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Links 2/23/2025

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Why Is Warren Buffett Hoarding So Much Cash? WSJ

Buffett seeks to reassure shareholders over record cash pile FT. Commentary:

Bank of England’s Gold-Diggers Grapple With Trump-Fueled Frenzy Bloomberg

Climate

Garbage Craig Mod

China?

Chinese take record 9 billion domestic trips during Lunar New Year, Xinhua reports Reuters

Trump orders new curbs on Chinese investments in strategic areas South China Morning Post

In Malaysia, low-priced Chinese brands gain popularity in Western-dominated malls South China Morning Post

Digital Watch

AMD is in talks to sell $4 billion AI server assembly plants Toms Hardware

Pollution from Big Tech’s data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn FT

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber? The Register

Syraqistan

At Bibas family’s request, no government minister to attend funeral for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir — report The Times of Israel. Commentary:

Hamas releases remains of captive Shiri Bibas after ‘mix-up of bodies’ Al Jazeera. The deck: “Family members and forensic experts confirm that the new remains turned over by Hamas belong to the deceased Bibas.” Commentary:

China?

Chinese take record 9 billion domestic trips during Lunar New Year, Xinhua reports Reuters

Trump orders new curbs on Chinese investments in strategic areas South China Morning Post

In Malaysia, low-priced Chinese brands gain popularity in Western-dominated malls South China Morning Post

Digital Watch

AMD is in talks to sell $4 billion AI server assembly plants Toms Hardware

Pollution from Big Tech’s data centre boom costs US public health $5.4bn FT

Hey programmers – is AI making us dumber? The Register

Syraqistan

At Bibas family’s request, no government minister to attend funeral for Shiri, Ariel and Kfir — report The Times of Israel. Commentary:

Hamas releases remains of captive Shiri Bibas after ‘mix-up of bodies’ Al Jazeera. The deck: “Family members and forensic experts confirm that the new remains turned over by Hamas belong to the deceased Bibas.” Commentary:

* * *

‘Blatant violation’: Hamas slams Israel as release of Palestinians delayed Al Jazeera

Israel indefinitely delays Palestinian prisoner release as hostages freed BBC

* * *

Shin Bet Arrests Two Israelis Suspected of Involvement in Tel Aviv Suburbs Bus Bombs Haaretz

European Disunion

Polls open in pivotal parliamentary elections in Germany EuroNews

Germans vote as far right surges in polarised national election France24

Now That Trump Is Done With Europe, Will Germany Step Up? Foreign Policy

New Not-So-Cold War

Wounded, recovered and back to war. Ukrainian soldiers are returning to battle after amputation AP

Fresh draft minerals agreement: US to be granted 100% of financial interest Ukrainska Pravda

US says revenue from minerals deal will fuel Ukraine’s postwar growth FT

Trump’s team confident they can end Russo-Ukrainian war next week, The Hill says Ukrainska Pravda

Biden Administration

Biden sent $2 billion to Stacey Abrams-linked group in green energy ‘scheme,’ EPA says FOX. Hmm.

Trump Administration

Trump moves with light speed and brute force in shaking the core of what America has been AP

* * *

Trump’s Commerce Secretary Confirms Plan to Gut Medicare—and More The New Republic. Commentary:

“Back in October … I flew down to Texas, got Elon Musk to [set up DOGE], and here was our agreement: that Elon was gonna cut a trillion dollars of waste fraud and abuse,” Lutnick told Jesse Waters of Fox News Wednesday night. “We have almost $4 trillion of entitlements, and no one’s ever looked at it before. You know Social Security is wrong, you know Medicaid and Medicare are wrong. So he’s gonna cut a trillion and we’re gonna get rid of all these tax scams that hammer against America and we’re gonna raise a trillion dollars of revenue.”

Just last week, President Trump promised that “Social Security won’t be touched, other than if there’s fraud or something. It’s going to be strengthened. Medicare, Medicaid—none of that stuff is going to be touched.”

Fast forward a week, and he endorsed House Republicans’ budget plan, which is expected to make an $880 billion cut to Medicaid to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Anxiety Mounts Among Social Security Recipients as DOGE Troops Settle In ProPublica

* * *

A look at Dan ‘Razin’ Caine, Trump’s pick to be the top US military officer AP

Many Americans don’t trust the media to cover Trump: Survey The Hill

* * *

STATE OF NEW YORK, et al., v. DONALD J. TRUMP (PDF) United States District Court, Southern District of New York

Judge extends block on DOGE’s access to federal payment systems Politico. The opinion.

Supreme Court sidesteps Trump’s effort to remove watchdog agency head SCOTUSblog

DOGE

DOGE Claims It Has Saved Billions. See Where. WSJ. The deck: “A WSJ analysis of government data found that many claims of savings were overstated and ‘woke’ cuts were only a tiny fraction of the total.”

Trump and Elon’s ‘Pointless Bloodbath’ at the FAA Is Even Worse Than You Think Rolling Stone

Hundreds of Philly IRS workers laid off on Thursday, union says NBC

Is Elon OK?

Feds must answer email on what they did last week — or lose jobs, Musk says WaPo. “Trump posted on Saturday morning to Truth Social, his social media platform, commending Musk for doing “A GREAT JOB,” but adding, “I WOULD LIKE TO SEE HIM GET MORE AGGRESSIVE. Musk’s post to X came about seven hours later, and the emails began going out to federal employees close to 4:30 p.m. Eastern.”

Elon Musk says ‘bar is very low’ after ordering federal employees to fill out productivity reports or resign FOX. Heather Has Two Supervisors apparently Elon’s favorite bedtime reading.

New Doge/Musk Email Goes Seriously Sideways Talking Points Memo.

Over the course of the evening top leadership at the FBI, the State Department, the VA, the Department of the Navy (to its civilian employees) and other parts of the government have explicitly instructed employees in their departments and agencies to ignore the email. Meanwhile the DOJ seems to be instructing its employees to follow it. (And yes, FBI is sort of under DOJ and that’s kind of weird but that’s where we are.)

It’s important to note that these emails are authorized or allowed if not directed by the President of the United States. And yet whole wings of the government are saying to ignore it. I mentioned to someone this evening that they’re treating a presidentially authorized email as some kind of insider threat. And this person says, we’re surprised that Trump is an insider threat? To which I said, yes, I’m surprised that his own appointees are doing so.

Kash Patel overrules Elon Musk as new FBI boss throws down gauntlet to DOGE Daily Mail

The Final Frontier

Boom or bust? Making sense of conflicting signals in the space economy Space News

Astronomers discover ‘Quipu,’ the single largest structure in the known universe Space.com

The Bezzle

Bybit Sees Over $4 Billion ‘Bank Run’ After Crypto’s Biggest Hack CoinDesk

Imperial Collapse Watch

Mearsheimer was right:

Palantir’s Call to Arms Is Also a Sales Pitch Bloomberg

America’s National Security Wonderland American Affairs

Class Warfare

The Black Panther Party’s Under-Appreciated Legacy of Communal Love TIme

Is Protest Dead? Foreign Policy

Life on the tracks: hanging with America’s hobos FT

We Are Losing Our Words The Common Reader

Antidote du jour (Bernard DUPONT):

Bonus antidote:

Double-bonus antidote:

See yesterday’s Links and Antidote du Jour here.

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About Lambert Strether

Readers, I have had a correspondent characterize my views as realistic cynical. Let me briefly explain them. I believe in universal programs that provide concrete material benefits, especially to the working class. Medicare for All is the prime example, but tuition-free college and a Post Office Bank also fall under this heading. So do a Jobs Guarantee and a Debt Jubilee. Clearly, neither liberal Democrats nor conservative Republicans can deliver on such programs, because the two are different flavors of neoliberalism (“Because markets”). I don’t much care about the “ism” that delivers the benefits, although whichever one does have to put common humanity first, as opposed to markets. Could be a second FDR saving capitalism, democratic socialism leashing and collaring it, or communism razing it. I don’t much care, as long as the benefits are delivered. To me, the key issue — and this is why Medicare for All is always first with me — is the tens of thousands of excess “deaths from despair,” as described by the Case-Deaton study, and other recent studies. That enormous body count makes Medicare for All, at the very least, a moral and strategic imperative. And that level of suffering and organic damage makes the concerns of identity politics — even the worthy fight to help the refugees Bush, Obama, and Clinton’s wars created — bright shiny objects by comparison. Hence my frustration with the news flow — currently in my view the swirling intersection of two, separate Shock Doctrine campaigns, one by the Administration, and the other by out-of-power liberals and their allies in the State and in the press — a news flow that constantly forces me to focus on matters that I regard as of secondary importance to the excess deaths. What kind of political economy is it that halts or even reverses the increases in life expectancy that civilized societies have achieved? I am also very hopeful that the continuing destruction of both party establishments will open the space for voices supporting programs similar to those I have listed; let’s call such voices “the left.” Volatility creates opportunity, especially if the Democrat establishment, which puts markets first and opposes all such programs, isn’t allowed to get back into the saddle. Eyes on the prize! I love the tactical level, and secretly love even the horse race, since I’ve been blogging about it daily for fourteen years, but everything I write has this perspective at the back of it.

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270 comments

    2. Wukchumni

      I’d guess the majority of Au trades in London are 1’s & 0’s gold, and if things were looking really dicey, i’d want to be first in line to get the real barbarous relic, not a faux facsimile utilized only for trading.

      Reply ↓
        1. Wukchumni

          My favorite vault tale of woe was this beauty from 1983…

          Stacks of 2×4’s spray-painted 24Krylon gold.

          International Gold Bullion Exchange was founded in 1979 by brothers William and James Alderdice. It grew to be reportedly the largest retail gold bullion dealer in the United States. It offered sale and storage of gold and silver bullion and coins. The company would sell gold bullion at a discount if the buyer agreed to postpone taking delivery. It was headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, with offices in Los Angeles and Dallas and employed over 1000 people. The company advertised in national publications like the Wall Street Journal and Barron’s.

          The company filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy in April 1983 and then ceased operating. When the company’s offices were raided by law enforcement, it turned out that the gold bar stacks shown in their advertising were only wooden blocks painted a gold color. While it operated the company collected over $140 million. At the time it shut down, there were $75 million in claims by 23,000 people. The company spent over $44 million on personal spending, salaries, marketing and travel and had little in assets when it shut down.

          Reply ↓
          1. griffen

            The history of American exceptional capitalism has a long and sordid list of tall tales, on scheming and the willing ability to separate a sucker and his money. Back then as detailed it was the above falsehood of a gold payoff, fast forward to our modern times and we have magical visions of wealth and riches thanks to the Bitcoin and, in kind it’s cryptocurrency counterparts.

            All reminding me of the fictional Duke brothers of course, from the ever excellent and relevant Trading Places… Randolph and Mortimer, emboldened by the orange juice crops report and the ultimate marks of their own corporate demise.

            Reply ↓
    3. Raymond Carter

      The Bloomberg article attempts to explain the surge in gold and silver exports from London to New York, but it makes no mention of the coincident surge in future contracts standing for physical delivery of Comex gold and silver in the last few months.

      Why isn’t this massive increase in the number of Comex futures contracts demanding physical delivery an adequate explanation for the run on London’s gold and silver? And why no mention whatsoever of the surge in physical deliveries in the Bloomberg article and others like it?

      See: https://www.moneymetals.com/news/2025/02/20/desperation-in-the-global-gold-market-003852

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      1. Divadab

        Bloomberg not a reliable source of information. They asserted that “Putin invaded Ukraine for no reason” – they’re just part of the Govt propaganda apparatus. I read them from time to time for clues about the narrative they are pushing but never consider their publication anything like factual.

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  2. The Rev Kev

    “Shin Bet Arrests Two Israelis Suspected of Involvement in Tel Aviv Suburbs Bus Bombs”

    Just as suspected. It was a false-flag op blowing up those buses. Thing is, this article merely says that two Israelis have been arrested. It doesn’t really say what type of Israelis which may be the important bit. I’m calling it as those two Israelis being either from Settler organizations or Ultra-orthodox factions. The Israeli censorship will be heavy on this story if so.

    Reply ↓
    2. Duke of Prunes

      Just saw on the ABC scary news (ie national news) the Israel is sending tanks into the northern west bank for the first time in 20 years (with accompanying footage) because of those bus bombing. So it worked just as planned.

      Reply ↓
  3. Mikel

    Palantir’s Call to Arms Is Also a Sales Pitch Bloomberg

    Excerpt from book.
    “..The most effective software companies are artist colonies, filled with temperamental and talented souls. And it is their unwillingness to conform, to submit to power, that is often their most valuable instinct…”

    Ripping off the creative content of artists of various disciplines…

    Then you look at DOGE emails to federal employees.
    It’s one thing having layoffs…that’s just showing something else childish and vile happening.

    Reply ↓
    1. ilsm

      Noting wrong with figuring out what federal civilians do in their jobs. The activity (should not expect products) reports would be useful if the authors position description came with.

      Palantir does a fair amount of services non personal for government.

      A fertile plain for waste is the DD 250’s for service contract payments.

      Reply ↓
      1. Mikel

        “Nothing wrong with figuring out what federal civilians do in their jobs.”

        Nobody saying that. They are talking about the level of assholery with everything.
        And it’s already noted that DOGE isn’t really there to try to understand what the Federal workers do.

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        1. jobs

          It’s worker-abusive theater for the MAGA cult who hates government except for the DoD, the CIA and a few other law enforcement/spook adjacent agencies.

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      2. SocalJimObjects

        “I spend my whole week liking Elon’s posts!!!” You write that and post some screenshots, and it’s a guaranteed 10K a year bump to your paycheck ;) If you add “I was doing some serious Technical Analysis trying to identify the best entry point for buying the President’s Meme coin”, you might be identified as an up and coming talent fit for managing the country’s Strategic Bitcoin Fund.

        Reply ↓
    2. Socal Rhino

      Requests for recaps of weekly accomplishments were routine in my experience in the corporate world. With the introduction of working from home, the ability to account for your time took on further importance. Survival in any bureaucracy requires at least some minimal skill at self promotion.

      Working in a software startup was very different.

      Reply ↓
  4. Mikel

    Palantir’s Call to Arms Is Also a Sales Pitch -Bloomberg

    A better late than never mainstream critique. Too much smoke blown up SillyCon butts for too long.

