One of these leaders has spent more than 3 years surviving unrelenting military assaults by Putin's Russia.

The other is loudmouth bully & draft dodger Donald Trump.

 

Of the many bizarre and uncomfortable moments during today’s Oval Office meeting between Donald Trump, J. D. Vance, and Volodymyr Zelensky—during which Trump finally shattered the American alliance with Ukraine—one was particularly revealing: What, a reporter asked, would happen if the cease-fire Trump is trying to negotiate were to be violated by Russia? “What if anything? What if a bomb drops on your head right now?” Trump spat back, as if Russia violating a neighbor’s sovereignty were the wildest and most unlikely possibility, rather than a frequently recurring event… - Jonathan Chait

I could scarcely be more appalled today.

It Was an Ambush
Today marked one of the grimmest days in the history of American diplomacy.
By Tom Nichols

Leave aside, if only for a moment, the utter boorishness with which President Donald Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance treated Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky at the White House today. Also leave aside the spectacle of American leaders publicly pummeling a friend as if he were an enemy. All of the ghastliness inflicted on Zelensky today should not obscure the geopolitical reality of what just happened: The president of the United States ambushed a loyal ally, presumably so that he can soon make a deal with the dictator of Russia to sell out a European nation fighting for its very existence.

Trump’s advisers have already declared the meeting a win for “putting America first,” and his apologists will likely spin and rationalize this shameful moment as just a heated conversation—the kind of thing that in Washington-speak used to be called a “frank and candid exchange.” But this meeting reeked of a planned attack, with Trump unloading Russian talking points on Zelensky (such as blaming Ukraine for risking global war), all of it designed to humiliate the Ukrainian leader on national television and give Trump the pretext to do what he has indicated repeatedly he wants to do: side with Russian President Vladimir Putin and bring the war to an end on Russia’s terms. Trump is now reportedly considering the immediate end of all military aid to Ukraine because of Zelensky’s supposed intransigence during the meeting…

Trump convenes his first second-term cabinet "meeting."

After an hour of random self-aggrandizing Acting Celebrity Apprentice POTUS babble, CNN cut away.

   

Somenone, please buy Elon Musk a dress shirt and tie. And, please, dude take that MAGA hat off.

 

 

Seriously?

 

Back to some real world. Katherine Stewart's timely new book is out.

 

 

 

A quick cite from the Preface, then onto some relevant current events.

PREFACE
…The big story of our time is the rise of an antidemocratic political movement in the United States. Like any such movement, this one is diverse and complicated. It brings together a collection of people and ideas that in ordinary circumstances would not dream of sharing a bed. It is united in its profound rejection of the Enlightenment ideals on which the American republic was founded, and it represents the most serious threat to American democracy since the Civil War…

Abraham Lincoln had it right when he said that the United States is dedicated to a proposition. The American idea, as he saw it, is the familiar one articulated in the preamble to the Declaration of Independence. It says that all people are created equal; that a free people in a pluralistic society may govern themselves; that they do so through laws deliberated in public, grounded in appeals to reason, and applied equally to all; and that they establish these laws through democratic representation in government. In the centuries after 1776, in its better moments, the United States exported this revolutionary creed and inspired people around the world to embrace their freedom.

But in recent years a political movement has emerged that fundamentally does not believe in the American idea. It claims that America is dedicated not to a proposition but to a particular religion and culture. It asserts that an insidious and alien elite has betrayed and abandoned the nation’s sacred heritage. It proposes to “redeem” America, and it acts on the extreme conviction that any means are justified in such a momentous project. It takes for granted that certain kinds of Americans have a right to rule, and that the rest have a duty to obey. No longer casting the United States as a beacon of freedom, it exports this counterrevolutionary creed through alliances with leaders and activists who are themselves hostile to democracy. This movement has captured one of the nation’s two major political parties, and some of its leading thinkers explicitly model their ambitions on corrupt and illiberal regimes abroad that render education, the media, and the corporate sector subservient to a one-party authoritarian state.

Stewart, Katherine. Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy (pp. 2-3). Kindle Edition.

