Judges are getting angry. Federal District Judge Amir H. Ali ordered the Trump administration to resume USAID payments and he wants it done:
During the contentious, 90-minute hearing, Justice Department lawyer Indraneel Sur told Ali he was “not in a position to answer” whether the Trump administration had taken needed steps to allow the assistance to begin moving.
“I don’t know why I can’t get a straight answer from you,” Ali responded. “We are now 12 days in. You can’t answer me whether any of the funds … covered by the court’s order have been unfrozen?”
Trump keeps stalling on stuff like this, perhaps in hopes that he can get away with delaying until he appeals to the Supreme Court and persuades them to overturn the lower court ruling. That's probably what I'd do, though it isn't foolproof. Even if the Supreme Court agrees with Trump on the merits, they're almost certain to first rule clearly (even unanimously?) that he has to obey legal court orders. They won't undermine the judiciary by playing coy over this.
While I was snoozing away in the hospital last week I missed the latest Truth Social news. Here's the stock price since Election Day:
Odd. This is not how it's supposed to work. Trump is now president, so DJT should be increasing smartly. Right?
Sure, except for the fact that the performance of DJT continues to suck. Here are the latest financial results:
They lost $37.7 million yet again in the fourth quarter, for a total of $401 million on the year, and ad sales were a whopping $990,000. That's ridiculous. And CEO Devin Nunes got paid $47 million for this dismal performance:
“Typically there’s some sort of correlation between how well a company is doing and the CEO’s pay, said Michelle Leder, the editor of footnoted.com and an expert on SEC filings. “When a company loses over $400 million and gives its CEO a $44 million grant, you have to wonder what they’re being rewarded for.”
Johnson (R-Louisiana) is set to put a budget resolution up for a floor vote Tuesday, but is facing a potential revolt from swing-district Republicans wary of cuts to social safety net benefits and fiscal hawks who say the bill’s $2 trillion in spending cuts don’t reach far enough into federal coffers.
....The huge, Trump-endorsed legislative package that Republicans — and even some Democrats — have taken to calling the “big, beautiful bill,” is full of contradicting demands that have left some lawmakers uncertain how to proceed.
Keep in mind that, as always, budget numbers are taken over ten years. So they aren't really looking for $2 trillion, they're looking for about $200 billion.
That's still a lot. Domestic spending—which is all they care about since they plan to increase defense spending—amounts to roughly $2.4 trillion per year—which includes both discretionary spending and welfare spending but not Medicare or Social Security. So they're hoping to slash domestic spending by 10% or so.
That's a solid chunk of money, and it's unlikely they'll get anywhere close. It's just too painful for too many people. Hell, nearly half the cuts come from Medicaid alone, and even Donald Trump has said he doesn't want to touch Medicaid.
Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-New Jersey), formerly a Democrat, said he called Trump on Monday to tell the president to reinforce his pledge not to cut Medicaid. “Don’t touch seniors’ Medicare, and don’t cut Medicaid, because it isn’t just for lazy welfare people. It’s for real people,” Van Drew said. “That’s the new Republican Party, a populist party, a party of working people, a party of blue-collar people.”
Of all the things you don't care about, this might top the list:
In the corporate world, commercial paper is a small, short-term loan backed by nothing and used as working capital for things like financing payroll or receivables. In the financial world, money-center banks typically issue commercial paper as working capital to fund short-term loans. In either case it can be used only by companies so creditworthy they don't really need it, so why does anyone bother with it? I've never quite understood.
But maybe everyone is figuring that out, which is why commercial paper outstanding has been steadily on the decline for more than a decade. There's about a third less today than in 2015.
Does this matter? Does it mean anything? Or is it just one of those things? Does anyone know?
Here's a list of court orders that have put a halt to various Trump/DOGE firings and spending cuts. It's by no means comprehensive, just everything I could find at the moment. Its purpose is to show that neither Trump nor DOGE are steamrollers. They've had some wins, but they've had a lot of setbacks too.
Judge ordered DEI funding at NIH restored. NIH is resisting.
Office of Special Counsel rules that some firings were unlawful, though it's unclear how many.
Manhattan judge blocked DOGE from accessing Treasury payment systems.
DOGE might be killed entirely because administration refuses to say who runs it. Possibly unconstitutional if not run by Senate-confirmed nominee.