    “The Technological Republic is a terrible book: badly written, tedious, and — when they can be gleaned in between the jargon, clichés and repetitions — full of bad ideas, ranging from the merely dubious to the execrable and disturbing. This book is dismal on the level of both form and content. It heralds a dark and depressing future.”

    NOW they finally see it?????

    Reply ↓
    2. The Rev Kev

      I see maybe a hundred people or so with that crowd. He will never again have crowds of tens of thousands of people following him in monster rallies and people giving him the last of their money either. Just another version of Hope and Change.

      Reply ↓
      1. ISL

        Bernie warns the US is moving towards oligarchy.

        I say that bus sailed, but strangely, your voice is impossible to hear when it’s a “D” captaining the ship of state.

        A selicious irony – Bernie provides an argument to vote R so he can revert to (ineffective) form!

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    3. urdsama

      This is a distraction ploy to block any momentum by third parties. Sabby Sabs and Due Dissidence have done some great coverage of this “tour” and Sanders specifically. The man who honeymooned in Russia has now gone into full red-scare mode and is parroting all of the anti-Russia talking points.

      Angry with myself for ever supporting the the man.

      Reply ↓
        1. anahuna

          Thanks for that clip. I love Sabby — such clear speaking and such clear energy supporting it. She is a great educator.

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    5. Kontrary Kansan

      In Iowa City he riffed on old campaign themes–of which condemning oligarchy is one. He followed the neocon line about Ukraine, if but briefly. He did not mention Gaza.
      Bernie has berned out.

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    7. fringe element

      Reading the other comments I guess I need to stop being cheered up by a few hundred people cheering Bernie. Plus, it’s the white working class, so I guess that is a bad idea.

      So how do Sabby and the guys at DD propose to stop the Trump juggernaut (while excluding the white working class of course)? I’m so backward I thought black and white people were in this together.

      Yeah, Bernie folded when we wanted him to fight, and he supported the low life hustlers in the Democratic party. So as opinion here would have it, that video of a huge crowd of mere hundreds cheering for Bernie is something we should dismiss.

      Oddly enough, that sounds exactly like the mainstream Democratic thinking that opened the door for Trump. A pox on the deplorables, we don’t need ’em.

      Sabby and the DD guys have the answers. They should be out there leading those cheering crowds. Let’s pop up in comments at their podcast sites and urge them to get out there and show Bernie how it’s done.

      Reply ↓
      1. Felix

        It’s not gonna be easy, fringe element. There’s residual anger among Blk/Brn and resentment among whites who personally haven’t done anything to keep us down. Fred Hampton did some great work bringing together Young Lords and Young Patriots into the Rainbow Coalition. Don’t forget Black and Brown have issues between ourselves as well. in the 60’s and 70’s the Black radical legacy of struggle had a sort of seniority in the sense they had been organizing since the 50’s. Much of that has remained for many reasons (police brutality, poverty etc) so it’s easier for Blk/Brn groups to mobilize and organize. It’s why so much struggle begins in the inner cities. I don’t know if it’s the same for poor whites? I can’t speak to that, I think if it’s not already happening it likely will happen (breakfast programs, free clinics). Fred Hampton made it happen, and it put a target on his back.
        Now we have many young white people radicalized by social media who have stood with Palestine as militantly as any Blk/Brn young people. New generation. Don’t give up hope.

        Reply ↓
  6. Wukchumni

    We Are Losing Our Words The Common Reader
    ~~~~~~~~~~

    Sometimes i’ll see an article online with the header telling me it’ll take 6 minutes or such to read, and you wonder when books will start taking on the trend, and sometimes I devour a book, other times I might be reading 4 at once, chapter remember.

    Words are pretty cool to dick around with and so often have multiple meanings so as to add confusion to the mix. They have a power of their own-the 26 disciples available to everybody-a very socialized language, it isn’t as if the Illionaires speak in tongues known only to them.

    This text-led trend of abbreviating everything takes the elegance out of the lingua franca and turns us into Gregg shorthand typists-no thanks!

    In my travels i’m running into more young men from say 25-35 years old who use the f word to the point where it has no point, not that they’d know.

    How much more fun to find really descriptive words in lieu of the same old same old crudeness?

    Reply ↓
    1. Steven A

      Wonder no more. Kindle displays an estimate of how much more time it will take you to finish a book as you are reading. This is one of the reasons I prefer the paper and glue versions.

      Reply ↓
      1. Wukchumni

        I must admit I appreciated it more when a kindle was merely a family of cats, such as the hair’m here where mommy and sonny boy live.

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      2. Chet G

        Kindle has a setting to show percentage read, instead of time remaining.
        As a book person I enjoy both paper and glue (or paper and string, depending on the type of binding) and the Kindle. As someone who has frequent insomnia, I can read in bed from the Kindle at night without disturbing my wife. Also, via Project Gutenberg I’ve come across many old books that would otherwise be difficult to purchase.

        Reply ↓
        1. JohnA

          Kindle has a setting to show percentage read. Surely anyone with the most basic grounding in arithmetic can see what page they have reached, how many pages the book contains in total, and quickly calculate the percentage read/remaining?

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          2. Don

            I have been using an ebook reader for a few years and I appreciate this function.

            As a voracious multilingual reader with limited resources,I (mostly) like my ebook because it saves me a great deal of money and I can easily obtain books from anywhere in the world. I miss a lot of things about physical books though; I can’t share them/pass them on, I can’t navigate non-fiction and reference titles (digital cookbooks are essentially useless, but I think that could be fixed if anyone bothered) and I can’t dump books that turn out to be not only badly written but toxic into the recycling bin, but mostly I miss the physicality of real books.

            I miss turning pages, inserting improvised bookmarks (business cards pencils, dust cover flaps…) and foxing corners… I miss being able to judge where I’m at in my reading as soon as a book with book marks inserted or foxed pages or (especially) a book placed open and flat when reading has been interrupted, is picked up, or just glanced at.

            I don’t recall resorting to arithmetic with a physical book or an ebook with a functioning percentage-read feature, but can certainly recall being frustrated with the latter when this function is not available.

            If wealthy, I might prefer a library in the house, a well-stocked book sharing box out on the sidewalk for the common people /s — plus a Kindle when travelling.

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      3. Carolinian

        The iPad Books app has a related feature where you can set a daily reading goal in minutes to serve as a kind of reading odometer. You can turn it off though.

        This all seems tacky to some of us but perhaps a screen obsessed population does need someone to crack the whip on their reading habits. Musk can send out an email “how many pages did you read last week?”

        On the plus side Cyberworld allows one to carry a substantial chunk of the world’s literature around on a hard drive. For those who want to read there are more opportunities.

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      4. Acacia

        Kindle is all about vendor lock-in, and enriching Bezos.

        I’ll stick with paper books and PDF, which is at least an open standard.

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    2. Steve H.

      I just used a Flesch calculator three days ago, trying to discern the argument inherent in the trialectic of the following quotes, alluded to earlier:

      > Weinberg: Why do I see what I see? Why do things stay the same? Why do they change?
      > Tolkien: So do I, said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
      > Niebuhr: God grant me the serenity to accept things I cannot change, courage to change things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.
      > Adler & van Doren: A work of speculative or theoretical philosophy is metaphysical if it is mainly concerned with questions about being or existence. It is a work in the philosophy of nature if it is concerned with becoming – with the nature and kinds of changes, their conditions and causes. If its primary concern is with knowledge – … and with its certainties and uncertainties – then it is a work of epistemology.

      The Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level of these are (-1.58, 3.1, 10.82, 7.28), respectively. Note that Niebuhr is rated more difficult, despite having fewer syllables per word (Weight, in Cecily Berry’s terminology). Weinberg again:

      > But there are other measures of quality, such as the Cohen Cloudiness Index, which is based on the simple premise that overabstraction is the number one enemy of meaning and understanding.

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    3. fringe element

      Here’s another idea – paper books – what a concept! For bonus points, nobody can hack into your system while you are reading at your favorite cafe.

      Reply ↓
    4. Harry

      The word “partner” now replaces,
      husband, wife, fiancee, girlfriend, boyfriend, inamorata, betroothed, gal pal,
      lesbian girlfriend, gay boyfriend, business partner? etc.

      That word put on par, and eliminates the distinction between 2 guys shacking up last week on par with a man and woman celebrating their 50th Wedding Aniversary.

      Reply ↓
      1. Yves Smith

        I hate to tell you but this reflects change in society.

        The rate of marriage is way down in the US, having fallen by over 50% since 1972: https://ourworldindata.org/marriages-and-divorces.

        I am sure it is not news to you that a lot of people are now having children even though not married, and telling themselves that that arrangement could be durable. Other studies have shown that the male partner is, as one might expect, less committed to the kid rearing project than in marriages (even also allowing for pretty high divorce rates).

        I also know personally, and am sure you do too, couples where both members are never-married, have been in a long-term cohabitation that sure looks like a marriage (decade +) but don’t see the point of getting married (at least one couple like this saw marriage as about procreation and they didn’t intend to have kids). One of these couples had the best relationship I have seen between any adult pair (and I was a house guest for 2 stretches of time and so had good opportunity to observe).

        Reply ↓
  7. The Rev Kev

    “I was leaving peanuts out for my local squirrels&ended up attracting this crow.He’s been coming to my home multiple times a day to get his daily peanuts. Today he brought me a dead rat and left it where I leave him peanuts. I feel super special now lol.”

    I’d feel kind of honoured as that crow went out of its way to give thanks with the only currency it could – food. And that shows a sophisticated metal process at work as well. I’d be checking out what other foods crows eat to give it as well-

    https://aviancontrolinc.com/what-do-crows-eat/

    Reply ↓
    1. vao

      It seems that giving gifts to human beings is not that rare amongst animals — beyond cats offering the proverbial dead mouse to their owners. See here and there for some amusing examples.

      Reply ↓
          1. Judith

            I read that story years ago and enjoyed thinking about that young girl and her crows. I did not know it had a sad ending

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      2. Dida

        Your second example is most likely fake.

        There is an entire industry of YouTube videos made of fragments roughly stitched together from other deconstructed videos, with animals ‘asking’ humans for help, being ‘saved’, and then, filled with gratitude, becoming the human’s best friends, bringing their babies to the saviour, and the like. Animals often have different markings from one scene to the other, but this doesn’t seem to matter to avid consumers.

        Reply ↓
        1. amfortas the hippie

          it happens.
          when i was growing up, mom kept goats for some unknown reason.
          so we had the equipment(ie: bottles and milk replacer).
          stepdad had buddies who were linemen for the electric coop…and thus were often out all night driving around after storms.
          they’d see a dead momma deer, and stop to look around…often finding a faun…which they would bring to us.
          we’d raise it and set it loose when it figgered it was ready to go.
          those deer would come back to show off their own offspring…and come up and eat out of my hand,lol.
          one in particular…after my wreck, laid up in the bed for months…and that thing, by then a spike, would wander into the house when stepdad was bringing in wood(wheelchair)…and into my room, and i’d awake to a horned mammal eating cigs out of my pocket.
          i exploited all this shamelessly in trying to impress chicks.

          Reply ↓
          1. Dida

            I’m sure it happens to the lucky few. And yours must have been a charmed childhood.

            I have nothing against genuine experiences, but I was speaking of the predatory side of YouTube, with thousands of such concoctions, which are very visibly stitched up crap with sappy voiceover from the same old YouTube voice ‘artists’.

            And I don’t want to spoil your innocence, but much of the animal copium on YouTube is sponsored by the pet food industry.

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    2. petal

      I used to put peanuts out for crows during the winter in hopes they’d leave something for me. Well, they did. They’d leave a piece or two of gravel. Guess I should be happy they didn’t leave me fresh meat.

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    3. Bugs

      It’s so kind of them to treat us with magnaminty after all we’ve done. I’m ashamed whenever a non-homo sapiens animal shows me gratitude. Except for my Canis Domesticus – he owes me big time. He has broken the deal on barking so many times that I’m thinking of stopping the treat exchanges.

      Reply ↓
    4. Tom B.

      I once noticed that chunks of soggy bread started showing up in our bird bath and was puzzled until I learned that crows and likely other birds do this to transport water to their young chicks in the spring.

      I started occasionally throwing in a crust of bread and one day found a 3 inch long wiggly toy rubber slug in the birdbath. Don’t know if this was intended as a gift or if it was a futile attempt to soften the slug up for dinner.

      Reply ↓
  8. timbers

    So Zelensky is reportedly (again) going to sign a minerals deal with US to be partly funded by Ukraine energy production and US tax payers:

    Fresh draft minerals agreement: US to be granted 100% of financial interest Ukrainska Pravda

    Trump says it will make Ukraine’s economy become 2021 all over again.

    US says revenue from minerals deal will fuel Ukraine’s postwar growth FT

    Why do I think anything Zelensky signs and gets his hands on will end up looking more like this?

    Biden sent $2 billion to Stacey Abrams-linked group in green energy ‘scheme,’ EPA says FOX.

    Reply ↓
    1. MicaT

      Timber’s can you provide some info on Ukraine energy production and how that is going to fund the US? I can’t find anything on that.
      Thx

      Reply ↓
      1. timbers

        First link contains text: “The Investment Fund will receive 50% of revenues from Ukrainian mineral and oil and gas resources (net of actual costs) for reinvestment in the Ukrainian economy (mining and processing infrastructure, ports, etc.).”

        Can’t vouch how accurate or plausible above words are.

        Reply ↓
        1. The Rev Kev

          I read that too. It means that the US will extract 50% of the Ukraine’s wealth till that $350 billion is paid back and the US will have control of – probably – Odessa port so that they have a stranglehold on any efforts of the Ukraine to export its products out to the world. It’s a wealth pump operation intended to suck the Ukraine dry for decades to come leaving that country poverty riven. The best part? If the people there flee that country in order to survive, it won’t be to the US as they have an ocean between them. Unintentionally though, the country will become an object lesson of what happens when you ally yourself with the US.

          Reply ↓
          1. timbers

            “…and the US will have control of – probably – Odessa port so that they have a stranglehold on any efforts of the Ukraine to export its products out to the world.”

            And box Russia in, at the Black Sea.

            Statements like that fuel my concern that – despite Lavrov’s statement no land in Ukraine where Russians live must be allowed to remain part of Ukraine because she will just kill those Russians – Putin will make unwise concessions in his negotiations with Trump and forfeit land beyond beyond the 4 Oblasts, allowing Odessa to remain in Western hands. Putin has a long history of making deals with the West that – for whatever reason – end up being bad for Russia.

