Tag: DOGE

The Sesquarcentennial Man

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Today is my regular Wednesday zoom call with the boys and of course we were hooting about last night’s speech.  Everyone loved the hilarious jabs at Biden, the endless list of billion-dollar boondoggles cut from USAID and Trump’s droll braggadocio of his list of accomplishments.  But I think I had them laughing hardest when I reminded them of the three hundred- and fifty-year-old social security recipient.  I thought a couple of them were going to have a stroke or swallow their tongues.  I think everyone inherently senses how this absurdity just encapsulates what runaway bureaucracy looks like in its terminal stage.  As Trump said, “This guy is a hundred years older than the country but he’s still on the rolls!”  You have to have a kind of primal respect for someone defending a lie that big.  It’s epic.

Now some would rightly point to the much greater financial impact of there being many millions of Americans claiming to be alive after 110, 120, 130 and even 140 years of age.  The benefits for millions of people are enormous.  They’re in the tens of billions of dollars.  They are an outrage and they should be crimes that are rooted out and punished.  Even the people just working in the social security department and ignoring the absurdity of these impossible ages should be punished.

And yet I can’t help but hearken back the Sesquarcentennial Man.  So that means he was born in 1675 AD.  Isaac Newton and Louis XIV of France were still alive back then.  In that year King Philip’s War broke out, as the Wampanoags attacked Swansea, Massachusetts.  Maybe Sesquarcentennial Man remembers the trauma of those frightening days.  Maybe he still requires medication to deal with the fear.  But whatever else we can say about him the most important characteristic he possesses is that we’re still paying for him.  And without Elon Musk we probably would continue to pay for him until the US Treasury finally closes its doors and goes out of business.

So yeah, we got a hoot out of it and thank you Donald Trump for your love of comedy.  But the real point is that the federal government is filled with people making six figure salaries while ignoring the apparently endless incompetence and corruption going on all around them with no concern for how it impacts their fellow Americans or the country as a whole.

Well, I think it just hardens our resolve to see DOGE fire as many of these useless and despicable individuals as is humanly possible.  We should want to see the number of federal employees reduced to the bare minimum possible through the use of automation and continuous improvement of the systems and processes needed to perform the critical functions of the government.  And by eliminating all non-essential functions of government.  No more research studies into fields that the government has no business funding.  If anyone has an unquenchable curiosity about the sex lives of any animal (including humans) let him pay for that voyeuristic pursuit out of his own pocket.  And likewise for every other pseudoscientific time sink.  Fund yourselves.

But more than anything else, I want to know about Sesquarcentennial Man.  Who is (or was) he?  How many descendants has he?  And most urgently, who’s cashing his social security checks.  Elon, can you help us out here?

Fixing Research With a Chainsaw

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A few days ago I linked to a video by Sabine Hossenfelder who shared a letter from a colleague warning her not to expose the fact that most academic research papers in particle physics were useless nonsense.

Now she’s followed up that video with one with her thoughts on what will happen when an administration that wants to reduce waste in government starts looking closely at what kinds of research are being funded in the hard sciences.  And that’s before we even get to the nonsense that the social sciences call research.

Now Sabine is far from a conservative.  She’s a moderate climate change advocate and several other progressive ideas.  But she seems to be a realist when it comes to the nonsense being funded in academic research centers.

She advocates for corporate research for anything that will have commercial applications and only sees government funding for things like defense applications and a very small set of other areas.

I agree with her.  Government funding of academic research has become a feeding trough for bad science.  It has created bloated university faculties doing useless research that benefits no one but the faculty and even they are dissatisfied because they know they’re frauds.

I can’t wait until Musk and DOGE gets to the NSF and the health research funding agencies.  It should be a mighty bloodbath.  And that will change the universities too, for the better.  They’ll be poorer and smaller in the short term but they’ll be healthier and more useful in the long run.

Tom’s World – 23FEB2025 – Gold Bricks Off the Titanic

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TomD

Remember 4 and a fraction years ago during the BLM riots when there were entire city blocks filled with parked charter busses just around the corner from the riot site?

