Monday, February 17, 2025
New Secretary of Health and Human Services RFK Jr Has Bonkers Views on Psychiatric Medicine
During his short-lived presidential campaign, Kennedy proposed creating wellness farms where young people could “get off” SSRIs and Adderall, a stimulant widely used to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder. Those comments were first reported by Mother Jones.
A Washington Post review of Kennedy’s public appearances found he also promoted these centers as particularly beneficial for Black youth. “Every Black kid is now just standard put on Adderall, on SSRIs, benzos, which are known to induce violence, and those kids are going to have a chance to go somewhere and get re-parented, to live in a community where there’ll be no cellphones, no screens. You’ll actually have to talk to people,” Kennedy said in a June episode of the 19Keys online show.
To pay for tax cuts, the GOP’s budget plan goes full Scrooge: tax cuts for the rich, austerity for the poor.
Goddamnmmmn they are evil assholes.
Monday, February 10, 2025
Trump says US may have less debt than thought because of fraud
This is some seriously evil shit that could tank the global economy -- what a POS GOP asshole
See also
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/letters/2024/03/19/letter-consider-what-trump-might/
Trump's Terrible Bullying Foreign Policy
... it would be wrong to dismiss Mr. Trump’s dizzying array of pronouncements and executive actions on foreign policy as simply the fulfillment of his campaign promises. He did not run on the dismantling of U.S.A.I.D., the conquest of Greenland or the occupation of Gaza.
Rather than showing strength, his foreign policy betrays a loss of American self-confidence and self-respect, eliminating any pretense that the United States stands for the things it has claimed to support since fighting two world wars: freedom, self-determination and collective security.
In many ways, Mr. Trump cuts a more familiar picture from history: an aging strongman musing about territorial expansion to consolidate power and cement his legacy.
At best, this kind of foreign policy will help shape an international order reformed in opposition to American excess; at worst, it could accelerate a global trend toward disorder and great-power conflict.
Consider what the rest of the world has seen these past few weeks. Mr. Trump is the first president in my lifetime to enter office pledging to “expand our territory.” He has insisted the United States take back the Panama Canal and seize Greenland, despite repeated objections from the governments and people of those countries.
It’s possible this is posturing to open negotiations, albeit for things that aren’t top of mind for most Americans: reducing fees for U.S. vessels transiting the Panama Canal or obtaining more access to resources and military bases in Greenland. It’s also possible Mr. Trump means what he says about territorial expansion. In any case, Mr. Trump’s targets do not suggest strength.
Picking on Panama and Greenland or threatening trade wars with Canada and Mexico has the feel of a schoolyard bully looking for someone smaller to push around.
While these fights may offer immediate political wins, the world does not live and die by the rhythms of American news cycles or the alternative reality of Fox News and OANN. It looks at us from the outside in and sees a president ignoring state sovereignty, which has been the cornerstone of global stability since the World Wars — and doing so at a time when Vladimir Putin is trying to subsume parts of Ukraine, Xi Jinping is committed to asserting control over Taiwan, and some Israeli politicians are pushing for annexation of Gaza and the West Bank, all under the guise of national security.
If the United States exempts itself from the rules, why will other nations follow them? This is one reason Mr. Trump’s suggestion that the United States take ownership of Gaza and turn it into the Middle East’s Riviera was so jarring. Like many things Mr. Trump proposes, it is unlikely to happen (again, hardly a show of strength). But it further legitimizes the idea that two million Palestinians in Gaza should abandon land they do not want to leave and ignores the fact that neighboring Arab states like Egypt and Jordan would be destabilized by complicity in ethnic cleansing. Moreover, it implicitly endorses a view of foreign policy that strips less powerful nations and peoples of any right to determine their own fate. Bezalel Smotrich, Israel’s far-right finance minister, seized on this new reality: “Now,” he said after Mr. Trump’s remarks, “we will work to completely bury the dangerous idea of a Palestinian state.” If Mr. Trump were concerned about the plight of Gazans, he would not be destroying the U.S. agency responsible for helping them rebuild.
Already, the global freeze on foreign assistance and suspension of much of U.S.A.I.D.’s work force renders the agency incapable of supporting the tenuous cease-fire in Gaza with humanitarian assistance, never mind the more arduous tasks of clearing rubble, defusing unexploded bombs and providing shelter to hundreds of thousands of civilians who have lost their homes.