            Reply ↓
          2. urdsama

            Like Russia will allow US control of Odessa…

            Chances of any treaty with Russia just went to 0 percent, if they were not there already.

            Reply ↓
    2. fringe element

      I heard that all the minerals Trump wants are in territory held by Russia.

      Also heard that our aid money doesn’t just supply weapons. We also pay salaries for all civil servants, from teachers to mailmen. Just wait until all those people stop getting paid.

      As to Odessa, yeah, Russia has to take that and I hope they will.

      Reply ↓
      2. timbers

        “I heard that all the minerals Trump wants are in territory held by Russia.”

        And Trump is smart enough to figure out it might be cheaper and less drama (well except for the freakouts from the neo-cons) to just get them by trading w/Russia, than dealing w/Ukraine to get them…if he can get sanctions on Russia out of the way.

        Reply ↓
  9. Mikel

    I just read yesterday’s discussion in comments about long Covid and vaccines, etc.

    Apparently, more study needed.

    But remember when some actuallly thought that mandating a treatment that didn’t prevent disease would be okay? As in who needs a control group for a mass distribution of an essentially experimental drug?

    Reply ↓
    1. judy2shoes

      “remember when some actually thought that mandating a treatment that didn’t prevent disease would be okay?”

      Yes, I do. Those same people that I know still believe it was okay. Those vaccine mandates will have to be yanked from their cold, dead hands.

      Reply ↓
      1. Craig H.

        OK?

        I have heard and read the message in multiple locations that the invention, manufacture, and distribution of the covid vaccine was the single greatest human achievement of the 21st century so far.

        Reply ↓
    2. Lee

      The Covid vaccines certainly underperformed relative to public expectations, which were largely based on false official pronouncements as well as our collective experience of receiving vaccinations that were much more effective and long lasting. Annual flu vaccines being an exception.

      However, as I understand the evidence as it now stands, and particularly for the most vulnerable, the currently available vaccines appear to be better than nothing at not entirely eliminating but reducing the risk of hospitalization, death and long term disability from Covid infection.

      I wholeheartedly agree that “more study is needed” to deal with this very tricky pathogen but given who’s now in charge of funding such efforts, I am not optimistic. Not that a Democrat administration would do much better.

      Reply ↓
      2. Mikel

        “However, as I understand the evidence as it now stands, and particularly for the most vulnerable, the currently available vaccines appear to be better than nothing at not entirely eliminating but reducing the risk of hospitalization, death and long term disability from Covid infection.”

        The discussion yesterday was about those claims. And it sounded like more study waa needed. There are quesstions about the shots and long Covid, etc.
        Investigating this more shouldn’t be controverserial. Science used to be about asking questions.
        It really should be expected before similar shots and treaments are usedfor other viruses, etc. Because of the pandemic it was an emergency approval. Long term effects of decades or more….jury is still out …IMO.

        Reply ↓
  10. Ben Panga

    A look at Dan ‘Razin’ Caine, Trump’s pick to be the top US military officer (AP)

    The article is vague about Caine’s experience. Curiously “CIA” does not appear in the article.

    Caine’s last 8 years work history from his LinkedIn:

    Associate Director – Central Intelligence Agency, USAF Lieutenant General (3-Star)

    Central Intelligence Agency

    Nov 2021 Dec 2024-3 yrs 2 mos

    Washington, DC

    Director – DoD Special Access Programs “Black Programs”, USAF Major General (2-Star)

    Office of the Secretary of Defense

    Sep 2019-Aug 2021. 2 years

    Deputy Commanding General – Special Operations Task Force, USAF Brigadier General (1-Star)

    Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve

    May 2018 – May 2019 1 yr 1 mo

    Baghdad, Iraq

    COMMA CAL OPERATION

    Assistant Commanding General/JSOC, USAF Brigadier General (1-Star)

    Joint Special Operations Command

    Jun 2016-May 2018. 2 yrs

    Fort Bragg. NC

    Reply ↓
  11. Sean

    America’s National Security Wonderland – Phenomenal essay. It treads familiar ground but for me, connecting the purpose of the security apparatuses to protecting ideologies, narratives, and a gerontocracy, cemented for me the hollowness of the current empire. Ukraine will turn out to be the perfect embodiment of this – a nexus where all these contradictions congealed into a putrid mess.

    What do you do as individuals, families, communities with limited resources in a situation where its risky to bet against empire collapse?

    Reply ↓
    1. IM Doc

      In regards to one of the points of that article.
      The family and I were just in a big coastal city with a huge port – glistening white cruise ships with no sign of any kind of rust on the outside.
      A bit down the road was a naval base – and I have to admit – I was really taken aback by the amount of rusting on the sides of the nasal vessels. I could not believe the difference between the two.
      I am not a nautical professional. I have never owned a boat. But I have always been under the impression that you do not let them rust on the outside – that great care must be taken to maintain them. And yet this was clearly visible to anyone able to make observations.

      Reply ↓
      2. Socal Rhino

        I’ve seen this come up on sites devoted to naval matters. Rust is ubiquitous on ships returning from a stint at sea. It’s superficial and addressed in port. If these ships are hanging out at port and showing rust, that would seem to be a maintenance issue.

        Reply ↓
      3. scott s.

        You are correct. The USN has fallen apart with regards to material condition of the fleet. We can propose different causes for this, but for me it a problem that has accreted over time and points to command just not giving a darn about it.

        Even back in my day you would see ships from Japan, and not just the exterior looked pristine but you could go into a head and everything was spotless. Yes, there is the argument “Sure they look nice, but how do they fight?” but it’s a question of pride which finds its effect in many small ways, not just the obvious.

        There’s some technical excuses given as environmental regulations have made coatings a difficult problem but as you note, its possible to look “smart” even with that.

        Maybe the new CNO will work on that?

        Reply ↓
    3. David in Friday Harbor

      Malcolm Kyeyune may be Swedish but his understanding of American norms and culture is more insightful than most Americans. His piece at Unherd “DOGE is not Radical Enough” similarly calls-out the Wonderland unreality of the entire American leadership class, Elon and Trump included. https://unherd.com/2025/02/doge-is-not-radical-enough/ Kyeyune sees all of this imperial play acting as Louis XVI at Versailles keeping up appearances of the ancien régime. The return of the Confidence Fairy.

      Trump’s bluster is little different than Biden’s — let’s not forget that Donald was already President for four years and that the culture of lying and deceit about military readiness and the “greatness” of the American empire is much Trump’s as anyone’s; perhaps more so. Musk is just a drug-addled man-child smashing-up things (many of which could use a good smashing); however the only way that he understands to grow something is to throw massive amounts of money at it. Sound familiar? Plus ça change…

      Reply ↓
      1. Mikel

        “that US democracy is fundamentally broken, that Congress is incompetent, and that none of the country’s basic challenges, from immigration to jobs, can be solved by its exhausted class of ancien régime failures.”
        Decades have been spent blaming the failures of oligarchy on the STRUGGLE for democracy.
        How the world do you make running for office a millions and billions of dollars proposition and then talk about who the people pick as an elected official?

        Reply ↓
  12. Lieaibolmmai

    Regarding Hobos, my great Uncle, Frank Gusick, a veteran of WWII (PFC US ARMY), was homless, and a Hobo in the 60’s. He was murdered at 47 years old by the railroad’s private police (railroad bulls) after they lit the car they were sleeping in on fire. Great way to treat a veteran. At least he is buried in the Golden Gate National Cemetery.

    I kind of do not like the way they romanticize it all.

    Reply ↓
        1. deleter

          That is sad. He was a paratrooper with
          the 513th Parachute Infantry Regiment,
          awarded a bronze star and 2 purple hearts according to the grave stone.

          Reply ↓
      4. Tommy S

        Wow! thanks…two my favorite old actors….I see dvd copy on e. bay. for $12. On topic. but different and almost an art film…..beautiful really… is Bill Daniels Who is Bozo Texino?…years of work on this…and even an ex flat mate of mine! Shot on real film with a Bolex. Then there is the fascinating tale of Boxcar Bertha in the re issued book on AK press…as told to the anarchist Dr. Ben….Sister of the Road….IWW ….all kinds of fun in there…

        Reply ↓
        1. Michael Fiorillo

          The YouTube channel of Stobe the Hobo – dragged to his death by a train in a Baltimore rail yard in 2017 – gives a useful and entertaining look at riding the rails in recent times. You could also check out Hobo Shoestring, as well, who died a few years ago. Plenty of YT videos by young idiots trying to do it, but these two guys were professionals.

          It’s a far cry from the 1970’s and early 1980’s, when I dabbled at hopping freights, mostly out West and in Canada, when yard workers could be readily approached for information, and would sometimes even tell where to wait and deliver an empty box car to you. These days, finding an open box car is a rarity: most trains are unit trains, transporting intermodal trailers, oil, cars, grain, etc. A long- haul mixed manifest train where you can find a ride is increasingly rare.

          Legend has it that Big Jim Hill, who built the Great Northern Railroad (Minneapolis to Seattle, now part of Warren Buffett’s BNSF empire), said, “The bums built my railroad, and the bums are gonna ride,” and as a result there was always an open boxcar on every Great Northern train. Also, because the Northern states relied on seasonal free labor to harvest crops, there was more tolerance for migrating workers; in the South, which long had a local, indebted and trapped agricultural workforce, getting caught on a freight train was a quick way to find yourself on a chain gang for a month.

          And “Who Is Bozo Texino?” is a really good film. When I was riding, “Herbie” (written under a sombrero-wearing man seated under a palm tree), was probably the most widespread tag.

          https://www.northbank Fred.com/tag.html

          Reply ↓
          1. barefoot charley

            Hobos of my acquaintance tell me there’s a pocket around or under the couplings of the unit trains where you have to ride nowadays. Open boxcars have gone the way of cabooses, RIP Big Jim Hill. I had a fine ride in an old boxcar from Iowa to the Chicago suburbs, where our dismount got my buddy a deferment from Vietnam. So once was enough.

            Reply ↓
            1. Michael Fiorillo

              Very tough, and dangerous, way to travel … but worth doing if you ever want to really know the pleasure of a hot shower and clean sheets.

              Reply ↓
              1. Tom Thumb

                In the ’60s and ’70s, I did a lot of hitchhiking; I mean, a lot, tens of thousands of miles. I never hopped a freight but I often thought about doing so, for the adventure, for the hell of it … In the summer of ’73 I was hitching from Denver to Chicago and got stuck, badly stuck, just outside Lincoln, Neb. Across some fields I could see not too far away a big railroad yard. After several hours of no ride, I wondered if that should be the day I tried my luck with a train. But while I was procrastinating, I got a lift; a good one, as it turned out, taking me well into Illinois. Anyway, a couple of years later I was browsing in a second-hand bookshop and saw Abbie Hoffman’s counter-culture ‘manual’, Steal This Book. Thumbing through it, I saw that there was a chapter about hopping freights. I started laughing out loud when I read the part where he says “But whatever you do, don’t ever try to get on in Lincoln, Neb.!”

                Reply ↓
                1. Michael Fiorillo

                  I was out and about a few years after that. The Nemesis for hitchhikers for us was Wawa, Ontario – which was terrible for hitchhikers anyway. My traveling companion and I, as we sweated through sixteen hours of hitchhiking and covering one hundred miles, were still hundreds of miles from Wawa, where legend had it that hitchhikers were stranded so long that locals bought them bus tickets, or stranded hitchhikers who married and settled in the town.

                  We jumped on a unit in Sudbury,m Ontario, with the help and direction of an old switchman, and made it Calgary.

                  Reply ↓
            2. Revenant

              An early account of the hobo life was “an Autobiography of a Super Tramp” by W.H. Davies.

              He was a Welsh ironworker’s son who rode the rails in the US at the turn of the 19th century but suffered an accident that left him with a wooden leg. He then wrote his story, published 1908. He became a darling of literary London in the inter-war period and a favourite of painters and sculptors.

              https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._H._Davies

              Reply ↓
              1. Michael Fiorillo

                Also, “The Road” by Jack London and “Hungry Men” by Edward Anderson (a very grim, Depression-era read) are also useful accounts of life on the rails.

                London’s book, if I remember correctly, recounts his freight hopping as part of Coxey’s Army, a brief lumpen uprising in the 1890’s that briefly scared the Overclass, but came to nothing much.

                Reply ↓
          2. amfortas the hippie

            aye.
            there was a sidetrack, so trains could pass each other, alongside my isolated country neighborhood.
            lots of woods along the tracks there.
            I started riding them when i was about 11….when they still had cabooses.
            when they were going slow, doing the passing thing.
            then jump off at a serviceable pile of sand down the way.
            there was one time, when the thing got moving too fast to jump, too quickly…and i was stuck on that thing for the 70 mile ride to Inglewood Yards, there east of downtown houston.
            had to call my dad,lol.

            last time i rode one was when i was 15…some 40 years ago.

            Reply ↓
    2. upstater

      NPR had a similar romantization of hopping freights in a Feb. 17 story, “Train hoppers ride the rails across America — and you can tag along”

      Trains magazine published the industry response:

      NPR story on train hopping raises safety concerns, industry officials say

      Wonder how many hobos use NPR tote bags as luggage? Hopping freights is really, really dangerous. Back in the 70s I rode many freights, but far more civilized riding in trailing locomotives. Crews never bothered us and sometimes invited us to the lead units. Now it’s a federal crime and both crew and riders have been prosecuted.

      Reply ↓
  13. The Rev Kev

    “Many Americans don’t trust the media to cover Trump: Survey”

    I don’t think a lot of Americans trust the media to give a weather report. Same too for countries like Oz, the UK, Germany, France, etc. They went from reporting the news to shaping narratives and censoring those that they did not like and acting as if they were the gatekeepers of what people should and shouldn’t know. Not many people trust them anymore – nor should they.

    Reply ↓
  14. lyman alpha blob

    RE: We Are Losing Our Words

    We aren’t losing them at NC. I have learned many new words here over the years, as well as many anglicized Latin words and phrases (ie modulo – thanks Lambert!). I do enjoy it when I need to stop mid-comment to look up a definition.

    Full disclosure – I will admit that I do use the NC comments section on occasion to practice my own words to keep from dumbing myself down, although I do endeavor to eschew the gratuitously sesquipedalian.
    Nobody likes a show off. Irony can be funny though ;)

    Reply ↓
    2. .Tom

      When I want to learn a new word I pick one from the famous speeches of Xenophon Zolotas to IBRD.

