One True Thing

 “The federal government is costly, inefficient, and deeply in debt. At the same time, it is not producing results for the American public. Instead, tax dollars are being siphoned off to fund unproductive and unnecessary programs that benefit radical interest groups while hurting hardworking American citizens. The American people registered their verdict on the bloated, corrupt federal bureaucracy on November 5, 2024 by voting for President Trump and his promises to sweepingly reform the federal government.”

--Memo from Trumplings to the Federal government

The animating base gospel of Trumpism, as it was for Reaganism, is contained in the email sent out by Trump's co conspirators printed above.

This is the old Reagan: "Government is not the solution. Government is the problem." AKA "The ten scariest words in the English language are: "I'm from the government and I'm here to help you." And then there was the Reagan riff on the infamous "welfare queen" who is out there driving around in her Cadillac, living at her luxury hotel, spending cash and talking trash and all on those welfare checks sent out by a feckless government, while hard working taxpayers struggled to meet their bills every month.

Despots, cranks, goons and simpletons all need a simple core fantasy: For Hitler it was the Jews, who stabbed the German army and the German people in the back and lost Germany World War One and brought brought economic collapse after that war. For Joe McCarthy, it was the Communists, who he claimed had infiltrated the American government and were poised to take over.  For Trumplings, it is that hoary, "Waste, Fraud and Abuse," or rearranged, "Waste,Abuse and Fraud," or WAF.

Truth is no government, no human organization functions with perfect efficiency, not even a National Football League team. 

But compared to most private companies, most creations of the human species, the American federal government is pretty efficient, wastes relatively little and subject to remarkably little fraud or abuse. 

It's the government is the problem goons who are the problem. Not the government.

5 THINGS I DID AT WORK LAST WEEK

•  Listened to Tim Burchett, Republican Congressman from Tennessee  who said President Trump and Elon Musk and his Musketeers are just so right about the trillions of dollars wasted, defrauded and abused  by the corrupt Washington, D.C. civil servants, which he knows is happening because he once had a friend who took over a (private) company once, and discovered that company had "ghost workers" on the books, doing no work but collecting pay checks so it must be happening in WDC, which everyone knows is true even if he cannot come up with a specific instance. Mr. Burchett was giving a for instance about government Waste/Abuse/Fraud (WAF) by talking about an instance which occurred in the private sector, not the government, it must be clear, so it was a little disorienting trying to figure out why he thought this was a perfect illustration of government WAF. But maybe what he was trying to say is people will do WAF if you give them the chance, and so, we know it MUST be going on in that corrupt city of Washington, D.C., because there are people there and people do WAF.
• Turned on FOX NEWS and listened for 15 minutes:  I was pleased to learn Mr. Musk and Mr. Trump will save the trillions they are losing by not collecting taxes from billionaires by stopping WAF in the Medicare program, but not to worry as none of this will result in a cut in benefits for Medicare recipients, even though these folks are sort of abusing the federal government by demanding back all those dollars they've paid into the Medicare system over the years. Really isn't Medicare and Social Security just the biggest WAF scam ever? Sure, people paid into those programs for decades, but now they actually expect to get benefits from all that. I mean, as Mr. Trump has said, anyone who pays taxes are losers, so they are all losers. Did they really expect to get that money back without a fight? Just ask all those union construction workers who built those Atlantic City casinos Mr. Trump never paid. You know if you hitch a ride on the back of a snake or a scorpion what is going to happen, so why are you bawling now?
• Did not respond to Mr. Musk's email saying I was fired if I did not respond to his email, because I don't think he is in any position to fire me, not being an actual real official--he sort of carries one of those Ebay badges which you can order online to say you're an FBI agent or a US Marshall or a DOGE Musketeer, which probably has an X on it somewhere, but I haven't seen it yet.

• Issued a new set of Membership Rules for anyone who wants to be part of the Democratic Party saying that anyone who wants in, who wants to be a member of the Democratic Party,  must sell us mineral rights to anything found in their backyards, or in their automobiles, and they must agree to the following statements: 1/ Diversity is a good thing in groups, but Diversity is not an individual merit,  and you can't get a job or admission to college because your face is not white 2/ Transgenders should be treated with respect and kindness but that doesn't mean they can compete on the girls swim team, if they have gone through a male puberty before they transitioned 3/ When speaking in public, never announce your pronouns or use the words/phrases "I'm really scared," or "I'm so sad" or "It's just so threatening and mean," or "unprecedented" or "dangerous" or "frightened" or any derivative of "frightened."  Re-read Churchill's "We Will Fight Them on the Beaches" speech at least weekly.
• Looked up the HR regulations re: what it means to be "semi-fired" Also went online to find out if I can buy a "Gold Card" which is like a Green Card which allows foreign aliens to work in the USA if they buy the card, and it might facilitate getting US citizenship eventually. The card costs $5 million, so I'm going to have to put that on my VISA, if I can get a visa without a Gold Card. It's not clear if it comes with a Trump Bible or a diploma from Trump University where I would like to major in cooking Trump steaks. 
• Listened to 4 hours of old Rush Limbaugh tapes

An actual, real Tough Guy

Is that 5? I can do more if Mr. Musk thinks that's a good idea.

Manchurian Candidate?

So, let's see.

The newly elected American President quickly moves to:

1. Announce he has no intention of stepping down at the end of his term. ("You'll never have to vote in another election.")

2. Fires the chief of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Navy's supreme commander (both Diversity hires, don't you know?) and thus defangs the only group which could stand in his way when he...

What Luck!

Diversity Hires!

3. Announces that he will not allow the Judicial branch to usurp the power of the Executive (i.e., his power,) and the 22nd amendment doesn't apply to him because he has not yet served two consecutive terms. So he'll worry about having to deal with stepping down or continuing, when he's 86, and besides, as long as he's saving the country, there is no law which applies.

4. Defeat the resistance of the one democratic nation actually fighting the Russian dictatorship, which invaded Ukraine because Ukraine forced it to invade, starting a war by getting invaded,  and now we've got the three major powers--China, Russia and the USA--all aligned, so  now the  encircled European democracies, all of which are struggling with far right parties who are coming to power on the surge of anti immigrant wave, are now alone to face the new axis of evil,  and they find themselves outgunned. What was once NATO has lost it's biggest, strongest member, and it has already fractured over Brexit, so continental Europe does not have to be invaded--it has already been outflanked.

Mix in South America, where a Trump wannabe named Bolsonaro  can be installed in Brazil, and what've we got?

Greenland and the Panama Canal now are taken by the USA, quick as you can say, "Crimea," and the only spots not subdued are the warring tribes of the Middle East, but who cares about them? They are so chaotic, none of them and in fact the whole package of them are really no threat. And eventually, we can gentrify the whole property, which is to say, we can make it a playground for really white, preferably Nordic people from the former countries called the Netherlands, Germany, Sweden, Norway and Denmark, who will all want condos where they can spend those dark forbidding winters.

The Only Channel where the news is Foxy

Think Netflix can turn this into a riveting mini series?

Or, maybe not. Too close to the bone. 

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, you know, 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 a 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. I would think that's not fraudulent, or abusive (at least not to the U.S. customers) or wasteful--the waste would be if a lot of U.S. customers got sick and had to use our resources here to get treated.

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, a U.S. Department of Agriculture official.  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 sick 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 simple diagnostic test, and the only way you'd know if the other cows on his farm had it was to wait for them to show symptoms, which could take years, could 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 be every hard working farmer's worst nightmare, 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, me 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 have sold those cows, from which 30,000 hamburgers carrying that prion 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?

Give me more of that.

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.