Who's got the nuclear codes? DOGE Could Compromise America’s Nuclear Weapons
Fuck all the fucking maniacal GOP assholes who enabled this
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) was created by Congress in 1999 in order to consolidate several Department of Energy functions under one bureaucratic roof: acquiring fissile material, manufacturing nuclear weapons, and preventing America’s nuclear technology from leaking. It has all manner of sensitive information on hand, including nuclear-weapon designs and the blueprints for reactors that power Navy ships and submarines. Even the Australian Navy, which has purchased some of these submarines, is not privy to their precise inner workings, James Acton, a co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, told me. So far, the people who work for DOGE have not wished to be slowed down by cumbersome information-security protocols. Late last week, they reportedly demanded access to a sensitive Treasury Department system that controls government payments.
When the most senior civil servant at the Treasury raised security concerns, DOGE engineers were undeterred, according to The New York Times. They were happy to blast ahead while he resigned in protest. The employees at DOGE are reportedly working seven days a week, on very little sleep. This slumber-party atmosphere isn’t a great fit for the sober and secretive world of nuclear weapons, where security lapses are hugely consequential. I spoke with three former officials and nuclear experts about what might happen if DOGE were to take a too-cavalier approach to the NNSA. None believed that Musk’s auditors would try to steal important information—although it is notable that not everyone at DOGE is a federal employee, many lack the security clearance to access the information they are seeking, and Musk had to be stopped from hiring a noncitizen.
Nuclear-security lapses don’t need to be intentional to cause lasting damage. “When access to the NNSA’s sensitive systems is not granted through proper channels, they can be compromised by accident,” the former senior official at the Department of Energy, who requested anonymity to discuss internal matters, told me. “You could stumble across some incredibly sensitive things if you are coming at it sideways.” DOGE employees might try to avoid file systems that are known to contain nuclear-weapons designs. But they could still create some risk simply by inquiring into the ways that the NNSA spends money abroad, Acton said. (Overseas expenditures have been a focus for DOGE.) The NNSA helps other governments keep highly enriched uranium secure within their own borders, and also arranges for them to ship it to the United States for safekeeping. The details of these agreements may include information about the degree to which a country’s uranium is enriched, its precise whereabouts, and the nature of the security systems that protect it—all of which are very sensitive.
If one of Musk’s recruits were to access this information on their personal laptop, they could expose those secrets to hackers or spies... None of this is to say that the NNSA should be exempted from questions about its budget. The agency likely overspends on some things, as any bureaucracy will. But nonexperts will struggle to determine what is essential and what is excessive in its highly specialized and technical realm. Building nuclear weapons is not like making widgets. DOGE can try to root out waste, but it should take its time, and avoid the break-it-to-rebuild-it approach that Musk tends to prefer. A tech-start-up mindset might be dangerous, the former official told me. “That doesn’t work with nuclear weapons.”
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
Sunday, February 2, 2025
Two Weeks into Trump Two and It's a Massive Racist Shitshow of Epic Proportions Plus a Coup Over The American Treasury
Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat (via newsletter):
It seems like the plot of a political thriller. We are living through a new kind of coup in which Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, has taken over the payment and other administration systems that allow the American government to function, and has locked out federal employees from computer systems. Many of Musk’s collaborators in this endeavor previously worked for his private companies and/or helped him take over Twitter.
Musk is subject to no Congressional or other oversight because he seems to have no real official function other than as head of the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, a plunder operation that was named after the cryptocurrency DOGE.
When I wrote my 2017 CNN essay, “Trump and Bannon’s Coup in the Making,” that described Donald Trump’s intent to give power to “a small group of loyal insiders, who take orders directly from the leader’s inner circle and…bypass those of the existing federal government and party bureaucracies,” Musk was not on my radar. Today, Musk would replace Steve Bannon in the title.
What is happening now builds on classic authoritarian dynamics as I described them in Strongmen and in many essays for Lucid. There is always an “inner sanctum” that really runs the show, with its mix of family members and cronies, some with histories of working with or for foreign powers. And there is almost always a purge of the federal bureaucracy. That is now being carried out on a mass scale.
Historian Heather Cox Richardson, former FBI agent Asha Rangappa, former U.S. Attorney Joyce White Vance, and others have analyzed these processes and the interrelated factions that are implementing what I have called a Fascist-style counterrevolution: the MAGA loyalists inside and outside of the GOP, the Project 2025/Heritage Foundation crew (roughly two-thirds of the executive orders Trump has issued conform to Project 2025 plans), and the technocrats around Musk and Peter Thiel.
Vice President J.D. Vance shows the overlap among the categories. Vance is a MAGA loyalist; he wrote the forward to Heritage CEO Kevin Robert’s book Dawn’s Early Light: Taking Back Washington To Save America; and he is the surrogate of Thiel, who bankrolled not only Vance’s Senate race but also his private business ventures.
