Sunday, February 09, 2025

Sunday Evening

Go birds.

America's Worst Newspaper

That fucking newspaper.

Oh No Not My Precious Money

These fucking people.

“While the administration works to achieve this goal at NIH, a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama,” Britt told AL.com.

On Friday night, the NIH announced it was cutting payments toward overhead costs for research institutions that receive its grants, a policy that could leave universities with major budget gaps, The Associated Press reported.

Lunch

Eat

Supervillains

A big criticism I have always had of these characters in movies and similar is that their motives rarely make any sense. Either it is nonspecific "I WANT TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD" stuff like Brain in Pinky and the Brain or some peculiar specific goal that isn’t even well-served by whatever evil plan that is being hatched.

But I get it now after seeing Musk.  He is a true solipsist who sees the world as a video game and other people as "non player characters." He is trying to "win" and if he can't he will unhappily unlplug the whole thing.

There was a funny Bernie-inspired debate a few years back about whether billionaires should be allowed, with all the usual dipshits lining up in favor.  Point to Bernie, I think.

The author of the linked piece has since said "ooops, my bad" which I think he has about every single major position he has publicly taken in his life.  Points for growth, but has he considered shutting the fuck up?

Morning

Sunday funday.

Saturday, February 08, 2025

Saturday Evening

enjoy

Afternoon

A moment of calm.

The Purge

Crime for members of the political appointees of the executive branch is now "legal" in the sense that there is no agency to prosecute it. Until reporting reflects this explicitly, journalists are just talking about a fantasy country.

Be Prepared To Lock Them Up

It's all on a server that also hosts CSAM by now.
A federal judge has restricted the Elon Musk-led government efficiency team from accessing a critical Treasury Department payment system.

The order, issued early Saturday, stops the access temporarily and demands the destruction of any downloaded information saying there is risk of “irreparable harm.”

Morning

Slacker Saturday

Friday, February 07, 2025

Friday Night

Rock on.

Someone Complained

Funny.
Feb 7 (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump on Friday made public an order delaying tariffs on de minimis, or low-cost, packages from China until the Commerce Department can confirm that procedures and systems are in place to process packages and collect tariff revenue.
I doubt it will return. There's no easy way to add in seamless tariff collection.

Seems Bad

I'm sure he's matured since.
Edward Coristine, a 19-year-old member of Elon Musk’s squad that’s criss-crossing US government agencies, was fired from an internship after he was accused of sharing information with a competitor.

“Edward has been terminated for leaking internal information to the competitors,” said a June 2022 message from an executive of the firm, Path Network, which was seen by Bloomberg News. “This is unacceptable and there is zero tolerance for this."

Big Balls himself.

...


Online Chats

Two US law enforcement officials who investigate cybercrimes told Bloomberg they’ve been tracking online chat rooms that Coristine and others participated in for at least a year. The officials, who requested anonymity because they are not authorized to publicly discuss their work, said they first became aware of him, under the usernames “Rivage” and “JoeyCrafter,” while investigating an alleged hacker who Coristine was communicating with in an online forum. The officials wouldn’t identify the hacker or the case they were investigating.

America's Worst Law Professors

Noah Feldman.

America's Most Ridiculous Humans

Pamela Paul.

Seems Bad

Won't stop until a judge sticks someone in jail.
Krause’s position will give him control over the Treasury Department system responsible for disbursing more than $5 trillion in annual payments, including for Social Security, Medicare, tax refunds and thousands of other measures. Musk has demanded on social media that Treasury unilaterally stop sending these payments, accusing the department’s career staff of breaking the law.

Who Is This For

What, even, is the supposed joke? Is that "the only problem"? What the fuck is wrong with you, man.

Seems Bad

There is the project 2025 stuff and the "everything that Trump has a grudge about" stuff, and he was convinced the problem with Covid was that people knew about it.
Cats that became infected with bird flu might have spread the virus to humans in the same household and vice versa, according to data that briefly appeared online in a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention but then abruptly vanished. The data appear to have been mistakenly posted but includes crucial information about the risks of bird flu to people and pets.
One thing he reacts to is the line going down, so the plunging Dow will often be our one big hope. Doesn't save us from everything, of course.