Also, there were Craig’s List recruiting ads for paid “rioters”. Somehow, nobody bird dogged the lead back to the source, not publically anyway. I’ll bet you that the ultimate money source was US.gov very possibly through USAID and a couple of cutout NGO’s.

…

The analogy used by a senior EPA employee recently was, “throwing gold bricks off the stern on the Titanic”.

Even now, I suspect that if we ever learn the true scale of the corruption, we will be stunned, at least initially. After the initial shock, I think there would then be some public hangings.

So Joe Biden sold his office of the Vice Presidency for somewhere in the $30 million range?

What a small time piker.

…

($4.7 trillion)

“That’s supervillain scale theft.” I don’t think there is even a word for corruption on that scale because the word has never been needed before.

Guest Contributor – War Pig – 23FEB2025 – Theft on a Cosmic Scale

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war pig

 

Excuse me. It was $4.7 TRILLION untraceable.

$4,700,000,000,000

That’s a whole lot of decimal places.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14407689/Elon-Musks-DOGE-Treasury-payments-untraceable.html

There are also other sources, this was at the top of the list and I’m lazy.

$4.7 TRILLION unaccountable. Incredible fraud and graft at that scale. That’s about 5 times the defense budget. That’s supervillain scale theft. Every Democrat in congress during the last 4 years, and likely a sizeable numbers of Republicans as well, should be flogged on the Capitol steps, then stoned by the taxpaying public.

That’s enough one dollar bills laid to end to reach to the sun and back 4.78 times. Theft on a cosmic scale.

No Signs of Winning Fatigue Yet

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So, as I was describing it recently, I needed a crisis in my novel to provide some excitement.  I have a faction of the “good guys” go rogue and decide to take over Cheyenne and declare Wyoming a sovereign nation.  Some National Guard troops are called in to defend the State Capitol building.  The rebels surround them and then National Guard reinforcements with heavier weapons encircle the rebels.  Now, I want my protagonist to intercede and defuse the situation.  But how does he get in and how does he convince them?  Getting in is easy.  The siege circles are rudimentary positions within a city so a speeding bullet-proof vehicle is enough to make it plausible and an RPG or two chasing him will make it colorful.

But what can he possibly say to heavily armed mutineers who have lost friends and family and want to lash out at the federal government?  Now that’s the hard part.  I’ve been working something up.  Part of it will play on the fact that many of the rebels were soldiers who served in Iraq like the protagonist.  But that only gets me so far.  The hero is a plain-spoken man so I have to be careful that the words don’t come off too polished and that the persuasion fits the mindset of his audience.  Well, to be continued.

So now Kash Patel is not only the FBI Director but also the temporary head of ATF.  Temporary sounds interesting.  I wonder if Trump’s thinking of abolishing the ATF and passing along whatever functions he deems useful to another department, maybe the DOJ.  And I was amused to hear that Trump wants to visit Fort Knox to see if the gold is really there.  I wonder if he’ll try scraping it with a knife to make sure it’s not just lead covered in gold paint.  We’re definitely getting our money’s worth with Trump.

Now one thing I have been thinking about the last few days is exactly what happens to the economy if Trump does manage to cancel a trillion or more dollars from the federal budget.  That is a lot of money.  First of all, the unemployment rate will increase somewhat by the number of fired bureaucrats.  And a trillion dollars removed from the federal budget will decrease to some extent business activity.  Could it cause a mild recession?  Maybe.  But the truth is that might be exactly what’s needed to tamp down inflation.  And if we are to have recession then the earlier in Trump’s term it happens the better.  And if it is short and mild then the drop in inflation will more than counterbalance the bad news with good.  After all, these unemployed are not factory or corporate employees.  They’re bureaucrats that don’t really add to the GDP in a meaningful way.  They’re more like parasites.  Well, we’re sure to hear from the press how bad it is for the economy to lay off bureaucrats.  It’s almost as bad as laying off reporters and talking heads.