All of these individuals and groups want to rearrange government around an extremist ideological project of Christian nationalism and White supremacy, and most of them want to enact neoliberal deregulation and privatization meaures to “free” America from “corruption” and “drain the swamp.” This is part of the “revolution” Roberts has long talked about, and it has a history that runs through right-wing dictatorships across a century.
The speed of its implementation makes Trump’s takeover stand out within an authoritarian framework. The more corrupt and criminal the autocrat, the more he is obsessed with punishing enemies and feeling safe. Cue the immediate execution of the revenge and retribution part of this plan, with anyone who was involved in attempts to bring Trump and his collaborators to justice for the Jan. 6 insurrection or anything else, FBI employees included, is now a target.
Only with coups –or crackdowns initiated in response to coup attempts, such as Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s post-July 2016 purges—do you see such a rush to punish and expel non-loyalists from the government.
The new administration also builds on the idea of “power verticals” such as that created by Russian President Vladimir Putin, who allied with oligarchs and billionaires to expand control of the media and other sectors and allow him to consolidate his personal power. Those personalist dynamics characterize current autocracies in Turkey, Hungary, and India, and the support Trump receives from media tycoons such as Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos are an American equivalent.
And here is where the U.S. 2025 situation starts to look different. The point of personalist rule is to reinforce the strongman. There is only room for one authoritarian leader at the top of the power vertical. Here there are two.
Elon Musk and Donald Trump watch the launch of a SpaceX Starship rocket test flight, Nov. 19, 2024, Brownsville, TX. Brandon Bell/Getty Images.
Musk’s Autocratic Capture
Musk already had dangerous amounts of power in America due to his defense and other government contracts that make our national security partly dependent on his products. His takeover of Twitter, a platform widely used by governments and politicians around the world, gave him even more leverage. What he lacked was the key to the castle, a way to get control of government from within. The $250 million he spent to help Trump get elected helped to unlock the door. And so DOGE was created as a vehicle for his infiltration.
The press reported on Musk’s unusual and constant presence at Mar-a-Lago, and the input he had on the presidential transition process, but did not highlight the likely aim behind it: to insert his private businesses into the governance equation. Employees from SpaceX and other Musk entities interviewed potential appointees for the Trump administration.
Now Musk and his surrogates have physically occupied the Office of Personnel Management, setting up beds to have a 24/7 presence. They have also infiltrated the General Services Administration, which manages technology in government buildings. Thomas Shedd, a former software engineer at Tesla, is now director of Technology Transformation Services within the GSA.
That means that random individuals, whose credentials seem to lie mainly in their loyalty to Musk, now have enormous power over America’s purse strings and access to a treasure trove of sensitive personal data. They locked out the federal employees to prevent any obstructions to this access.
This is what militaries do during coups: you capture the major targets, with government buildings high on the list, and you take over communications and other systems.
Yet Musk did not need to deploy a private army to stage his coup. He was given permission to stage this operation by Trump’s Treasury Secretary, Scott Bessent, a former hedge fund manager. Acting Deputy Treasury Secretary David Lebryk, a career civil servant, resisted when Musk allies demanded access to the payments system. Lebryk was then placed on administrative leave, at Bessent’s suggestion.
According to a person interviewed by Politico, Musk’s team gained entry on Bessent’s assumption that the DOGE team’s access would be “read-only.” But Musk’s social media posts indicate an intention to cut off funds of people and organizations designated as enemies.
When extremist and proponent of Evangelical Christian holy war Gen. Michael Flynn claimed on X that Lutheran Family Services charity and aid work was a cover for a “money laundering operation” that profits from federal funding, Musk responded: “The @DOGE team is rapidly shutting down these illegal payments.”
Musk and his minions are not working alone to destroy America. The GOP, Heritage, and many American actors are embedded in foreign autocratic and right-wing populist networks, while billionaires Musk and Thiel (and their muse, Curtis Yarvin, who tells his followers that “democracy is done”) have ambitions on a global scale that hinge on destroying open societies.
Through his various investments and companies, Musk is a business partner of China, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and other autocracies, and has been in regular contact with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose dream is to see America implode from within. Even if Musk were removed tomorrow, he is part of a larger design to wreck America as a functioning democratic society and a global power. It is now America’s turn to be a laboratory of autocratic innovation.
Links:
World's richest man's takeover of U.S. Treasury is a coup
(related) Elon Musk's weird plan to make everyone put their money into his X site and use it as a bank.
The rest of the shitshow (at least some, anyway, there's so fucking much)
Trump’s disregard for US constitution ‘a blitzkrieg on the law’, legal experts say