask, they are IMPORTANT PEOPLE, not Plebes.
And many if not most have had Covid multiple times.
The stupidest timeline certainly appears to be getting stupider…
The very incomplete stops at stop signs and going through red lights I used to see all the time in San Francisco and in Marin especially during the commute. Dangerous behavior as opposed to just illegal behavior seems to be increasing. Those stops I saw were illegal, but it almost always appeared that the driver was being aware of the traffic and just wanted to not stop, and if he blow through the sign or the light without endangering anyone he did so. Nowadays, drivers often don’t appear to be aware of the other drivers (or pedestrians) while being increasingly impatient.
Drivers are going through signs and lights while in heavy traffic apparently not even really looking around. Not distracted, but not paying attention, which is just scary. Eyes ahead, hands on the wheel, and nobody is home, just zooming along through the intersection, which reminds me of alcoholics when they are driving on familiar streets going home. It is all auto-piloted.
The last time I saw somebody I recognized doing something like that he was a police officer I knew.
So, Elez gets fired for some quite racist, quite recent remarks. Then he gets re-hired I guess the same day, or next day. I’ve never been in favor of “cancel culture” but this is unsettling. https://apnews.com/article/trump-doge-marko-elez-musk-vance-racist-posts-959272aca0eece7385cdbc470930bf37
Thank you. I missed Elez’s comeback. In a way, though, it shows the weakness of perfornative aghastitude as a personnel strategy. It used to be that people would get fired when presumed guilty of whatever performative aghastitude liberal Democrats enacted. Elon, in my view rightly, says “Not on your Nellie!” Why rightly?
Because whoever gave Elez write access to our national personnel and payroll systems should at the very least be fired (and in jail if an offense can be found). That’s the really important issue, and it’s never discussed. Instead, we get the aghastitude and a dogpile.
It’s exactly like what happened to Mario Cuomo. Was Cuomo forced to resign because he whacked a few tens of thousands of elders by forcing them into nursing homes during the first phase of the pandemic? No. Sexual harassment.
Always on point, Lambert. Thank you for this.
“Taking DOGE to Court is a Doomed Strategy,”
This strategy creates a perverse joy in me because I believe progressive liberalism has become a totalitarian ideology and such purely legalistic thinking will only accelerate its disintegration.
It just may be that those individuals and groups still interested in a working class politics should consider a future in which they build a house on the left side of MAGA square, where there Is currently plenty of excitement, energy and a real contestation of ideas.
Wrt Khanna, I don’t think he “missed” the vote. He just didn’t (show up to) vote. Musk is right on this account: in fact, Khanna is not just being a d**k, but a lyinv weasely one.
“Trump Is A Deal Maker” Whitney Webb‘s Take on DOGE, Elon Musk, DeepSeek AI, and the Elite’s!
Wow.
Thanks!
p.s. I wonder though how it affects US investigative journalism if serious reporters are driven out of the country to do their work like Webb. That puts serious limits to your routine. You cannot do the groundwork any more, not build networks, not speak to people in person, not build trust over decades, not create relationships which you need to pierce the institutions. The virtual existence cannot genuinely be investigative journalism. I would rather consider Webb a non–fiction writer / scholar. But I appreciate her work of course!
