“It’s only a thimbleful of a voice, and I have to use it close to the microphone. But it is a kind of oversmoked voice, and it automatically sounds intimate”:
Keeping up with the DOGE news
I can’t keep up – there’s too much news breaking every day. But I try.
This seems important. Some of it isn’t due to payments to people perpetrating fraud, but some definitely is. At the very least, we seem to have utterly incompetent bookkeeping. How much is merely that and how much is payment to people perpetrating fraud? Either way, it’s shocking:
On Wednesday, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) held her DOGE subcommittee hearing and announced it has discovered that over the past 20 years, the U.S. government has squandered $2.7 trillion on improper payments. Just last year alone, the government handed out $170 billion to individuals who were deceased, criminals, or otherwise ineligible for government programs.
Even more alarming, the government made $44 billion in payments with no clear record of where the money actually went — officials simply don’t know.
Medicare and Medicaid are the biggest culprits when it comes to these improper payments. The Biden administration lost a staggering $764 billion due to a combination of inaccurate record-keeping, bureaucratic incompetence, and outright fraud.
This has been going on under presidents from both parties. No one seemed to have the power and energy – and in some cases, even the inclination – to look into it. Before we had computers, it would have been difficult – well-nigh impossible – to search thoroughly. But we’ve had computers for a long time.
Remember the old adage, “good enough for government work”? This isn’t good enough – even for government work.
And what’s up with the limestone mine? Yes, the limestone mine (and I linked to Yahoo because they’re not known for being sympathetic to any causes on the right, and nevertheless they’re covering this):
In a press conference in the Oval Office on Tuesday, Elon Musk, the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, said that the US government stores and processes all retirement paperwork in a limestone mine.But he added: “We were told the most number of people that could retire possibly in a month is 10,000 because all the retirement paperwork is written down on a piece of paper. Then it goes down a mine.”
Musk said: “Instead of working in a mineshaft, carrying manila envelopes to boxes in a mine, you could do practically anything else, and you would add to the goods and services of the United States in a more useful way.”
DOGE’s X account later published photos of the facility.
I’m surprised they haven’t enlisted monks to be scribes.
This is actually not news, although it was news to me and probably to you. But the article mentions that:
A 2014 Washington Post report said 600 Office of Personnel Management workers processed federal employees’ retirement papers by hand at the site, with them passing thousands of case files from cavern to cavern.
The manual process continues to operate because of successive administrations’ failures to automate it, the outlet said, delaying how fast workers receive their full retirement benefits.
The left is trying very hard to stir up outrage about what DOGE is doing, with stories like this one, parts of which seem bogus. But yes, I am pretty sure that DOGE is causing some hardship. But something needed to be done, and it’s been needed for a long, long time.
In addition, although this isn’t a DOGE action, it’s along the same lines. From Lee Zeldin:
?The Biden EPA tossed $20 billion of “gold bars off the Titanic”.
BIG UPDATE! We found the gold bars and they are now being recovered for you, the hardworking American taxpayer.
Here are more of the details: pic.twitter.com/DM4C0TQcpj
— Lee Zeldin (@epaleezeldin) February 13, 2025
RFK Jr. confirmed
He’s not my favorite of Trump’s nominees. But I’ll give him a chance.
The vote mirrored that for Tulsi Gabbard yesterday – Mitch McConnell was the only Republican voting no.
I do think that RJK’s anti-vax views have been somewhat exaggerated by his detractors. He’s certainly not against all vaccines, for example.
And here’s a relatively fair article about him from, of all places, the BBC.
The DOJ sues New York, Hochul, and James
Bondi announced the move, and why:
“They [NY] have a ‘tip-off’ provision that requires New York’s DMV commissioner to promptly inform any illegal alien when a federal immigration agency has requested their information,” Bondi said. “It’s tipping off an illegal alien. And it’s unconstitutional, and that’s why we filed this lawsuit.”
The left is screaming – among other things – “we must protect these people from Musk stealing their data!” This of course has zero to do with Musk, and everything to do with policies that New York enacted in 2019, when Musk was happily making Teslas and was still more or less on the left, or at least not on the right.
More here, from Jonathan Turley:
“One of the interesting aspects about the case against New York is that its law has a provision that is called a tip-off provision. So that an unlawful immigrant is told whether the federal authorities have inquired about your status, and the federal officials are saying, ‘Well, what gives with that?’” Turley told Jesse Watters. “You know, you’re basically giving a tip off to someone that we’re trying to apprehend.”