      “In an epoch characterised by monopolies, oligopolies, monopsonies, monopolistic antagonism and polymorphous anelasticities, our policies have to be more orthological. But this should not be metamorphosed into plethorophobia which is endemic among academic economists.”

      Reply ↓
  15. Es s Ce Tera

    re: New Doge/Musk Email Goes Seriously Sideways Talking Points Memo.

    What I find interesting about this is, most corporations (with good security departments) send out deliberate spam/phishing emails to train employees on what not to open or respond to, how to identify phishing attacks. This email checks almost every box for a phishing attack.

    It’s a) it’s coming from an outside party, or an unexpected inside party, often purporting to be from HR, b) claims to be from an executive or appears to be from someone high up in the organization chain, is using their authority, c) it sets a short timeframe to comply, adds urgency/pressure, d) is employing fear tactics, e) it’s soliciting sensitive information, f) has a dubious email address, g) bypasses normal channels and established procedures.

    Given the folks at DOGE come from the corporate world, would presumably have had that same security training, why would they construct an email which so perfectly matches the criteria for a phishing attack, almost guarantees that employees WILL ignore it?

    And they will ignore it because to respond would create grounds for disciplinary action.

    Also, even if valid, email is insecure – email packet traffic traverses the world, you’re asking government employees to broadcast to the whole world what you’ve been doing, every foreign government is going to be gobbling up that data. Another reason you’ll be disciplined as government employee for responding.

    Could it be DOGE is trying to find the weakest links among government employees, I wondered. But you can do that without leaking government info.

    So I have to wonder if this email is what it seems.

    Reply ↓
    2. IM Doc

      For a very long time, I had to fill out an email like that every 6 months. Questions like “State 10 ways that what you did at work last week accomplish the goals of our organization”. The surveys were required – or you would face termination. They were like clockwork in February and August. There were many other questions on them as well. It took an hour or so out of my life twice a year to fool with them.

      I always assumed this was just part of the modern MBA/HR crap that had to be endured in our world. There are so many other things that are much worse – it is hard to quantify badness.

      Never in my wildest dreams did I think that somehow federal workers were exempt from this claptrap. But I am assuming from their reaction that is the case. I would likely have a similar reaction to this kind of time waster if it was presented to me for the first time at my age.

      Reply ↓
      1. Objective Ace

        The issue is not the request. It’s that it is coming from an entirely separate organization. Federal agencies are independent of one another. OPM can’t order employees from another agency to do anything.

        To take your example, what if you received the demand from an entirely different hospital system who neither you, nor any of your supervisors answer to? And combine that with a single days deadline, the worlds richest man threatening to fire you for noncompliance, and that many employees who are on leave already due to the short notice.

        I’m not sure why you are assuming federal employees are exempt from any “claptrap”. However, the expectation should be that it comes from ones actual supervisor

        Reply ↓
        1. IM Doc

          Well in my case – it was from a completely separate entity that I never dealt with. It had nothing to do with the medical school hierarchy – it came from some distant non-profit corporation that signed our checks. The academics ( state workers) were completely under the control of the corporate HR – it was a very bad situation that continues to this day.

          Reply ↓
          1. bob

            But, hey, It’s not bad…

            “I always assumed this was just part of the modern MBA/HR crap that had to be endured in our world. There are so many other things that are much worse – it is hard to quantify badness.”

            What you mean to say is that you had no choice in the matter. But can’t do that. For some reason. Do as you are told, because you are told…

            The idea that a PHD would just answer any old request out into the world (“it was from a completely separate entity that I never dealt with”), because they were told to is very bad opsec for an organization that deals with lots of very personal information. That’s the point.

            Reply ↓
            1. Yves Smith

              You are out of line.

              The regulatory changes implemented as part of Obamacare make it almost impossible for doctors to practice medicine as sole practitioners. We’ve been writing for over a decade about the corporatization of medicine.

              Reply ↓
              1. IM Doc

                The situation at my old place of employment is that the HR dept is a completely detached entity in a distant city that is at least nominally part of the same big group. The chairmen of the departments of medicine are no longer in charge of HR.

                It could be much worse. I have so many colleagues in which the schools have completely outsourced their entire HR to completely separate companies, often with the employees of the HR located in distant states. There are also many of the big non-profit health care companies who have done the very same thing. They are multi-state entities and they either have a faraway HR dept run by the same corporation in just one location or they have completely sourced out the HR to God only knows who.

                Reply ↓
              2. ChrisFromGA

                They’re coming after the lawyers, too.

                Law firms forbid corporate ownership. That’s the ABA circling the wagons. Nobody circles the wagons like the Buffalo …I mean the ABA.

                Consequentially, law firms are partnerships or solo practices.

                But, a crack has started to form. Arizona changed their state law to allow non-lawyers to have an economic interest in law firms:

                https://www.azcourts.gov/accesstolegalservices/Questions-and-Answers/abs

                And KPMG (an accounting firm) has applied for a license from the state. Corporations would love to get in on the pie because they can enshittify the practice of law just like they did to medicine. Imagine Private equity getting in on the game – fire all the support staff like paralegals, and junior associates. Replace them with greased, fraudulent AI that pukes out incorrect results, makes up cases, etc.

                The other misuse case is outsourcing and concentration of risk – instead of hundreds of small and mid-sized law firms, if the big 4 can own law firms, they can replace corporate legal departments.

                You’d better hope that the ABA lobbies hard to stop this shit.

                Reply ↓
                  2. Mikel

                    The industrial economy was monopolized and exported.

                    Expect the same thing to be done to the service economy – where possible.

                    Reply ↓
        2. BrianH

          If managers/executives care about the employees and the organization, these types of requests don’t happen. If you want to drill down on job requirements and the difference between formal expectations and actual performance, you don’t do it like this. You sit down with the employee, work mutually to define the job requirements and work mutually to create the process for measuring and evaluating. These emails and the ones Doc mentions are simply gotchas, and they are designed to create anxiety in even the hardest working employees.

          Reply ↓
          1. Bsn

            Seems obvious, but I’ll chime in as a public school teacher. It really got bad about 15 years ago in conjunction with “Building Better Schools” or some such name. The first serious “improvements” were in Bush II’s time. Taking time from teachers is a great way to dumb down the future voters. As you can see, it was pretty successful.
            One of my favorite “surveys” was when the district said we must submit our “Winter” song list to be approved by them. If you know how log it takes to get 100+ students to be happy about their performance and the families proud, you will understand that the repertoire choices have to be determined long in advance.
            Well, I would send them long, long lists of “possible” musical choices: folk songs from all over, traditional American songs, self composed pieces by students, etc. They gave up on their demands after many emails back and forth of why are you are playing “Tet Trung” or “Silver Moon Boat” at a holiday concert. No way in Billy Heck can you call it a Christmas Concert much less a Holiday Concert. It boiled down to a “Winter Concert” in the end.
            My favorite “stick it to the man” music was playing Low Rider at a Winter Concert. Parents were …… “what the heck”. But after the piece we had a student explain that Santa wanted to teach the children to consider their environmental foot print and drive slow. Of course the children loved it and we had a large percentage of Latino students. They were proud!
            I miss the children but not the admin.

            Reply ↓
            1. Micharl Fiorillo

              I taught in the NYC public schools during the Bush/Obama/Bloomberg years: dark times for teachers and students, and a feast for psycho admins and Trojan Horse privatizing groups like TFA.

              Reply ↓
          2. Socal Rhino

            I may be wrong but it sounds like you have never lived through a corporate downsizing effort. They start with a presumption that jobs need to be cut. This isn’t a performance review cycle.

            I have lived through several, and some of the first things I would do if a federal employee hearing about DOGE is update my resume and start compiling evidence of value that I’m adding in my position. Start thinking about your personal network and what other jobs you might be capable of filling.

            Reply ↓
            2. bob

              100%.

              The south african nazi started out saying he wanted to fire lots of people. He’s doing it. With Big Balls and his dogboy show.

              Reply ↓
      2. Mikel

        Many have gone through phases of that at jobs.
        They have added assholery to a process that even the Federal workers have most likely been through before.
        And by now it’s pretty obvious a lot of DOGE isn’t sent there with the mindset to understand what they are doing. Only to find ways to tear apart, sell for parts, or whatever.

        Reply ↓
          1. hk

            In the style of the former USSR in 1990s?

            Gilbert Doctorrow likened Trump to Gorbachev. That made me think about the parallels.

            Reply ↓
      3. Mikel

        “Never in my wildest dreams did I think that somehow federal workers were exempt from this claptrap. But I am assuming from their reaction that is the case.”

        I’m sure they have an evaluation process or have been through them before. The reaction is to arrogance (diplomatically put for me) they read into the request from DOGE.

        Reply ↓
      4. Revenant

        I may have led a sheltered life (neber worked for a US company!) but have never heard of this sort of exercise in the UK or EU at any size of corporation. This would be dealt with in weekly meetings with your line manager and annual appraisals.

        These are also largely worthless processes but usually designed to be objective rather than in/exculpatory!

        Reply ↓
    3. Socal Rhino

      If you are a federal employee that had been living in a cave for the past month, that might be plausible. More likely, getting surprised by this email you would reach out to coworkers or superiors and ask if this is legit. Good managers would be proactively contacting their teams to let them to know to expect this and be sure to answer, similar to my TBTF fail notifying employees about possible questions coming from a special master appointed as part of a deferred prosecution.

      Reply ↓
  16. AG

    re: Musk

    The German Constitutional Blog which is extremely pro EU-elites has a dossier on Musk with 14 essays.

    Even if it may be full of bias in between one might find helpful bits.

    DEBATE

    Musk, Power, and the EU: Can EU Law Tackle the Challenges of Unchecked Plutocracy?

    At a time when calls for the EU to respond to Musk’s actions are multiplying, the question of whether, why, and how the EU may react remains largely undefined. What makes Musk’s conduct problematic under EU law? Is it a matter of disinformation, electoral integrity, foreign influence, unprecedented market concentration, or possible abuse of power? Or is it all of the above, or a combination of these factors? This symposium intends to explore these questions through a series of brief opinion pieces.

    https://verfassungsblog.de/category/debates/musk-power-and-the-eu-can-eu-law-tackle-the-challenges-of-unchecked-plutocracy-debates/

    content:

    11 February 2025
    Jacquelyn D. Veraldi, Alberto Alemanno
    Does the EU Have What it Takes to Counter American Plutocratic Power?

    10 February 2025
    Anna Gerbrandy, Viktorija Morozovaite
    Corporate Power Beyond Market Power

    07 February 2025
    Julian Uhlenbusch
    Elon Musk, the Systemic Risk

    03 February 2025
    Elena García Guitián, Luis Bouza García
    Democracy vs. Digital Giants

    27 January 2025
    Carolyn Moser, Laurids Hempel
    Elon Musk’s Wake-up Call for Europe

    24 January 2025
    Ferry Biedermann
    Countering the Tech Oligarchy

    William E. Scheuerman
    The US Supreme Court and Plutocracy

    23 January 2025
    Todd Davies, Spencer Cohen
    Democracy or Domination

    22 January 2025
    William E. Scheuerman
    Trump and the Folklore of Capitalism

    21 January 2025
    Judit Bayer
    Zuckerberg’s Strategy

    20 January 2025
    Dieter Zinnbauer
    Plutocracy 2025

    19 January 2025
    Viktoria H.S.E. Robertson
    Protecting Democracy in the Digital Era

    17 January 2025
    Jacob van de Kerkhof
    Musk, Techbrocracy, and Free Speech

    Alberto Alemanno, Jacquelyn D. Veraldi
    Musk, Power, and the EU

    Reply ↓
    1. pjay

      LOL! So Musk is now the New Hitler, or Darth Vader, that threatens Europe. Look at some of these titles: “Does the EU Have What it Takes to Counter American Plutocratic Power?”; “Corporate Power Beyond Market Power”; “Democracy or Domination” – so it is *Musk* – and *Trump* – that have led to these dangerous threats of “American Plutocratic Power”?

      I do not ignore the possible dangers of the current Trump/Musk bull-in-the-China shop tear. But they are simply the result of a long process of betrayal of their citizenry by the Western political class. Having destroyed any actual left alternative, frustrated electorates in Western “democracies” have had only one direction to go. And so here we are.

      Rather than this bulls**t symposium, my biased advice for Europeans would be to start with Jeffrey Sachs’ excellent address and Q&A at the EU “Geopolitics for Peace” forum which was noted by several yesterday. A truly remarkable presentation given the context. I know it was posted yesterday, but worth linking to again:

      https://www.pressenza.com/2025/02/jeffrey-sachs-explosive-address-at-the-eu-parliament-sends-shockwaves-across-europe/

      The 15 minute video provides some highlights. But the full transcript is posted as well.

      If the Europeans really want to protect themselves from the likes of Musk and Trump they could do worse than to follow Sachs’ advice. I’m not holding my breath though.

      Reply ↓
      1. pjay

        My apologies for using the term “bulls**t symposium” in reference to your suggestion. I did not take your suggestion in the spirit in which it was made, but instead reacted to my own frustrations about our current situation. I especially regret this given Yves’ appeal that we be civil in our comments, with which I strongly agree.

        There are actually some useful specific policy suggestions in some of these articles, as you imply. Yet they tend to be myopic for the reasons expressed in my original comment. I stand by my recommendation of the Sachs address, though I regret the tone of my original response.

        Reply ↓
        1. AG

          Thanks, but no need to apologize.

          I am regularly overcome by feelings of utter disgust when I go through the Constitutional Blog. Just think what these people have to say about Gaza.

          It´s not that 100 out of 100 voices are mocking the ICJ. But the entire thrust of that space is demeaning. And as lawyers are – they think they are scientists operating with laws of the certainty of gravity. Anyone contradicting their “expertise” is initially not to be taken seriously.

          As to Musk – since a few days ago Executive Order and Carl Schmitt were discussed here and Constitutional Blog of course has a lot on Schmitt I thought I give the other “dude” a try and I found them pretty much invested into Mr. Musk. He would be flattered if he knew.

          p.s. Sachs´s fate with legacy media is a case in point to how disrespectful these arrogant bastards are.

          Reply ↓
  17. griffen

    Heretofore I would have found much to applaud in the corporate career at Cantor Fitzgerald, and not to romanticize at length but that firm sustained much loss of human life in the events of 9/11/01. Lutnick has been highly vocal in the company endeavors to rebuild but also to provide support and funds to the survivors and families impacted in that attack.