America This Week, Feb 7, 2025: It’s still complicated
Little deduced coup
You don’t know what I got (you don’t know what I got)
Little deduced coup
You don’t know what I got
Well, I’m not bragging, so don’t put me down (deduced coup)
But I’ve got the fastest set of AI tools in town (deduced coup)
When something comes up for me, faster than I could try (deduced coup)
‘Cause if AI had a set of wings, man I know it could fly
It’s my little deduced coup
You don’t know what I got
(My little deduced coup)
(You don’t know what I got)
Just a little deduced coup with a rumor mill (deduced coup)
But it’ll wipe out USAID’s standing still (deduced coup)
It’s important and believed, and it’s never bored
It’ll do the work of hundred and forty humans on the floor
It’s my little deduced coup
You don’t know what I got
(My little deduced coup)
(You don’t know what I got)
It’s always comes in clutch, my AI on the floor
And it purrs like a kitten as you hear Schumer roar
And if that ain’t enough to make you flip your lid
There’s one more thing, 9,706 @ USAID got the pink slip, daddy
It’s my little deduced coup
You don’t know what I got
(My little deduced coup)
(You don’t know what I got)
Little Deuce Coupe, by the Beach Boys
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fk6O_paS0hY
And on the culture front, just for laughs I suppose, here is something that purports to be a message from Kanye West. ( Though in line with warnings upthread one has to wonder if this was written by bots or AIs or some other bad actors).
https://www.reddit.com/r/popculturechat/comments/1ijxes8/kanye_wests_disturbing_tweets_from_this_morning/
from Dexter Filkins´s NEW YORKER piece on the US Army´s crisis – the US in a nutshell – telling names and modest goals:
The U.S. Army’s recruiting station in Duluth, Georgia, north of Atlanta, has nine recruiters, and each aims to sign up one new recruit a month. It’s a modest goal, but they’ve met it each month for the past four years. “We try to seek out every eligible man and woman in the area—every single one,” the station’s leader, Sergeant First Class Stephen Supersad, told me.
NIH announces today a cap of 15% on indirect charges, which is additional money the universities receive for infrastructure with each NIH grant award. A fixed rate, institution wide amount is negotiated directly between each school and the NIH, so the rates vary from school to school. Some numbers. The overall average rate last year was about 25%. Again, this is in addition to the grant, ostensively to support infrastructure. Unverified, but I’m seeing reported Harvard, Yale and J.H. receiving hi 60s rates, not a misprint, sixties.
Columbia U’s financials are available on their website. IIRC this revenue source accounts for about 21% of ’23-4’s operating budget.
University management to bend the knee, more at 11:00.
at one point in time Stanford was over 100%
This is an excellent development. This has needed to happen for a long time.
Some of whats now billed as “overhead” will likely find its way into hidden direct costs. For example, many professors on 9-month contracts have benefits paid by the institution. If placed on a grant for 2 months in a year, the marginal extra benefits (retirement 5-10%, SS 1-7.65%) amount to less than 20% of salary. Bill those benefits at 40% and convert overhead into direct costs. Facilities use and grant administration folks will likely also be converted into direct costs.
I doubt much will be saved by simply mandating 15% max overhead. While its true that many private foundations limit overhead costs to 10-20%, they typically permit traditional overhead costs to be billed as direct costs. Foundation donors are then happy along with everyone else. Institutions won’t apply for their grants if the institutions can’t manage and perform grant work with the overhead provided. So, limiting indirect costs to 15% isn’t likely to rout out much waste, fraud, and abuse.
This is not at all how KLG sees this and he’s worked often on NIH grants and knows many many many colleagues who have. This will greatly diminish medical research in the US. I have a post coming based on a fuller discussion of his argument.
The only way medical research will be diminished is if the overall NIH grant budget is cut. It’s hard to imagine a scenario where NIH grant money is left on the table because institutions can’t figure out how to game the system and refuse to respond to requests for proposals. After all, the same institutions commonly respond to private foundation RFPs with 10-20% maximums on indirect costs. Hopefully, the upcoming post will explain why NIH proposals can’t use the same accounting techniques that are used when responding the private foundation RFPs.
Sorry, that is not what KLG says and he has actually worked on many grants and is on the faculty of a medical school and has colleagues at other med schools.
I suggest you not dispute the opinion of people in the know, on medical school faculties. KLG has been doing biomedical research back to the AIDS era. You do not know the fine points of how these grants work. You also do not know if the objective is in fact to reduce NIH spending. So you are out over your skis here. I advise you wait for the post with KLG’s explanation.