And speaking of the media, I’ve noticed that some of the left media shills are starting to wake up again.  They’re trumpeting that all the DOGE activity has angered the American people and like a sleeping giant they are awakening and demanding that USAID be allowed to waste the billions of dollars that Joe Biden earmarked for them.  Oh, well played.  Yes, the American people are incredibly strong advocates for voluntary medical male circumcision in Mozambique or mental health support for Venezuelan LGBTQ+ youth or “Safe Mobility Offices” for migrants in Latin America.  People are crying out to protect these critically important programs and the bureaucrats employed to spend these funds.

But the top news in the last few days are the various environmental slush funds that Joe Biden squirreled away just as he left office.  Ten billion dollars deposited in a commercial bank account for theft at a later date and two billion dollars in a PAC overseen by that legendary champion of environmental stewardship Stacey Abrams.  Now that’s world class robbery.

So, the hits keep coming and most conservatives say they’re not tired of winning yet.  Good.

Tom’s World – 22FEB2025 – DOGE, Blessed Be Their Name

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TomD

I think it amusing/horrifying that the DIMs have finally identified their base principle, their hill to die on that MUST NOT be breached. DOGE has revealed the nature of that principle. And it is not DIE, open borders, green energy, climate change, transgender, etc., etc.

The hill that that they have chosen as the location for their apoplectic battle is the continuation of graft and corruption on the $trillion dollar scale.

Example from yesterdays news- Though it’s difficult, I’ll try not to get too pejorative here but that FAT ***** Black Georgia “woman”,Stacey Abrams, was in the news. DOGE (blessed be their name) uncovered that a PAC formed by Stacey a couple of months ago for environmental justice received a $2 billion (read $2 thousand million) grant from the nightmare Biden admin.

Understand that this PAC was 2 months old and had no employees and had a capitalization of $100 before the grant. Also understand that the grant had no conditions, no oversite, no monitoring, no auditing.

That precisely is the base principle of what the Dims have become and will “die” to protect.

How Else Should DOGE Change America?

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Up till now my thoughts on DOGE combing through the federal budget involved how much money could be stripped from the budget deficit.  But something else occurs to me.  In addition to the wasteful spending on hare-brained research projects and woke propaganda we will also learn which companies have benefitted most from government contracts (both defense and non-defense).  And this list may explain the agendas some of these companies follow.  For instance, how much money does Google get from the federal government.  Does this money represent a significant part of Google’s revenues?  Does it have any effect on the agenda that Google pursues?  Also, if that agenda is biased against conservative individuals and corporations can the Trump administration dissuade Google from this agenda by threatening their government contracts?

Here I’m using Google as an example.  For instance, defense contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, etc. depend for a very large chunk of their income on defense contracts.  They are beholden to the DoD for their very existence.  Forcing them to drop practices and attitudes that clash with the directives of the Trump administration is assured to work.  Using this kind of approach, it seems that great inroads can be made in the private sector.  Law suits, audits of corporate documents and whistle-blower activity could go a long way in de-woke-ifying much of the corporations that do significant business with the federal government.

Next up would be lawsuits against banks that “de-bank” conservative businesses and individuals.  De-banking has been the subject of frequent stories about individuals and companies that don’t toe the line on woke practices.  A good example is the free-speech social platform Gab that has been forced to go to incredible lengths to work around the de-banking and other financial boycotting that woke corporations have instituted against it.  It seems that a Trump administration Justice Department should already be investigating any and all complaints from conservatives and their companies both as individual crimes and as part of a RICO conspiracy.  In fact, I’ll go further.  Even though we’re only one month into the Trump administration, I’m already disappointed that investigations haven’t already been announced into these practices.

And if DOGE really wants something interesting to investigate let them set some of their AI geniuses loose on Google’s AI and find out why it always creates images of the Founding Fathers or Vikings or any other exclusively northern European individuals as if they were indigenous to Sub-Saharan Africa.  I’m sure people with the correct computer savvy would very quickly locate the smoking gun of anti-white discrimination in these Google products.  And then Google would be forced to explain how this little pet project doesn’t violate the ban on DEI in federal contracts to Donald Trump personally or risk losing the enormous contracts they currently have with Washington.