Morning

Thirsty Thursday.

... apparently it's Friday.

Thursday, February 06, 2025

Thursday Night

Sucks to be "Marko Elez" and not, like, "John Smith."

Who Knew There Were Lines

A staffer for Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency whose access to U.S. Treasury payment systems was approved by a federal judge on Thursday has links to a deleted social-media account that advocated for racism and eugenics.

The 25-year-old employee, Marko Elez, resigned Thursday after The Wall Street Journal asked the White House about his connection to the account.

The deleted profile associated with Elez, who was embedded in the Treasury Department to carry out efficiency measures, advocated repealing the Civil Rights Act and backed a "eugenics immigration policy" in the weeks before President Trump was inaugurated.


"You could not pay me to marry outside my ethnicity," the account wrote on X in September, according to a Wall Street Journal review of archived posts. "Normalize Indian hate," the account wrote the same month, in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley.

Probably the last one that got him fired. 



Keep Them Busy With Petty Shit

Thinnest skinned dorks in existence.

On Wednesday, some employees at the General Services Administration found a creative way to express displeasure with the “Fork in the Road” offer to resign: a spoon emoji. During one video meeting in which members of the agency’s technology-focused branch were encouraged to take the offer, some rained down spoon emojis in an associated chat room. On Thursday, G.S.A. workers noticed that the spoon had been removed from the list of emojis permitted in their videoconferencing platform.

Remembering This Banger

Ageing well, like everything Larry says.



Team Pritzker

The finest representative of the big oaf community.

“Unlike Donald Trump, Illinois follows the law. The bipartisan Illinois TRUST Act, signed into law by a Republican governor, has always been compliant with federal law and still is today. Illinois will defend our laws that prioritize police resources for fighting crime while enabling state law enforcement to assist with arresting violent criminals. Instead of working with us to support law enforcement, the Trump Administration is making it more difficult to protect the public, just like they did when Trump pardoned the convicted January 6 violent criminals. We look forward to seeing them in court.”

Lunch

eat

Speaking Of Liars

The standard form of journalism is to privilege the statements of the people in power, then perhaps give voice to "critics argue" a few paragraphs later.  What if you recognize you can't do that if your job is to inform readers?

News of mass immigration arrests has swept across the US over the past couple of weeks. Reports from Massachusetts to Idaho have described agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) spreading through communities and rounding people up. Quick Google searches for Ice operations, raids and arrests return a deluge of government press releases. Headlines include “ICE arrests 85 during 4-day Colorado operation”, “New Orleans focuses targeted operations on 123 criminal noncitizens”, and in Wisconsin, “ICE arrests 83 criminal aliens”.

But a closer look at these Ice reports tells a different story.

That four-day operation in Colorado? It happened in November 2010. The 123 people targeted in New Orleans? That was February of last year. Wisconsin? September 2018. There are thousands of examples of this throughout all 50 states – Ice press releases that have reached the first page of Google search results, making it seem like enforcement actions just happened, when in actuality they occurred months or years ago. Some, such as the arrest of “44 absconders” in Nebraska, go back as far as 2008.

All the archived Ice press releases soaring to the top of Google search results were marked with the same timestamp and read: “Updated: 01/24/2025”.

The distribution of Pinocchios from a glorified opinion columnist does not fix the problem.

I know we have this conversation every time Republicans are in power.

Yelling Is Good

I don't know what, precisely, roused the Democrats, but it was very clear their original post-election plan was to sit back and let Trump do unpopular things and wait until the midtermms. Give him enough rope, basically.

The plan was to go on TV every day and ask, WHAT ABOUT THE PRICE OF EGGS MR. PRESIDENT, while not standing up for their vulnerable constituents.

It isn't always clear what the minority party can accomplish/stop, but my view is sitting around looking like you aren’t even pretending to try does not actually endear you to voters.  It certainly doesn't endear you to the people who might have YOUR backs when necessary.

They have to relearn this every time they lose.