Here’s your Boeing story:
Boeing has informed its employees that NASA may cancel SLS contracts
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/02/boeing-has-informed-its-employees-that-nasa-may-cancel-sls-contracts/
All I can add is long overdue. The first launch for SLS was originally scheduled for 2016. They are more than a bit late, and still have two astronauts stuck on the ISS.
“That’s real progress. But I think the terms need to be sharpened a lot. The standard should be no help on the budget or the debt ceiling until the lawbreaking stops.”
A far more likely scenario is the Dems capitulate on spending by slashing medicaid and food stamps whilst saying; “it was the only way we could use our limited leverage”
The true monkeywrenchers solution here is to ‘freeze’ or even ‘shrink’ Federal budgets a certain percentage, across the board. Do not exempt any Departments, especially the Department of “Defense.”
Expanding on the Late Roman Empire theme, cutting just the VA budget would be like an Emperor “forgetting” to pay off his Praetorian Guard. Not very encouraging for one’s ‘extended life span.’
> The true monkeywrenchers solution here is to ‘freeze’ or even ‘shrink’ Federal budgets a certain percentage
I think you could slap a program that did that on the back end our our payment system without knowing a lot about its inner workings. Just reduce all the checks by a given percent. That’s my theory for what DOGE was really doing. My other idea is putting payments “on the blockchain.” Stupid, but good for the Bubble
Cue up a sorta ballad from my high school years, by the band Poison*. So themes from art, from fiction….are decidedly less fictional seeming here some 35 years forward from this song and video being popular about 1991 I think…
*forgive them their tousled hair and make up! Adding here ok the axiom of mean bad Republicans is valid, but who just left the WH after being in place since late January 2021(?). I keep circling to the idea of now this very new emperor is very, very bad with his horrible new clothes…And media types opined that Joe Biden was always a decent man. Maybe that Jay Gould quote is more apt now than when he was purported to have said it.
“See the lonely sleeping on a cold dark street,
Their bodies in an old bone grave,
Underneath the broken old neon sign,
That used to read Jesus Saves…
While miles away are the rich folk
And I see how they living it up
while the poor they eat from hell’s mouth
The rich drink from the golden cup
and it just makes me wonder
Why so many lose and so few win…
Give me something to believe in…”
Trump says he is revoking Biden’s security clearance
Would Biden even know?
LOL.
This could mean that Trump is planning something that he does not want the so called “Deep State” to get wind of too soon. Something like selling out the Ukraine. (A good businessman knows when to cut his losses.)
dogboy dogboy dogboy
I can’t stand his idiot ass acronym, dogboy is so much easier and more descriptive. Efficient….
re: POLITICO and USAID
Matt Taibbi and Lee Fang with two different takes on the subject:
LEE FANG:
“USAID Funded Journalism Needs Scrutiny. Viral Claims Attacking Politico Are False
The U.S. government helps operate a shadow network of “independent news” sites around the world. Politico is not one of them.”
https://www.leefang.com/p/usaid-funded-journalism-needs-scrutiny
TAIBBI, however is essentially behind paywall:
“I held off on writing about the “payoffs”-to-media story, for fear I might say too much. The betrayal I feel is almost too vast to express. It’s bad enough that I grew old in this business watching it break its own rules, screw up, and smear its best practitioners, many of whom were friends or mentors. Now, at a critical juncture, the smearers are playing victim.
It’s the last straw. The legacy press needs to be put out of its misery”
https://www.racket.news/p/the-media-is-busted
p.s. I haven´t listened to ATW yet.
I’m suddenly receiving what I consider a nonsense emails:
“Here’s your verification code to sign in to Substack”
Is it real? I have doubts.
Just got one of these purporting to be from NC. It’s a scam. Don’t bite.
Probably a phishing scam. We are getting those regularly now. The latest one is “from” Comcast, and very well constructed. It looks real.