    Fast forward to the current environment and he sounds like a fully entitled conservative Republican prick of the highest order ( yeah it’s a low bar to hurdle ). The very type who will, or would slash FEMA aid to hurricane Helene survivors that lost everything. Cause it didn’t impact him where he lived. Here in South Carolina we have the senior senator Graham to look up to with his “wisdom and guidance” in similar situations….it is not encouraging to say the minimum. Onward and upward for some but the rest are gonna need their own bootstraps of course. A reminder of why I find most national politicians, of varying stripes, hard to trust in. They seemingly have little grasp on an average American family that’s been struggling with inflation and those effects.

    Adding a favorable quote from Fight Club… I am Jack’s complete lack of surprise…\sarc

    Reply ↓
    1. Wukchumni

      The trunk show of the Pachyderm Party is parading down Pennsylvania Avenue, while the Donkey Show has to pay people to watch them perform.

      Reply ↓
        1. Felix

          I see the Donkey Show here continues apace, Rev Kev. Lateefah Simon has assumed Barbara Lee’s district 12 post. Simon quietly stood by her mentor VP Harris in support of genocide, but since Trump’s election she has suddenly discovered the existence of Gaza and takes a strong position against the US owning it.
          She has checked all the diversity boxes and looks to be entrenched for many years.

          Reply ↓
  18. The Rev Kev

    “Germans vote as far right surges in polarised national election”

    You tend to forget that in any politically healthy country, that you have a left, a central and a right faction in play and you will probably find that the spread will be in the shape of a Bell curve. But we don’t have that anymore in many countries. The left has been driven from the field or suborned into what we call a ‘liberal’ faction who are anything but and who will ally themselves with centralists for power. The Greens in Germany are an example of this. Due to the hostility of centralists/liberals in power to the needs and wants of the people, the people find themselves having to align with right factions as they are the only ones actually listening to them anymore to the shock of the centralists/liberals. And again, the AfD in Germany is an example here. So what I am saying that any country that has adopted this sort of model is inherently unstable and we are seeing the results in play in the US and in the EU States.

    Reply ↓
  19. Wukchumni

    Why Is Warren Buffett Hoarding So Much Cash? WSJ

    Buffett seeks to reassure shareholders over record cash pile FT. Commentary:
    ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

    Cash is King, until some idiot leader decides to throw a spanner in the works and you lose your hegemony.

    Reply ↓
    1. Jabura Basadai

      concern for Buffett’s cash hording goes back a ways – doesn’t seem mysterious to me –
      8/2023
      https://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/warren-buffett-berkshire-recession-michael-burry-big-short-steve-hanke-2023-8
      2/26/2024
      https://www.ft.com/content/c2f72b52-df75-463a-987a-e2d3ae4f4c97
      if you hit a paywall – https://archive.ph/wHXwm
      9/9/2024
      https://www.fool.com/investing/2024/09/09/warren-buffett-54-billion-warning-to-wall-street/

      Reply ↓
  20. griffen

    Scanning the Sunday morning weekend shows this morning and come across what I would label as one, a reminder of the horrific battles fought in the Pacific during WW2, and two a reminder that there was a great generation of volunteer forces that included many families who lost numerous family members…

    Flag raising at Iwo Jima in February 1945…I must wonder if this photo is the most famous from that particular war.

    https://www.archives.gov/research/still-pictures/highlights/flag-raising-on-iwo-jima

    Reply ↓
  21. Wukchumni

    If you search for legal tenderness
    It isn’t hard to find
    You can have the local lucre you need to live
    But if you look for truthfulness
    You might just as well be blind
    It always seems to be so hard to give

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    I can always find someone
    To say they Dollar sympathize
    If I wear my reserve currency status out on my sleeve
    But I don’t want some dismal scientist
    To tell me pretty lies
    All I want is everyone to believe

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    I can find a DOGE lever
    I can diss NATO friends
    I can have security until the bitter end
    Anyone can comfort me
    With promise sorry notes again
    I know, I know

    When we’re in too deep inside of the Ukraine war
    Don’t be too concerned
    We won’t ask for nothin’ while it’s game on
    But when we want security
    Tell me where else can we turn
    ‘Cause spoils of war is what we depend upon

    Hegemony is such a lonely word
    Everyone is so untrue
    Honesty is hardly ever heard
    And mostly what we need or it’s through

    Honesty, by Billy Joel

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4gOIt-M02A

    Reply ↓
  23. Trees&Trunks

    Is he committing suicide or have his great friends in the West, the people at the Children’s Table, promised to extract him? If they extract him, what is the correct measurement unit of his survival: seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years?

    https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/zelenskiy-says-he-is-willing-give-up-presidency-if-it-means-peace-ukraine-2025-02-23/

    How about a competition at NC – the funniest necrology of one of history’s most despicable men?

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rMEpcQ6izBQ
    A laughter that cost the Ukrainians a bit more than 1 million dead men, millions of people leaving the country and basically destroying the country.

    Reply ↓
    1. Ignacio

      Desperate is not enough to describe Zelensky. At the same time he still feels so important himself to believe that NATO entry depends on him. Too much of white horses in his blood?

      Reply ↓
  24. Wukchumni

    I went to the CPAP party
    To reminisce with my old friends
    A chance to share old memories
    And say our slogans again

    When I got to the CPAP party
    They all knew my name
    But no one recognized me
    I didn’t look the same

    But it’s all right now
    I learned my lesson well
    You see, that first term was like a starter marriage
    So you got to help yourself

    People came from miles around
    Everyone was there
    Elon brought his chainsaw
    There was magic in the air

    And over in the corner
    Much to my surprise
    Mr. Bannon gave us a salute
    Wearing no Nazi disguise

    But it’s all right now
    I learned my lesson well
    You see, that first term was like a starter marriage
    So you got to help yourself

    I played them all the old slogans
    I thought that’s why they came
    No one heard the mood change
    We didn’t look the same

    Garden Party, by Ricky Nelson

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OukwGBpnuXE

    Reply ↓
    2. Revenant

      CPAP is the device for managing sleep apnoea. Continuous positive airway pressure, I think.

      CPAC is a conference of CPAP users, sorry, neocons.

      Reply ↓
  25. Es s Ce Tera

    re: Trump and Elon’s ‘Pointless Bloodbath’ at the FAA Is Even Worse Than You Think Rolling Stone

    The piece highlights how utterly baffled everyone is by the firings, how nonsensical they are, with no rhyme, reason or logic. I’m reminded of how, during Lenin and Stalin, there were very many instances of logically and morally questionable directives but the whole point of the Party and Party Ideology was you did what the Party wanted, without thinking, question or resistance. Blind loyalty, obedience and adherence to the authority of the party apparatus, in other words, was ideological purity, even at the cost of your own or others lives. Sacrifice of self and everyone around you is what it’s all about, yours is not to reason why, yours is but to do and die.

    The danger of having a police/military/agency state is everyone is pre-conditioned, ripe for such. It’s almost like kindling, as if Comrade or Chairman Trump is trying to light that fire.

    Reply ↓
    1. Emma

      Can we leave comparisons to The USSR or Maoist China out of a discussion about American/Afrikaner oligarch doing exactly the same thing that they’ve previously done at other companies that they hostile-y took over?

      Western understanding about Stalinist USSR and Maoist China is utterly polluted with anti-Communist claptrap funded by decades of many many billions via NED, USAID, the Ford Foundation, and others. The works of Grover Furr debunks this in exhausting detail.

      And it’s absolutely unnecessary. This is just unthinking normalizing demonization of Communism by automatically comparing it to every horrible CRIMES OF CAPITALISM. Whether Communism is good or bad can be judged on its own more and by the way, Communism is actually quite popular with Russians and Chinese who lived through it.

      Reply ↓
      1. Es s Ce Tera

        I don’t think Stalin or Lenin were either communism or socialism. Failed attempts, at most, and the very reason they were failures is the phenomenon I just described made them dictatorships, instead.

        Reply ↓
        1. Kouros

          The dissolution of the local soviets and centralization was the giveaway. Then followed the embracing of US type of factory managerialism, entirely top down, no Toyota/Lean principle for them.

          Reply ↓
          1. CA

            “Then followed the embracing of US type of factory managerialism, entirely top down, no Toyota/Lean principle for them.”

            What a nice insight.

            Reply ↓
        2. Emma

          Whatever your thoughts about whether Stalin, Mao, Castro, or anybody else who actually implemented some form of actual existing socialism in their own freaking countries, why would you compare them to Elon Musk’s very American, very late capitalism, wreck.

          If you want to lecture on the evils of flavors of communism you hate, do it on its own terms, acknowledge the limitations that such efforts labored under, and provide proof, not unsubstantiated insinuations. And STOP tying it to completely unrelated problems of capitalism almost a century later. I would say the same if you just tied Elon to Pol Pot or Genghis Khan.

          Reply ↓
          1. Es s Ce Tera

            Emma, I don’t hate communism, my own stance is a preference for communism or anarchism. I lament the subversion of the communist experiment by the ideological thought police who turned it into a dictatorship instead of what it should have been, an early form of participatory democracy (the closest example being Spanish anarchism under Franco). I see similarities between what happened then and what is happening now, there is a method to the no rhyme or reason illogic of the firings and purges, they achieve compliance and adherence.

            Reply ↓
            1. Emma

              Yep, I know the type. All actual existing socialism is unbearably evil except for a couple heavily mythologized and probably infiltrated months in the Spanish Republic. Please forgive me for wanting something a little more durable and resistant to destruction by Western imperialism.

              Reply ↓
              2. Dida

                I would say that in principle there is nothing wrong with comparing the United States in its current incarnation with the Soviet Union before its collapse. Social scientists have devised disciplines which compare societies (comparative sociology), political systems (comparative politics), or economies (comparative political economy).

                The problem is, that, as you so trenchantly emphasized, people have no in-depth knowledge of the former communist states, and substitute what they don’t know with vilification and contempt. I myself am East European, and over my lifetime I evolved from hatred for anything communist to appreciation and respect, but it required decades of reading, including on the history of capitalism.

                The melange of ignorance and contempt that I find in comments regarding the ‘crazy’ Baltics, Moldova, Poland, or the Soviet Union, now offends me at times, but what can I do? Is it reasonable to expect people to go read a couple of academic books before they post an ephemeral comment on a board, particularly one where threads typically live for only one day?

                Reply ↓
                1. Emma

                  I agree that comparison with late USSR would be an interesting comparison with the present day West, but they always jump immediately 1930s Stalin (as if the system that would fight off the Nazi juggernaut was just one man) and 1960s Mao (definitely problematic, but again tremendous growth in human development that set the stage for the Deng era economic takeoff).

                  I don’t think Communist states (or ones that start off as socialist but take increasingly hard turns like Cuba, Venezuela, and arguably Iran) are anywhere near perfect. But once I started to gain an understanding of the stresses that they work under and the tremendous achievement they accomplished despite their challenges, I can’t help but respect their accomplishments and bear a grudge against those who ignorantly yet very smuggly bad-mouth history.

                  Reply ↓
              3. Darthbobber

                But doesn’t the phrase “actually existing socialism” simply assume exactly what needed to be proved? Unless one is such a minimalist that calling a given arrangement “socialism” suffices to make it so?

                Meszaros would agree that a meaningful socialism needs to be resistant to not just western imperialism but to ready reversibility to capitalism. And one of his central critiques of the Bolshevik model was that the maintenance of key elements of capital’s metabolism (focus on exchange value and the separation of control and direction from the workers in the hands of an external force) not only made progress toward socialism unlikely but virtually guaranteed eventual capitalist restoration. From his perspective, whether the role of “capital personified” is played by the individual capitalist or by representatives of the state the central dialectic problem remains the same.

                This confusion of state or party control per se with socialism is exactly what Marx was afraid of when he wrote the Critique of the Gotha Program

                Reply ↓
                1. Emma

                  I come to view Mao’s “excesses” as primarily an attempt to respond to this tendency. The schism between Khrushchevite revisionism and pushing for further revolutionary actions to push away this ” state capitalism”. Both failed, though I would argue that socialism under USSR was reformable and simply had the misfortune of getting Gorbachev and Yeltsin, who promised reforming a schlerotic system but killed it for the benefit of the West.

                  I was much harsher on Mao than the CPC official line until the last 5 years, when I started to really appreciate that the Cultural Revolution may indeed have pushed China away from the path taken by the USSR and Eastern Block and towards something more viable. A lot of it may simply be luck and timing, since the Chinese avoided the Volcker Shock and had to bootstrap their development on their cheap human capital.

                  The Chinese project of the last 45 years has been to grow the material base and government structure out sufficiently to resist this tendency and they’ve proven very successful so far, despite plenty of growing pain along the way (the leadership that put this market liberalization plan into place predicted that it would lead to corruption and high amount of inequality, they just felt the trade off was worthwhile and that they could control it as long as they had control of the commanding heights of finance, media, and military.

                  Reply ↓
          2. CA

            What is especially interesting to me is that neither China since 1977, nor Vietnam since 1985, is considered socialist by a liberal range of Western intellectuals. President Xi Jinping writes speech after speech, which are turned to books, describing China and the books are of no consequence to Western liberal intellectuals:

            https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1vhkj

            August 4, 2014

            Real per capita Gross Domestic Product for China, Japan, Korea, Thailand and Vietnam, 1985-2023

            (Indexed to 1985)

            Reply ↓
            1. Acacia

              Because the intellectuals in question are looking at the actual, political economy of China instead of what President Xi hyperbolizes about it?

              Reply ↓
              2. Emma

                Western intellectuals with horrible track records for making sense of their own national political economies, feel confident prognosticating on the conditions of a country of 1.5 billion people.

                This despite not knowing the language or living there for any period of time, not understanding Chinese history, not having Mainlander friends (but usually have diaspora anti communist friends), rejecting all Chinese media as propaganda, not paying attention to what the Chinese leadership say and material outcomes of their economic plans, and never doing proper self criticism when their nth prediction of China collapsing failed to materialize.

                This sounds strangely familiar to how Western intellectuals think about “deplorables” in their own countries.

                Reply ↓
          3. Mikel

            “Whatever your thoughts about whether Stalin, Mao, Castro, or anybody else who actually implemented some form of actual existing socialism in their own freaking countries, why would you compare them to Elon Musk’s very American, very late capitalism, wreck.”

