Mafia

Schneier on Security reposted an essay was written with Davi Ottenheimer that originally appeared in Foreign Policy. It takes a very negative view of what DOGE is doing. It's garbage. But looking through the comments I found this one that I think is pretty great.

Shoal Creek • February 13, 2025 8:59 AM

You’re assuming that government (any government) is legitimate. It’s not. Governments are basically racketeering gangs that fight each other for territory and try to give people the illusion that they chose to voluntarily participate. Mafias are just as legitimate, but without as much gaslighting. When a mafia starts to self-destruct, let it. It likely needs to be destroyed any way.

 

Trump's War on Secrets

Stolen entire from Essays in Idleness.

Depth-charging the deep state by David Warren

The most consequential act the new Trump administration has brought upon the American Republic, is its (declared) war on secrets. After several weeks we see that this extends beyond free public enquiry into the Kennedy assassination, the killings of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy, Sr., the 9/11 incidents, UFOs, the Batflu origins, and the Jeffrey Epstein client list. Much ugliness will likely be released for each of these tabloid stories, and I say this not with any special knowledge but by observing how tightly the secrets have been held. (Investigations into assassination attempts on Donald Trump himself will also prove interesting.)

But the inspections by Mr Elon Musk of more recent secrets, with his clever young cybernetic accomplices and their latest algorithms, is already bringing us so much truth. The reader who has made himself aware of only the USAID payments will understand what may, or rather will, be revealed as the Musketeers survey the remaining ninety-nine-one-hundredths of the U.S. government, with not only presidential but majority congressional approval.

That the Democrats, and their allied “uniparty” Republicans, are appalled — shrieking bloody murder in defence of secrecy, corruption, fraud, deceit, and abuse — is part of the common instruction. I have long supposed the Devil’s “fan base” is to be found overwhelmingly on the political Left. The cause is obvious: they are the godless parties.

One bites oneself, for this is a dream come true. … “DEI, die, die.” … Let us recite the Prayer of Saint Michael, the way we imagine that good Catholic, Tom Homan, is doing this morning.

Censorship versus Free Speech

Stolen entire from Racket News. The linked article has a couple of YouTube videos. Presumably, this post is a transcript of those videos.

My Statement to Congress

Opening remarks on John Kerry, European speech law, and USAID before the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, February 12th, 2025

Matt Taibbi

Feb 12, 2025

Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Two years ago, when Michael and I first testified before your Weaponization of Government Subcommittee, Democratic members called us “so-called journalists,” suggested we were bought-off “scribes,” and questioned our ethics and loyalties. When we tried to answer, we were told to shut up, take off our tinfoil hats, and remember two things: one, there is no digital censorship, two, if there is digital censorship, it’s for our own good.

I was shocked. I thought the whole thing had to be a mistake. No way the party I gave votes to all my life was now pro-censorship. Then last year I listened to John Kerry, whom I voted for, talk to the World Economic Forum. Speaking about disinformation, he said “our First Amendment stands as a major block” to our ability to “hammer it out of existence.”

He complained that “it’s really hard to govern” because “people self-select where they go for their news,” which makes it “much harder to build consensus…”

I defended Kerry when people said he “looks French,” but Marie Antoinette would have been embarrassed by this speech. He was essentially complaining that the peasants are “self-selecting” their own media. What’s next, letting them make up their own minds?

“Building consensus” may be a politician’s job, but it’s not mine as a citizen or as a journalist. In fact, making it hard to govern is exactly the media’s job. The failure to understand this is why we have a censorship problem.

This is an Alamo moment for the First Amendment. Most of America’s closest allies have already adopted draconian speech laws. We’re surrounded. The EU’s new Digital Services Act is the most comprehensive censorship law ever instituted in a democratic society.

Ranking member Raskin, you don’t have to go as far as Russia or China to find people jailed for speech. Our allies in England now have an Online Safety Act that empowers the government to jail people for nebulous offenses like “false communication” or causing “psychological harm.” Germany, France, Australia, Canada, and other nations have implemented similar ideas.

These laws are totally incompatible with our system. Our own citizens have been arrested in some of these countries, but our government hasn’t stood up for them. Why? Because many of our bureaucrats believe in these laws.

Take USAID. Many Americans are in an uproar now because they learned about over $400 million going to an organization called Internews, whose chief Jeanne Bourgault boasted to Congress about training “hundreds of thousands of people” in journalism. Her views are almost identical to Kerry’s.

She gave a talk about “building trust and combatting misinformation” in India during the pandemic. She said that after months of a “really beautifully unified Covid-19 message,” vaccine enthusiasm rose to 87%, but when “mixed information on vaccine efficacy” got out, hesitancy ensued.

