Waste, Fraud and Abuse!

Is it just me, or does the Department of Government Efficiency sound like a transparent scam to anyone else?

It begins with the fundamental premise that there is, MUST BE, rampant waste, fraud and abuse permeating, marinating our federal government. On the one hand, Mr. Musk tells us, WE ALL KNOW how corrupt and wasteful our government is, but on the other hand, all those federal workers whose job it is to follow the rules set out by law are wasting our money trying to do their jobs to prevent fraud and abuse.

Dept Agriculture

This is a department based on the implicit assumption we KNOW there is something rotten in Washington, that swamp thing. 

But do we really? My social security check gets deposited into my bank account every month, which I think is pretty efficient and downright nifty. Not that long ago a factory making a drug called metformin in India got closed down because American FDA inspectors working to inspect that factory in India discovered contamination in batch rolling off the line in that country. Golly gee, that's keen. Imagine: some U.S. feds, humping all the way out to India to inspect a factory there because they make stuff we consume here.

Reminds me of a woman I met who came to my office in her blue wool power suit, carrying her maroon leather attache case, the very image of a career woman, a fed. Asking about what she did for the government, she told me she was about to hop a flight from Washington, D.C. to go out to Iowa to tell a farmer there he had to kill 300 cows because testing of one of his cows showed it had Mad Cow Disease and there was no way of knowing how many of the other 299 cows have it because there is no diagnostic test, so all the cows have to be killed and that would hurt him substantially even after insurance. 

Mad Cow

I said, "Oh, you must be just the very nightmare of every hard working farmer, going out from the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C., telling him that news, looking every bit the heartless bureaucrat."

She smiled, and for a moment I saw something else beneath that blonde bun and wire rimmed glasses and blue eyes. "Well, actually, I grew up on a dairy farm in Wisconsin," she said. "So when I go out there, they find out pretty quick, I know my way around a farm, and I know the pain."

"You know the pain?"

"One night, my brother was coming home in his truck and it overturned and he was killed. So they woke me up at midnight, and my sisters, and they told us he was dead. We got up 3 hours later to milk the cows."

"They couldn't give  you a little time to sleep in and recover?" I expostulated. "I mean, they'd just told you your brother had died."

"Well," she said with a hard smile. "The cows didn't know that."

So, that's what I think of when I think of a federal employee.

That farmer in Iowa who has Mad Cows, a prion disease, undetectable, could see those cows from which 30,000 hamburgers carrying that prior could be produced and sold to unwitting citizens and nobody would know about it until 20 or 25 years later when 30,000 people are found drooling in their beds, rapidly demented with the human version of the disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease. But that bullet got dodged because of the federal lady in her blue suit flying out from the Department of Agriculture in Washington, D.C.

Mad Cow Disease, In People

Waste, fraud and abuse?

Objective Truth: The Trump Truth

  

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as "the truth" exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as "Science." There is only "German Science," "Jewish Science," etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. 

If the Leader says of such and such an event, "It never happened"--well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five--well, two and two are five.

--George Orwell

So now we learn that Russia did not start the war in Ukraine by invading Ukraine on 2/24/22, but somehow, Ukraine started the war, by getting invaded, or by goading Russia into invading, or by recklessly attacking Russia's nuclear power plants, or by getting Congress to impeach Trump for attempting to extort the President of Ukraine, or something. 

President Trump says Ukraine started the war. The US government objected to the G-7 statement that Russia was the aggressor. 

President Trump calls President Zelensky a "dictator" and calls for elections while the bombs are falling. (That would make for interesting polling places.) 

President Trump says the war in Ukraine would never have happened had he been President. Says that Hamas would never have attacked on October 7, had he been President. 

Washington attacks Pearl Harbor!

In other words, we have now gone full blown Orwell.

Of course, Donald Trump says so many things, and in the past we have written off half of what he says as just the babblings of an infant--oh, he didn't really mean that, take him seriously, not literally--so you could kind of pick and choose which of his blitherings you wanted to accept. 

But now when he says President Zelensky started the war in Ukraine and is a dictator, it's hard to keep smiling past that.

Is there something we can agree is objective truth?

Alex Jones claimed there was no massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary, Newtown, Connecticut, that no children were actually murdered by gunfire. And his lawyer, when confronted with that, answered, "Well, were you at the morgue when they brought those bodies in?"

Sandy Hook Students or actors?

So much of what we accept as truth is not something we actually witnessed: We can believe the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor when we see the photos, but, hey--those could have been staged, right?