Ch 11: Exporting the Counterrevolution
In the decades immediately following the Declaration of Independence in 1776, the new American republic became the modern world’s first great exporter of democratic revolution. As America’s founders watched the strategic alliances between priests and kings tumble before the advance of ideas of human equality, individual rights, and representative government in France, Haiti, Greece, the Spanish colonies, and eventually much of Europe, they were exultant. “From that bright spark which first illumed these lands / See Europe kindling, as the blaze expands,” wrote Philip Freneau, the so-called poet of the American Revolution. His friend Thomas Jefferson was equally pleased. “This ball of liberty, I believe most piously, is now so well in motion that it will roll round the globe, at least the enlightened part of it, for light and liberty go together,” he wrote. “It is our glory that we first put it into motion.”

Today, however, sectors of the American right have become exporters of the antidemocratic counterrevolution. Not satisfied with their efforts to roll back individual rights in the United States and replace democratic pluralism with sectarianism and authoritarian forms of governance, America’s Christian nationalists have pushed their ideas and agendas out to other countries around the world. Joining them in the effort are a host of “antiwoke” culture warriors from the New Right along with the white supremacists, men’s rights activists, New Traditionalists, and others they inspire. Some groups in those other countries have proved receptive to the new ideologies. A global antidemocratic reaction has emerged that in turn contributes to the counterrevolutionary process in America.

The axis around which a sector of the global antidemocratic reaction now turns is an extraordinary alliance between a dominant wing of the Republican Party in the U.S. and the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Only twenty years ago, the same Republican Party was willing to go to war to overthrow a dictatorship in Iraq and (supposedly) promote democracy. Yet the faction of the Republican Party that has mortgaged itself to Donald Trump balked at providing relatively small-scale aid to Ukraine as that country attempted to fend off a brutal and unprovoked Russian invasion. And even while Vladimir Putin continues to crush democracy in his home country and abroad, with assassinations of journalists and political opponents, widespread imprisonment, and kleptocratic arrangements, to say nothing of the suspiciously convenient “suicides” and “accidents” of Russian business, political, and military leaders, the right wing of the Republican Party hails him as a hero and a strong leader. To be sure, after months of pressure from the White House, House Speaker Mike Johnson managed to squeak out approval for aid to Ukraine in April 2024, bypassing opposition of a number of Republicans. And yet out on the far right, among the kind of people who contribute to Claremont Institute publications and who now form the “brain trust” for Donald Trump and other Republican leaders, one can hear Ukraine’s resistance to Russia described as a “woke war.” It is important to note that Russia and other hostile foreign powers have avidly targeted sectors of the American left in order to intensify and exploit divisions in U.S. society. This activity and its consequences are grossly underappreciated… (pp. 213-214). 

Just for starters.

 

See some prior posts of mine apropos of "Christian Nationalism."

 

Also, the word "Evangelical." And, Matthew D. Taylor's fine book on the topic. Hmmm... one more for now: "Claremont College," anyone?

 

"A Republic. If we can keep it?"

 

More shortly...

_________

  

Day 1,096

of Russia’s 3-day conquest of Ukraine.

   

The New Whirled Order

 

 Yeah. Below, a back-to-reality break:

 

The 16th NATO Supreme Allied Commander, James Stavridis attended the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, and spent 37 years in the Navy, rising to the rank of 4-star Admiral. He oversaw NATO operations in Afghanistan, Libya, Syria, the Balkans, and counter piracy off the coast of Africa. He led the US Southern Command in Miami, charged with military operations through Latin America.

He served as senior military assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of Defense. He led the Navy’s premier operational think tank for innovation, Deep Blue, immediately after the 9/11 attacks. He also commanded a Destroyer Squadron and a Carrier Strike Group, both in combat. He was the longest serving Combatant Commander in recent US history.

Highly decorated, his awards include the Battenberg Cup for commanding the top ship in the Atlantic Fleet and the Navy League John Paul Jones Award for Inspirational leadership. Following his military career, he served as Dean of his alma mater The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University, where he earned his PhD. In 2016, he was vetted for Vice President by Secretary Hillary Clinton, and subsequently invited to discuss a cabinet position with President Donald Trump.