We’re paying this person to train journalists, and she doesn’t know the press doesn’t exist to promote “unity” or political goals like vaccine enthusiasm. That’s propaganda, not journalism.

Bourgault also once said that to fight “bad content,” we need to “work really hard on exclusion lists or inclusion lists” and “really try to focus our ad dollars” toward “the good news.”

Again, if you don’t know the fastest way to erode “trust” in media is by having government sponsor “exclusion lists,” you shouldn’t be getting a dollar in taxpayer money, let alone $476 million. And USAID is just a tiny piece of a censorship machine Michael and I saw across a long list of agencies. Collectively they’ve bought up every part of the news production line: sources, think-tanks, research, “fact-checking,” “anti-disinformation,” commercial media scoring, and when all else fails, censorship.

It’s a giant closed messaging loop, whose purpose is to transform the free press into a consensus machine. There’s no way to remove the rot surgically. The whole mechanism has to go.

Is there “right-wing misinformation”? Hell yes. It exists in every direction. But I grew up a Democrat and don’t remember being afraid of it. At the time, we didn’t need censorship because we figured we had the better argument.

Obviously, some of you lack that same confidence. You took billions from taxpayers and blew it on programs whose entire purpose was to tell them they’re wrong about things they can see with their own eyes.

You sold us out, and until these “rather tiresome” questions are answered, this problem is not fixed. Thank you. 

New Experiences And A Cold Morning (Two Posts In One)

Stolen entire from Adaptive Curmudgeon.

New Experiences And A Cold Morning (Two Posts In One)

Have you enjoyed the bright new age? Despite 2024’s fake polls, assassination attempts, and endless complaints, a new situation rushed into existence right on schedule. It’s like it was created by the utter, complete, and total collapse of the Bidenverse? Maybe we needed to hit rock bottom? Reagan won huge because Carter sucked. Biden is similar. If they hadn’t mercilessly lawfared him, would Trump 2 have leveled up to the Ultimate Boss he’s become?

Watching rational governance return to America is like watching a horse released from a tiny paddock into a large field. Muscles are used. Strength happens. A head is held high as the horse does what it was born to do. Look at that thing run!

Older folks might have memories. I’ve only heard stories of a government that was proud and strong. For most generations, the only experience is plodding mediocrity. As with all forms of evil, it gradually descended into blithering madness and abject corruption before going down in flames.

And now Trump does one thing after another. His actions make me (and a lot of other folks) smile. It’s refreshing when a President acts like he has an actual job. We’d gotten used to figureheads who treated “the big chair” like a side gig; the posing of a marionette for cutting ribbons and giving speeches. Meanwhile, private grift and secret maneuvers were the real action.

It’s fulfilling to see things happen. Right there in front of your eyes, you’re seeing responsibility exercised, duties fulfilled; someone is even trying to balance the books! We’re seeing (possibly for the first time) actual, no-bullshit, all the warts exposed, transparency.

America (and perhaps most of Europe) has spent a very long time locked in a web of conflicting interests. The slightest change in anything anywhere generated an equal and opposite force from an eternal maladapted bureaucracy. That is ending.

I knew this day would come. Multi-generation attritional wars of ineptitude must end. They have to. When something can’t possibly continue, it won’t.

I did not guess it would happen this way. I vacillated between anticipating a Mad Max Armageddon or the mass death of Boomers leading to the financial depression they baked into the cake. In defense of Boomers, they did it not necessarily out of malignancy but of inertia. They just weren’t going to let the world adapt to… the world.

Yet to my surprise, real measurable change is happening more or less peacefully. (If you ignore a few assassination attempts and whatever we should call 2020.) Don’t fret over the uncertainties, rejoice that we no longer have concertina wire around the White House or political prisoners.

This is the second time I’ve seen it. The first was the fall of the Berlin wall.

I spent an entire (young) life concerned that oppressed people suffered behind that wall. If you’d asked anybody, anyone at all, they’d have said it was there forever. It was never going away. It was never going to get better. Nobody anywhere had the slightest bit of optimism. As Gen X, I spent my life being told there was no hope. The wall, a geopolitical scar left from the second great war and supported by inevitable infallible socialism, was there for eternity.

Until it wasn’t. On November 9, 1989 the house of cards collapsed. Could there be a greater revelation?

I’d been lied to. In 1988, everyone said communism was inevitable and sure to overcome America. By Christmas 1989, newly freed people were already starting to rebuild a better life.

Anyone who saw the Wall fall should know “experts” make mistakes. They were absolutely, massively, completely, utterly wrong. (Maybe the Berlin Wall was supposed to teach us to keep our head when “experts” wanted everyone to go apeshit over Covid? The President himself pronounced me doomed: “…we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm…” Wrong call motherfucker! I’m as happy as a pig in shit and your decrepit ass was kicked out of your own campaign!)

Love him or hate him, Trump Version 2.0 is the fall of another Berlin Wall.

A man can say what he’ll do and then do it. Who knew?!? Did you know a president can do the things he said he’d do during the campaign? We know there’s no law against it, but doesn’t it seem like a rule of nature? Once a politician  has your vote he’ll “grow in office”, doing the bare minimum until he’s a fucking slug. That’s my observation. Until now.

Which brings me to the next pleasant revelation; I forgot there could be a Republican president that isn’t immediately fucked by the Republican party. It’s not required by law, but it most certainly is practice and tradition. Reagan could tell ya’ all about it. Trump #1 did about as much as he could possibly while his own party jammed a shiv in his back every chance they could. I assumed it inevitable that a President of R gets hosed by his own party. The party is so reliably bad I wonder why the party of R actually exists. This time it’s different. After a few bleating sheep-like motions they sniffed the wind and fled while the Orange Juggernaut steamrolled everything. Neat!

I could go on for hours but I don’t need to. You’re watching the same show. The best I can say is “enjoy this moment“.

Motion in direction can be beautiful. I’ve often sought out riverbanks for the same feeling I’m getting out of “events” today. I’ll find a nice rock or tree stump and watch the mighty inexorable flow of a river. Steady and strong, eternally in motion yet also calming and true. How many tons of water flow by? How far does it go? How majestic is it to see each little molecule of H20 become a forever flow to the ocean.

Rivers feel strong. The Army Corps of Engineers might hurl money at the Mississippi but it always gets to Gulf. Apparently it gets to the Gulf of America now. Ha ha ha! Rivers can be killed. Ask the Colorado River Compact about it. But it’s hard to screw up that bad.

Now is a time to pleasantly flow like a river. I was tired of percolating in a swamp.

I drove to town. I used to go there every day. That changed. Not the town, me. I go there only occasionally.

After COVID, seeing what people allowed themselves to become, I just stopped needing the presence of people so much anymore. I’m not angry (I’m not even disappointed), I’m just removed. I was never of the city, now I’ve structured a life where I don’t often go there… and I don’t miss it.

Folks think I must be suffering. What am I missing? Symphonies? Do you honestly go to the city for symphonies and glorious museums? Of course not. You go there to buy shit at Walmart. I need shit less and less.

I was never gregarious and now I’m even less so. I kind of like the new me. Nobody escaped Covid. It (or rather the social upheaval generated of it) either it made you more of what you already were or nudged you to be something different. I was always less interested in people and more in trees; Covid reminded me why.

I’m not a hermit. I need hardware stores and car parts just like everyone else. I need to do certain business transactions. I have weaknesses. (I keep an eye out in case the McRib comes back.)

So it is that I found myself in town. It was -20 Fahrenheit and snowing.

The “city” was hunkered down, riding out a climate that will literally kill you. The best part of brutal climates is that it reduces bullshit. When it’s that cold, nobody’s bitching about recycling or wants you to sign a petition. Nobody’s out on the streets being a pain in the ass. Electric cars evaporate. The only pedestrians are dressed like they’re running a trap line. They move from Point A to Point B with quick, forced efficiency. It gets so cold, only  serious, rational, adults can handle it.

-20 is hard core.

My diesel truck (fueled on the higher cost diesel #1) was running flawlessly. I churned through unplowed urban parking lots in useful non-ironic 4×4 mode. I did my errands. Then I left.

As I left I noticed what I never see at -20 Fahrenheit. Lunatics and bums and drugged out losers. They wander the streets in August, but are gone at -20. I’m not sure where they go. Like mosquitoes, they simply reappear when it’s warm. Unlike insects, their absence under certain circumstances tells me they’re an optional part of the environment.

I was thinking about USAID; a bureaucracy seemingly built entirely to launder tax dollars into kickbacks and unpleasant experiences. Old videos of old cities don’t show bums. At least not like we accept in a modern city.

I theorize nutjobs and addicts and flakes are ubiquitous because they were deinstitutionalized. One could argue with the wisdom of “dump them on the streets”. Maybe the institutions sucked. I dunno’. I read One Flew Over The Cookoos Nest just like you did. But is delusional wandering in traffic better?

I only know that a world of non-crazy people ended before I was born. It ended so completely I have trouble imagining it. Only during a blizzard do I see a remnant of the time when a regular citizen could walk city streets without dealing with derelicts. Grainy videos of Buicks maneuvering busy streets filled with working men wearing ties and hats are as distant as Mars.

Was that on purpose? How much of was caused by USAID? How much money does it take to generate derelicts to beg at the stoplight in August yet vanish in January? I harbor the suspicion they’re more created than inevitable. Just one of a thousand ways our tax dollars are spent to destabilize society and annoy us.

I’m starting to wonder what WON’T be around after USAID (and much more) is cut? Have you considered this?

What won’t happen without all that corrupt funding?

Will I be able to turn on my truck radio without NPR bitching at me about gun control? Will I be able to stop at a light without some willfully unemployed jackass begging for a buck? Will I make a service call without pressing 9 for English? Will I “Netflix and chill” without a black lesbian in the lead role? Will there be TV without a thousand ads for drugs? Will teachers instruct students in fractions instead of “oppression”? Will subsidized electric cars be less common? Will I drive on the highway without billboards barking about various government programs? Will the power grid stay on better? Will McDonalds fries once again taste yummy?

Imagine all the good things we might get from the absence of corrupt and expensive Federally funded bullshit!

Everything from plastic straws to non-propaganda media might return. Dare we hope for a quieter, saner life?

I can’t wait to find out.

Wrong Side of the Tracks - Netflix Series

Trailer - Entrevías [TEMPORADA 4, FINAL] (TeleCinco) | HD
Pack TV 2

Season 4 and all our whack-a-doodle characters are back. At the end of season 3, Irene, the adopted daughter of Jimena, dies. Six months later her death is still having an impact on the family. It shows up in different ways. The old man, Tiros, is finally emerging from his room. His son Santi has developed a serious gambling problem. Jimena, his normally rational, pragmatic daughter leads a protest that attacks the police. Nelson, Irene's teenage husband gets arrested for hitting a cop during that protest. Tiros finds out he has a 'mass' growing inside his head. Gladys finds out that while she can run the day-to-day operation of the bar, she is not a business woman and the bar is in trouble. Fortunately, Pepe, the previous bar owner, has returned from a six month vacation in Cadiz.

Then there's the cops:

• Ezequiel, the street-wise detective who resembles a bum.
• Amanda, the attractive, lesbian department head who is married to Jimena.
• Camilla, the new, cute recruit, paired up with Ezequiel.
• Rene, a new guy representing big business interests. Turns out he is Glady's ex-husband and Nelson's father. He is also a minister of a small church who happens to offer counseling to gambling addicts like Santi. He is totally suspicious, but he might turn out to actually be good guy. Then again, maybe not.

Let's not forget Sanchis. Near as I can make out, Pepe and Sanchis were soldiers under Tiros command and are all still devoted to each other. Sanchis has a bit of drug habit, but he can still be effective in certain high-stakes situations.

Dulce is the kickboxing young woman leading a gang.

Previous posts about this show:

• 2022 post
• 2023 post

Lottery

Quick.
Chris Kohler

A few weeks ago me and me gang were eating lunch at Walter Mitty's and a woman came up to our table and gave us each a $1 game ticket. Something about hourly drawings and if your number comes up you win $5. A couple minutes later the clock hit one o'clock and the TV playing in the corner above the bar announced this hour's number. None of us won. You realize that the lottery is a scam designed solely to suck money our of your wallet, right?

After watching this video the other day, I got to thinking about the lottery, or rather lotteries in general. And then I saw this one.

So I'm thinking that maybe instead of offering one prize of a hundred million dollars they offer 10,000 prizes of $10,000. Maybe that would do some good. Or maybe it doesn't make any difference, Maybe people who play the lottery haven't got any sense, and they guy in the video is right.

Random News

The news stories about Trump and Musk are making me very happy. The destruction of USAID is wonderful. Note that the total budget for USAID is like a drop in the bucket of entire Federal budget and its destruction is not going to have a significant impact on inflation, which is our biggest enemy. But this action is a huge moral boost for anyone who pays taxes. At least it is for me. I read recently that 'entitlements' (whatever they are)  are (is?) the elephant in the budget. Remind me to take a look in six months are see how things are going.

Came across three stories this morning that weren't about the fireworks in D. C.

• Woman jailed in Sweden for keeping Yazidi slaves in Syria
• I Worked At Anheuser-Busch When Bud Light Imploded. Here’s What I Learned.
• Russia’s top MP holds talks with Djibouti’s parliament speaker