Wednesday, February 26, 2025

That Was Quick

The post above, reporting on Director Gabbard's announcement on the Jesse Watters show at 10:45 PM, followed the one below, timestamped 3:26 PM. It appears that someone sent Christopher Rufo, co-author of Monday's City Journal article that broke the story, this screen shot of an NSA trans chat thread from this past December 20. If they didn't see this coming, they certainy should have. As someone who's written corporate policies on authorized use of IT resources, the apparent NSA policy reported in the City Journal article is pretty standard:

According to an NSA press official, “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.”

A firing for this sort of thing by a non-government employer would probably stand up in court. A difficulty here might arise if the fired NSA employees claimed this use was specifically authorized:

[T]hey did so with the full support of NSA leadership, which declared that DEI was “not only mission critical, but mission imperative.”

On the other hand, anyone in NSA leadership who said this would be fired himself. It looks like similar purges will be under way in the FBI:

FBI leadership is starting an investigation into the origins of the agency’s plan a decade ago to infiltrate the campaign of presidential candidate Donald Trump using two female undercover “honeypot” agents.

The off-the-books investigation, launched in 2015 by FBI Director James B. Comey, was revealed by an agency whistleblower in a protected disclosure to the House Judiciary Committee last year and first reported exclusively by The Washington Times in October.

In the intelligence community, a honeypot commonly refers to an undercover operative, usually a woman, who feigns sexual or romantic interest to obtain information from a target.

. . . The whistleblower agent “personally knew” that Mr. Comey ordered an FBI investigation into Mr. Trump and that Mr. Comey “personally directed it,” according to the disclosure.

The investigation did not appear to target a specific crime but was more of what agents would describe as a fishing expedition to find anything incriminating against Mr. Trump.

. . . “The case had no predicated foundation, so Comey personally directed the investigation without creating an official case file in Sentinel or any other FBI system,” according to the whistleblower’s disclosure. “The FBI has multiple methods of protecting highly sensitive investigations, so Comey did not have a legitimate reason not to officially create an official investigation file or have a file number.”

. . . The investigation was eventually closed because a major newspaper obtained a photograph of one of the undercovers and was about to publish it, but the FBI press office told the outlet that the photograph was an FBI informant who would be killed if the photograph was publicly released.

In fact, it was a photograph of the FBI undercover employee.

The FBI whistleblower employee noted in the disclosure that one of the undercovers agreed to be transferred to the CIA so she would not be available as a potential witness.

. . . The other undercover employee was rewarded for her activities through a promotion in the bureau and is now a high-level FBI executive in a major field office.

The whistleblower employee observed one or more employees in the FBI being directed to never discuss the operation with anyone ever again, including other people involved in the 2016 Trump campaign infiltration operation.

It looks like Trump's appointees are moving very quickly over cases like this. And if one set of FBI executives can tell employees never to mention it, a new set can tell them to explain it all, in detail. This should be juicy.

Many visitors have probably noted that Blogger put up a flag on yesterday's post warning users that it had sensitive content. It seems that this only demonstrated the Streisand effect yet again:

Streisand effect, phenomenon in which an attempt to censor, hide, or otherwise draw attention away from something only serves to attract more attention to it. The name derives from American singer and actress Barbra Streisand’s lawsuit against a photographer in 2003, which drew attention to the photo she was suing to have taken off the Internet.

It spiked my traffic yesterday and today. Maybe Blogger will do it some more -- I hope so!

posted by test @ February 26, 2025   0 Comments

Tuesday, February 25, 2025

Thoughts On The NSA Trans Chat Rooms

There's been a lot of reaction on alt media yesterday and this morning to a City Journal piece by Christopher F. Rufo and Hannah Grossman, The NSA’s Secret Sex Chats.

We have cultivated sources within the National Security Agency—one current employee and one former employee—who have provided chat logs from the NSA’s Intelink messaging program. According to an NSA press official, “All NSA employees sign agreements stating that publishing non-mission related material on Intelink is a usage violation and will result in disciplinary action.” Nonetheless, these logs, dating back two years, are lurid, featuring wide-ranging discussions of sex, kink, polyamory, and castration.

You can go to the link and the various stories on alt sites for the lurid details, and I don't see much point in belaboring them here. The UK Daily Mail carried the reactions from the Trump administration:

[Director of National Intelligence Tulsi] Gabbard, who oversees the 18 American spy agencies, responded to the report promising to clean house and confirmed the existence of the chats, which have been destroyed.