A best-selling author, Stavridis has published twelve books on leadership, character, risk, the oceans, maritime affairs, and Latin America, and hundreds of articles in leading journals. His most recent books are To Risk It All: Nine Conflicts and The Crucible of Decision, 2034: A Novel of the Next World War, a New York Times bestseller, and 2054: A Novel.

Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist and Chief International Security Analyst for NBC News. He is Partner and Vice Chair, Global Affairs of The Carlyle Group and Chair of the Board of Trustees, Rockefeller Foundation.

 Admiral Stavridis spoke to us last night at the latest Baltimore Speakers Series event.. He was fabulous, a real patriot, accomplished military scholar, and brilliant, humorous, self-deprecating mind.

And then there's this ketamine-addled DOGE dipshit, appearing at CPAC.

 

 

He's cutting federal spending, get it?

 

 

ON A DEADLY SERIOUS NOTE

 

In this book, I aim to define freedom. The task begins with rescuing the word from overuse and abuse. I worry that, in my own country, the United States, we speak of freedom without considering what it is. Americans often have in mind the absence of something: occupation, oppression, or even government. An individual is free, we think, when the government is out of the way. Negative freedom is our common sense.

To be sure, it is tempting to think of liberty as us against the world, which the notion of negative freedom allows us to do. If the barriers are the only problem, then all must be right with us. That makes us feel good. We think that we would be free if not for a world outside that does us wrong. But is the removal of something in the world really enough to liberate us? Is it not as important, perhaps even more important, to add things?

If we want to be free, we will have to affirm, not just deny. Sometimes we will have to destroy, but more often we will need to create. Most often we will need to adapt both the world and ourselves, on the basis of what we know and value. We need structures, just the right ones, moral as well as political. Virtue is an inseparable part of freedom.

“Stone Walls do not a Prison make / Nor Iron bars a Cage”—said the poet. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t. Oppression is not just obstruction but the human intention behind it. In Ukraine’s Donetsk, an abandoned factory became an art lab; under Russian occupation, the same building became a torture facility. A school basement, as in Yahidne, can be a concentration camp.

Early Nazi concentration camps, for that matter, were in bars, hotels, and castles. The first permanent one, Dachau, was in an abandoned factory. Auschwitz had been a Polish military base meant to defend people from a German attack. Kozelsk, a Soviet POW camp where Polish officers were held before their execution, had been a monastery—the one where Fyodor Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov, set the dialogue with the famous question: If God is dead, is everything permitted?

No larger force makes us free, nor does the absence of such a larger force. Nature gives us a chance to be free, nothing less, nothing more. We are told that we are “born free”: untrue. We are born squalling, attached to an umbilical cord, covered in a woman’s blood. Whether we become free depends upon the actions of others, upon the structures that enable those actions, upon the values that enliven those structures—and only then upon a flicker of spontaneity and the courage of our own choices.

The structures that hinder or enable are physical and moral. It matters how we speak and think about freedom. Liberty begins with de-occupying our minds from the wrong ideas. And there are right and wrong ideas. In a world of relativism and cowardice, freedom is the absolute among absolutes, the value of values. This is not because freedom is the one good thing to which all others must bow. It is because freedom is the condition in which all the good things can flow within us and among us.

Nor is it because freedom is a vacuum left by a dead God or an empty world. Freedom is not an absence but a presence, a life in which we choose multiple commitments and realize combinations of them in the world. Virtues are real, as real as the starry heavens; when we are free, we learn them, exhibit them, bring them to life. Over time, our choices among virtues define us as people of will and individuality.

When we assume that freedom is negative, the absence of this or that, we presume that removing a barrier is all that we have to do to be free. To this way of thinking, freedom is the default condition of the universe, brought to us by some larger force when we clear the way. This is naïve.

Americans are told that we were given freedom by our Founding Fathers, our national character, or our capitalist economy. None of this is true. Freedom cannot be given. It is not an inheritance. We call America a “free country,” but no country is free. Noting a difference between the rhetoric of the oppressors and the oppressed, the dissident Eritrean poet Y. F. Mebrahtu reports that “they talk about the country, we talk about the people.” Only people can be free. If we believe something else makes us free, we never learn what we must do. The moment you believe that freedom is given, it is gone.