Astronauts on the moon? Hollywood studio right?

Oh, just so staged!

When you accept the Alex Jones criteria--you can only know what you have actually witnessed, you become a sort of free floating agnostic.

And eye witness testimony is so unreliable. As so many studies have shown: eye witness memory is maeleable, untrustworthy, often wrong. 

Was there really a disease called polio? Is there such a thing as AIDS?

Fake Iron Lung Ward

Did COVID kill millions? Did you see those bodies in those trucks outside the hospital yourself? Or was it just all fake news?

Did Jesus walk the earth and perform miracles?

Did Bobby Thomson really hit a home run to win the pennant for the Dodgers?

Did the Hindenburg really explode? Were you there it see it?

Artist's Rendition?

Did Lincoln ever really live and walk the earth or did we just make up this fallen hero? 

Does Volodymyr Zelensky really exist? Did he actually say, when offered an escape from Ukraine as the Russian tanks rolled toward Kyiv, "I don't need a ride; I need ammunition."?

Dictator, Invader?

Really, when you think about it, until Donald Trump says so, nothing is real.

Just Ask Donald

Court Jester Speaks Truth to Power

 

Just ran across this guy on youtube.  Ron James.

A Canadian, of course.

Ron James

Never heard of him before.

The most amazing thing is this is from 8 years ago.

Which just goes to show, even if you see the truth and say it, that doesn't mean anyone will hear it, or even if millions hear it, it doesn't mean it will have any effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YGuXQTrzcLk

But, for what it's worth, here it is.

Mr. Trump's Truths

Listening to President Trump's press conference driving home yesterday I found myself laughing. 

Ukrainian Aggressor

It was like watching Archie Bunker in "All In the Family" with a little Rush Limbaugh background music.

Ask Mr. Trump about American officials talking with Russian officials in Saudi Arabia to come up with a plan to end the war in Ukraine, and you get an avalanche of braggadocio, including, in no particular order, because there is no particular order in Mr. Trump's speech--it's all stream of consciousness, but you get this stuff:

1/ Ukraine would never have happened if Trump had been President, which he actually was, but wasn't because the election was stolen. Putin would never have had the nerve to invade because, "I told him No! Don't do it." And now it's just all rubble, like Gaza, so why would anyone actuall want to live there, and so many have died and you know it could all have been avoided, but now that it's happened, it would make a great resort, with nice Black Sea ocean front properties and golf courses just about anywhere there aren't mine fields.

2/ Hamas would never have launched October 7 if Trump had been in the office he had actually rightfully won.  But now that Gaza is a wasteland it could be a beautiful beach front property, and all those shiftless Palestinians have got to be sent off to Jordan and Egypt, and Saudi Arabia can pay for it all, and while they're at it, maybe they can help Mexico pay for that wall which never got built, but like those casinos, would be just beautiful, had the building ever happened.

3/ Biden was just so incompetent and everyone knew it, and everyone could see it, and any infrastructure that got built was Trump's idea, and all those programs to give money to workers idled by the Pandemic was Trump's idea but would be waste fraud and abuse and Diversity, Inclusiveness and Equity if we did it now.

Ukranian Black Sea Trump Resort 

4/ Europe, which means Scandinavia, France, Britain and Germany and Italy is one big bunch of shirkers who refuse to pay for their own defense and have been free loading off the United States, which should never have contributed a cent to NATO because we have a big ocean to protect us from Russia. Never mind there is a big sky in which ICBM's can fly, because they'd never launch a missile against the USA, as long as Trump is President, which is why Mr. Trump must remain President for life.

And his next cabinet will include Mr. Bolsonaro from Brazil and Mr. Orban from Hungary and Marie LePen from France and the leader of the Proud Boys and a few of those leggy ladies who sit on the white couch at FOX news who have names but seem interchangeable, so why bother learning them and did you know you can catch them by their pink pussy hats? 

Department of Homeland Security (Gaza Branch)

The time on the highway just flew by.

Drowning in the Sea of Love: Democrats Too Woke to Breathe

 I support anyone's right to  be who they want to be. My question  is:  To what extent do I have to participate in your self image?

--Dave Chappelle 

"Our rules specify that when we have a gender non-binary candidate or officer, the nonbinary individual is counted as neither male nor female and the remaining six officers must be gender-balanced."