'This behavior is unacceptable and those involved WILL be held accountable. These disgusting chat groups were immediately shut down when @POTUS issued his EO ending the DEI insanity the Biden Admin was obsessed with. Our IC must be focused on our core mission: ensuring the safety,' she wrote.

Elon Musk also had a crack at the news and referenced his email asking workers to explain their duties each week: 'Well... at least we know what they did last week.'

. . . An NSA spokesperson told Rufo that the chats were real and that they're 'taking actions against any and all employees who abused this system.'

Several questions came up for me concerning the details of the chats. First, just to establish the context here, I double-checked the numbers. An NIH study estimates the number of transgender individuals in the US as 390 adults per 100 000, or almost 1 million adults nationally. This comes out to .002% of the US population of 340 million. Many of the chats in the City Journal story purport to cover male-to-female bottom surgery.

However, according to UVA Health,

Gender reassignment (confirmation) surgery is more common in transgender men (42 to 54%) than transgender women (28%). Top (chest gender confirmation) surgery is performed approximately twice as often as bottom (genital) surgery. In studies that assessed transgender men and women as an aggregate, top surgery accounts for 8 to 25% and bottom surgery accounts for 4 to 13%.

Just for convenience, then, let's say 10% of trans men have had bottom surgery -- at least we're getting some idea about order of magnitude. So if there are maybe 1 million trans men in the US, although this is using the total for both genders, and these figures are iffy in any case, if 10% of trans men have had bottom surgery, we're talking somewhere around 100,000 people total in all 50 states. But apparently enough of this small group works, or worked, for the NSA to be a significant part of the workforce and secure management support for a chat group on agency time using agency resources. According to the City Journal report at the link,

Activists within the agency used LGBTQ+ “employee resource groups” to turn their kinks and pathologies into official work duties. According to the current NSA employee, these groups “spent all day" recruiting activists and holding meetings with titles such as “Privilege,” “Ally Awareness,” “Pride,” and “Transgender Community Inclusion.” And they did so with the full support of NSA leadership, which declared that DEI was “not only mission critical, but mission imperative.”

Oddly enough, DOGE has surfaced a separate trans influence operation within the intelligence community, of which USAID, source of the funds in question, is a major part:

Stonewall could be forced to cut up to half of its staff after President Trump’s decision to freeze foreign aid, The Times understands.

Workers at the [UK] LGBTQ+ charity were told on Thursday that restructuring would take place, and that only roles with dedicated funding would be safe.

. . . Sources said they believed up to half of the workforce could be made redundant in the move, which they were told would “secure the future of Stonewall for the long term as a significant LGBTQ+ organisation able to deliver impactful campaigns and legislative change across the UK and further afield”.

Insiders believed the announcement was linked to decisions made by Trump over the provision of foreign aid.

But isn't this just a different way of saying a key UK trans influence operation was astroturf funded by the US deep state? And the US deep state, judging from the NSA chats, has been working on behalf of a tiny minority within a tiny minority, viz, trans men who have had bottom surgery -- or at least claim to have had it. I question how much of the talk in the chats was pure moonshine. At the City Journal link,

Last January, chatroom members discussed their practice of polyamory, or “ethical non-monogamy.” “[A] polycule is a polyamorous group,” one employee explained. “A is my [girlfriend], and B-G are her partners. . . . then B&C are dating but not C&D, nor E, F, or G with any of the others, though there are several MWB (metas-with-benefits) connections.” Another employee claimed to be part of a nine-member “polycule,” adding that “some of our friends are practically poly-mers, with all the connected compounds.”

A lot of this must be simple baloney, tall tales on taxpayer time. On one hand, this is money going down a black hole, but on the other, the story raises legitimate concerns, especially if this is mostly just guys reinforcing each other's fantasies:

These NSA chat logs suggest the presence of at least hundreds of gender activists within the intelligence services who cannot distinguish between male and female, and who believe that discussing castration, polyamory, and “gangbangs” is an appropriate use of public resources. For psychological and ideological reasons, these kinds of people will not be easily sidelined.

Well, as Musk put it, at least we know what they did last week. And for that matter, how many of these people "work from home"? If Musk's tactics of creative destruction are effective in getting rid of them, so much the better.

posted by test @ February 25, 2025   0 Comments

Monday, February 24, 2025

What Is It About Trans That Triggers Supporters So Badly?