We Americans tend to think that freedom is a matter of things being cleared away, and that capitalism does that work for us. It is a trap to believe in this or any other external source of freedom. If we associate freedom with outside forces, and someone tells us that the outside world delivers a threat, we sacrifice liberty for safety. This makes sense to us, because in our hearts we were already unfree. We believe that we can trade freedom for security. This is a fatal mistake.

Freedom and security work together. The preamble of the Constitution instructs that “the blessings of liberty” are to be pursued alongside “the general welfare” and “the common defense.” We must have liberty and safety. For people to be free, they must feel secure, especially as children. They must have a chance to know one another and the world. Then, as they become free people, they decide what risks to take, and for what reasons.

When Russia invaded Ukraine, President Volodymyr Zelens’kyi did not tell his people that they needed to trade liberty for safety. He told them that he was staying in the country. After my visit to Yahidne, I spoke to him in his office in Kyiv, behind the sandbags. He called de-occupation a chance to restore both security and freedom. He said that the “deprivation of freedom was insecurity,” and that “insecurity was the deprivation of freedom.”…

Snyder, Timothy. On Freedom (pp. xii-xv). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I read a ton of Timothy Snyder. Highly recommended.

_________

  

What does Elon want?

 Techno-Fascism by ChatBot.

   

 

 FROM THE NEW YORKER

...The federal government is, in effect, suddenly being run like an A.I. startup; Musk, an unelected billionaire, a maestro of flying cars and trips to Mars, has made the United States of America his grandest test case yet for an unproved and unregulated new technology. He is hardly alone in his efforts to frame A.I. as a societal savior that will usher in a utopian era of efficiency. The tech investor Marc Andreessen recently posted on X that wages will “logically, necessarily” crash in the A.I. era—but that A.I. will also solve the problem, by reducing the price of “goods and services” to “near zero.” (Any explanation of how that would happen was not forthcoming.) Last month, Sam Altman, the C.E.O. of OpenAI and perhaps Musk’s primary nemesis, launched a five-hundred-billion-dollar data-center initiative called Stargate with the coöperation of Trump. But Musk, with his position as a close Presidential adviser, and with office space in the White House complex, is uniquely and unprecedentedly poised to fuse the agendas of government and Silicon Valley. (On Monday, in what looked like an effort to troll Altman and derail an investment deal, Musk led a group of investors in a nearly hundred-billion-dollar bid to acquire OpenAI.) In a recent article for the advocacy nonprofit Tech Policy Press, the respected A.I. researcher Eryk Salvaggio labelled Musk’s activities as an “AI coup.”

A government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making. Musk’s program has already halted operations altogether at the U.S. Agency for International Development, which was responsible for more than forty billion dollars in foreign aid in 2023, and at the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, an agency that may have drawn Musk’s special notice for its track record of suing tech companies for deploying loosely regulated technology. Trump and Musk both love to blame the country’s problems on the so-called deep state, the federal employees who maintain the government’s day-to-day operations. As many of those people now find themselves locked out of their offices, with their work phones deactivated, a new, inherently undemocratic deep state is moving in to fill the void: a system imposed by machines and the tiny élite who designed them. With doge, Musk is not only sidelining Congress and threatening to defy the courts, helping to bring the country to the point of constitutional crisis; he is also smuggling into our federal bureaucracy the seeds of a new authoritarian regime—techno-fascism by chatbot…

Utterly crazy time.

UPDATE

TOM NICHOLS COMMENTS ON THE SEAN HANNITY INTERIEW W/MUSK &TRUMP

...After an hour of this rambling and sometimes weird [Hannity] conversation, all I could think of was George W. Bush’s reported reaction to Trump’s first inaugural address: “That was some weird shit.”

This low-key fandango was probably good enough for MAGA fan-servicing purposes, but seems unlikely to reassure the millions of Americans doubtful that the president and the plutocrat know what they’re doing. The president seems only dimly aware of the details of Musk’s adventures, but he’s certain that a smart guy like Musk is furthering his agenda—whatever it is. Musk, who answers to no one, is full of fervor to kill off government agencies he does not understand, because unelected rich men firing probationary federal employees is apparently how true Jeffersonian democracy is restored to an ailing America…

Below, a Facebook friend posted this.