--Jaime Harrison Democratic National Committee Chairman

A Real Man

There are so many discussions of how the Democratic Party imploded this year and everyone has his own favorite issue which he is sure is what bothered that Red Wave of voters and swept the Democrats aside.

Mad Dog thinks there were many factors but, like most people he has a prime contender: Gender wokeness.

Among the people Mad Dog sees in his office weekly, there are a substantial number of Hispanics, and virtually every male and most of the females react with something somewhere between repulsion and hilarity at the idea of there being more than two genders, and transgenders look to them like circus freaks. Among the White plaid shirt and suspenders work a day HVAC men, the plumbers, electricians, carpenters, talk of more than two genders sounds like the essence of effete egg heads whose hands are uncalloused and who look down on the working man as too stupid to grasp the reasons why we should announce our pronouns before delivering any kind of public announcement.

We are the party that reads the New Yorker and the New Yorker has sold out to the language police and carries a paragraph like this: "They say that even in times of despair they were able to write, 'My best stuff came out then,' they said, and they know that troubled times beget strong action."

And why does the New Yorker embrace such stuff?

The New Yorker! E.B. White must be rolling over in his grave.

For Mad Dog's money, the breaking point came at the onset of the New Hampshire State Democratic convention, which was held on line during the pandemic and it began with a 15 minute (felt like a century) of Indians (who must be called "Native Americans" as if they arose from the soil of the North American continent and did not cross the Bering Strait and immigrate like everyone else) beating on tom toms while Ray Buckley, the chairman of the State Democratic Committee grinned, channeling Alfred E. Newman, the poster child of Mad Magazine. 

Watching liberals grovel before the various groups they thought were under their big tent was enough to turn Mad Dog's stomach. 

One thing you can say about Trump, is he was not afraid to offend people. He was, in that, a macho male.

Democrats of all genders are female, soft, compassionate, unwilling to offend, and there's not a Winston Churchill or Teddy Roosevelt among them. Not to say either of those historical fellows is a good model for a Democratic Party. I'd choose a Lincoln maybe. But trying to think of some muscular, virile, confident, White male to lead the charge, Mad Dog has been unable to come up with a single candidate. The last real man we had was Obama.

Conjuring up the image: Brad Pitt, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Denzell Washington is one thing. 

But what Democratic office holder do we have who would fit into that crowd?

The feisty-est Democrats are Jamie Raskin , Adam Schiff and Jay Pritzker.  But none of them are macho men; they are simply good speakers. And none of them stand a chance of become the Democrats' Trump. 

So the Democrats have lost the White male mojo, lost the beer and NFL crowd, and have settled in among the Birkenstock and Granola crowd. 

There's nothing wrong with being a pink knit hat with ears party, if you can win elections that way.

But, the problem is, you can't.

Talking Past Each Other

 

Thinking about what people said at the Deliberative Session last Wednesday, Mad Dog has been marveling at what was said, who said it and why.

This group meeting is meant to replace the old annual Town Hall meeting common in small New England towns. Now, with a population of 20,000 (in off season), meetings of the whole town are not practical and, in any event, most people are working long hours or have kids at home, so going out at 7 PM  on a work day is not top of anyone's list.

You have to be highly motivated to come out to the Academy (the middle school) on a cold New Hampshire night to talk about school warrant articles, the funding mechanism for the schools in town.

Various speakers in favor of spending taxpayer money on a Church school argued that the amount of money was almost trivial in the context of a town budget for the school which ran into millions, with which Mad Dog found no dispute. 

Another argued that to vote against the article would exacerbate hostilities in town, saying that this article had raised hackles. He never  considered  that withdrawing the request for taxpayer money would have an even more predictable effect: If the church school simply asked the archdiocese of Manchester for that $50,000, no dissension in the town would occur.

One man said there is nothing illegal about giving taxpayer money to a church, as "attorney N" has informed us  in at least three public discussions over the years. "Attorney N" always cited a New Hampshire Supreme Court decision which decisively found that despite the New Hampshire state constitution which explicitly says no citizen shall ever be compelled or taxed to support any church or church school. (Part II, Article 83, and Part 1, Article 6).  

Mad Dog was surprised to hear this assertion made because at the last Deliberative Session the prior year, a citizen had risen to say that he had Googled this case cited by "Attorney N"  but he found no such case, and in fact he had found an advisory from the new Hampshire Supreme Court, when it had been asked by the legislature whether legislation granting state Lottery funds for religious schools would be struck down as a violation of church/state separation, and the Court said, absolutely it would be struck down so don't even think about it. 