Turley said that Trump has been forthright about his intentions.
“This is going to be a very interesting fight, and there’s nothing subtle about this. This is sort of smash-mouth litigation saying, ‘We’re at odds, and we’re going to have to resolve this in the courts.’ This is part of a general move by the Trump administration to go ahead and get these fights going,” Turley said. “They want to establish the rules, and President Trump has said, ‘Look, I’ll comply with court orders that go against me. I’ll appeal them, but we want judicial review.’” …
“The important distinction there, Jesse, is that there’s a line of cases in the Supreme Court called anti-commandeering cases. And in those cases, which rest on state’s rights, the court has said, ‘Look, you can’t require the state to carry out federal functions and federal policies.’ But that tip-off provision is an active effort that works against federal enforcement,” Turley said.
A state cannot actively work against the federal authorities.
Also, Alan Dershowitz has released another video along the lines of the one I spotlighted the other day. Here’s the new one:
Open thread 2/13/2025
Now, here’s something I never thought about before:
What will happen on Saturday with Hamas and the hostages?
Unfortunately, I can’t answer the question. I don’t think anyone can at this point, including the main players.
At least four things happened recently to get us to this possible fork in the road. First was the terrible condition of the last three hostages released. Second was Hamas saying it canceled any more releases till further notice – although they’ve now sort of walked that back and said maybe (I can’t find a link for that at the moment, but I heard it late last night). Third was Trump’s saying that’s it, enough, give back all the hostages or you’ll regret it – in other words, FAFO. And Netanyahu has echoed what Trump said, except Netanyahu only said that “the hostages” have to come back on Saturday rather than all the hostages.
The agony of the families who were expecting their loved ones back during this first phase must be horrific. Perhaps Trump and Netanyahu are calculating that Hamas’ reluctance to continue meant most of the remaining hostages are dead, or in such horrible condition that Hamas will never release them. Or maybe Hamas considered pausing the returns in order to fatten up the next group up a little more, but Trump and Netanyahu are saying their time for stalling has run out.
Hamas has never had to fight this war with Trump as the US president – only with Biden and company in charge. What will they do? What will Israel do? What will Trump do? Letting go of the planned return of the hostages is extraordinarily painful, because this time the idea is that they will probably die soon if they aren’t dead already, although there’s renewed evidence that at least some are still alive. But Hamas may have overplayed it’s hand. Let’s hope so.
Tulsi Gabbard is confirmed as head of intelligence
All the Republicans in the Senate voted yes, except their former leader Mitch McConnell.
Interesting.
With the coordinated and persuasive assistance of Chairman Tom Cotton, R-Ark., and Vice President JD Vance, crucial senators who had lingering concerns about Gabbard were convinced to back her in the crucial committee vote last week, including Sens. Susan Collins, R-Maine, and Todd Young, R-Ind.
Her success came despite the impassioned plea of Vice Chairman Mark Warner, D-Va., and Democrats, who all opposed Trump’s DNI pick.
I don’t think that there’s any love lost between the Democrats and Gabbard since her defection from the party and support of Trump. As for McConnell, here’s what he said:
The Kentucky lawmaker flagged Gabbard’s refusal to label Snowden a “traitor” as a serious concern.
“Edward Snowden’s treasonous betrayal of the United States and its most sensitive lawful intelligence activities endangered sources, methods and lives,” he said in a statement after the vote.
He also denounced Russia’s “unprovoked war of aggression against Ukraine” as something that threatens American interests and is “solely the responsibility for Vladimir Putin.”
“Entrusting the coordination of the intelligence community to someone who struggles to acknowledge these facts is an unnecessary risk,” he said.
McConnell questioned Gabbard’s evolving views on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which authorizes expanded surveillance that accounts for 60 percent of the intelligence in the president’s daily briefing.
Gabbard introduced legislation to repeal FISA’s Section 702 when she served in the House, but she said ahead of her Senate confirmation hearing it had been fixed and called it a “vital” national security tool.
What’s Trump going to do about Ukraine?
Many people expect him to abandon the country, throw it to the Putin wolf. I’ve never thought that would happen. But I do think that, in characteristic fashion, he’ll change our relationship to Ukraine in accordance with his own priorities and what he sees as America’s interests.