            I’ve been interested lately in the history of the Soviet Union’s experimentation with forms of techno-authoritarianism and its relation to theories of scientific management. The Soviet Union had their own version Fred W. Taylor (of Taylorism fame) with Aleksei Kapitonovich Gastev.

            Reply ↓
            1. CA

              Mao was a revolutionary inspiration, organizer and leader. Mao was not a social organizer or political-economic organizer. The social organizer was Deng. President Xi is institutionalizing the social structures envisioned by Deng.

              Reply ↓
              1. Mikel

                I’m talking about the Soviet Union and the USA and techno-authoritarianism. I just included more of Emma’s quote than may have been necessary.

                Reply ↓
              2. Darthbobber

                And yet the red districts post long march were socially and economically organized in pretty sophisticated fashion by somebody or other.

                Reply ↓
            2. Emma

              There are definitely many lessons to be taken from the history of actual existing socialism, as much from failure as successes. Anybody who only praises the achievements of socialism without examining its failures had failed to be a scientific socialist and is not actually working towards the goal of socialism/communism, which is above all to give the masses the control of and rewards for their political economy.

              I’m just asking that socialism be judged accurately on its own merits and with proper understanding of its goals and constraints, and not made into a boogieman to be trotted out whenever Western ubercapitalist oligarch or politician does something ubercapitalistic. Socialism/Communism/nationalism all have their own problems and contradictions to resolve, but stop blaming or comparing the crimes of late capitalism to them.

              Reply ↓
  26. IM Doc

    I am hearing from many colleagues this AM that the big city hospitals in which they work are now being overrun with flu and other respiratory issues. The ERs are in many cases back to being war zones with 1-2 day holdovers very common.

    So everyone needs to take care and be as healthy as you can.

    I thought it important to realize that since COVID started to really wind down in the hospitals, your non-profit corporate hospital companies have been doing their very best to lay off all kinds of nurses, PTs, etc – and have trimmed the nation’s hospital capacity by at this point 16-20% – reports vary. So when you are sick in the ER for 1-2 days please keep in mind, it is not the ER doctors and nurses who have done this.

    This report – documents that occupancy is at an all time high – but staffing and beds have been cut by 16% in the past year or so.

    https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1073936

    You know things are bad when the WSJ is now openly bragging about all the massive hospitals across the country that are being repurposed into condos.

    https://www.wsj.com/real-estate/former-hospitals-residential-housing-bae7c276

    That very first picture in that article makes me heartsick – that building looks very similar to 2 of the hospitals in which I trained.

    Long ago when I was young, there were often 2-3 wings of any of the hospitals in which I worked that were darkened and inactive. They had all the equipment ready to go – and they could be up and going within hours. That is no longer the case. We do not do “inefficiencies” like surge capacity anymore.

    I know which system was much more efficient – and it is not the system we have now.

    Reply ↓
      1. Mikel

        They’ll just tell everybody the problems are due to “DEI” and not the hyper-financialization system people were integrated into.

        Reply ↓
    2. mrsyk

      We are hearing the same stories from two friends who are nurses here in the northeast. Lots and lots of “flu”, most of it not Covid. Also hearing about lay-offs, re-assignments, etc, all set to the years long backdrop of shuttering rural hospitals.
      Whoever thought “just in time delivery” applies to healthcare should go take a flying leap.

      Reply ↓
    3. Bsn

      A trick I learned from a nurse/friend. If you can (insurance, money, etc.) call an ambulance to get to the ER. They will take you right in. Brother had a flare-up with myocarditus recently (can’t explain to him why, but “w’evah”) and spent 10 hours in the waiting room with serious chest pain. He’s been there 3 times now. Took the ambulance last time and got right in.
      PS, no masks after you leave reception.
      But, he has an appointment with a cardiologist….. in 1.5 months. So all better now /s

      Reply ↓
    5. CA

      “I am hearing from many colleagues this AM that the big city hospitals in which they work are now being overrun with flu and other respiratory issues…”

      1) CDC is reporting, highest flu incidence in 15 years

      2) About 45% of adults have had the flu vaccine so far this year

      Reply ↓
    6. AG

      re: German hospitals and COVID

      German Ministry of Health in 2021 had issued a report by the Leibniz Science Institute on the state of German hospitals.

      The revised version covered the time between Jan. 2020 – May 2021:
      The German language pdf is here:
      https://www.rwi-essen.de/en/publications/search/detail/analysen-zum-leistungsgeschehen-der-krankenhaeuser-und-zur-5630

      Apart from the contained statistics I assume document translation via google would do.

      Back then I had read the first version that covered only fiscal year 2020.
      In essence the heads of all German hospitals had concluded that:

      a) German hospitals faced no serious challenge due to COVID
      b) As a consequence the “reform” i.e. reduction of hospital capacities as planned pre-2020 could be carried out without worries.

      This verdict considering that all over we were told to be experiencing the biggest crisis of the nation since 1945.

      It´s a major study so it makes no sense to start quoting from it.

      But to give a taste (page 16 from 66 altogether):

      “(…)
      Covid-19 cases in total

      In 2020, a total of 172,248 treatment cases were treated with the secondary diagnosis U07.1 (Covid-19, virus detected)8.9 It should be expressly pointed out that these are cases, not persons, as transferred patients count multiple times.

      The median age of the patients was 71 years (25th to 75th percentile 55 to 82 years; Table 3). Of all 172,248 cases, 26,268 had an intensive care OPS complex code (8-980*, 8-98f*) (with an average length of stay of 20.3 days,of which 11.0 were in intensive care), another 120 had an OPS code for intensive care complex treatment
      in children and another 10,037 cases in designated intensive care beds that did not have an intensive care complex code, a total of 36,305 cases or 21.1% of all cases with the secondary diagnosis U07.1. 17,376 cases (10.1% of all cases or 47.9% of cases treated in intensive care) were ventilated for at least six hours.

      The average length of stay for COVID-19 treatment cases was 11.2 days, meaning that 1.93 million days of stay were achieved in 2020, which corresponds to 1.9% of all days of stay.

      Since around 2,000 inpatient admissions took place every day in the second half of December, it can be assumed that on December 31, more than 20,000 COVID-19 patients were still being treated as inpatients, who are not included here. The total number of days of stay is therefore likely to have been just over 2 million (half the length of stay per inpatient) and thus 2% of all days of stay. Measured against the available bed capacity, this results in an average occupancy rate of 1.3% due to COVID-19. The highest daily occupancy rates were in the second half of December, with just under 5% of all beds.
      (…)”

      And from page 56 final assessment:

      “(…)
      Over the entire period, we observed a decline in the number of patients of 14.7%, which corresponds to around 2.8 million patients. For calendar weeks two to eleven, a comparable level of treated patients can be seen across all years. At the beginning of the twelfth calendar week in 2020, we observed a sharp decline compared to the previous month. Compared to the average of the previous two years, the average number of patients in the twelfth week fell by around 102,400 (-24.6%). The decline increased to around 175,700 (-40.8%) in calendar week 15. From calendar week 16, the average number of patients increased slightly again, but the difference compared to the previous weeks is clearly visible up to calendar week 29, with it being greatest in calendar weeks 12 to 24. As the year progresses, the level in 2020 approaches that of previous years, but always remains around 10% below. In calendar week 45, it drops again significantly by around 54,000 (-14.1%) and remains at a lower level until the end of the year.
      (…)”

      The emergency did spike with some psychiatric institutions and with particular smaller hospitals where moving patients to other places was difficult or not possible. But these were structurally never questioning the system as a whole as was suggested by the ruling elites.

      This study never played any role in the public discourse then and since!

      Reply ↓
  27. Carolinian

    Larry Johnson on stubble boy Zelensky’s Producers scheme.

    https://sonar21.com/is-volodymyr-zelensky-channeling-max-bialystock/

    “Zelensky has offered the rights to rare-earth minerals in land occupied and claimed by Russia. He’s trying to sell something he does not own nor control. The UK’s Starmer got scammed. Remains to be seen if Trump is going to be bamboozled as well.”

    One needs a score card for all the grift, for sure. If only there were some institution, one with printing presses, that could help us.

    Reply ↓
      1. ChrisFromGA

        I loved that show. Edward James Olmos as Lieutenant Castillo, the guest stars like Ted Nugent and G. Gordon Liddy, and the episode where Tubbs went crazy at the credit union as part of an undercover operation.

        Of course, they don’t make ’em like that anymore.

        Reply ↓
        1. mrsyk

          Me too! I enjoyed Jan Hammer’s electro jazz rock keyboards as well. Here he is as part of the Stanley Clarke quartet performing Lopsy Lu, from Clarke’s second lp.
          Stanley Clarke – bass
          Tony Williams – drums
          Bill Connors – guitar
          Jan Hammer – keyboards

          Reply ↓
        1. paul

          The first ten minutes of the film is a personal faovourte, and everyone should enjoy it.
          The rest is a messy fever dream,pepered with pro insights.
          Sonnys theme,apart from the title song, is the highlight, but the beach scene in ‘thief’ beats them all out.
          Jan hammer,james cann, michael mann, its triple a feature for sure.

          Reply ↓
      4. Emma

        If they gave Julani a shave and let Zelensky’s beard grow out and give him extender shoes, then traded their places, would we be able to tell them apart? Isn’t it basically the same group of people who are visiting them, 3 years apart?

        Reply ↓
    1. flora

      Ian Welsh’s idea has crossed my mind. Let’s see, Musk claims he’ll find $500 billion in waste,fraud, and abuse in this year alone. And… it turns out $500 billion is exactly the amount T promised to AI developers for his AI “moonshot” plan. And Musk is suddenly pushing hard his Grok AI. Just a coincidence. (Are we back to the Gilded Age’s railroad scams yet?) / ;)

      Reply ↓
      1. Carolinian

        Whatever Musk is up to it is at least out in the open since lately his name is on every lip. Whereas the mysterious fortunes acquired by the Clintons, Obamas, Bidens or even George Clooney ($500 million???) are met with “don’t speak of the elephant.” If the Trumpies are following the money and not just grabbing some this could be quite a year.

        Reply ↓
        2. Dr. John Carpenter

          Yep. This is the point I’ve been making about Trump and Musk. But it seems a lot of people are more comfortable when the grift happens in private so as to not spoil brunch.

          Reply ↓
    2. Socal Rhino

      It’s certainly possible, but I think (rightly or wrongly) there is an intent to reduce federal expenditures. It’s part of the strategy put forward by Bessent. More likely to push some tasks down to the states than replace government staff with contractors.

      Reply ↓
      3. Emma

        Federal expenditures are mostly in entitlements and Lutnick recently made their intent very clear. So good luck to everybody who is dependent on or hoping to get on Social Security and Medicare. Military expenditures can make a slight difference, but it’s looking less like a cutback and more like redirecting the pork to Anduril, Palantir, and other opaque SV Broligarch companies (so the pork doesn’t even result in good paying jobs in various congressional districts).

        A big chunk of non-DoD civilian government expenditure is in Department of Energy (nukes) and the VA. The rest is really chicken scratch – weather forecasting, park rangers and wild land managers, student loans processors, Section 8 housing processors, tax collection, ATC, airport security theater actors, etc. Take all of them away will not make a noticeable dent in anybody’s budget, but enjoy ads with your USPS delivery notice and tornado warnings.

        That $4 trillion tax cut is going to people who already have high incomes. Much of it will be made up with tariffs that will disproportionately affect people who need to buy imports to get by.

        So enjoy the slash and burn theater. We’ll move onto something else soon enough, maybe a horror flick.

        Reply ↓
    3. Glen

      It’s all anecdotal, but according to my USN buddies, all the contracting out has ended up costing way more, and is much less capable than in days past.

      Reply ↓
  29. Socal Rhino

    Re: events at the pentagon

    Danny Davis and Doug McGregor are applauding these moves. Both are retired army colonels. Both have been advocating for such changes for years. They also think these will be very popular with the rank and file. Not so much with the generals and admirals.

    Reply ↓
  30. Bill B

    On the Musk email: Perhaps he could look at their job descriptions and activity reports they’ve already submitted? This is just harrasment. The part about getting terminated if not answered within 48 hrs is a tell: “Failure to respond will be taken as a resignation.”

    It’s quite common for feds to submit activity reports to their managers, weekly, monthly, annually, depending on the manager or agency, but getting a demand for a weekly activity report authorized by the President is probably unprecedented, and may I say, “weird.”

    I’d like to know what each of the DOGEbags did last week in 5 bullet points. But, there’s no transparency, so forget it.

    Reply ↓
  31. Tom Stone

    Seeing an American President wearing a Crown and proclaiming Himself “King” is not something I ever expected to see, and the fact that he calls himself a Republican is the icing on the cake.
    A “Republican King”, will wonders never cease?

    Reply ↓
  32. ChrisFromGA

    Lo Mein

    (Sung to the tune of, “Cocaine” by Eric Clapton)

    If you wanna hang out, you gotta get takeout
    Lo mein
    If you want to chow down, you won’t be left with a frown, lo mein

    She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright … Lo mein

    If you got bad news, you need a fast carb food, lo mein
    When chopsticks don’t work, just grab a fork, lo mein

    She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright .. lo mein

    [Guitar]

    If your meal is done, but your tummy needs fun, lo mein
    Don’t forget this fact, you get heart attack, lo mein

    She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright … lo mein
    She’s alright, she’s alright, she’s alright … lo mein

    Reply ↓
        1. mrsyk

          Clapton doing his thing, lol, I remember watching SNL when Marley joined him on stage for I shot the sheriff.
          Layla is one of my favorite tunes.

