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“A DOGE employee now has edit access to NOAA documents and the agency has been ordered to halt its international communication.”
So much for hurricane warnings.
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Only MAGA hurricanes will be allowed. Not these winds from abroad.
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If the movies are to be believed, and apparently they aren’t, I thought you 
's got all shooty and head-stompy and hogtied everyone in sight with zip-ties when people tried to break into and take over classified facilities.
Maybe it’s time 
sent some DOGE-certificate waiving 19-yr olds with laptops down to see what we can take over, at least while the gettin’ is good. 
Get us some UFO tech from Area 51 or something. /s
I say /s, but it’s pretty clear 
is probably ahead of the game on this one, given the excellent kompromat that the inter-webs have already dug up on the DOGE-minions. I’ll buy 2x 
and split a bottle of Malört with anyone who’ll take the other side of a bet that Musk is revealed to have MSS contacts and/or a 
NIA handler.
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I’ll discuss the fraud at USAID.
My first job was with a food aid contract to USAID.
I know A LOT about international food aid, not because I did anything at my job, but because I was so bored off my ass that I read all these academic papers that people spent a lot of time preparing and I don’t think we did anything with them. I think they were supposed to be for some conference. Anyway, I was bored and I read them.
There is a lot of grift in food aid. We send food aid to a country that’s war torn, and the local guerilla warriors take control of it and sell it. We send food aid to a country that has very few roads that can be navigated, people store them at their homes, and then people come and steal it. We send food aid in response to a famine, and then (as in the case of Chad), it becomes a major part of their country’s income.
Yep. There is a LOT of waste, a lot of theft, a lot of corruption.
AND also, the food does get to people who are starving.
Because, you know, people who live in crappy countries need food.
One of my BIG takeaways was how damaging war is. Most famines are caused by war. Lack of infrastructure is a huge deal. I remember reading how Mozambique had all these beaches, right? fish…and the roads were so bad, a lot of people couldn’t get to them, because of war.
International food aid doesn’t always go to help the downtrodden. It can end up being in the hands of an army; it often does. But, it still will get to people who otherwise would have starved.
We are SO SO SO PRIVILEGED in the US. We don’t know how it is to live in a country where people will just steal your shit. We can’t expect these governments to be models of efficiency.
The State Department deals with a lot of different countries with a lot of corruption. It’s the cost of doing business. We still help a lot of people.
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It’s the same strategy that caused train crashes.
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One thing I learned in decades of first aid training; triage. What’s the most serious thing? Deal with that, and then move on. Right now, American democracy is the thing most damaged. If it isn’t saved, all the rest goes down the toilet.
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Hate speech is ok if you use a pseudonym and delete the account after you’re caught. Everyone knows that. /s
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I wonder how the Indian member of that team feels about “normalizing Indian hate”?
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Now I’m wondering who tipped off the WSJ.
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Ooh; hadn’t thought of that!
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Probably that he just means “the bad Indians”; not anything like himself.
Tasty leopard morsel is his drag name.
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It would be a shame if the DOGE team ripped itself apart with juvenile, paranoid infighting. A real shame.
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I have noticed. Reeeeeeaaaallly noticed an intense ideology among those who graduated from top engineering schools after, say, 2004ish… they tend to really BELIEVE that ai can do everything better than humans because it won’t make mistakes like humans by, for instance, being influenced by emotions or substances…
to a degree that I would call delusional at this point but the faithful still believe I suppose. I would not be surprised if some percentage of these people truly see it all as a step on a path towards utopia and the consequences as necessary sacrifices.
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I remember reading a book called Cults in America (if I remember correctly), and the author was saying that college age people are particularly vulnerable to cults, for a number of reasons. This may be the first burst of independence from their parents and the community that they grew up in, and they are looking to assert themselves as separate from those things, but they are also feeling adrift and lonely and may be subconsciously looking for connections to groups to replace their childhood peer groups. They may also be subconsciously looking for an authority figure.
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Just an aside:
We had a Korean Christian cult at my uni. On campus, they had meetings which taught Korean language and culture. They also arranged for students to travel overseas to teach English. Before they went to their teaching destination, they were trained elsewhere. In an isolated location. Housed in crowded dorms. And provided insufficient food and sleep time.
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Standard tactics.
My foster niece got hired by something called a commercial cult; it’s run like a cult, but there is no religious component. They hire young kids, make them show up at a warehouse at crack-of-dawn-o’clock in the morning, no breakfast, no coffee, sing the company song, get a pep talk from the president and his team, get driven off to the back end of nowhere with no way of leaving until they are picked up at the end of the day. They go door to door with a quota of shit to sell, or charity donations to make, and they don’t get paid unless they make their quota. They get brought back to the warehouse at the end of the day and are yelled at for not making their quotas, and people are singled out for punishment.
My foster niece who was butting heads with my sister at that point, told them that she was on her own and had no family. My sister was concerned, because Krista was coming home exhausted, famished and beaten down, but would not share what was going on. I was due to take my niece out for a birthday shopping trip, and she asked if I could probe a bit to find out more. So during lunch I said “[Sister] says you have a job; how’s that going?” and it all came flooding out. I told her that this was not a normal situation, and in fact was very, very wrong, and that she really needed to talk with her my sister about it.
I should also say that Krista was model pretty and it came out that the president had singled her out for a trip to the US with him. Right.
Krista took me seriously, and talked with my sister, who went roaring in to the warehouse the next day, telling them that Krista quit, that they’d damn well better pay her or my sister’s next stop was going to be the fraud squad. She got Krista’s money, and they had disappeared from the warehouse by the next week; it was empty.
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