The rule of thumb now is not to open anything sent to you in an e-mail. Always ‘contact’ an individual or organization through separate “addresses” known from before the arrival of the questionable missive.
(Thus endeth the pompous rant.)
Stay safe.
Those are a feature… I’ve received those spam emails frequently and on occasion, one skips over and past the filtering hurdles….One more thing in the column For Analog and one in the column Against Digital Online Etc…
The only time I get these is when I’m actually trying to sign in to Substack. Is that the case with you, flora? Or are the emails coming from out of the blue?
Picked up a copy of “The Ugly American” from 1958 in my library. Since I never thought about the Peace Corps outside comical terms (think 1985 comedy “Volunteers”, by Nicholas Meyer who also did Star Trek II – Hollywood used to make fun of the empire long time ago) I now wonder, in how far the “Corps” and USAID can be distinguished?
2 very odd conversations by Doug Henwood:
1) Eoin Higgins, author of Owned, on tech moguls and the journalists, like Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi, who work for them
2) Ronnie Grinberg, author of Write Like a Man, on the mostly male, mostly Jewish New York intellectuals
Jan. 30th
55 min.
https://shout.lbo-talk.org/lbo/RadioArchive/2025/25_01_30.mp3
1) is defamatory. It’s disappointing to see how Taibbi being savagely attacked for years by liberals who can’t stand free speech when it makes them look bad has become cognitively captured by libertarians. But to depict him as a minion of tech moguls is flat out dishonest. And even more so with Greenwald, who had the cojones to stand up to the US deep state. I am pretty convinced they would have assassinated him over the Snowden disclosures but they couldn’t come up with a plausibly deniable way to do it. His dealings with Omidyar raise eyebrows but my take is he was snookered, as in he thought Omidayar would review the archives for security risks (as Greenwald had been doing before publication) but simply buried them.
In my initial comment draft I was trying to make fun over Higgins´s name and “My Fair Lady” and Higgins being uneducated about the real nasty world just like the Prof. Higgins character. Both originating with detached ivory tower mentality. Anyway. I seem to have this romanticizing view of Doug Henwood. So whenever I find his podcast to be so unsatisfactory I feel really disappointed. Eoin Higgins really is a specimen of the new “liberal” progressive cultural elite who lack the analytic depth and breadth. They are media-savvy but that´s it. Ronnie Grinberg is more complicated a case but in essence similiar. I am not sure if she has any clue of what working-class really means outside the class-room or a library.
She has this short essay. The headline proves my point. She has no idea what she is talking about. First it´s Chalamet not Chalalemet. Second only for someone with an intellectually inept hammer Allen, Rogen, Chalamet qualify as something of the same kind:
“Forging an American vision of Jewish masculinity
When we think of Jewish masculinity in the United States, our imagination likely conjures up the quintessential nebbish: the neurotic, bookish, geeky intellectual type: think Woody Allen or, more recently, Seth Rogen or even Timothée Chalalemet.”
The essay itself eventually is not as bad:
https://press.princeton.edu/ideas/forging-an-american-vision-of-jewish-masculinity
History repeating but maybe it won’t rhyme, version 2025. In the spring of 1993 I was a sophomore in college, knew next to nothing outside my tight little bubble of family and close friends….when the raid on Waco and the Branch Davidian’s complex exploded so to speak into national headlines….What a wild story. So I just began a recapping of those events on a recent TV mini series or well recent from 2018 ( this is streaming on Paramount app ). David Koresh,. Two years after there was Oklahoma City…
It’s off topic but honestly….I recall a whole lot of foaming and frothing at the recently elected Clinton’s and yet somehow the Republic survived that era. Heh, Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America, and Joe Scarborough was then a newly elected representative from Pensacola…
> Pensacola
Pensacola — It’s the spot! –Walt Kelly
Can you still get it for a nickel?