And, no, I am not claiming that my very angry blog posts make a difference.

Sounds Bad

This is the kind of piece which people (understandably) use to defend the New York Times, but the real test is whether the political reporters remember they're dealing with people who lie about everything.  Peter Baker probably thinks reading the news makes him biased, or something.

In the days after President Trump took office, as Elon Musk’s team began pressing for access to the Treasury Department’s payments system, officials repeatedly said that their goal was to undertake a general review of the system. They said they would observe, but not stop money from going out the door.

But emails reviewed by The New York Times show that the Treasury’s chief of staff originally pushed for Tom Krause, a software executive affiliated with Mr. Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to receive access to the closely held payment system so that the Treasury could freeze U.S. Agency for International Development payments.

In a Jan. 24 email to a small group of Treasury officials, the chief of staff, Dan Katz, wrote that Mr. Krause and his team needed access to the system so they could pause U.S.A.I.D. payments and comply with Mr. Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order to halt foreign aid.

Morning

go

Wednesday, February 05, 2025

Wednesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy.

Seems Bad

Hope the white house press corps are having an exciting time.
Half of Virginia’s community health centers have been cut off from federal grant money, forcing some to stop providing certain services and others to close branches.

The commonwealth has 31 Federally Qualified Health Centers with over 200 locations — a majority of which serve rural areas with limited access to medical care. Annually, about 400,000 Virginians rely on the care provided by these nonprofit, community-based centers, according to the Virginia Community Healthcare Association.

Positive Steps

We're not in "lol nothing matters" territory quite yet.
A second federal judge on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump’s executive order that seeks to end birthright citizenship, saying it’s likely unconstitutional and “runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth.”

The nationwide preliminary injunction from US District Judge Deborah Boardman is a significant ruling against Trump’s Day 1 order, which was swiftly met with legal challenges and put on hold days later by a separate judge.

The order “conflicts with the plain language of the 14th Amendment, contradicts 125-year old binding Supreme Court precedent and runs counter to our nation’s 250-year history of citizenship by birth,” Boardman said during a hearing on Wednesday.

Woopsie Doodle

Gonna be like this every day.
The C.I.A. sent the White House an unclassified email listing all employees hired by the spy agency over the last two years to comply with an executive order to shrink the federal work force, in a move that former officials say risked the list leaking to adversaries.

The list included first names and the first initial of the last name of the new hires, who are still on probation — and thus easy to dismiss. It included a large crop of young analysts and operatives who were hired specifically to focus on China, and whose identities are usually closely guarded because Chinese hackers are constantly seeking them to identify them.
The CIA is also getting Musk's bogus retirement offer, which is not legal and contains the fine print that if you don't get the promised money:

Lunch

Still sick. Might need a nap.

You Could've Listened

I don't claim that The Left is always correct (The Left often doesn't agree with itself, so this would be impossible), but a tremendous problem is that anything coded left - such as criticism of Elon Fucking Musk - is dismissed out of hand by Very Serious Centrist Dipshits. If The Left hates him, he must be doing something right!
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who previously said there are certain aspects of DOGE he could get behind, told us he’s “appalled by the unconstitutional efforts to block funding appropriated and authorized by Congress.” Khanna said he’s made those concerns known to Musk.
Yes I bet Elon is very concerned about your concerns!

Dipshit.

Maybe If His Byline Was "Matt" or "Nate" More Democrats Would Listen

Snark, but definitely not directed at Bouie.
And so the president’s opponents, whoever they are, cannot expect a return to the Constitution as it was. Whatever comes next, should the country weather this attempted hijacking, will need to be a fundamental rethinking of what this system is and what we want out of it.

The Price of Stuff

A lot of people are suddenly getting "must pay duty" notices from other shippers.
HONG KONG/SEOUL/SHANGHAI, Feb 5 (Reuters) - The U.S. Postal Service said it would temporarily suspend parcels from China and Hong Kong, after President Donald Trump ended a trade provision this week used by retailers including Temu and Shein to ship low-value packages duty-free to the U.S.