When the war between Russia and Ukraine began with Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, it was shocking and deeply disturbing. Initially I thought Russia would win handily, but that turned out to not be true and Ukraine mounted a fierce resistance. It always seemed as though it might be a futile resistance for the simple reason that Putin seemed determined to play out the old Russian way of war: throw a lot of people into it and sustain high casualties, and outlast the enemy because of Russia’s huge population.
At this point, the war has gone on for three years with much loss of life on both sides. To what end? Ukraine remains standing, and Russia has control of some extra territory that was Ukraine’s. But the war has seemingly been more or less stalemated for a long time, and meanwhile we supply a great deal of aid to Ukraine, particularly military aid.
Trump has long said he plans to negotiate an end the war. This is in line with his general dislike of war – a dislike I think we all share – and especially of US involvement in foreign wars. But my sense is that he also has a general desire for fairness to Ukraine; although the country will lose something, it shouldn’t lose its essential nationhood and most of its territory should remain intact. Nevertheless, America’s interests, which include a stable Europe, are not to endlessly fuel an interminable war between Russia and Ukraine that at this point is mostly only good for causing more death and destruction.
When I imagined what that agreement might look like, I have long thought it would involve not only some land loss by Ukraine, but no NATO membership and yet some sort of guarantee of protection. Trump might arrange some sort of deal where we help Ukraine in yet-to-be-decided ways while getting something back.
Today Trump announced he’d talked to Putin and that the negotiations are set to begin:
Trump added that the negotiating process “will begin by calling President Zelenskyy [sic], of Ukraine, to inform him of the conversation, something which I will be doing right now,” before revealing that the American delegation to any peace talks would be led by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Middle East special envoy Steve Witkoff.
In a Facebook statement, Zelensky confirmed that he and Trump had “a meaningful conversation” about “opportunities to achieve peace [and] discussed our readiness to work together at the team level, and Ukraine’s technological capabilities—including drones and other advanced industries.”
“We also spoke about my discussion with [Treasury Secretary] Scott Bessent and the preparation of a new document on security, economic cooperation, and resource partnership. President Trump shared details of his conversation with Putin,” Ukraine’s president added.
“No one wants peace more than Ukraine,” Zelensky concluded. “Together with the U.S. [sic], we are charting our next steps to stop Russian aggression and ensure a lasting, reliable peace. As President Trump said, let’s get it done.”
For Trump’s part, the American president said the conversation with the Ukrainian had gone “very well.”
It is impossible to know what’s really going on behind the scenes or what Zelensky really thinks. But my hunch is that once he realized Trump was going to be the next president, he started shifting to a practical way to look at things. I doubt he wants the country to keep bleeding, and I think he sees there can be something – quite a bit, actually – in this for Ukraine, if he plays his cards right.
As best I can determine, we are still giving Ukraine military aid at the moment. Whatever nonmilitary aid Ukraine was getting through USAID has been suspended for 90 days along with other USAID payments in general, although it isn’t completely clear that humanitarian aid has completely stopped.
Also, see this, which I see as a way to put pressure on Europeans to pay their share, in typical Trumpian fashion. The article is from today:
America will no longer front the lion’s share of aid to Ukraine, the Trump administration said today in a devastating blow to Kyiv that will pile pressure on Europe to fill the void.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said that Washington will ‘no longer tolerate an imbalanced relationship’ with its allies, adding that ‘Europe must provide the overwhelming share of future lethal and non-lethal aid to Ukraine’.
He stressed that the United States was no longer ‘primarily focused’ on Europe, and said that the old continent would have to fund most of Ukraine’s defense itself in a turn away from a 75-year role as the ‘primary guarantor of security in Europe’.
The article also says there won’t be US troops in Ukraine. Is this any sort of surprise? I never thought there would be. And that Ukraine would have to cede some territory. Did anyone think there would be a peace deal without at least some territory ceded? If so, I think that person was dreaming. The details – which we don’t know yet – are what matters.
Here is one possibility, from an article that was published yesterday:
Ukraine has offered to strike a deal with U.S. President Donald Trump for continued American military aid in exchange for developing Ukraine’s mineral industry, which could provide a valuable source of the rare earth elements that are essential for many kinds of technology.
Trump said that he wanted such a deal earlier this month, and it was initially proposed last fall by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy as part of his plan to strengthen Kyiv’s hand in future negotiations with Moscow.