Last week's conflict between President Trump and Maine Gov Janet Mills over allowing biologically male athletes to compete in women's sports brought up a puzzling issue: supporters of trans people quickly become hysterical and profane in their arguments, even in violation of ordinary decorum. For instance,

The governor of Maine’s chief of staff publicly melted down and cursed at a White House official on Saturday over the state’s dispute with the White House on men in women’s sports, a senior White House official told The Daily Wire on Saturday.

The incident allegedly occurred as Alex Meyer, the White House Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, spoke with a group of gubernatorial chiefs of staff on Saturday morning in Washington, D.C., the senior White House official said. When Meyer told Jeremy Kennedy, the chief of staff for Maine Governor Janet Mills, that the state must follow the law and protect women’s sports, Kennedy allegedly responded, “F*** you, you a**hole,” before storming out of the room.

A spokesman for the governor denied this to The Daily Wire on Saturday morning, saying: “Jeremy did not say those words. He did not engage in profanity.” The governor’s office did not immediately respond to further requests for comment about the altercation and did not deny that Kennedy was upset and stormed out of the room.

A second incident took place within the same few days last week:

The Justice Department accused a judge Friday of “hostile and egregious misconduct” in her handling of a high profile case dealing with President Donald Trump’s executive order on trans-identifying troops in the military.

DOJ Chief of Staff Chad Mizelle informed Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan on Friday that United States District Court Judge Ana C. Reyes engaged in such conduct toward DOJ’s attorneys, suggesting bias and disrespect toward the DOJ’s position and imperiling a fair weighing of the case.

. . . “While Judge Reyes was not sure exactly how many sexes there were, she hypothesized that could be ‘anywhere near about 30 different intersex examples,'” the DOJ letter states. “It was during these lines of questioning that Judge Reyes engaged in the unacceptable misconduct at issue in this complaint, questioning a Department of Justice attorney regarding his religious beliefs and then using him unwillingly as a physical prop in her courtroom theatrics.”

. . . “What do you think Jesus would say to telling a group of people that they are so worthless, so worthless that we’re not going to allow them into homeless shelters?” she allegedly asked. “Do you think Jesus would be, ‘Sounds right to me’? Or do you think Jesus would say, ‘WTF? Of course, let them in?”

“This line of questioning is deeply problematic for several reasons,” the DOJ letter said. “First, the question has no relevance to the legal analysis of military policy. Second, it placed DOJ counsel in an untenable position of either appearing unresponsive or speculating about how an incoherent hypothetical aligns with Judge Reyes’ personal religious beliefs.”

. . . The DOJ also took issue with Reyes’ use of the phrase “WTF,” meaning, “what the f***,” as she questioned an attorney on his religious beliefs, saying that it “sheds light on the severity of the judge’s lack of professional decorum.”

. . . The DOJ said that Reyes told its counsel: “I made a change to my standing order when I was in the back. My new standing order says that no one who has graduated from UVA Law School can appear before me. So, I need you to sit down, please. I need you to sit down.”

“When counsel complied with this directive, the judge continued her hypothetical about UVA law graduates being banned from her courtroom because ‘they’re all liars and lack integrity,'” the letter continued. “Only after Judge Reyes used counsel as a physical prop did she instruct him to come back up to continue the proceedings.

The most effective argument in favor of transsexualism and related issues like biological male athletes competing as women is that gender dysphoria is a medical condition, and those who suffer from it are entitled to scientifically based medical treatment. But if these are scientific and medical issues, why are those who argue for transsexuals so easily triggered into intemperate behavior, profanity, and violation of decorum? But this is clearly a pollitical, not a medical or scientific issue.

Vocal Trump opponent Stephen King came out in support of Gov Mills:

Author Stephen King on X, formerly Twitter, wrote: "Governor Janet Mills to Trump: 'See you in court.' Makes me proud to be a Maine man. Thank you, Governor, for standing up to the bully."

But in general, this isn't an issue to which the majority can rally. Newsweek quoted an opponent from the Gay Men's Network, a UK organization that opposes the use of measures like puberty blockers:

If I had told you in the 1980s that you would cheer on men depriving women of sporting glory, dignity in their changing rooms or the right to fair play on school fields, you would have thought me mad. The bully here is you and your governor. Your victims are girls playing sport.

What politicians like Mills seem to assume is that the trans issue embraces a whole LGBTQ+ spectrum, when the more conventionally same-sex attracted aren't fully on board with the more radical pansexualists. Lesbians in particular haven't been with the program:

Wild guess, but I’m going to say it has something to do with the way that so many [trans males] barge their way into women’s spaces and then complain that women are being mean, or bigots, or TERFs, or whatever, when they push back and assert their right to their own spaces, many of which they need to feel safe, and most of which they fought hard to achieve in the first place.