 

Lotta people took it seriously. 

UPDATE: RICK WILSON

Trump Joins The Wrong Side in WWIII

Historians may one day mark this week as the beginning of World War III.

Like every great conflagration in history, it did not start with fireworks or ringing declarations but with the quiet, hollow tread of cowardice masquerading as strategy or capitulation draped in the threadbare costume of strength and the folly of baring every card while claiming negotiation.

No rousing Sunday headlines heralded another world war, just the tragic end of an alliance built. There was no grim storm of missiles over Western Europe or Russian tanks thundering through the Fulda Gap. The only civilians being killed were in Ukraine, dead at the hands of the Russian beast.

But make no mistake: just as France and Britain once closed their eyes to Hitler’s threat, we are now living in the early hours of a devastating conflict born of men too weak to stand for what is right.

It was Neville Chamberlain who gave appeasement its most infamous face. This weekend, we learned Chamberlain was a rookie.

For a genuinely catastrophic betrayal of the West, look no further than the staggering realignment ordered by Donald Trump this week.

In just five days, America has become a client state of Russia, subservient, obedient, and just as accepting of the slaughter and evil for which Vladimir Putin is famous...
 

Trump just insulted and overtly threatened the Ukrainian President this afternoon.

 

More shortly.

_________

  

Happy Celebrity Apprentice Acting President's Day, 2025.

Are we having fun yet?

   

Four weeks in...

 

"Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction."

DESTRUCTION

Science Based Medicine

Three months ago, after Donald Trump had won the 2024 election—and even before he had chosen longtime antivax activist Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. as his nominee for Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS)—I characterized RFK Jr. as an “extinction-level threat to federal public health and science-based health policy.” The reason was simple. Last summer, RFK Jr. had abandoned his quixotic and doomed campaign for President as an independent and bent the knee to Donald Trump. As a result, he was rewarded with a promise to be, in essence, Trump’s health policy czar and to have a prominent role in health policy in his administration if he won. During the campaign, RFK Jr. even came up with a slogan that riffed on the long familiar Trump slogan “Make America Great Again” (MAGA) by changing it to “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA). Cleverly, he said nothing at all about vaccines in his “MAHA manifesto“—an absence that his antivax minions noticed right away and were dismayed by—instead planning to “reform” the FDA, emphasize healthy food (depending on your definition), and legalize psychedelics and stem cell clinics. A couple of weeks after the election, President-Elect Trump nominated RFK Jr. for HHS, a nomination that I referred to as a “catastrophe for public health and medical research.”

Of course, RFK Jr. was “controversial” (translation: a batshit) nominee. I will even admit that, after RFK Jr.’s disastrous confirmation hearings, in which he lied repeatedly and blatantly about being “pro-vaccine” and in which Sen. Bernie Sanders embarrassed him over the organization that he founded, Children’s Health Defense, selling baby onesies with antivax slogans on them—asking RFK Jr, “Are you supportive of these onesies?“—and Sen. Elizabeth Warren pointed out how much money he makes assisting a law firm suing vaccine manufacturer, I briefly held out a tiny hope that a few Republicans would vote against him, denying him the nomination, but I soon realized that none of it mattered and that he would definitely be confirmed…

A long-read. Worth it. RFK Jr, ugh. Exigencies proliferate. One can hardly keep apace.

 

ANOTHER INTERESTING READ

 

During my years in the European Parliament, I progressively came to see technology through the lens of power. Technology could help emancipate people and raise unheard voices, or it could transform disruptors into monopolists who ruthlessly pursued efficiency, surveillance, scale, and profit. In either case, technology is not neutral. As I will elaborate in this book, systems are themselves designed with values built into them, even if that is unintended. Additionally, given that most technologies are developed by private companies, these technologies are ultimately deployed for profit maximization, and profit maximization incentives are often misaligned with what is best for society. Sam Altman’s Worldcoin, for example, aspires to build a global identity database by asking people in developing countries to scan their irises, in return for a bit of cryptocurrency; the firm is either blind or completely cavalier to the risks of concentrating so much sensitive biometric data under one roof. Social media platforms seek to extend online engagement time of their users with little concern for the negative effect on teenagers’ mental health. Tech firms and their products now also make potentially life-altering decisions. Commercial algorithms designate triage statuses in hospitals and analyze medical images. All the while, democratically elected representatives remain in the dark about key details of how these products work, since independent research is often impossible. For too long, too much trust has been placed in tech companies without making sure that their technology operates within the parameters of the rule of law and supports democratic outcomes.