“We really have this big potential in the territory which we control,” Andrii Yermak, chief of staff to the Ukrainian president, said in an exclusive interview with The Associated Press. “We are interested to work, to develop, with our partners, first of all, with the United States.” …
Ukraine’s rare earth elements are largely untapped because of the war and because of state policies regulating the mineral industry. The country also lacks good information to guide the development of rare earth mining.
Geological data is thin because mineral reserves are scattered across Ukraine, and existing studies are considered largely inadequate. The industry’s true potential is clouded by insufficient research, according to businessmen and analysts.
In general, the outlook for Ukrainian natural resources is promising.
That could easily be part of the deal, benefiting both Ukraine and the US.
Open thread 2/12/2025
The aftermath for survivors: the Holocaust, and October 7
The terrible plight of returned hostage Eli Sharabi – the man who was released from Hamas captivity last Saturday in a state of extreme emaciation and weakness, only to discover that his wife and two teenage daughters had been murdered in cold blood by Hamas right after he was kidnapped in October of 2023 – immediately called forth Holocaust comparisons from many people, including me. This was not only because of his obvious starvation and debility, but also because of the devastation wrought on his family (his brother also was kidnapped, and had died in captivity).
So although Sharabi is having a reunion with relatives, there won’t be any reunions on earth with his wife and daughters except by their gravesites. It’s a blow of such magnitude it’s hard to fathom, but many Holocaust survivors (including Otto Frank) endured similar suffering and losses: the torment and horror of the camps, and then the tragedy of learning that their families were gone. The road to recovery was difficult, and if you have read many tales of Holocaust survivors, you learn that some don’t make it back to wholeness.
I’ve written before about Holocaust survivors and their differing reactions; some do a great deal better than others. Part I of the series can be found here, and Part II can be found here. Part I is about a survivor who had an unusually optimistic nature and made quite a smooth transition, and Part II is about the brilliant Italian writer Primo Levi. I urge you to read them both, but especially the essay about Levi.
Levi may or may not have killed himself forty years after his war experience. He was in his 70s and suffering from depression, but the fall which caused his death may have been an accident. No one knows. In that essay, I quote some passages from his masterpiece Survival in Auschwitz. I cannot recommend the book highly enough.
But it is the sequel to that book that I’m going to be talking about now; its American title is The Reawakening [*see below]. It tells the tale of his year-long journey to get home and to recover from enormous emotional and physical devastation. He was very fortunate in some ways – his family had survived, and he was young (25) and was able to marry and rebuild his life.
This passage from the book (translated from the original Italian) describes the moment when – having been left behind ten days earlier at the camp, expected to die with hundreds of others because of severe illness, when the Germans abandoned the camps and led the rest of the inmates on horrific death marches, so determined were they to cause the death of all the remaining inmates – Levi sees his first liberators, four Russian soldiers on horseback:
To us they seemed wonderfully concrete and real, perched on their enormous horses, between the grey of the snow and the grey of the sky, immobile beneath the gusts of damp wind which threatened a thaw.
It seemed to us, and so it was, that the nothing full of death in which we had wandered like spent stars for ten days had found its own solid centre, a nucleus of condensation; four men, armed, but not against us: four messengers of peace, with rough and boyish faces beneath their fur hats.
They did not greet us, nor did they smile; they seemed oppressed not only by compassion but by a confused restraint, which sealed their lips and bound their eyes to the funereal scene. It was that shame we knew so well, the shame that drowned us after the selections, and every time we had to watch, or submit to, some outrage: the shame the Germans did not know, that the just man experiences at another man’s crime, the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist, and that his will for good should have proved too weak or null, and should not have availed in defence.
That’s a sample of the quality of Levi’s writing and the depth of his thought: the feeling of guilt that such a crime should exist, that it should have been introduced irrevocably into the world of things that exist …
The Holocaust haunted him. At the very end of the book The Reawakening, he sounds a chilling note about how extraordinarily difficult it is to endure experiences such as those of the camps, and how life-changing, and how hard to shake. This was written in 1961:
I reached Turin [his home town] on 19 October [1945], after thirty-five days of travel; my house was still standing, all my family was alive, no one was expecting me. I was swollen, bearded and in rags, and had difficulty in making myself recognized. I found my friends full of life, the warmth of secure meals, the solidity of daily work, the liberating joy of recounting my story. I found a large clean bed, which in the evening (a moment of terror) yielded softly under my weight. But only after many months did I lose the habit of walking with my glance fixed to the ground, as if searching for something to eat or to pocket hastily or to sell for bread; and a dream full of horror has still not ceased to visit me, at sometimes frequent, sometimes longer, intervals.