The Trump administration imposed an additional 10% tariff on Chinese goods that came into effect on Tuesday and moved to close the "de minimis" exemption that allows U.S. shoppers to avoid paying tariffs for shipments below $800.
Figuring out how to prevent shippers from exploiting the de minimis exemption is probably not a bad idea, but doing it in this hamhanded "don't worry about the consequences" fashion would be low hanging fruit for Dems if they weren't, also, on this anti-China kick.

People love their dropshipping crap and people fucking hate getting surprise tax bills from their delivery companies.

...the USPS has resumed service but the duty issue remains! 

Anyway, this highlights a big issue with this kind of thing. The actual $ cost isn't necessarily a huge burden, but the paperwork and processing across several entities is.

Morning

Wacky Wednesday

Tuesday, February 04, 2025

Tuesday Night

Rock on.

Happy Hour

Get happy

Sounds Bad

Maybe somebody should do something.
We know that the vast majority of federal aid has been halted, particularly that which comes from the U.S. Agency for International Development. This includes medical care and food for malnourished children, refugee hospitals, supplies for war-torn regions, and much more. Claims that humanitarian aid was exempted from the pause are simply not true. We know that clean-energy businesses aren’t receiving grants passed by Congress under the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act. We know that Energy Department grants intended for historically disadvantaged cities or projects with community benefit plans (including the restarting of a nuclear facility in Michigan) have been stopped. We know that electric-vehicle charging station grants have been stopped.

This is all completely illegal. Elon has boasted of shutting down certain payments through his takeover of the payment system, though that’s probably just bloviating. (It’s also terrifying, as it carries the threat of mucking up the payment system in ways that could destroy the country.) But we’re not in a theoretical place when it comes to payments to disfavored causes and organizations. They are doing this now, in the open, in plain view of everyone, and in so doing usurping the power of a coequal branch of the government.

Afternoon

Have a little bit of that norovirus or similar. Talk amongst yourselves!

Sounds Bad

For What You're Worth, Jake

Chris Murphy: They don't seem super different than Elon Musk, who has amplified vicious antisemitic information on Twitter and who gave the Heil Hitler salute on Inauguration Day -- it seems to be standard! Jake Tapper: For whatever it's worth, the Trump Team says that wasn't a Heil Hitler salute.

[image or embed]

— Justin Baragona (@justinbaragona.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 10:05 PM

WHO ALLOWS HIM? WHO ALLOWS HIM, MOTHERFUCKERS???

 Journalists love pretending "the narrative" isn't something they are mostly responsible for.


Seems Bad

Hopefully Dems figure out a way to make crime illegal.
A 25-year-old engineer named Marko Elez, who previously worked for two Elon Musk companies, has direct access to Treasury Department systems responsible for nearly all payments made by the US government, three sources tell WIRED.

Two of those sources say that Elez’s privileges include the ability not just to read but to write code on two of the most sensitive systems in the US government: The Payment Automation Manager (PAM) and Secure Payment System (SPS) at the Bureau of the Fiscal Service (BFS). Housed on a top-secret mainframe, these systems control, on a granular level, government payments that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.

Monday, February 03, 2025

Monday Night

Rock on.

Philadelphia's Worst Humans

Aiden Steigelmann.

Happy Hour

Dems need to hire some shitposters for their messaging.

"Nazi children are destroying the government"

[image or embed]

— Just Kidding (@internethippo.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 7:44 PM

Come Back Next Month

I guess we'll be doing this regularly.



The Answer Is No

Pretty easy, really.
The New York attorney general, Letitia James, has warned New York hospitals that complying with the White House’s executive order to end gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth could well violate state law.

The letter, which the attorney general’s office sent Monday morning to health care providers and other organizations, puts hospitals at the center of a conflict between the federal government and state authorities.

Progress

More like this.
WASHINGTON—Sen. Brian Schatz (D., Hawaii) said he would place a “blanket hold” on all of President Trump’s State Department nominees until the administration’s attack on the leading U.S. foreign-assistance agency ends, a move that threatens to stall Trump’s ability to get his foreign-policy team in place.
Some members also went to the USAID building today. We'll see if they get any coverage!