It might also have something to do with the fact that these men LARPing as women have massive institutional power behind them, making them feel empowered to throw their weight around (sometimes literally) and bully and threaten anyone who says they have no right to claim things reserved for women.

Somehow the politicians who wield this institutional power, like Maine Gov Janet Mills, see the same-sex attracted as part of a cohesive group of pansexualists, and championing the rights of trans biologiocal males, the smallest and most extreme specialty interest, will gain them the support of all the others. Thus we see Gov Mills cavorting at a drag performance: This is a major misreading of the public mood. The public hysteria by supporters of men competing in women's sports isn't a winning strategy.

posted by test @ February 24, 2025   0 Comments

Sunday, February 23, 2025

Elon Musk Tells The Bureaucrats To Explain What They Do

During my career, I worked for government agencies at various times as an employee, a conttactor, and an employee of private companies who performed work on site at government agencies. I would say that the problem of staff who have no discernible duties is universal, hardly limited to government, although it's more visible there.

I recall some years ago reading an account of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas's time as chairman of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission between 1982 and 1990. According to Wikipedia, he was credited with improving the efficiency of the EEOC. Settlement award amounts to victims of discrimination tripled, while the number of suits filed decreased.

The account I read, but haven't been able to find now, said that one of his techniques for doing this was to go down to the cafeteria in the mornings and insist that the employees finish their coffee and go back to the office. I thought of this sometime later when I was working for a quasi-government agency that was in a building with a cafe on the ground floor. I would often go down there for lunch, but not for much else.

One day, the proprietor came to my table and asked, "Do you work for XYZ upstairs?"

"Yes," I said.

"Do you know you're the only one who works there who isn't down here all day long? You come down for lunch, and that's it."

I know I had weekly meetings with my boss, where I was expected to do exactly what Elon Musk now says federal employees will be expected to do, give their boss a list of things they'd done over the past week. I always did this, although sometimes, as any smart subordinate would do, I maybe overstressed some of the importance of one or another item. But at each of these meetings, my boss became increasingly exasperated, picking through each item in more and more detail. "You said you did this. But how long did that really take you?"

"Maybe half an hour," I might say. "But it was one of the things I had on the project plan, and I got it done."

"But you're just setting this whole list up to make yourself look good." I didn't have much to answer -- I thought subordinates ought to be entitled to give the best account of themselves. But later I heard my boss was known for always being out in the building courtyard on a more or less permanent cigarette break.

At another job, I was working for the company I've described here before, Technology Associates. I was at a customer site as the on-site rep. The manager there one day called my boss at TA, I'm not sure why. and said, "He's one of the best workers I have. He's here on time every morning, and he gets right down to work."

My boss at TA gave me a call. "I've been hearing you get to work on time, and you get right down to work. They think very highly of you. Do you know what that says to me? It says you're trying to put yourself between TA and the customer." I thought I was supposed to make TA look good, but I knew that if I answered that, I'd be in even more trouble.

Well, the problem of employees who don't do anything isn't limited to government, but it's certainly there. Via The Atlantic,

President Donald Trump and his billionaire adviser Elon Musk justify dismantling the civil service as cost cutting. The federal government has “billions and billions of dollars in waste, fraud, and abuse,” Trump claimed earlier this month, and Musk has complained about a “staggering amount of waste of taxpayer money.” Their actions—a barrage of executive orders, memos, layoffs, and attempts to unilaterally eliminate entire agencies—have sparked outrage, but Musk sees that only as proof of their achievements: “They wouldn’t be complaining so much if we weren’t doing something useful.”

. . . The Trump administration has created a toxic work environment. I’ve spent 25 years studying public administration and have never seen anything like the deep sense of dread that federal employees are now experiencing. I spoke with workers who feared reprisal if their names were published. One told me that there’s an “eerie” mood in the Census Bureau office: “No one can openly discuss anything.” Another civil servant said that people who’ve worked in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for decades are afraid and “can’t believe what’s happening.”

Press reports of Musk's demand that workers document what they've done indicate that this is simply the same thing he did when he took over Twitter in 2022.

The day before Musk closed his $44 billion deal to buy Twitter, which he’s re-dubbed X, he walked through the front door with a sink. Starting within hours of his takeover the following day, Musk took something like a hacksaw to the company, moves that he said were essential to “save” the company but that caused chaos.