Schaake, Marietje (2024). The Tech Coup: How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley (Kindle loc 216). Kindle Edition.

Timely.

 

And the hits just keep on comin’

The Washington Post canceled plans to run a front-and back-page advertisement that would have earned the paper $115,000 — and ran straight into fresh fury.

The ad, reportedly sponsored by the watchdog group Common Cause, demanded that President Donald Trump fire Elon Musk, who is working as a special government employee endeavoring to slash spending, and purging federal government workers. 

Now many Washingtonians and political experts are furious with the paper, which Amazon founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos purchased in 2013. It follows recent anger after Bezos announced the newspaper would buck historical precedence by not endorsing a political candidate last year.

Democracy defender and elections lawyer Marc Elias pointed out that in October, the paper ran an ad from a right-wing group funded by Musk to attack Elias personally for his work…

TUESDAY UPDATE

More shortly...

_________

  

Donald Trump, the Savior

Former Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Reince Priebus on Trump’s “saving the country“ boast: “It's catnip for the media. It's entertainment for Trump. In good times, in bad times, the President enjoys taking a grenade out on a Saturday afternoon, throwing it on the floor, and watching everybody react. Now, could it be a distraction? Could it be a diversion? Could it be just pure entertainment? This is what the President does. And there's no downside.”

Robert F. Kennedy Jr

confirmed by the Senate 52-48 to head HHS.

 

Try to imagine my disgust. Click either post above.

 

My late elder daughter, Sissy

YO, MR "MAHA" RFK JR

 

Scientific American

Our brains are full of plastic.

This was the fun news I read earlier this week while picking up dinner take-out, packed in plastic containers, crammed in a plastic bag and accompanied by Styrofoam cups. Great, I thought, convenience culture is killing us.

But is it? This is the problem with the slew of research finding microscopic shards of plastic in our arteries, kidneys and livers, the findings that our oceans, food, soil and air are teeming with tiny bits of Tupperware. Scientists still don’t know what this plastic is doing to us. And because research takes time, while scientists are trying to answer question, we just keep inhaling, eating and drinking tiny pieces of plastic.

Why? Regulatory action has never really stopped the U.S. plastics industry from cranking out more plastic, even as clean air and water advocates try to fight the industry’s pollution problems in court and locals wage grassroots wars to slow the permitting of more plants that spew all those toxic chemicals. And now, back in office, is a president beholden to fossil fuel interests (where petroleum and natural gas are plastics precursors), a leader who uses his new powers to demand the use of plastic straws, and an administration that is hell-bent on crippling EPA’s mission to keep us safe rather than empowering it.

Meanwhile, we do not know what all this plastic is doing to us. And no one currently in charge seems to care… [ read all of it ]

ERRATUM

ERRATUM

Click above.

UPDATE

Sonya Stokes, an emergency room physician in the San Francisco Bay Area, braces herself for a daily deluge of patients sick with coughs, soreness, fevers, vomiting, and other flu-like symptoms.

She’s desperate for information, but the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, a critical source of urgent analyses of the flu and other public health threats, has gone quiet in the weeks since President Donald Trump took office.

“Without more information, we are blind,” she said.

Flu has been brutal this season. The CDC estimates at least 24 million illnesses, 310,000 hospitalizations, and 13,000 deaths from the flu since the start of October. At the same time, the bird flu outbreak continues to infect cattle and farmworkers. But CDC analyses that would inform people about these situations are delayed, and the CDC has cut off communication with doctors, researchers, and the World Health Organization, say doctors and public health experts.

“CDC right now is not reporting influenza data through the WHO global platforms, FluNet [and] FluID, that they’ve been providing information [on] for many, many years,” Maria Van Kerkhove, interim director of epidemic and pandemic preparedness at the WHO, said at a Feb. 12 press briefing.