Judge calls White House ban of AP over Gulf of Mexico "discriminatory and problematic," and sets hearing for March.
A federal judge temporarily blocked ICE from immigration raids in churches in 35 states.
Trump has agreed to free up $2 billion in funds for Pennsylvania that had been "paused."
Multiple judges have halted Trump's ban on birthright citizenship.
Judge blocked DOGE from accessing sensitive info at OPM and Dept. of Education.
FDA rehires its medical device staff after laying them all off and then panicking over what they'd done.
Judge killed Trump's temporary payment freeze in 22 states. Trump claimed to have already rescinded the freeze, so nyah nyah. But it's not clear if Trump is complying.
A federal judge ordered the Trump administration to reverse its foreign aid funding freeze on existing programs.
A judge halted all firings at the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau. The CFPB's director was also ordered to maintain all records and not to transfer money out of the bureau’s reserve funds. In response, nearly all employees were placed on administrative leave.
A federal judge blocked Trump’s ban on refugee admissions, saying the directive appeared to amount to a “nullification” of federal law.
Last year the Biden State Department approved about $500,000 for EVs as diplomatic shuttles. This is . . . I don't know, maybe a dozen cars? Not very many, anyway, especially for a guy who's famously pro-EV.
Armored Teslas! And it was for $400 million, enough to replace every armored car in the diplomatic fleet:
According to the State Department document reviewed by NPR, there are about 3,000 armored cars and SUVs around the world that are used to transport diplomats, VIPs and other officials working for the State Department.
If every one of those vehicles was replaced with a new Cybertruck, which costs around $80,000 for an entry-level model, the bill would come out to about $250 million. The vehicles would then need to go through a process known as "up-armoring," which can cost tens of thousands of dollars per car. Multiply those costs by the size of the State Department's entire fleet and experts said $400 million would likely be a ballpark cost.
A Tesla Cybertruck that's fine for the Mojave Desert but entirely unsuitable for either up-armoring or for use in places like Karachi and Mogadishu.
Shortly after this became public the line item was quietly changed to "Armored Electric Vehicles." A week later it was eliminated entirely.
Elon Musk says he had nothing to do with this, and I probably believe him. First, it makes no sense. Teslas just aren't good candidates for up-armoring:
[Michael] Evanoff, a former senior State Department diplomatic security official with 40 years of experience, said the gold standard for diplomatic security are vehicles that are manufactured from the ground up with armor, not with armor added on later. Carmakers including Mercedes, BMW and GM offer such armored models. In fact, the State Department awarded GM a $300 million contract for armored SUVs in 2023.
A Cybertruck, he said, would not fit the bill.
Second, everyone knows about Donald Trump's grudge against EVs. He'd go ballistic if he heard about this, and Musk would never take that chance. It's not remotely worth the risk.
So what really happened? My guess is that some bright spark in the State Department put his finger to the wind and decided it was a neato idea that would get him in good with Musk, the administration's incoming viceroy. He didn't realize either how stupid it was or that the ultimate boss, Donald Trump, would never go for it. However, smarter people at State did realize this and quietly deep-sixed the whole idea.
But not quietly or quickly enough. It's now out there forever as one of the dumbest ideas ever.
Here's a chart showing airline fatalities over the past century. In 1980, at about the same time that commercial airlines began hiring Black and women pilots, fatalities began a 30-year decline to zero:
This is not a smoking gun. Fatalities likely went down for reasons of their own that were unrelated to civil-rights era hiring practices. Nonetheless, it almost certainly shows that "DEI hires" didn't produce any increase in accidents or fatalities. The evidence is flatly inconsistent with that.
So don't worry about the color or gender of your pilot the next time you board an airplane. It doesn't matter.
Last year the Biden administration ordered an investigation of unfair practices by China in the commercial shipbuilding industry. It was finished up and released just as Biden left office in January:
The report described a top-down, centrally controlled strategy by Beijing that not only puts the U.S. and other countries in a weak competitive position, but also threatens national security.
China’s share of the global shipbuilding market rose from less than 5% in 1999 to more than 50% in 2023, while pushing its ownership of the commercial world fleet to over 19% as of January 2024.