. . . Still, while the takeover may have hurt Twitter employees, users, advertisers and – at least in one sense — Musk’s own pocketbook, it has also added to his own personal power. Over the summer, Musk used X to try to sway public opinion in favor of Trump. And since Trump’s reelection, Musk now has the president’s ear and an office in the White House — and he’s become tens of billions of additional dollars richer, on the back of expectations that his connection to Trump will benefit his empire of companies.

And for that reason, he may have little incentive to change his employment – and layoff – strategy in his new role at DOGE.

My view is that Musk simply understands how the world works and acts accordingly.

posted by test @ February 23, 2025   0 Comments

Saturday, February 22, 2025

The Ukraine Policy Dilemma

A couple of recent articles at Real Clear Politics display the muddle of conventional thinking about Ukraine. In Compact, which describes itself as "an online magazine founded in 2022, seeks a new political center devoted to the common good", with Ivy Leaguers on its masthead, we find Reality Is Winning the Ukraine Narrative War:

While the Russian and Ukrainian militaries have been clashing violently on the bloody battlefields of Eastern Europe, a parallel war has long been underway in the media sphere, where armies of information warriors have battled to shape the ways Western publics think about the conflict.

The dominant army in this information war has comprised most Western governments and leading media organs, abetted by a formidable array of public relations firms working in partnership with the Ukrainian government. It has insisted that the Ukraine war is best understood as a modern-day variation of Nazi Germany’s World War II aggression, with Putin reprising the Hitlerian role of revanchist dictator seeking to grab land and dominate Europe. Unless he is stopped through resolute military force, they argue, his armies will move from Ukraine to the Baltic states, Poland, and beyond.

Arrayed against this army has been a loose band of realist experts and anti-establishment skeptics who contend that the war’s origins more closely resemble those of World War I. To varying degrees, they acknowledge that Russia’s paternalistic attitudes towards Ukraine have played a significant role in Moscow’s motivations, but they argue that the invasion is fundamentally the product of what international relations theorists call a “security dilemma.” Steps by NATO to bolster the security of its members and aspirants were perceived as threatening by Moscow. Aggressive efforts by Russia to block these moves threatened the West, producing a spiral of action and reaction that continued to escalate absent diplomatic efforts to arrest it.

This is something of a straw man good guy-bad guy narrative, whereby anti-establishment skeptics battle the evil establishment. The problem is that right now, the establishment -- for instance Foreign Affairs -- seems to be on the side of the skeptics, at least as far as NATO is concerned:

At last week’s Ukraine Defense Contact Group meeting in Brussels, newly minted U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declared that the position of the U.S. government was that Ukraine will not join NATO. Although greeted with horror by some in Washington and in European capitals, Hegseth’s remarks were in fact more a public statement of reality than a genuine change in policy. This position had been telegraphed throughout the Trump campaign and transition, and even the Biden administration had been skeptical of Ukrainian membership any time soon. The risks of admitting Ukraine to the alliance—reflected in widespread opposition to it in the United States, Germany, and elsewhere—have long made this reality perfectly clear to all.

. . . With the Trump administration insisting that no U.S. troops be sent to Ukraine, the conversation in European capitals is increasingly focused on whether and how European states can provide “security guarantees” through their own deployments.

Yet there are reasons to doubt whether a European guarantee to provide troops is feasible, especially without substantial U.S. involvement.

. . . Kyiv itself has long been insistent that the only way to resolve this concern is to provide Ukraine with NATO membership as part of an eventual peace deal. This is ideal from Kyiv’s point of view because it offloads the problem of preventing a future war to the United States. It would also be beneficial for European states—“cost effective,” as one EU leader recently put it—as it would rely less on spending, arms, or military deployments and more on the paper guarantee provided by NATO’s Article 5.

But NATO membership for Ukraine remains unlikely in the long term and implausible in the short term.

The piece, after surmising that a peacekeeping force would require from 50,000 to 200,000 troops, which the US refuses to provide and Europe is unable to, concludes that Ukraine should guarantee its own security. But isn't this the unworkable situation we have now? Well, we'll just strengthen and rebuild Ukraine's military!

A rebuilt and adequately supplied Ukrainian military would be a formidable deterrent to Moscow, and Western support will be critical to this military rebuilding. Rather than paper promises of NATO membership—or insufficient European troop deployments—what Ukraine needs is Western partners to provide arms and funding in the case of a future war, much as these states have done for the last three years. This could even be framed as a kind of security guarantee, in that it provides training and arms to Ukraine in peacetime and aid in a future war.

But how does this differ from current policy? The piece says flat out, the US and Europe will fund a new Ukraine military "much as these states have done for the last three years". I assume that now would involve magicallly cutting out the corruption that by Zelensky's own account siphoned off 50% of that aid. Curious about what sort of mind would devise such an imaginative solution, I discovered the author, Emma Ashford,

is a Senior Fellow with the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center. She works on a variety of issues related to the future of U.S foreign policy, international security, and the politics of global energy markets.

. . . Prior to joining the Stimson Center, Ashford was a senior fellow with the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which focused on challenging the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy. She was also a research fellow in defense and foreign policy at the Cato Institute, where she worked on a variety of issues including the US-Saudi relationship, sanctions policy, and US policy towards Russia, and US foreign policy and grand strategy more broadly.

How on earth does this "challenge" the prevailing assumptions governing US foreign policy if it envisions keeping Ukraine out of NATO -- the policy of the US at least since Dubya -- and sending hundreds of billions down a continuing black hole of military aid? I think Sundance at Conservative Treehousehas a better grasp of the situation:

Elements outside our central government, likely CIA clandestine operators in coordination with GCHQ in U.K, are the leading operators on what they frame as Ukraine military operations.

. . . Sooner or later, something is bound to happen, because the desperation to retain control amid those within the IC consortium is palpable and visible. They fear President Trump and President Putin forming a geopolitical alliance and they are reacting out of fear for diminished influence.

This presents a problem for our nation. The background here is very concerning. This is why I said, “at a certain moment, likely as a part of a media question, someone is going to ask President Trump why a certain action was taken by his administration in the Ukraine conflict. President Trump will respond by saying, “we didn’t do that.” The puzzled media will repeat the question. President Trump will again say, no one in my administration did that. . . And suddenly, things will reveal.”

Biden was never in control of the Ukraine operation. This is something that started within the U.S. State Department (CIA division) long before Biden was installed. President Trump is now having to deal with a geopolitical consequence that comes from this collaborative IC operation that is obviously no longer exclusive to the USA. Other intelligence agencies are now too far enmeshed to safely retreat.

It makes sense for President Trump to start this conversation by pointing out the Zelenskyy factor within it. It was a logical prediction to look at the scope of the problem and see Zelenskyy as the Gordion knot that needs to be cut.

Trump's currentely expressed view, which I think is the only genuinely realistic one, is that Ukraine has no credible path forward:

“I’ve been watching for years, and I’ve been watching him negotiate with no cards,” Trump said of Zelensky. “He has no cards. And you get sick of it.”

“So, I don’t think he’s very important to be at meetings, to be honest with you,” Trump added. “He makes it very hard to make deals.”

Trump suggested Russian President Vladimir Putin wanted to reach a deal to end the war in Ukraine. He claimed Putin did not necessarily have to negotiate a ceasefire, because if he wanted, he’d get “the whole country.”

It looks like Trump's next steps are clear:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has few — if any — advocates in President Trump’s inner circle as the pair’s souring relationship threatens to tank Kyiv’s standing in peace talks with Russia.

. . . While the deterioration between Washington and Kyiv appears sudden, one source familiar with White House discussions told The Post Thursday: “It’s nothing new to me.

. . . The “real question is, has anyone told [Trump] they really, really like him?” the source said of the Ukrainian president.

A second source close to Trump concurred with the assessment and suggested that “the best case for [Zelensky] and the world is that he leaves to France immediately.”

I suspect this will happen soon. The alternative to the feckless dither we see on various sides of the argument is to recognize that the Ukraine war is the creation of unelected intelligence and quasi-diplomatic entities that invented the idea of a reified "Ukraine" that could defend itself without exorbitantly expensive aid that the West is no longer in a position to supply, especially when it was always assumed that the US would provide the great bulk of it.

But what about the Reimagining US Grand Strategy program at the Stimson Center, or the Atlantic Council’s New American Engagement Initiative, which fund people like Emma Ashford and are part of the machinery that brought us the Ukraine war in the first place? Aren't they actually also part of Musk's grift machine?

posted by test @ February 22, 2025   0 Comments

Friday, February 21, 2025

"The Grift Machine Has To Stop"

This is a quote from an interview with Elon Musk, where he referred specifically to the Ukraine war. But it occurs to me that this has been a key strategy for Trump since he returned to office.

For instance, the removal of Temporary Protected Status for Haitian migrants knocks away a key cause of the problems in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA:

The Trump administration on Thursday canceled an extension of Temporary Protected Status for Haitians, the latest move by the president targeting the form of immigration relief for people coming from countries facing political upheaval and natural disasters.