It is a dream within a dream, varied in detail, one in substance. I am sitting at a table with my family, or with friends, or at work, or in the green countryside; in short, in a peaceful relaxed environment, without tension or affliction; yet I feel a deep and subtle anguish, the definite sensation of an impending threat. And in fact, as the dream proceeds, slowly or brutally, each time in a different way, everything collapses and disintegrates around me, the scenery, the walls, the people, while the anguish becomes more intense and more precise. Now everything has changed to chaos; I am alone in the center of a grey and turbid nothing, and now, I know what this thing means, and I also know that I have always known it; I am in the Lager [German expression for concentration camp] once more, and nothing is true outside the Lager. All the rest was a brief pause, a deception of the senses, a dream: my family, nature in flower, my home. Now this inner dream, this dream of peace, is over, and in the outer dream, which continues, gelid, a well-known voice resounds: a single word, not imperious, but brief and subdued. It is the dawn command of Auschwitz, a foreign word, feared and expected: get up, Wstawàch.
* As I said, the second book is called The Reawakening in the US, but the actual title in Italian is better translated as The Truce, and that’s what it was called in other countries. I think the difference is meaningful. The American title emphasizes hopefulness: the author has come back nearly from the dead, returned to life, and has many adventures. Although the book is hardly light, it’s lighter than Levi’s Auschwitz masterpiece, which was called Survival in Auschwitz only in the US; in other countries it was published with a title that seems to have been Levi’s choice: If This Is a Man.
In each case, the original title is more poetic, more ambiguous, and less upbeat. Yes, the quotes in this post refer to Levi’s reawakening to normal life. But as he describes in his nightmare, it’s not a totally successful reawakening. Sometimes he’s still in the nightmare, and has trouble knowing which world is real. Perhaps they both are real: thus, The Truce.
Please watch: Dershowitz says it perfectly
As my regular readers are almost certainly aware, I have a law degree from a university that’s supposedly not too shabby. But it was a long long time ago that I sat in a law school classroom. I didn’t like most of my classes, although there were a few exceptions that I liked very much, such as what had traditionally been known as Jurisprudence. I finally realized even while in school that I probably wouldn’t be practicing law, for a host of reasons; one of them was the fact that at the time I was fairly shy.
Nevertheless I did somehow take in a lot of valuable knowledge, and I don’t mean “valuable” in the sense of earning money at the law – which I never did – but “valuable” in life. The same skill that got me through some exams where I didn’t really know the answer – that is, using a combination of gut intuition and some knowledge – stood me in good stead in life, when a friend would ask me a legal question and I’d answer, “Well, my knowledge of law is very old, and I’m not a member of the bar, and I don’t know the specific law at this point, but here’s my best guess … ” . And of course that rusty old knowledge enables me to at least understand most of the legal questions that pop up again and again when I blog.
If people had told me I’d be voluntarily writing legal papers several times a week, at my age, I’d say they’d lost their minds. Yet here we are.
Anyway, that’s all an introduction to the fact that I feel the weight of the need to write of what I think the issues are with Trump’s efforts at shrinking the federal government, versus what the MSM wants the public to think. The answers will be different for each agency, depending on what is being attempted by Trump and company, and whether the agency is wholly under the executive branch or whether Congress was involved (and in what way Congress was involved). It’s not simple; it’s complex, and the courts will undoubtedly get very involved, with some of the questions almost certain to end up being decided by SCOTUS. And all the way, the MSM will try to stir up hysteria on the left by claiming that Trump is doing something Hitlerian and dangerous.
I have some general thoughts on the matter that I was trying to formulate and organize when I happened to click on the following video by Alan Dershowitz, and I discovered – as has been the case so many times – that he summed up exactly what I was thinking, only he says it more elegantly and succinctly. I’ve cued up about a 21-minute segment that covers it nicely, and I urge you to listen (you can speed it up if you like; that’s what I usually do).
You might want to send it to people you know who are frantic about what’s happening. Will it help? I don’t know, but perhaps there’s a chance.
Open thread 2/11/2025
[Hat tip: commenter “AesopFan.”]
I think the content is quite good, but I don’t think this is really Jordan Peterson reading it – I think it’s an AI-generated version of his voice: