A SCIENCE FICTION AWARD TRIED TO CANCEL A LIBERTARIAN AND FOUND OUT THE TIME FOR CANCELLATION IS PAST: ‘Cancellations are Canceled’: Science Fiction Competition Tries To Cancel Author, Sees Backlash.
Archive for 2025
February 19, 2025
ZERO TOLERANCE FOR INSURRECTIONISTS:
This is a potential seditious conspiracy and should be investigated. I can’t believe they actually feel free to say this out pound and publish it.
— Rando Piloto (@pilotoincognito) February 18, 2025
They don’t believe in consequences for them, only the opposition. Give ’em the J6 treatment. New Rules.
FOR THE SCIENCE, IT IS CHANGING TOO: New Evidence Shows Earth’s Core is Changing Shape.
SADLY, I FIND THIS VERY CREDIBLE: Elon Musk says stranded ISS astronauts were ‘left up there for political reasons’ by Biden.
I TEND TO DOUBT EVERYTHING FROM CHINA, BUT IT’S POSSIBLE: A unique submarine battery recharging system?
LATE BUT STILL YUMMY: Happy Valentine’s Sky Candy — Stars in Your Eyes.
WORTH READING: MICHAEL CHAMBERLAIN: New Docs Further Show How Biden’s State Dept Ignored Warnings About Funding Hamas-Linked UN Org.
OTHER THAN BEING ENORMOUSLY CORRUPT? One big issue with the FBI.
I DON’T CARE IF SHE WAS PARDONED. SHE’S NOT IMMUNE FROM CIVIL SUITS: Dr. Birx Admits Young and Healthy People Didn’t Need COVID Vaccine.
JUST READ ALL OF IT: School Choice, Sputnik Moments, Centrists, and More…
POLAND IS IN AN UNENVIABLE POSITION: Trapped in the Death Zone: the EU’s deadly border crisis (It’s a video.)
NOT RIDICULOUS. EVIL: This is beyond ridiculous.
AND TILTING AT WINDMILLS IS RUNNING A SALE: Mid February Sale.
WHICH HAVE A VERY CLEAR VIEW INDEED: A View From the Cheap Seats.
ON THE WHOLE “TRUMP IS WORKING TO FREE THE TATES” THING THAT SMELLED LIKE ALINSKY… THERE MIGHT HAVE BEEN A GOOD REASON FOR THAT: The US has not made any requests to Romania upon the legal situation of well-known foreign influencers investigated by the Romanian authorities.
WELL, BY TRAINING AND EARLY CAREER, HE IS AN ACCOUNTANT: Educating the Stupid on How Audits Work In Real Life.
THE GOVERNMENT IS A LOUSY VEHICLE FOR CHARITY: In At the Beginning.
THE PROMO POSTS GO ON: Authors Standing For Freedom, special book promo.
OUR UNIVERSAL SCHOOLING DISTORTS OUR EXPECTATIONS; AND WE DON’T NOTICE BECAUSE EVERYONE HAS THE SAME DISTORTION: Good Boys And Girls Get Stars.
February 18, 2025
America’s Self-Inflicted Strategic Threat
Dig.
The political hacks opposing the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) are laughable — until you realize these hysterics present a serious threat to U.S. national security.
President Dwight Eisenhower’s no longer with us, but we have his National Security Council 162/2 report, dated Oct. 30, 1953. Once top secret, it’s now on the internet.
Ike’s West Point gut told him America faced a long and dreary strategic siege, and to pay for the win, we needed wealth — meaning a long-term productive and growing economy.
MORE:
2022’s hyperinflation and government budget excess exacerbated Washington’s debt problem. Now inflation is embedded in all U.S. economic action, to include military preparedness. Did Joe Biden do it? Yes.
But he did it in league with a criminal enemy: America’s embedded bureaucratic state, an unelected and predominantly Democratic Party caste addicted to self-serving, reckless spending and — until the Trump administration’s DOGE — immune to audit.
Bottom Line: “The unelected bureaucratic state has lost track of five defense budgets.”
RTWDT. Read the whole damn thing.
OPEN THREAD: Hump Day.
UPDATE: Oops, this was supposed to be sked for tomorrow. Oh well.
AUTHOR OF GULAG NOW SIDING WITH THE NOMENKLATURA: There’s a Term for What Trump and Musk Are Doing.
Despite its name, the Department of Government Efficiency is not, so far, primarily interested in efficiency. DOGE and its boss, Elon Musk, have instead focused their activity on the eradication of the federal civil service, along with its culture and values, and its replacement with something different. In other words: regime change.
No one should be surprised or insulted by this phrase, because this is exactly what Trump and many who support him have long desired. During his 2024 campaign, Trump spoke of Election Day as “Liberation Day,” a moment when, in his words, “vermin” and “radical left lunatics” would be eliminated from public life. J. D. Vance has said that Trump should “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state, replace them with our people.” Steve Bannon prefers to talk about the “deconstruction of the administrative state,” but that amounts to the same thing.
These ideas are not original to Vance or Bannon: In the 21st century, elected leaders such as Hugo Chávez or Viktor Orbán have also used their democratic mandates for the same purpose. Chávez fired 19,000 employees of the state oil company; Orbán dismantled labor protections for the civil service. Trump, Musk, and Russell Vought, the newly appointed director of the Office of Management and Budget and architect of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025—the original regime-change blueprint—are now using IT operations, captured payments systems, secretive engineers, a blizzard of executive orders, and viral propaganda to achieve the same thing.
This appears to be DOGE’s true purpose. Although Trump and Musk insist they are fighting fraud, they have not yet provided evidence for their sweeping claims. Although they demand transparency, Musk conceals his own conflicts of interest. Although they do say they want efficiency, Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut. Although they say they want to cut costs, the programs they are attacking represent a tiny fraction of the U.S. budget. The only thing these policies will certainly do, and are clearly designed to do, is alter the behavior and values of the civil service. Suddenly, and not accidentally, people who work for the American federal government are having the same experience as people who find themselves living under foreign occupation.
Earlier today, Steve linked to “George MF Washington’s” Substack about the 1993 movie Dave, in which “Washington” wrote:
“Dave” (1993), and then later on “The American President” (1995) and “The West Wing” (1999) created a gauzy Federal fantasy land where Progressive Government was always and everywhere a force for good. Where all Americans aspired to a life beneath an all-powerful benevolent Government which did everything for us from birth to earth. In these movies, government never arrests you for speaking out at your local school board meeting. They don’t deny you disaster aid based on your political yard signs. And they never, ever, kick down your door and murder your pet squirrel. These movies built a world where the heroes were always coded Liberal, where they always did the right thing, and where screenplays written by prominent Hollywood Progressives ensured that Conservative-coded villains would always be frustrated by the ability of their opponents to tie them in rhetorical knots.
Most importantly, with the movies and TV shows of this era, Progressive Hollywood was telling us “this is how it ought to be… this is how Government should work.” But to watch “Dave” here in the post-Biden era… the era of Trump 2.0… is to realize that what Hollywood really did in the late-90’s, was to set a bunch of traps for itself and then gamely walk right into them thirty years later.
Now we’re up to 1996’s Wag the Dog, which began with a title card that read, “Why does the dog wag its tail? Because a dog is smarter than its tail. If the tail were smarter, it would wag the dog.”
Or to put it another way:
Elon Musk on Hannity: “If the bureaucracy is fighting the will of the people. Then we live in a bureaucracy, not a democracy." pic.twitter.com/RS0PmArkxD
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) February 19, 2025
2025 will be the year of deciding who is in charge of Washington, the swamp dwellers, or the president.
Related: Continental Divide. Europeans are starting to realize that their governments are too big. Will Americans catch on next?
Throw your Euro stereotypes out the window: Last weekend, a Greek government that has cut public-sector pay and lowered pensions won a clear victory in local elections. Despite strikes and violence, despite the fact that Greece’s debt is still growing and more cuts are coming, there will be a Socialist mayor of Athens for the first time in 24 years. (And, yes, in Greece, the Socialists favor budget cuts, and the conservatives oppose them.)
Nor are the Greeks alone. Last month, voters re-elected a Latvian government that cut public-sector workers’ pay by 50 percent. The British government coalition, which is also trying to eliminate benefits and cut spending, remains strangely popular, too. Although—contrary to my previous observation—London witnessed its first Continental-style, anti-austerity riot last week, there wasn’t much general enthusiasm for the protesters. Some of their leaders wound up denouncing the riots, and they haven’t hurt the government’s poll numbers yet, either.
It’s saying too much to call it a pattern, and it may well not be a permanent change: I’m sure there are plenty of European politicians who won’t survive their next encounter with the voters. But there is something in the air. It almost seems as if at least a few Europeans have actually drawn some lessons from the recent recession and accompanying turbulence in the bond markets. They have realized, or are about to realize, that their state sectors are too big. They are about to discover that their public spending, which seemed justified in good economic times, has to be cut.
—Anne Applebaum, in the then-still Washington Post-owned Slate, November 15th, 2010.
I liked that version of Applebaum. What happened in the years since, beyond TDS?
TURNING TO COMPETENT PEOPLE — AN IDEA SO CRAZY IT JUST MIGHT WORK: SpaceX invited to provide input on FAA air traffic control modernization.
THE ENEMY WITHIN:
SCOOP: State Dept 'Diversity' Fellows Launched an Internal 'Resistance' Against Israel—and Blinken's Staff Offered Them a Meeting, Internal Emails Show — Group of US diplomats were "actively engaging in resistance" against US support for Israel https://t.co/Ft7SBnpAcz
— Adam Kredo (@Kredo0) February 17, 2025
JUST GOT EXCITED: New Theory Explains How Ancient Earth Came to Be So Wet.