China controls 95% of global shipping container production, according to the report, and 86% percent of the world’s supply of intermodal chassis. The report said the targeting was enabled by government policies that unfairly depress costs or provide advantages.
Shipowners and analysts are trying to digest the proposal. Chinese-built ships face fees of up to $1 million for each U.S. port call based on the size of a company’s Chinese fleet.... There would be a second fee of up to $1 million based on how much of a company’s future ship orders come from Chinese shipyards. And for Chinese-owned operators like Cosco, there would be an additional fee of up to $1 million for each U.S. port call based on the ship’s size.
“For containerships their costs will be at least 10 times higher than existing charges and affect American importers, exporters and consumers,” said Lars Jensen, chief executive of Demark-based Vespucci Maritime, who advises several top shipping lines. “I hope that the public debate will avert this madness.”
That's a lot of fees, and many of them apply to shippers who merely own a single Chinese-made ship. But what are they supposed to do? Scuttle their existing fleet of Chinese ships? Sell them off to regional carriers who don't ship to or from the US? I don't know, but either way it's yet another big tax on Chinese goods entering the US.
And there's more! By 2032 US flagged/crewed ships need to carry 15% of US exports and US-built ships need to carry 5%. I'm not sure how this works since the US doesn't build any big ocean freighters these days, but I suppose we'll figure it out—most likely by punting when the day finally arrives. That's pretty often how we handle such things.
This is off the beaten path, but there's been some Twitter conversation recently about "great man" theories of history and how you can, for example, figure out the IQs of historical individuals in the first place.
As it happens, there's a very famous study of historical figures written a century ago by IQ pioneers Catharine Cox and Lewis Terman. They use various ways of estimating IQ without directly measuring it, and if you're interested in how they do it the best bet is to read their book. In short, though, they rigorously investigated childhood precocity, schoolwork, and the nature of later accomplishments to make their estimates.
Cox's original book included 300 historical figures. A complete list is here. I chose 50 fairly randomly for the chart below. Note that the IQs have been adjusted from Cox's original estimates to reflect what they'd be on a modern IQ test rather than on the older scale originally used by Cox.
There are some interesting things here. It's not surprising to find Leibniz and Newton with stratospheric IQs, but who would have guessed a British prime minister would match them?
Byron, Dickens, and Hugo are surprisingly brilliant writers. Ditto for Madame de Staël of salon hosting fame. Beethoven was smarter than I would have guessed, while my personal favorite Benjamin Franklin was less so. Many generals and political leaders (Bolivar, Napoleon, Washington, Lee, Cromwell, Grant) have pretty pedestrian IQs but obviously it didn't matter. IQ might make the mathematician, but not the leader, who needs more than just IQ to succeed.
In case you're wondering just how rare high IQs are, here's a quick summary:
For example, this means there's about one person in the US with an IQ above 190 and perhaps a dozen in the entire world.
On the other hand, if you have a piddling IQ of 145, there are more than 300,000 just like you in the country. Don't get cocky.
A month into Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s much-hyped efforts to root out fraudulent and wasteful spending by government agencies, not a single instance of fraud or waste has been discovered.
....None of this has stopped Trump, Musk, congressional Republicans, and their allies in rightwing media from breathlessly highlighting millions of dollars’ worth of spending as examples of fraudulent government programs.
Nowhere in those lists of programs — like the USAID initiatives that White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has been lambasting for weeks, including the tortured and incorrect claim that US taxpayers funded “condoms for Gaza” — is anything that even Musk or Trump themselves have identified as “fraud.” Instead, the goalposts for DOGE have silently moved from finding fraud and corruption to simply pointing out and cancelling government programs that Trump and Republicans simply don’t support.
This is actually a little surprising. Fraud as a percentage of federal spending is pretty small, but it still amounts to a lot of dollars. If you wanted to highlight fraud, it wouldn't be hard to find. There are new real cases of Medicare and Medicaid fraud all the time, along with some lesser known programs, and it wouldn't take much to dig them up and flog them hard on Fox News. You only need two or three to make it look like we're drowning in fraud.
So why not do it? First off, Trump and Musk probably don't really care. Second, it does require actual work to root out real fraud. And third, even the MAGA crowd might be a little cynical these days about "waste fraud 'n abuse." Maybe it's just been overused.