          Reply ↓
  33. Alice X

    >Trump’s Commerce Secretary Confirms Plan to Gut Medicare—and More

    I’ll be dead shortly afterwards, so it won’t be over my dead body. :-/

    Reply ↓
  34. Boomheist

    Re: Is AI making us dumber? Until humans invented writing everyhing, every bit of knowledge, had to be learned and carried in the head and transferred through teaching or story telling to the next generation. And it turns out the size of those Cro-Magnon 50,000 year old brains was bigger than our brains today. Then you invent writing, a way of exporting memory, initially held by a priesthood for thousands of years, then the masses with the invention of the printing press. So for the last, say, 500 years, libraries and written records have been a way to store information and knowledge. This has the benefit of adding greatly to what we know, but also relieving some of the need to memorize so much on an individual basis.
    Now we have computers and the cloud, a way to store information in digital form, accessed by a few key or thumb strokes, the instant availability of knowledge. For the last few years search engines have offered this, but now with AI we have, essentially, one stop shopping for all knowledge. Now, instead of having to learn and remember things, or processes to do things, we can simply ask Grok, and we are told.
    My thesis is that this new development, the formation of a one-place-answers-all system, will mean that we humans will no longer have to remember much, know how to do much, as we are being increasingly trained to just ask the cloud and in the meantime forget things. My thesis is we are indeed being dumbed down, made dumber, and in fact our brains will literally shrink as more and more of what we used to hold in our brains is now left to the cloud, to be pulled up only when asked.
    And while AI has a tremendous potential to do many good things, and how extraordinary it is to ask a detailed question of AI and get in seconds a fully formed paper with sources and references, which is mostly accurate, in the end using this AI will weaken our brains and abilities. I think it is already happening.

    Reply ↓
  35. griffen

    Zeitgeist watch, daily breakfast edition. Or perhaps instead this could go as well under Imperial Collapse, as pricing of eggs goes into overdrive. I don’t recall if this was covered previously or if had been reported…here from the US region advertised as Upstate in South Carolina.

    A surcharge added for the increase price, $0.50 per egg, was plastered on the doors for a regional breakfast and lunch restaurant chain ( no it was not the Waffle House ). My biscuit foraging expedition was indeed successful, but I’ll have to continue being very sensitive, on where or if I go out to enjoy a literal second breakfast or breakfast for lunch. Others may have similar anecdotes or possibly worse I suppose

    Hey will the looming tariff plans and expected tax cuts help on that front? Asking for a friend…of course my rhetorical question is layered in sarcasm.

    Reply ↓
    1. Carolinian

      SC eggs have roughly doubled in price vs several months ago or about .20 per egg. Clearly you are being shafted by these eateries.

      However in CA the surcharge would be about right unless they are now charging $1 per egg.

      Reply ↓
    2. chris

      Brown eggs are 11$/dozen at my run of the mill not Whole Foods grocery store in Maryland. I find trading skills for my neighbors eggs is a good idea these days.

      Reply ↓
  36. Bugs

    German legislative elections:

    Union 30%
    AfD 20
    SPD 16.5
    Greens 12
    Left 9
    BSW 5
    FSU 4.8

    Talk of a Union / SPD / BSW coalition. Sarah Wagenknecht looking very happy with the results. Surprised by the solid performance of Die Linke.

    Reply ↓
    1. nyleta

      Taurus missiles incoming, what will be the Russian reaction ? With the Geran 3 drone coming on line they will be able to pile up unused missiles a lot faster for the inevitable clash coming when the US puts the squeeze on in the Baltic.

      Mr Trump has publicly promised to con Russia out of any permanent security gains from the SMO within the next 6 months. Not that he has much reputation to lose.

      Reply ↓
  37. Michael Fiorillo

    The article about the Panthers, while having elements of truth, was heavily over-idealized.

    The contemporary Left heaps a lot aspiration on the Panthers, most of it overdone. I don’t how many times I’ve heard people on the so-called Left claim the Panthers Free Breakfast program shamed the federal government into following suit, which is simply not true; the Panther’s community service projects were real, but existed on a tiny scale even in Black neighborhoods and were as subject to the ravages of COINTELPRO and the internal chaos endemic to the Party as anything else they were involved in. It’s safe to assume that up to half the people in the Party were either cops or hustlers at any given moment. Adolph Reed, who was adjacent to the Panthers-in-decline during his early years in radical Black politics, has spoken about this. David Hilliard, a Panther leader in the Bay Area who later became an organizer for SEIU, when asked how to prevent shady characters from joining the Party, responded, “When I find out, I’ll let you know.”

    Ironically, or not, when the Party collapsed in the early ‘70’s, many Panthers were thrown a lifeline by the same Old Left which had been so derided during the ‘60’s: Harry Bridges and the ILHWU – West Coast longshoremen – got them good-paying jobs on the docks, allowing them to continue radical politics in another venue.

    As for the “Love” that supposedly permeated the Party: OK, in the sense of Che’s famous quote that a revolutionary must be motivated by love. On the other hand, as a Panther-idolizing and adjacent White yout’ with friends in the Party – one, a Jew, who was accepted even though Whites couldn’t join, was accepted because his anthropologist mother had been enrolled as a member of a Native tribe – we spent most of our time chanting, “Revolution has begun/ Time to pick up the gun” and tagging right-on speeches and statements with the ever present, “All power to the people and death to the Fascist Pig!”

    Lots, and I mean lots, of macho posturing and over-the-top sexism, though that was endemic in the White Left, as well.

    All that said, here’s a choice sample of some great, urgent Black Panther Party music from the era, featuring the great Andy Bey on vocals and incredible bass playing by Ron Carter.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKkfbde0x24

    Reply ↓
  38. DJG, Reality Czar

    The first reports that I am seeing of the German elections. La Repubblica.

    Estimate for Alternativ fur Deutschland: 20 percent.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_19s0H3sr2Q

    Our German correspondents will enlighten us here in the comments.

    Meanwhile, I am seeing clips of Giorgia Meloni at CPAC, the conservatives’ love fest, where she is offering Italy for sale. Scrumplizioso!

    Reply ↓
      1. Ignacio

        At the end depending on whether BSW and the liberals manage to pass the 5% limit the most likely outcome seems to be the CDU/CSU-SPD coalition which speaks volumes of the political degradation of Germany. In any case it is almost certain Germany will be in the hands of another PMC representative as original and innovative as kartoffel with ketchup. Nothing will fundamentally change in Germany.

        Reply ↓
        1. AG

          >”as original and innovative as kartoffel with ketchup.”
          👍

          No, nothing will change. The massivity of incompetence and imbecility hits you like a brick. Everyone of those men and one woman (Weidel) was so utterly dumb one must be ashamed considering what has been going on since the Inauguration of Trump at latest. (Mrs. Ali was there instead of Wagenknecht and she hardly spoke so I do not address her.)

          Weidel at least was right on the energy issue and Germany´s need to do business with US, CHINA, RU and not war. But her conclusion: “Germany has to become strong again” – wtf is she talking about. And her unprepared comments were not good (repetitions and contradictions.) Of course the others are full-blown idiots. Defy description.

          I am aware of how meaningless these appearances are. But in God´s name at least when the election is over try to be honest for a fraction of a second. And don´t pester us with your generic PR agency gibberish.

          I seem to be turning into a clone of Andrei Martyanov it´s that bad.

          Reply ↓
  40. DJG, Reality Czar

    PopesterWatch: He is still at the Gemelli Hospital in Roma.

    Here is a “best-of” his antiwar statements. Something that has fascinated me since my transfer here to the Chocolate City of the Undisclosed Region of Nebbioloshire is that Catholicism is an emanation of Italian culture and Italian culture is an emanation of Catholicism: Which means that even atheists in Italy take the pope (this Pope, rather than drama queen JPII and fashion plate Ratzi the Sixteenth) seriously.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLUHMx2mKAo

    Reply ↓
    1. paul

      The lads (I am not awareof many ladies) in the vatican are having a good propoganda score with the new hit movie ‘conconclave’.

      Naiil biting intrigue, a little tourist development and no-one ending ritually hung underneath blackfriars bridge,takes the edge off these things.

      Life is difficult,and bureaucracies are hard to dicipline,but at least they are pr/a/a/eying as hard as they can for something better.

      Robert harris, nihilist,talented posh boy stuff.

      Reply ↓
  41. AG

    Listening to the heads of German parties on the main TV panel for whatever masochistic inclination proves how damned Germany is. The only person who belonged to the room with a bit of wit was absent – Wagenknecht – since vote count is still keeping BSW in limbo (ca. 5%). The others act as if the past 3 years had never happened.
    Breathtaking. Insultingly provincial, dumb, stupid.

    Reply ↓
  42. paul

    My goodness!
    The comments are alive and well.

    RE: https://www.theregister.com/2025/02/21/opinion_ai_dumber/

    they had a zinger at the end:

    We’re trading deep understanding for quick fixes, and while it feels great in the moment, we’re going to pay for this later

    The ongoing agression against acccuumated experience (formerly known as knowledge (formerly known as something of permanent common value)) is our big asteroid.

    Reply ↓
  44. Revenant

    Obligatory Kneecap link in response to the Black Panthers article: the Irish-speaking nationalist community have long organised on the model of the Black Panthers to provide concrete material benefits to their community. And Kneecap are now bringing some of that visual cool and swagger to the party.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=KSnF7RaeoXE

    Here is a very young Mo Chara being interviewed (at 1m32 and 4m15) as a member of the youth group Glór Na Móna on their work in providing free breakfasts to the residents of the Springfield estate, one of the most deprived in Belfast.

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=1QNBgIUebN4&t=366s&pp=2AHuApACAQ%3D%3D

    https://www.glornamona.com/free-community-breakfast/?lang=en

    Kneecap’s music and political engagement have shown me the community organising in the nationalist parts of West Belfast. I have been blown away by the level of it: we are taught nothing of this in the rest of the UK, it’s almost like it’s suppressed….

    The West Belfast Gaeltacht is a good example (founding an Irish Language cultural centre, radio station, newspaper, theatre group etc. and most fundamentally an Irish language school, when the Unionist government would not pay for it, funded through donations.)

    https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=T71wvl8hu4Q

    Before this, there was the Shaw’s Road Gaeltacht, where a group of Irish speakers built their own houses in the 1950’s and, less well known, rebuilt their protestant neighbours’ houses after an episode of inter communal arson attacks (before the Troubles began).

    Clinton and Blair may have had a hand in only one good thing, the Good Friday Agreement….

    Reply ↓
  45. Fred S

    And now the US is playing out the script with Trump performatively dumping on dictator Zelensky “forcing” the Zelensky exit strategy as laid out in that script https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/23/europe/ukraine-zelensky-resign-nato-intl/index.html so he can get out alive, avoiding the alternative of assassination, to his bolthole with the loot he’s made from the US during the war. All is performance and theatre for the mainstream media stenographers and churnalists to distract the masses.

    Aaaah those massively valuable rare earths and strategic minerals in Ukraine that Lindsay Graham and now Trump harp on about – for the USA to build the SR-71 it had to acquire titanium from the USSR via indirect deceptive acquisitions way back in the day.

    Multiple TV shows on the go at the same time provide rolling distractions away from their real game https://www.crisesnotes.com/why-should-we-care-if-the-trump-administration-and-musks-doge-are-acting-unconstitutionally/ “the only way that the man in a taxicab can become interested in the gold case is if we kept the story on the front page” and “He said if we keep things in a constant turmoil if the case should go against us the man on the street will say for God’s sake, Mr. President, do something about it and, he said, if I do everybody in the country will heave a sigh of relief and say thank God “. 

    All working toward confecting a constitutional crisis so Trump’s controllers can go martial law for the USA https://www.citizensforethics.org/news/analysis/trumps-politicization-of-the-u-s-marshals-service-is-a-threat-to-our-democracy/. Opponents can secure as many court decisions as they like but unless they have the capacity of enforcement those decisions are meaningless.

    American fascism has a democratic veneer and functions with corporate control (MIC, Wall St) of the military state whereas German fascism was a partnership between the state and capital with the military state as the senior partner. ~ Aaron Good https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLDAi0NdlN8hNArLl765PXe8tsTKmOciGL.

    Reply ↓
    1. ACPAL

      And don’t forget, Mitch McConnell bought the Supreme Court for the conservatives so they would renege on Roe V Wade. The lower courts can say what they like but too many of the Supremes owe their positions to the Republican party. The constitution and the rule of law only works if people believe in it and willingly support it. At this point I’m not convinced that Trump, Musk, and the rest give a crap about the constitution or established law. IMHO we’re not far from a dictatorship or fascist government. And that ain’t good.

      Reply ↓
    2. ACPAL

      “Aaaah those massively valuable rare earths and strategic minerals in Ukraine that Lindsay Graham and now Trump harp on about” – Fred S

      It just occurred to me that if Z signs over the mineral fields (now in Russian hands) to T it can be said that the US would then have an excuse to send in the military to take possession of “US property.” This would not be an existential threat to Russia so nukes need not be involved, just a good old slug-fest.

      Reply ↓
      1. Yves Smith

        We said this at the very outset in a post on this harebrained idea: Is Trump Poisoning the Prospects of Negotiation With Russia Over Ukraine with His Minerals Deal?

        Most commentators took the Trump talk of owning or getting rights to Ukraine’s minerals to be bluster. Yours truly remarked otherwise, that this looked like a way for Trump to justify and get funding for a continued US participation, even if at a lower level than under Biden, by presenting it as a loan. This would make it the bastard cousin of the Ursuala von der Leyen plan to issue bonds against Russian frozen assets to which it does not have good title.

        But this approach would appeal to Trump by virtue of first, creating an option (options have financial value) and second, making possible Trump posturing about continuing the war seem dimly credible by providing a way to get funding through Congress. Even if the US and its Western allies can only dribble arms to Ukraine out of current production, more money would allow it to continue to prop up the regime in Kiev.

        Reply ↓
  46. ChrisFromGA

    Lest it be said that D.O.G.E. is not doing some good work, here is validation that something I suspected all along was true:

    https://x.com/doge/status/1892374128444772703

    Schools have spent nearly $200B of COVID-Relief funds with little oversight or impact on students. $393K to rent out a Major League Baseball stadium, $86K in Caesars Palace hotel rooms, $60k in swimming pool passes, and even an ice cream truck. All of this money was drawn with zero documentation.

    There is $4B left and the new
    @usedgov
    is setting a simple new rule – all grantees must provide receipts for every purchase BEFORE funding is released.

    Sources:
    http://ed.gov/about/news/press-release/us-department-of-education-updates-guidance-covid-19-funding

    https://defendinged.org/investigations/wasteful-esser-expenditures/

    So it was always a giant slush fund. Nothing to do with public health or the pandemic.

    I happen to live in a County where the MLB stadium was built with public funds, and is contractually obligated to hold 3 public events free of charge per year.

    I wonder if the chuckleheads in our vicinity blew some of those CARES act fund on sending kids to the Braves stadium when they had the legal right to go there for free … time for a F.O.I.A. request!