In June, amid the island's violent domestic turmoil, the Biden administration announced the temporary immigration protection was extended for Haitians until February 2026.

The Department of Homeland Security announced Thursday that it was vacating the extension and the protections would end on Aug. 3.

As I've discussed, for instance, here, the Haitians have been key to an elaborate NGO-driven economy. The Biden immigration policy brought in hundreds of thousands of Haitians, who needed jobs, housing, food, health care, cars, education, and so on. Other arms of the government then gave grants to NGOs, which in turn worked with sweatshop employers, their job recruiters, slumlords, community organizers, and so forth to supplement the migrants' low-pay jobs and overcrowded rentals, which drove down salaries and drove up rents.

The Haitians then strained local schools and health care resources. The NGOs apparently bought them cars, but they didn't get driver training or insurance, and the local insurance rates soared. But for the NGOs, some of which were associated with Catholic Charities, there was a guaranteed skim: part of the grants was always a generous percentage for the NGOs' administrative overhead. DOGE has been restricting these charges to 15%, when they previously had been as high as 70% -- but if the Haitians must go back to Haiti, there will be far less need for such grants going forward in any case.

The complaints from the US Catholic Bishops about cuts to their programs would have more credibility if we knew how much their programs charge for administrative overhead, as well as the precise activities they sponsor in places like Springfield. I have a suspicion that some of these programs have been hijacked by secular employees with a political agenda in conflict with Church teachings, or tacitly tolerated by local bishops with a similar agenda. At minimum, the precise budgets and line item programs need to be made transparent -- the bishops should be eager for these issues to be resolved.

The administrative overhead skim is completely legal. But I've always thought there's also an illegal skim, part of which takes the form of kickbacks to politicians, organizers, and other influential parties. The most prominent in the past week has been the $2 billion awarded to a climate group with ties to former Georgia Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, described by Wikipedia as "an American politician, lawyer, voting rights activist, author, and perennial candidate", who has not held public office since leaving the Georgia House of Representatives in 2017.

The money was earmarked for Power Forward Communities — a nonprofit partnered with multiple left-wing groups founded by Abrams and which the Georgia Democrat has stated she was “thrilled” to be part of, the Washington Free Beacon reported on Wednesday.

The funds were set aside at an outside financial institution — Citibank — before Biden left office and part of a larger, $20 billion pot of money the former president’s EPA received through the Inflation Reduction Act to dole out to climate groups.

“It’s extremely concerning that an organization that reported just $100 in revenue in 2023 was chosen to receive $2 billion,” EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin told the outlet, referring to Power Forward Communities’ latest tax filings. “That’s 20 million times the organization’s reported revenue.”

It's hard to avoid thinking that much of such money simply finds its way into the pockets of favored figures. Cuts in at at least some foreign and domestic NGO progams have been immediater, resulting in layoffs and project terminations. In the USAID,

In the first day President Trump took office in the White House, he paused almost all of the operations of the world’s single biggest aid donor – US Agency for International Development (USAID) – for 90 days.

Prior to Trump’s pause on aid, more than 10,000 people worked for the organisation, with around two-thirds working overseas. Because of the freeze, many have been put on leave and thousands of contractors have lost their jobs. Projects across the world have also been forced to alter or cease operations entirely.

In Ukraine alone,

Shelters used by evacuees are also facing uncertain futures. One location used in Ukraine for evacuees is a concert hall in the eastern part of the country. Prior to the freeze, 60 per cent of the costs to run the shelter (around $7,000 USD) was being paid by the US.

News outlets have also been hit, such as Ukraïner – known for its war reports in many languages – which has announced it is scaling back its operations since the USAID cut. Dozens of its projects rely on financial support from the organisation.

‘We will no longer be able to make the series of war reports…because they are very expensive to produce,’ said Ukraïner’s founder Bohdan Logvynenko in a Facebook post. ‘To make them cheaper and stop traveling to the front line, we may have to significantly sacrifice quality.’

The situation in Ukraine seems to be changing by the hour. As of yesterday, there were sketchy reports that at least some US weapon shipments had been paused:

Ukrainian lawmaker Roman Kostenko, who works as the secretary of the Verkhovna Rada’s Committee on National Security, Defense and Intelligence, told reporters on Thursday that the US weapon sales and deliveries have been halted.

Kostenko made the announcement during a press roundtable on Thursday that was later posted on YouTube.

According to Kostenko, “Deliveries of the weapons that were going to be sold have stopped. Those companies that were supposed to transfer these weapons here are now waiting, because there is no decision.”

