Month: February 2025

DOGE has published a "Wall of Receipts" claiming to have saved taxpayers $55 billion. The New York Times isn't buying it:

The math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes.... Some contracts the group claims credit for were double- or triple-counted. Another initially contained an error that inflated the totals by billions of dollars. In at least one instance, the group claimed an entire contract had been canceled when only part of the work had been halted.

The Times is reluctant to estimate how much DOGE is actually saving, but I'll take a crack at it. A blogger's crack, that is, meaning it's the roughest possible horseback guess and not to be taken too seriously.

Contracts: The Times figures that contracts amount to 20% of the DOGE total, but when you account for all the mistakes it probably comes to 10%, or about $5.5 billion.

Lease cancellations: DOGE says this amounts to roughly $100 million. Let's take them at their word.

Staff cuts. The AP estimates DOGE has cut about 300,000 employees, which amounts to 3% of all federal workers. However, many of these took buyouts and most of the rest are probationary, which makes it hard to even estimate savings. But I'm going to anyway: $5 billion for the former and $11.5 billion for the latter, coming to a total of $16.5 billion

GRAND TOTAL: $22.1 billion.

So there you have it. My best guess is that DOGE has saved about $22 billion, almost all of it from firing federal workers. If this is close to accurate, it comes to 0.33% of the total federal budget. You may decide if this is a lot or a little.

Donald Trump has now fired seven senior military officers, including the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff; the Chief of Naval Operations; the Commandant of the Coast Guard; the vice chief of the Air Force; and three judge advocate generals (Navy, Army, and Air Force). All were apparently fired for being a little too DEI. Take a look:

They do look a little too diverse for Trump's taste, don't they?

As we all know, if there's a natural origin for the COVID virus there needs to be an intermediate host. That is, the virus needs to have passed from a bat, where it originated, to some other animal, where it finished evolving into a form deadly to human beings. Today Nature published a longish piece suggesting we've probably found the intermediate host:

Today, mounting evidence from more than a dozen studies point to a person, or people, catching the virus from a wild animal.... And the animal at the top of the list is the raccoon dog.

....One of the reasons raccoon dogs were suggested as a prime candidate early on is because they were probably involved in passing another, related, virus to people. In 2003, researchers isolated close matches of the virus that causes severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) in several civets and a raccoon dog at a live-animal market in Guangdong, China.

This finding prompted researchers in Germany to investigate these animals’ susceptibility to SARS-CoV-2. They found that raccoon dogs can be infected by SARS-CoV-2, and — despite not getting that sick themselves — can pass on the infection to other animals.

....Further evidence to support the raccoon-dog theory came in 2023. Chinese researchers published genomic data of swabs taken at the Huanan market in January 2020, after it was shut down, including of stalls, rubbish bins and sewage. Studies found mitochondrial DNA of raccoon dogs in several swabs, including those that also tested positive for SARS-CoV-2.

....Most researchers agree that SARS-CoV-2 probably originated in Rhinolophus bats living in Yunnan, southern China.... That’s why it is important to consider the geographic ranges of suspect intermediate animals to see whether they overlap with those bats.... Among the animals at the Huanan market, the ranges of wild raccoon dogs...overlap with that of the bats. Fitting with this hypothesis, the mitochondrial DNA from raccoon dogs at the Huanan market did not match those from farmed animals in northeastern China, and were instead closer to wild-caught animals in central and southern China.

This isn't a smoking gun, but it's strong evidence not just for the zoonotic origin of COVID, but for raccoon dogs specifically as the intermediate host. Adjust your priors accordingly.

Inflationary expectations among consumers have skyrocketed since November:

Thanks to Trump's tariffs and other economic illiteracies, inflation expectations have gone up 1.7 percentage points since Election Day, from 2.6% to 4.3%. Aside from the 2022 inflationary surge, this is the highest that consumer expectations have been over the past decade.

Remember the huge fuss Republicans made over Joe Biden's alleged interference with social media platforms? Naturally they took it to court, where a Louisiana judge went stone nuts:

Mostly his opinion is a long, familiar conspiracy-esque recitation of right-wing hobbyhorses about efforts from public health officers to highlight COVID misinformation, with a bit of Hunter Biden and election integrity thrown in. The key question, apparently, is whether the federal government "significantly encouraged" social media companies to toe the government's lefty line or else, and Doughty has no doubts on this score.

There was never anything to this, which makes it ironic that at this moment Elon Musk really is intimidating an advertising agency to do business with X or else:

A lawyer at advertising conglomerate Interpublic Group fielded a phone call in December from a lawyer at X. The message was clear, according to several people with knowledge of the conversation: Get your clients to spend more on Elon Musk’s social-media platform, or else.

....Interpublic leaders interpreted the communications from X as reminders that the recently announced $13 billion deal to merge Interpublic with rival Omnicom Group could be torpedoed, or at least slowed down, by the Trump administration.