Re: The Wrong Durée
Black Marxism can be a bit of a slog, and I haven’t made it through to the end, but what I have read makes me skeptical of the way this review characterizes Robinson’s positions. Perhaps somewhat ironically, a lot of what Johnson writes seems in line with a very traditional vein of anti-Marxist, and particularly anti-historical materialist, criticism – you take high-level observations of sociological trends, misconstrue them as a totalizing account of the determining forces of history, and then take the author to task for the lack of the very nuances you’ve just flattened away.
Johnson’s account of Robinson’s social and intellectual milieu in the section “Robinson’s Black Power Origins” also strays into the territory of “smear by association” at some points. There’s some actually relevant stuff in the beginning about Robinson’s life, things he did, and organizations he was part of, and then there’s this curious pivot sentence (“What is clear from these biographical details is that Robinson was committed to an anti-imperialist, Third Worldist, and Pan-Africanist project, as were many others of his generation, and his formative academic work through the publication of Black Marxism retains these political commitments alongside a growing skepticism of Marxist thought and politics, which closely resembles the posture of U.S. black cultural nationalists during the same period.”) followed by a wealth of detail on the flaws and failings of a bunch of people and organizations whose closest stated connection to Robinson is exactly this – that their positions on some issues facially seem kind of similar.
To cap this off, Johnson details some of the views of Haki Madhubuti and then essentially attempts to hang them around Robinson’s neck in a way that seems pretty cynical. Rather than quoting any of Robinson‘s actual views, he spends a paragraph quoting Madhubuti being inflammatory and uncareful (at the very least) in his reading of Marx and Engels, then says “if we set aside his vitriol, [which I just made the decision to show you at some length, despite my stated desire to set it aside,] however, Madhubuti’s criticisms are consonant with those Robinson makes” before going on to try to tie the two thinkers together on the basis of some fairly broad similarities. I get that this section is ostensibly trying to examine the roots of Robinson’s thought, but this seems less like that and more like Johnson trying to discredit Robinson by conflating his positions with much less carefully reasoned ones – something you can do to just about anyone.
As I say, there’s some stuff in this review that I’m less equipped to evaluate, but the parts I can seem a lot like a hatchet job. In the paragraph beginning “It is true that some Greeks and Romans remarked…”, for example, we have the following:
However, Robinson does not quote Herodotus to suggest that this description constituted racism, and indeed the section of Black Marxism this quote is drawn from concludes with the sentence “Yet despite their less than cordial relations with Africans, the Romans, like their Greek predecessors, did not evolve prejudices of color and race:”, followed by a supporting quotation from, and I swear I am not making this up, the work of Frank Snowden. The views Johnson is trying to ascribe to Robinson through implication are not only not present in Black Marxism, they’re actively rebutted, using the very same source!
So yeah TL;DR I wouldn’t take this review too seriously.
Thanks for this.
I think Democrats should have a spine, so far I agree. But how hard is this lever if Trump establishes direct control over payments?
Debt ceiling? Mint the coin ™.
Congress fails to pass a budget? Guess Trump has to step in and decide a temporary budget to keep things running.
In a power struggle where the executive arm of the government doesn’t obey laws and norms, what matters is what the armed branches of government does. Do they comply with marching out official after official? Do they comply even when the courts decide differently? Do they comply even if it’s the bosses in the armed branches that are shown the door?
If so, then the executive can do what it wants. The state is fundamentally a top-down structure, as long as people obey.
The obedience is a fragile thing and the more so the less legitimacy the government has. And when it breaks – when orders are given but the men wielding guns goes “family blog this!” and goes home – it breaks hard. Democrats should make Trump undermine his legitimacy in every step, in order to play the long game.
But as long as the men wielding guns obey, the executive can do what it wants. In the realm of human affairs at least. Nature doesn’t take orders and machines work according to natural science. If Elon breaks the US government’s payment system, it’s broken until it’s fixed or a new one is installed. And for that time, decisions on making payment will matter much less.