My weekend’s been busy, so it’s time for a weekend roundup of all of the dumb stuff that happened while I was busy with my day job and with other things over the weekend. Nothing major that isn’t a continuation of earlier bullshit, but oh what a fucking continuation it’s been.
Nuclear Security No More
One of Musk’s DOGE cadre of hatchetmen – or maybe hatchetchildren – has been feeding names and positions into their AI black box to figure out who to fire. This has been going on since they started, but it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t know what they’re doing, because they keep firing people you really don’t want to fire if you’re interested in national security.
One of the most recent firings has been the staff of the National Nuclear Security Administration, which is a rather important department. It was founded in 1999 after the Wen Ho Lee spying scandal. The NNSA maintains security over the U.S. nuclear weapons stockpile, as well as providing the US Navy with nuclear propulsion, and also responds to nuclear and radiological emergencies in the United States and abroad.
They fired all but around 50 people from the agency, cutting around 300 jobs, because the responsible individual just didn’t know what the agency did. And now they’re scrambling to re-hire these former employees, but they can’t, because they don’t know how to contact most of them.
The individual responsible is reported to be Luke Farritor, a 23 year old also responsible for a lot of the AI-powered job cuts in the federal government.
Who Needs Air Safety?
Next up on the federal job chopping block is the FAA. Around 400 workers were fired over the weekend from across the FAA – air traffic controllers, maintenance technicians, policy setters, et cetera. Sean Duffy, the Secretary of Secretary of Transportation, has provided DOGE “special access” to the FAA and its systems in order to upgrade the system.
It’s worth noting that the FAA has been complaining about being understaffed for at least a decade, and they’re already overworked. Firing 400 people is manifestly a bad idea for air safety, given this fact. Part of the idiocy of these firings is that they just shoved “probationary” members into the woodchipper, assuming these were new hires. In many cases, they were not – they were people like a 26 year veteran radar maintenance technician, whose current promotion was probationary, despite his long history of service. But they’re too stupid to realize that, so tons of institutional knowledge have been lost. I’m sure they want to replace a lot of the ATC staff with AI, which will only result in more air accidents.
Now, another point I want to make is that so far, of the air accidents this year, none of them are due to Trump’s administration. Why? Because he’d made no changes at the time of the accidents, or the changes he made would not have affected the outcome. For instance, the Delta flight that rolled over in Toronto is the result of Canadian ATC, and the pilot likely overestimating their abilities to land. The Blackhawk impact in DC was the result of pilot error by the Blackhawk crew. Some of these are due to understaffing at the FAA but that’s a longer running problem than just Trump.
That said, these firings will only result in more accidents and less safe air travel, which is a hell of a thing for the safest national airspace in the world, by number of travelers.
Texas Loves Disease
Measles is running rampant in parts of Texas, because vaccinations are a conspiracy against health.
Great.
Elon Musk Threatens to Imprison 60 Minutes
The thin-skinned emperor has suggested the staff of 60 Minutes be imprisoned for their interview with Kamala Harris. For editing a TV program. Because it’s ‘election interference’. He argues it was deceptive editing, but they released the full transcript, showing nothing untoward and totally normal.
Meanwhile, of course, his electoral activities are totally normal and above reproach.
What a whiny bitch of a Nazi.
DOGE In the IRS, and Their Idiotic Website
There’s no reason for DOGE to have access to tax filings by normal citizens, yet they’re looking for access to all that data to train their AI systems. Or maybe to blackmail ordinary people and frighten them into subervience. Or maybe just mundane surveillance. While they’re claiming it’s about finding waste in how tax dollars are spent, there’s no way they can find that by looking at our personal tax filings. Like always, they’re lying.
These people couldn’t find fraud if it ran up and said “Hey, wanna join a Ponzi scheme?” They published a website with such poor security anyone over the internet could push updates to it. And they expect us to believe they’re capable of securing our data? Give me a fucking break. They have no idea how these systems work, and really don’t have any desire to, either, because the goal is to break government, not improve it.
In response to the mass pushback by citizens against DOGE and their grasping little minions, the White House has announced Elon Musk has no official position and is not a government employee. He’s just a personal advisor, or something. Again, give me a break. DOGE is taking their marching orders from him, he’s giving press conferences in the Oval Office, he’s making threats to government bureaus and announcing what DOGE is doing. This is the kind of bullshit gaslighting that I made this blog to remember, and to be able to show people when they vomit the party line back at us later.
So if he’s not a government employee and he has access to our data – which he most certainly does – time to haul his ass off to ADX Florence for the foreseeable future. Of course, that won’t happen, but it should.
Protecting the Sex Trafficking Influencers
In the latest bullshit loyalty move by the current administration, it seems that Trump’s White House has decided Andrew and Tristan Tate should be allowed out of Romania while their criminal trials and proceedings are ongoing. Which of course means they’d go free because they’d run and never return. The Tates were arrested on charges of sex trafficking, kidnapping, rape (including of minors). They, of course, say that they were arrested because they’re against ‘woke’ politics. Ahh yes, Romania, famous bastion of woke politics.
If Romania caves to this, it will be an incredible stain on them. Keep those shits in prison.
File Under “Not Knowing How Things Work” – 150 Year old SSA recipients
The last big update is the ostensible fraud in the Social Security Administration, namely that Social Security is being paid to 150 year old recipients. This is a prime case of not knowing how things work: the engineering ‘geniuses’ in DOGE don’t have any clue how COBOL works, and are so confident in what they expect to find they never questioned if their methods were faulty. Several retired COBOL engineers have gone on record to correct their assumptions.
The whole issue stems from COBOL not having a date type, so it’s all in reference to 1875 due to an agreement upon creation of the system. So certain birthdays wrap around, showing 150 years of age, because it’s a quirk of the programming language.
When you don’t know how anything works, everything is a conspiracy.