“We are communicating with them,” she added, “but we haven’t heard anything back.”

On his first day in office, President Donald Trump announced the U.S. would withdraw from the WHO…

Ugh. 

_________

  

President Elon Musk

 and his Celebrity Apprentice understudy Donald Trump.

 

LOL... 

 

A picture really does speak louder than words, and yesterday’s Oval Office briefing by President Elon Musk proved it in spades. There he was, in the most exclusive office in D.C., simultaneously manhandling the press while having one of his 11 spawn babysat by some poor subordinate. If Michelangelo were around, this tableau would be on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—commissioned by a Medici who wanted to show off his power over the Pope.

Meanwhile, a slumped Donald Trump sat nearby, wearing the bored, empty stare of a man who wants nothing more than his afternoon pudding. You don’t need a body-language guru to see he’s thoroughly checked out: drooping shoulders, slack jaw, glazed eyes. His single moment of real engagement was with Musk’s kid, Glorbax_Rocketchild42069.

Musk—who has apparently given up even the faintest nod toward business casual—rocked a MAGA trucker hat, jeans, boots, and a T-shirt.

Imagine the howls of fury from Fox if an Obama (remember Tan Suitgate?) or Biden advisor tried that look in the Oval. I can say from personal experience that any self-respecting political hack of yesteryear would rather die than step foot in that room without a jacket and tie. In my day, you marched to Brooks Brothers and bought a dark suit, crisp shirt, and red tie. That was the uniform. 

Musk, however, treats the office—and the man whose name is still on the door—with a sartorial contempt that fairly crackles.

But it’s not just contempt for Trump that Musk is serving up. 

By extension, it’s a giant middle finger to the Presidency itself. Musk’s destructive spree across agencies and programs and his roving disregard for the law, Constitution, institutional knowledge, and history—everything but “shareholder value”—are Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” mentality taken to its final, hellish conclusion.

So there sat Trump, reduced to a prop in Elon’s alpha preening. It was a public notice to every White House staffer and every Trump factotum—Stephen Miller, Susie Wiles, and the rest of the bootlicking coterie — that Musk is running the show. Speaking of Susie Wiles, she’s been leaking stories for weeks now that she’s got Elon on a leash, that she’s in control, and that the White House knows everything DOGE and Elon are doing. Her Chief of Staff chops were a comfort to many Wall Street types, and now its revealed that she too is one of the NPCs in Elon’s virtual insanity. 

The media was on notice, too. Trump won’t call Elon to account for any of it; he’s too busy enjoying the illusions and distractions dangled by his staff, like a map of the “Gulf of America.”…

RICK WILSON (ABOVE & BELOW) MINCES NO WORDS

Bad indeed.

 

UPDATE: NEW BOOK COMING, MARCH 18TH

 

Who works for the government and why does their work matter? An urgent and absorbing civics lesson from an all-star team of writers and storytellers.

The government is a vast, complex system that Americans pay for, rebel against, rely upon, dismiss, and celebrate. It’s also our shared resource for addressing the biggest problems of society. And it’s made up of people, mostly unrecognized and uncelebrated, doing work that can be deeply consequential and beneficial to everyone.

Michael Lewis invited his favorite writers to find someone doing an interesting job for the government and write about them in a special in-depth series for the Washington Post. The stories they found are unexpected, riveting, and inspiring, including a former coal miner devoted to making mine roofs less likely to collapse, saving thousands of lives; an IRS agent straight out of a crime thriller; and the manager who made the National Cemetery Administration the best-run organization, public or private, in the entire country. Each essay shines a spotlight on the essential behind-the-scenes work of exemplary federal employees.

Whether they’re digitizing archives, chasing down cybercriminals, or discovering new planets, these public servants are committed to their work and universally reluctant to take credit. Expanding on the Washington Post series, the vivid profiles in Who Is Government? blow up the stereotype of the irrelevant bureaucrat. They show how the essential business of government makes our lives possible, and how much it matters.

Timely, in light of the Musk/Trump hypervelocity brute force effort to eviscerate the federal government.

 

More of my Michael Lewis.

_________