Well, maybe that last is too ambitious.  But you get the idea.  I’m convinced the federal government has been picking winners and losers by the selection of contractors and this selection is tied to the “politics” of these contracting companies.  Eliminating the biases by forcing changes on these companies, or better, by selecting alternative companies that do not have a leftist bias, could enormously shift the current leftist bias in corporate America.

And finally, the black hole of leftist bias, the dreaded “terms of service.”  Companies tack a wall of text to their service agreement that provides them with literally an infinite number of objections to anything you could possibly do as a sentient being in the Milky Way galaxy, but then refuse to tell you exactly which of the myriads of conditions, they claim you have violated.  What is needed is a federal law that states that if a company claims you are in violation of their terms of service, then they have to provide a detailed explanation of this violation.  And if a US citizen wants to dispute this claim there will be a federal arbiter to hear the dispute gratis.

Well, that’s enough of that.  Me daydreaming about Trump and Musk punishing woke companies is fun but farfetched.  But investigating the relationships between the federal government (and Congress) and the contractors that get government contracts will be an even bigger story of bias, waste, graft and corruption than the NGOs that have been such an interesting grab bag to fish around in.

Fake Science Exposed

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Sabine Hossenfelder has a PhD in particle physics.  She gave up academic physics when she discovered that it made raising her children impossible.  For the last number of years, she has become a YouTube popularizer of science.  Many of her videos are interesting and entertaining.  I don’t find myself agreeing with every conclusion she draws but her talks are thought-provoking and often compelling.

In the above linked video, Sabine reads a letter from a colleague in answer to a journal paper she wrote seven years ago casting doubt on the validity and value of much of modern scientific research in general but specifically in what she calls research into the foundations of physics (particle physics).  In this letter she received from a colleague it is admitted that much of “research” done by academic physicists is worthless.  But that it supports thousands of physicists who otherwise would be unable to support themselves and their families through their educational background in physics.

In other words, because they are “scientists” they deserve to be supported by the government regardless of whether their work has any value to anyone.  Sabine spends most of the video attacking this mindset and declaring this academic fraud a severe danger to the whole enterprise of modern science.

In my opinion she’s absolutely correct.  And she is far from the only one admitting that academia (and to a large extent corporate research) have been getting less and less result from steadily more and more scientists.  And why is this?  Probably the top reason is falling standards at the universities.  Colleges have become mills stamping out more and more degree holders in scientific fields.  But the caliber of these graduates is decreasing.  A good place to look for the reason for this is affirmative action.  Universities now award more degrees to woman than to men.  If you allow for the discrepancy between male and female skills in math and science, you can infer that standards have been reduced to accommodate more women in these fields.

And all of this is happening just as DOGE is examining government programs to uncover waste and corruption.  Well, if Musk’s people were smart, they would look for whistle-blowers in all of the various NSF and other science funding entities and determine just how much of the research that is funded by the government is poorly done or even worthless.  I think they’ll find that the ratio of bad to good is close to 10:1.

During the Cold War an emphasis on scientific and engineering research was needed to “win” the arms race and the space race and every other technical challenge that we made up in our minds about beating the russkies.  Well, we won and we can stop worrying about the race and start worrying about our tax dollars being thrown away on worthless research.  Being a particle physicist should be the occupation for a very few highly gifted mathematical geniuses that can add to the store of human knowledge about an incredibly esoteric scientific field.  It isn’t the place for thousands of mediocre minds who’ve burrowed into a university payroll by checking a DEI box or two.  Likewise, the United States government shouldn’t be paying for research in pure and applied science if the results don’t provide value to some worthwhile project.  Injecting mice or rats with cocaine to see what aberrant behavior they will demonstrate is not something the United States government should pay for or even allow.

Not everyone is Einstein, Watson or Crick.  But at the very least the people who are paid US tax dollars to do science must be intelligent and competent enough to earn that money.  Currently, the great majority of academic (and corporate) researchers are neither of those things.  I hope that DOGE makes it one of their priorities to whittle down government research grants by a factor of ten.  That will be a good start.  It will save us billions of dollars and change the way the universities do business.