It gets worse and worse.
For example, this makes a kind of sense.
AP, 22 Feb 2025: Musk’s cost-cutting team is laying off workers at the auto safety agency overseeing his car company (via)
Wired, Brian Barrett, 20 Feb 2025: The Incompetence of DOGE Is a Feature, Not a Bug, subitled “A series of mistakes by DOGE shows just how arbitrary and destructive this slash-and-burn strategy can get.”
Heather Cox Richardson, February 19, 2025
The past week has solidified a sea change in American—and global—history.
A week ago, on Wednesday, February 12, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels, Belgium, that President Donald Trump intended to back away from support for Ukraine in its fight to push back Russia’s invasions of 2014 and 2022.
Today’s outrageous statement by Trump, made so casually it’s hard to believe it was a red herring meant to distract the media for a news cycle so they would not notice how Musk continues to dismantle the government; more likely it’s Trump gaslighting the world, sure that whatever he says will be believed by his followers. We’re in Orwell territory, again.
Politico, 19 Feb 2025: Trump blaming Ukraine for Putin’s war leaves Europe reeling subtitled “The U.S. president called out Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelenskyy during a diatribe against Kyiv.”
I keep thinking this has to implode, sooner rather than later. Trump and/or Musk will do something so egregious, so dangerous, that *someone* will step up to reign them in, even if very carefully, behind the scenes, so as not to upset the clueless MAGA supporters.
Examples of the first item today and yesterday.
NBC News, 18 Feb 2025: USDA says it accidentally fired officials working on bird flu and is trying to rehire them
Also:
NBC News, 17 Feb 2025: Hundreds of FAA employees are let go as Trump’s mass layoffs continue, subtitled “Nearly 300 Federal Aviation Administration employees were fired just weeks after a midair collision over Washington, D.C., killed 67 people.”
Not to mention the Delta rollover plane crash in Toronto yesterday.
Subtitled “On Wanting Not to Know”
(Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 2024, 239p, including 12p notes and acknowledgments)
This is a little book published just a couple months ago that appealed for a couple reasons. First, I read the author’s previous book, THE ONCE AND FUTURE LIBERAL (review here), which was a decent-enough summary of various political matters, if not especially revelatory. And second, this book suggests it might inform associated themes about disinformation and fake news, about why people would prefer conspiracy theories to objective truth.
Musk’s boys don’t know Cobol; Robert Reich accuses MSM of being wishy-washy about the coup; Paul Krugman on the Trump administration suppressing health information; Connie Willis on Trump’s “massacre” of attorneys who resigned rather than drop charges against Eric Adams.
First, a possible explanation for that bizarre claim by Musk that he’d found 150-year-old Social Security recipients.
Facebook post by Christopher Rowe, 14 Feb 2025:
Most of Musk’s stuff is done out of simple hatred and naked ambition, but one shouldn’t overlook the great percentage that comes from simple incompetence. (This isn’t even to get started on his hypocrisy, such as implementing drug testing on federal employees who’ve never had them imposed under any administration–the guy has bragged about doing hallucinogens and smoked pot during an interview). These people have done more to spit on the US in six weeks than Andrew “Trail of Tears” Jackson did in eight years.
Well… this is plausible, about Musk’s kids, despite being computer programmers, are likely uninformed about older computer languages. They’re young. Anything to substantiate this? Let’s Google. OK, here’s this.
Daily Kos, 14 Feb 2025: Nope. There are no 150-year-olds on Social Security. It’s COBOL!
Family arriving today for the weekend, so just a few quick items for now.
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Slate, Ben Mathis-Lilly, 14 Feb 2025: What the DOGE Takeover Really Means, subtitled “In the dark corners of social media where Elon Musk and the people who aspire to work for him live, it’s clear: This is about putting ‘traditional’ Americans back in charge.”
Subtitled: How We Know What’s Really True
Illustrated by Dave McKean
(Free Press, Oct. 2011, 271pp, including 6p of index and acknowledgements)
When I was organizing my nonfiction books notes and posts last December, I was surprised that I had nothing on this book, though I was sure I read it. My records show I read it shortly after publication, in 2011. I suppose the reason I didn’t write up any notes is that it’s Dawkins-lite, somewhat like FLIGHTS OF FANCY (review here), heavily illustrated and aimed at, perhaps, younger readers. The themes are pretty basic. Still, those themes are also fundamental. So I reread the book last month, to capture the book’s ideas here. There are three essential ideas.
The first essential idea is in the subtitle. The book is a tour of a several basic scientific topics, not just to provide the current state of knowledge on those topics, but to explain *how* people reached these conclusions. You don’t get that in intro science courses in high school or even college, unless you specifically take history of science courses. (At least, in my experience.) Thus some people are put off by what they see as the impudence or even arrogance of scientists dictating what’s true and what’s not — especially when what they claim to be true conflicts with religious myths.
Paul Krugman, 13 Feb 2025: Elon Musk Is Faking It, subtitled “The fraudster who cried ‘fraud'”
Krugman starts with that howler about how USAID supposedly spent $50 million on condoms to Hamas. There was no evidence. Continue reading