 "Attorney N" never rose to respond to that criticism and by the old legal doctrine, qui tacit, consentit (silence implies consent), she caved, and tacitly conceded what she was saying all those years had been pure poppycock. 

That was all very public and the man arguing that Ms. N had already settled this issue was either not present for that debacle, or had forgotten, or had simply not understood how thoroughly Attorney N had been discredited. 

She was not present at the most recent Deliberative Session: Mad Dog  suspected  she was still smarting from the smack down she had got last year.

Another citizen, a member of the Budget committee, rose to say that just because there are empty seats in Hampton schools, doesn't mean we are paying twice for kids who leave those seats empty and go to Sacred Heart.  It had been argued that paying for kids to go to Sacred Heart was analogous to paying for cafeteria lunch for all students, but then paying for a small group of students to go eat lunch at McDonald's. We already bought lunch for all the kids--why are we now paying again?  

That argument bounced off the Budget Committee man like water off a duck's back. He blithely insisted that if those kids, whose seats await them at the public schools, decided to return to public schools and reclaim those open seats, it would cost the public schools "millions," because...well, he didn't say why, but he did say that's just what he believed.

Somehow, if those kids were, by analogy, to not go out to ' and returned to eat those uneaten meals in the cafeteria, it would cost us all a lot more!

The same man also averred that just because someone says government paying for a religious school violated the establishment clause of the First Amendment, that does not mean that such government pay out actually is unconstitutional. Nobody in the deliberative session is a constitutional lawyer he noted. 

He also threw in that "competition is good for public schools" saying that with Sacred Heart competing for students, it would cause the public schools to step up their game, because, you know, private enterprise is always leaner, more focused and efficient than government. This has been the chant of the voucher school programs for years. Private is always better than public.

This left Mad Dog wondering what the public schools would do differently, to "compete." 

If Sacred Heart School, which educates only 45 students from Hampton, were to close down tomorrow. Would the Hampton public schools say, "Oh, well, now there's no more competition, so we can all go skiing or fishing now, because, well, there's no more competition"?

Through all this, that  George Carlin refrain kept running through Mad Dog's brain: Carlin was talking about how local Catholic churches were always seeking sources of money:  "God loves you but he needs money. He always needs money. He's all-powerful, all-perfect, all-knowing and all-wise. But somehow, he just cannot handle money!"

Is Diversity a Virtue?

 

Of course, any discussion of "diversity" has to begin with an understanding of what you mean by it.

Starship Enterprise: Making Diversity Work

"Diversity/Equity/Inclusion" banners flew over college campuses coast to coast and, as I walked by them I thought, "Well, not a bad idea," without thinking more about it.

You will not replace us

To my mind, "diversity" meant faces of different races in a college class. That did not mean a diversity of experience, as all those faces belonged to kids who were raised in the same upper class neighborhoods, went to the same schools and spoke in the same rhythms and used the same language. If you were speaking on the phone to a Black classmate, you would never know he was Black, until the advent of FACETIME.

diversity

But as my good friend, and longtime sage mentor pointed out, when she thinks of Diversity she thinks of her sister, who just got laid off from a high tech firm, one of two in her division, both of them women, the only women in that division, while younger, less competent men were kept on. Diversity in the workplace to her meant seeing women and hearing from women in that workplace.

4 women in a Residency program 

Thinking back to the transformation I saw in hospitals, the advent of more women physicians made a huge difference in the atmosphere among the interns and residents, where women were often referred to as cunts or sluts or "the town tunnel." Women insisted that if they were suffering from the flu, with a temperature of 103, coughing, they be allowed to remain at home and they insisted that during flu season, the on call schedule be designed to allow for that, which never occurred to me, as I had gone to work with that fever, likely spreading flu to my patients and coworkers. It was the macho thing to do.

Not that women weren't tough enough to do that: Speaking with an ER doctor, a woman, I noticed her red eyes and nose, her coughing, and her pockets stuffed with Kleenex, and I asked her why she wasn't home and she laughed and said, "During flu season all the folks who work in the ER are sicker than ninety percent of the patients we are seeing: If we stayed home, the ER would close down."

But Diversity goes well beyond gender and race. There is a transgender, male to female working at our town library, who is well over six feet tall, purple hair and flowing dresses. The library is the main hang out for middle school students, age 11 to 14, who gather there while their working parents are still at work, and these students glance at this unusual library employee with hardly a hitch--she is just another town character, alongside several other oddities.  That is probably a good thing--tolerance for the abnormal inculcated in the kids of a small New Hampshire town.