I do know that when Dems are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the minority party, and when Republicans are in power, news outlets love to rush the cameras to the majority party, but that's more reason to create spectacle, not less.

"Trades"

Lunch

Eat

Doug Ford, Leader Of The Resistance

At least we have some unexpected plot twists.
Progressive Conservative Leader Doug Ford is "ripping up" Ontario's $100 million contract with Elon Musk's Starlink in the wake of U.S. tariffs on virtually all Canadian goods, he said in a statement Monday.

Marks

The easiest people to con are the ones who believe they are geniuses, and therefore untrickable. And so the savviest people of The Discourse - journalists, business guys - always think they are perfectly correct in believing that other people are the marks, that they themselves are in on the con. It's okay to lie to the great unwashed, the pig people, as I, a very smart person, am convinced I understand what is really happening.
It’s been fairly frequently remarked that markets seemed to believe that Donald Trump would do all the stuff that markets liked, and none of the things that markets don’t like. Well, we now know how that turned out.
Imagine what else "markets" get tricked by!

Occasionally people complain when I link to paywalled things, but almost everything is paywalled now and I don't really know what to do about that. 

(If it is paywalled for you, it is a long rundown of pronouncements from investor guidance newsletters and similar. As for getting around paywalls, disabling javascript after loading the site often does the trick!)

...That was fast:

I assume that means she agreed to pretend to do some bullshit.


But Mah Beat Sweeteners

Most journalist names - the ones who go on tv - are competing over who can ingratiate themselves the most with the incoming administration. If Dems want coverage they are going to have to work at it.

Oldheads remember how much derision the press corps directed at Democrats in in the minority who tried to do any oversight in the early Bush era.  These people are truffle pigs to power.

Related: if you were a low level gov't staffer, would you trust one of the political reporters of the New York Times  (or Dash Sulzberger generally) to not bury your whistleblowing under an avalanche of bothsidesing?

To not do worse than that?

Morning

If Elon Musk does it, then it isn't illegal.

Sunday, February 02, 2025

Sunday Night

Rock on.

Would Probably Help To Know Some Lawmakers Have Their Backs

 But I suppose planning tea time with genocidaires is more important.

The top agent at the F.B.I.’s New York field office vowed in a defiant email to his staff to “dig in” after the Trump administration targeted officials involved in the investigations into the Jan. 6 attack — and praised the bureau’s interim leaders for defending its independence.

“Today, we find ourselves in the middle of a battle of our own, as good people are being walked out of the F.B.I. and others are being targeted because they did their jobs in accordance with the law and F.B.I. policy,” wrote James E. Dennehy, a veteran and highly respected agent who has run the largest and arguably the most important field office in the bureau since September.

Hey, Hakeem, You Busy?

 



Well What Are You Going To Do About It

 Sounds bad.

Tariffs And Trade Wars

I do think economists have muddled the issues for years, pretending that tariffs are in and of themselves some great evil borne out of ignorance, instead of one tool of taxation and policy among many.

It is the trade wars that are a problem, especially as tariffs become a tool for noneconomic goals (we call those sanctions now, usually).

Canadians know how to concentrate the pain onto various American brands in Republican states and congressional districts.

In 2018, for example, they targeted the vital playing cards industry. United States Playing Card Company is located in 
Erlanger, Kentucky (Mitch's state).

The US rules the interdependent world om a lot of ways,  but it is best not to surrender to bullies.

Elon's Been Working Hard

Amazing.

WASHINGTON, Feb 2 (Reuters) - A key U.S. pilot messaging system was experiencing a temporary outage, which could lead to flight delays on Sunday, U.S. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy said late on Saturday.

It's one thing to play Jenga with your microblogging site...

I have no idea if this is really their fault, but purging all the people who know anything other than how to own the libs with Nazi shitposts...

Morning

 Sunday funday

Saturday, February 01, 2025

Saturday Evening

Enjoy

Afternoon

Enjoy

Answer Never Coming



Actually Busy

Taking a little break from watching the world burn.  Talk amongst yourselves!

Morning

 Slacker Saturday.