But every indication is that Trump's people are working across the board to stop the grift machine by simply turning off the money spigot. This in turn is causing loud complaints, which is useful in itself -- as various administration figures have pointed out, the people complaining the loudest, certainly including those in Congress, are the ones losing the most. That's where we need to look.

posted by test @ February 21, 2025   0 Comments

Thursday, February 20, 2025

Substance From A US Vice President

When I think about vice presidents, I automatically think about Kamala Harris, Mike Pence, and Joe Biden. Dick Cheney at the time was an exception, but his reputation is steadily declining. Then we're back to Al Gore, Dan Quayle, Bush père, Walter Mondale, and Spiro Agnew. Contrast all these with J D Vance's remarks in the post above about the situation on the ground in Ukraine:

. . . neither Europe, nor the Biden administration, nor the Ukrainians had any pathway to victory. This was true three years ago, it was true two years ago, it was true last year, and it is true today.

. . . President Trump is dealing with reality, which means dealing with facts. And here are some facts:

. . . Number two, Russians have a massive numerical advantage in manpower and weapons in Ukraine, and that advantage will persist regardless of further Western aid packages. Again, the aid is *currently* flowing.

. . . Number five, the conflict has placed--and continues to place--stress on tools of American statecraft, from military stockpiles to sanctions (and so much else). We believe the continued conflict is bad for Russia, bad for Ukraine, and bad for Europe. But most importantly, it is bad for the United States.

Given the above facts, we must pursue peace, and we must pursue it now. President Trump ran on this, he won on this, and he is right about this. It is lazy, ahistorical nonsense to attack as "appeasement" every acknowledgment that America's interest must account for the realities of the conflict.

There's an intriguing context here as well. One of his points in his remarks above is that the Western Europeans "pursue domestic policies (on migration and censorship) that offend the sensibilities of most Americans". This is simply an extension of his Munich address last week:

Vice President JD Vance set off a firestorm in Munich when he chastised European leaders for their hostility toward free speech, their democratic deficit and their poorly conceived immigration policies.

Vance’s shocking words — and the prospects of American disengagement — were so traumatic, they prompted French President Emmanuel Macron to cobble together an emergency summit of European leaders, where the participants promptly agreed on nothing.

. . . After three months in the shadow of the omnipresent President Trump, the Munich conference was Vance’s first opportunity in the spotlight on his own. And he was not about to let it pass with some anodyne word salad. He took the opportunity to make it into a major address on the hot-button political and cultural issues of free speech and immigration.

Here's an op-ed at USA Today:

Watching Harris speak to a crowd or give an interview made me feel humiliation for our country. I'd think, this is our best? This is who we brought to the world stage to represent us?

After listening to Vice President JD Vance defend free speech and blast censorship last week in Europe, I don't feel like that anymore. Vance has brought clarity, inspiration and leadership to the vice presidency, and he took it on the road to show Europeans who America is now and why we hold Western values so dear.

Vance is the kind of vice president Americans deserve.

. . . Have you ever been in a toxic, dysfunctional relationship then met someone healthy and new and thought, "Wow, I didn't realize how bad things were until now?" That is how millions of Americans feel now that Vance is representing the United States here and abroad.

. . . Americans deserve a vice president who is a powerful envoy − an ambassador of our ideas.

On one hand, Vance is something completely new, or almost -- Theodore Roosevelt as vice president under McKinley might be comparable, and McKinley is at least arguably comparable to Trump:

William McKinley (January 29, 1843 – September 14, 1901) was the 25th president of the United States, serving from 1897 until his assassination in 1901. A member of the Republican Party, he led a realignment that made Republicans largely dominant in the industrial states and nationwide for decades. He successfully led the U.S. in the Spanish–American War, overseeing a period of American expansionism, with the annexations of Puerto Rico, Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaii. McKinley also rejected inflationary plans such as free silver in favor of keeping the nation on the gold standard, and raised protective tariffs.

But while Roosevelt rose as a reforming politician and active media figure in the years before he became vice president -- and even during the 1900 campaign, when he enthusiastically supported McKinley as his running mate -- according to Wikipedia, he lost interesst in the vice presidency.

The office was a powerless sinecure and did not suit Roosevelt's aggressive temperament. Roosevelt's six months as vice president were uneventful and boring for a man of action. He had no power; he presided over the Senate for a mere four days before it adjourned.

Vance, on the other hand, appears to be playing the office for all it's worth. I'm not sure if we've ever seen anything like this.

posted by test @ February 20, 2025   0 Comments