But, back in 1966, I well recall a student asking the professor in an English class if we could interrupt the scheduled topic to discuss the protests advocating for admitting 12% of the next class as people of color.  I made myself unpopular by asking why we should do that. If we were all supposed to be there because of some sort of merit, why were we abandoning the idea of meritocracy for the sake of injecting a certain number of students into the student body simply to achieve a mix of non white faces in the crowd?

The professor asked me what I thought consisted of merit.

I said, well, we had been told it was SAT scores, and grades.

And he asked about the kids who were admitted with lower SAT's because they were good football players, or those with lower grade point averages who came from the Pacific Northwest or the Southwest or the South, because the college liked to think of itself as a "national" university.

Southern Opinion and Perspective

Well, I replied, you might say the different perspective and values those kids brought to the college might be considered a merit, but he asked whether I could tell a kid was from Seattle talking to him about any topic, because his perspective was so different, and I had to admit everyone on campus, no matter where they were from seemed pretty alike, except for the kids from the deep South, and so "geographic distribution" didn't seem to affect the college experience much.

Unanimity of Opinion, Save One

White people and, more recently Asian Americans have argued that setting aside places for Blacks meant those places were lost to them and they had clearly been displaced from places at Harvard to allow Blacks to occupy those places.  In this, they shared the perspective of those marching at Charlottesville, White men chanting, "You will not replace us."

White Anglo Saxon Protestants saw themselves displaced from medical schools and Ivy League colleges when those institutions divested themselves of quotas against Jews.

Asian Americans with high test scores and high GPA's found they were rejected on the grounds of not being "positive personalities" i.e., not being likeable, kind, generous, widely respected.  That is, they were rejected for being competitive grinds, grade grubbers, i.e. they were rejected for playing the game, ruthlessly, by the rules, and not as some sort of gentlemen. 

If you are going to define merit as high grades, high scores but then you change that when you discover you are facing a class of 100% Asians, what do you do? Do you accept that? Or do you change the rules, and assign points to exclude those who are successful playing to win?

4 women in a class of 90, by quota rule

And that brings us to the basic problem of how do you define merit? Do we even know what qualities, talents, potentialities are required to make the best workers?

Doctors, to take just one example, need very different talents, depending on the specialty: What you want in a neurologist is light years away from what you need in a cardiac surgeon, and the pediatrician is almost a different species from the orthopedist.  

And the fact is, you do not need to be good at solving differential calculus equations to be a good endocrinologist or urologist, and your grades in organic chemistry are probably not predictive of your ability to do abdominal surgery. 

We are simply not very good as identifying talent for most fields--in this musicians are much better than any group. The audition behind a screen for the New York symphony is the purest form of meritocracy there is in human resources, but it is duplicated almost nowhere else, not even in selecting professional athletes. (Read "Moneyball.")

Sometimes, forcing institutions to look for other traits is not such a bad thing. When I was young, small fast athletes were cut from the football team, as coaches knew that only the biggest, strongest boys made good football players, at least as those coaches designed their playbooks. If your offense consisted of running the ball up the middle and had no passing attack, then you didn't need small fast guys who could catch a ball 40 years downfield. That was until, in the 21st century, driven by the big bucks that reward winning in the NFL, small, quick, elusive and, above all, fast athletes proved to be invaluable scoring machines and now you see a lot of diversity of body type on the NFL gridirons in the huddles of every team.

What is Merit?

Personally, I would like to see Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Stanford announce that they will admit 1/3 of their classes based on just grades and test scores, and 1/3 based on some special talent (oboe playing, computer skills, kicking field goals, equestrian prowess) and 1/3 by lottery. 

Of course, that would deflate the myth that simply being admitted to Harvard means you are a certified genius, but it would likely benefit Harvard and the rest of the country.

For certain arenas, diversity is clearly a dangerous and counterproductive consideration: being a good surgeon, a competent engineer or an airplane pilot, musician, doctor should have no diversity requirement. Admissions to schools training these folks should  be color blind, sex blind, blind to everything but the attributes which make for good performance.

If that means that the next class of Harvard medical school is 100% Asian females, so be it. 

But I doubt that would actually happen. 

Mr. Trump and his White Supremacists fans are loathsome, but that does not mean they are always wrong about everything, and the attack on diversity is (often secretly) applauded by a wide range of Americans and is broadly popular, I am guessing, just based on what I hear in the office, and around town.