    Reply ↓
    1. matt

      One of my cousins is a science teacher, and his district spent all their covid funds on extra programs and aides instead of purchasing infrastructure. They are now experiencing a terrible crunch where teachers are getting fired and programs are getting slashed. A bunch of classmates at my little sister’s private school are from that town trying to escape it. Meanwhile, towns like mine that spent the money on building things are still doing ok. (I forget exactly what we put the money into.)
      It really depends on who is in charge of your city’s funds.

      Reply ↓
  47. AG

    This was Wagenknecht´s interview on Febr. 21st with JUNGE WELT daily.
    I can´t archive the translated version so I post the entire machine-translation:

    original German:
    https://archive.is/rDjBN

    From: Issue of 21.02.2025 , page 3 / Focus
    BSW before the federal election
    “Even CDU voters do not want war in Germany”
    “There is a real media blockade”: The BSW is fighting to enter the Bundestag. A conversation with Sahra Wagenknecht

    By Nico Popp

    “Shortly before the federal election, international politics are gaining momentum. Germany and the EU are confronted with the fact that Washington is negotiating a ceasefire in Ukraine with Moscow. In Berlin and elsewhere, many actors seem somewhat overwhelmed. How do you assess this development?

    European politics has completely maneuvered itself into a corner with its unspeakable reliance on arms deliveries and an endless prolongation of the war. I was one of those who advocated ending the Ukraine war through negotiations from the beginning. We were always told that Putin does not want to negotiate at all. Now Trump is making a serious offer of negotiations for the first time, and lo and behold: negotiations are taking place. That would have been possible two or three years ago, too; the war could have been ended in Istanbul in April 2022. Trump, who is certainly no angel of peace, wants to end the proxy war because it has become too expensive for him and he wants to concentrate on other conflicts. The war-mad European elites are standing on the sidelines, duped, and will have to explain to the European population why they should now foot the bill for the whole disaster.

    There will probably soon be a dispute over who will pay for the rearmament that is now being demanded even more vehemently. What is the BSW’s position on this issue?

    We don’t need a new arms race, but rather talks about arms control and disarmament again. There are initial reports that a 700 billion euro arms package is to be put together at EU level, and the debt rules are to be relaxed to do so. This madness will lead us into a major war at some point. The aggressiveness with which the BSW has been fought in recent months – since November there has actually only been negative reporting about us – is probably mainly due to the fact that the political establishment knows that we are the only opposition with backbone on this issue.

    Armament and militarization played hardly any role in the election campaign. But why?

    The issue is deliberately kept out. We have repeatedly tried to address the threat of war, but there is a real media blockade. More or less all the other parties are on board with the arms buildup and have an interest in not having to talk about it in the election campaign. The Greens are now the worst couch potatoes and arms lobbyists, but the CDU also still wants to supply “Taurus” to Ukraine, and Olaf Scholz has brought the US medium-range missiles into the country for 2026. And everyone knows that a large proportion of voters do not want that. CDU voters do not want to see war in Germany either, and very few want to see pensions or education cuts in order to buy more weapons.

    You have repeatedly tried to mobilize on the streets against the escalation policy. Why did you not do so during the election campaign?

    During the election campaign, it is very difficult to organize a rally without it immediately being suspected of being a covert BSW campaign event. This would make it almost impossible to make a broad appeal. We used our election rallies to mobilize against the madness of war.

    One of your themes in recent years has been the narrowing of the “acceptable” corridor of political opinions. Currently, we are seeing a further intensification of repression against the Palestine solidarity movement. What is the BSW’s position on this?

    What is happening is appalling. The fact that Francesca Albanese, UN Special Reporter, was prevented from publicly expressing her opinion in Germany is a scandal and the result of the expansion of the definition of anti-Semitism, which, according to German authorities, now includes pretty much any criticism of Netanyahu’s criminal war against Gaza. This means that any criticism of war crimes is outlawed, which is simply outrageous! But our society has become increasingly authoritarian and repressive in recent years anyway. Just think of the new category of “delegitimization of the state” created by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution. This means that virtually any government critic can become an object of observation. But as for Gaza: Germany is even partly responsible for the war crimes. The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution has asked the Bundestag to stop supplying weapons to Israel. This was rejected by everyone else. A minute’s silence for the many civilian victims of the Gaza war that we had requested was also recently rejected.

    Your former party is focusing on rent and inflation in the election campaign. The BSW is not addressing these issues with the same emphasis, although they are likely to be relevant for a large part of the potential electorate. Why is that?

    In addition to the question of war and peace, justice is our big issue: access to doctors and education, growing poverty in old age. We recently presented an emergency program for 100 euros more per month for everyone, as well as a concept for pension reform based on the Austrian model. But we are almost completely blocked by the media. It is obvious that those in power prefer an easy-care opposition without a peace policy profile in the Bundestag. The chairman of the Atlantic Bridge has said this publicly: he prefers Die Linke to the BSW. This may also explain the sudden enthusiasm of the mainstream media for Die Linke.

    The dominant theme in this election campaign was migration policy. Quite apart from the content of this debate: by approving the so-called influx limitation law, your party has put itself in a position to act as part of a conservative and right-wing parliamentary majority on this issue. One side effect is that people with a migration background, many of whom could imagine voting for BSW according to a recent survey, are now hesitant. Have you made a serious mistake here?

    No. I see that many people who have an immigration history themselves want the loss of control to end. The very high numbers that we have had in recent years are simply not sustainable because the necessary infrastructure is lacking and integration is failing. This means that the mood in the country is increasingly turning – especially with crimes becoming more frequent, such as in Magdeburg, Aschaffenburg and Munich. The main beneficiary is the AfD. If everything continues as before, the AfD will be the strongest party in 2029. If you don’t want racist sentiments to gain a foothold in Germany, you have to stop uncontrolled migration. In addition, open borders for all and a strong welfare state do not go together. But of course one problem of this election campaign was that much more was talked about migration than, for example, about poverty in old age or about war.

    You have proposed a referendum on migration policy. Wouldn’t that be a further step towards making migration policy the linchpin of all domestic policy issues? This tendency exists on both the right and the left of the political spectrum.

    Migration will remain a dominant issue as long as we do not reduce the high numbers. This has been the main breeding ground for the AfD since 2015. The referendum would be a way to overcome the political deadlock. Denmark has reduced migration, the formerly strong right is now a marginal phenomenon. Defending unlimited immigration is not anti-fascism, it has the opposite effect.

    But don’t demands like the one for a referendum play into the hands of those like the CDU/CSU and AfD who would prefer to only talk about migration, because this conveniently sets individual sections of the working class against each other?

    The AfD is particularly benefiting from the fact that the problems are not being solved. It would have been wiser if the SPD and the Greens had passed a package of measures with the Union, because then the AfD would not have had this proposal in the election campaign. But instead the SPD and the Greens hoped to use the debate to mobilize electorally. This backfired on them, and the Left Party benefited, as it is the only party that still fully supports the position of “open borders and the right to remain for all”. But it is no longer being voted for by the poorer people who have to pay the consequences, but by a more privileged urban milieu. The AfD stands by laughing because it too has been strengthened by this debate.

    The BSW quickly celebrated success, entered three state parliaments and is now part of two state governments. Since then, however, poll ratings have stagnated or crumbled. Was this rapid transition to the executive at the state level a mistake?

    That was not the constellation we wanted, but we were in a dilemma. We became very strong in the elections and then had the problem that without us, no government majority beyond the AfD was possible. If we had refused on principle, we would have disappointed our voters. We then tried to focus the negotiations on a few important issues, for example on foreign policy, where the states do have influence via the Bundesrat. At a time when everyone was only talking about weapons, we managed to anchor a commitment to diplomacy and criticism of the US missile deployment in the coalition agreements. We dropped out in Saxony because, among other things, the CDU and SPD were completely unwilling to compromise on this issue. With a view to the federal election, it would of course have been better if there had been majorities in all three states without us, because then we would have had the opportunity to gain a profile in state politics in the opposition. It is obvious that we disappointed and lost quite a few voters in Thuringia, particularly through the coalition with the CDU.

    Do you regret not having opened the BSW to people who wanted to join long ago? It would hardly be possible to run a federal election campaign with the necessary breadth with such a small party. And your former party is reporting record numbers of members every week and is once again radiating dynamism.

    I want our solid and honest supporters, who also support our election campaign, to become part of our party. But if we had taken in thousands of people overnight whom we do not know and whom we have not spoken to beforehand, our party would probably have fallen apart in the first year, as most young parties do. In Hamburg, two people were enough to almost paralyze the entire regional association and to provide the national press with negative news about “chaos” in the BSW. If we had had something like that in 16 states, we would not be in the Bundestag election campaign with any prospect of success now.

    Let us assume that the BSW enters the next Bundestag: What role does the party want to play there?

    We will certainly be in opposition. A consistent and loud opposition to this insane war policy, but of course also to social cuts. And I am sure that it will make a significant difference in the policies of the SPD in particular, but also of the other parties, whether we are in the Bundestag.”

    p.s. I wrote almost a year ago that the question of immigration will put a serious test to the party. I was right unfortunately considering their double digit polling results for many months.
    On the other hand Wagenknecht is of course correct about the sad fact that basically the entire establishment was hostile. And of course had she decided to vote the other way media would have spun the anti-BSW stance accordingly.

    The house always wins. But almost being midnight I still hope at least those 5% will hold.

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  48. AG

    An interactive map on voters switching between parties from 2021 to 2025:

    Scroll down until you reach “Wählerwanderung” (voter migration)
    There you can select the parties:

    https://www.freitag.de/thema/bundestagswahl

    If you choose the button “Alle anzeigen” (choose all) you see all streams of voters changing their party preference by numbers at once.

    For instance the last group are non-voters of 2021, voting in 2025: 4,16M

    410k voted for BSW
    1.86M for AfD
    320k for Left
    1.04M for CDU
    190k Greens
    340k SPD

    Also interesting East Germany vs. West Germany (now quoting TV not the paper´s page)
    AfD 17% vs. 30%
    BSW 3,7% vs. 10%

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    1. AG

      re: above – the higher turn-out for BSW/AfD of course coming from the East not the West

      It´s funny to see Berlin, which is dominated by the LEFT being surrounded by AfD dominated rural areas.

      Across the entire country more or less still wealth decides over voter choices.

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  49. chris

    Kind of a sad anecdote to share Re: DOGE abusing federal workers.

    I was talking to a friend who was acting as if the apocalypse had come. They talked about how it was impossible to plan, how it was stressing out the entire family, how they might have to move to a place with work and might not have the money for it, how it seemed so unfair that this could happen at all. I listened for a while and when I had the chance, I asked if they had any family who had gone through a plant closing, or a factory shutdown, or a mass layoff at one corporation or another. They said no, but that it couldn’t be worse than this. I told them, actually, it is nearly exactly what you’re describing. I suggested that maybe this experience will help you and others feel solidarity with the workers who have gone through that over the years. My friend said that there was nothing in common between themselves and miners or auto workers. I told them, you both receive W-2s, and you’re both being abused by very wealthy people, isn’t that enough? Then they asked to change the subject.

    It may be that all of these people in tech and government who are losing their jobs have no capacity for empathy or common cause with the working class.

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    1. Emma

      Yeah, these Feds are really not helping their case. The Fednews Reddit forum is full of venom for Trump voters, seeing Putin behind every Musk antics, COVID vaccine stuff, and talking about their important work against “adversaries”.

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    2. griffen

      Corporate America has stomped on plenty of people across wide swathes of the country and industries, even in times that apparently were booming. Given hindsight of course, which is generally infallible the real truth usually becomes quite clear, for example 2006 to 2007.

      I’ll share my personal anecdote briefly but losing job once in May 2009 and then the next role lasted from late 2010 into April 2012…finance industry and banking was consolidating so it was less a surprise the second go around. It is never a fun period. Then there is all the nonsense involved with each job search, equally with recruiters and or getting in the door past the HR gate persons…

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  50. AG

    BERLINER ZEITUNG at 1:10 am, that is 5 minutes ago in the middle of the night, suggests BSW probably makes it. FDP appears to be out.

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  52. AG

    BSW with 4,972% = 14.000 votes missing
    In recent interviews Wagenknecht did repeat her carrying on no matter what.
    Upcoming local elections are waiting.
    We will see. Without a mandate in parliament it is a difficult task.
    But they have to crack the immigration nut.
    Or mobilize non-voters.

    THE GREEN PARTY on its first election in 1980 had 1,5%
    AfD 2013 4,7%

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  53. Pat

    A couple of odd things that may or may not be of interest… first several of the award winners at the Four Continents Skating Championships had to bow out of the Gala Celebration gue to illness, not specified.

    Watching the SAG awards, and it is a weird mix of incompetent and amateurish. My favorite wtf moment was inept host Kristin Bell introducing the two female leads of Abbot Elementary as presenters only to have one of the two presenters be Andrew Scott. Even better they continued with the banter written for the two women that was supposed to be a play on a Female dominated industry. Obvious last minute replacement Scott was game but it just didn’t make sense. So many of the bits and introductions are stumbled over and more than one person has continued to read the teleprompter and say “Playback”. They interrupted Jane Fonda’s speech with a partial prerecorded announcer, which Fonda handled well. But there is also a theme of celebration of California that is ironic as so much of production has moved away. In fact, none of the film and television series that the first group of winners have come from did not film in California. This is not making the film industry look good.

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    1. Pat

      A bit of an apology, I missed the first few minutes so might have missed an earlier request, but there was just a please donate commercial for the SAG AFTRA Foundation, so the California focus makes sense.
      Unfortunately it followed a really embarrassing presentation by an apparently intoxicated David Duchovny with Gillian Anderson trying to keep things on track after the scripted banter tanked. So still inept.

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    2. Carolinian

      The film about Saturday Night Live that I mentioned was filmed in Atlanta except for a few shots at Rockefeller Center. Even back when I still lived there a lot of production was taking place in Atlanta.

      At least southern California still has pistachios and almonds. Perhaps they could revive all those orange groves that preceded Tinsel Town.

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      1. Wukchumni

        Actually there is precious little in the way of pistachios and almonds grown in SoCal.

        Full disclosure: Pistachio Almond ice cream is my favorite.

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  54. MPM

    The actual press release (which obviously Fox news did not read or reference) about the $2 billion dollar grant to a seven year investment fund. https://powerforwardcommunities.org/press-release

    No mention of Stacey but if this grant is “fraud” some of the well established heavy hitters involved in the coalition might want to bring some legal representation to Fox’s attention.

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