....The push for agency agreements follows a flurry of brands returning to spending on X, including Amazon...Apple...and telecom company Verizon.

....“We now see brands returning in quite significant numbers, because the easiest route is to just spend a minimum viable amount on the platform,” said Ebiquity’s Schreurs. “Not because they want to advertise there and run their ads adjacent to the content on X, but because they are afraid of legal and political ramifications of not doing so.”

For some reason, the judge in this case—Northern District of Texas, natch—seems surprisingly sympathetic toward Musk. Golly, I wonder why?

You've probably seen Donald Trump's precipitous fall in four recent polls:

But did you know that the all-time record holders for the poorest early approval ratings are Donald Trump and . . . Donald Trump? It's true:

Right now Trump is doing slightly better than he did during his first term, but I doubt that will last for long.

The Senate passed a budget resolution last night:

• $175 in new spending on border security.
• $150 billion in new defense spending.
• $15 billion in new energy production.
• No framework for extending 2017 tax cut.

And now for a look at the House budget proposal:

• $4.5 trillion to extend 2017 tax cuts.
• $880 billion in spending cuts on Medicaid.
• $330 billion in spending cuts on education.
• $230 billion in spending cuts on SNAP and agriculture.
• $562 billion in miscellaneous spending cuts, possibly as much as $1 trillion.
• $190 billion in new spending on border security.
• $100 billion in new defense spending.

Summary:

• Senate: $340 billion in net spending increases.
• House: ~$2 trillion in net spending cuts and $4.5 trillion in tax cuts.

The House budget is especially hard to make sense of. In any case, as usual these numbers are over ten years, which means the Senate bill costs roughly +$40 billion per year while the House bill saves about -$650 billion per year. That's a considerable difference of opinion.

Trying to figure out how much we spend on defense is a dog's breakfast. However, once you account for nukes and some other stuff it comes to $895 billion according to CBO and would increase 2% over the next four years for a total of $913 billion by 2029.

Republicans worked hard during the budget cap process to get these small increases in defense spending. But now along comes Pete Hegseth to propose 8% cuts over the next five years for a total of $601 billion by 2030. That's a slash of more than a third.

Do Republicans plan to put up with this? With the exception of the Cold War dividend, defense spending has always increased. It's barely conceivable that they'd accept a $300 billion cut. But even for a bunch of guys whining about Diego Garcia, I guess anything is possible.

UPDATE: It turns out the House and Senate budget proposals both include defense increases of about $100-150 billion over ten years. That comes to an increase of about +$10-15 billion per year compared to Hegseth's -$70 billion per year. wtf?

The truth is that I'm not sure how I'm doing. But there's this:

• • My oxygenation level is consistently high. That's good, but my breathing is still pretty shallow if I move around even a little bit.
  • My colon virus seems to be gone. This is based on a lack of bowel movements lately.
  • But I'm peeing a lot, which is good.
  • My enterovirus (cold virus) is probably gone, though there's no telling for sure.
  • CT scan thorax: "Overall slight increased extensive bilateral consolidative and groundglass infiltrates. 4.2 cm dilatation of the ascending aorta. Tiny nonobstructing left nephrolithiasis." Got that?
  • Chest X-ray: "Interval mild increase in left lung diffuse airspace opacification. Mild to moderate right lung airspace opacification remains without change. There is a small left pleural effusion and adjacent compressive atelectasis or pneumonia, new. Stable cardiomediastinal silhouette. Low lung volumes."

I gather from this that the flu and pneumonia are roughly the same as before. This is bad. These are the key things that need to get better, and I don't know why they aren't. I'm extremely fatigued and it's very frustrating.

Donald Trump fired a few thousand Park Service workers, but apparently Doug Burgham has decided to hire them back. Efficiency! However, the one maintenance guy at Yosemite who has the keys to unlock people from the bathrooms remains fired.

Elon Musk got mad at Danish astronaut Andreas Morgensen and called him "fully retarded." The contretemps turns out to be related to the return of two astronauts stuck on the ISS. Apparently Musk has grown very fond of the slur "retarded," using it over a dozen times since November.

You already know this, but Trump has decided that Ukraine started the war with Russia. Quite so. Remember how Poland started WW II with Germany?

President Donald Trump and billionaire adviser Elon Musk have said on social media and in press briefings that people who are 100, 200 and even 300 years old are improperly getting Social Security benefits — a “HUGE problem,” Musk wrote. 300 years old! That would be a problem. Now, it so happens that Social Security was created in 1936 and the first beneficiaries go back to the 1880 census. So that's an absolute max of 145 years old as of this year. "Fully retarded" barely begins to describe this.

Donald Trump says he's going to expand IVF. Not quite, it turns out:

Within 90 days of the date of this order, the Assistant to the President for Domestic Policy shall submit to the President a list of policy recommendations on protecting IVF access and aggressively reducing out-of-pocket and health plan costs for IVF treatment.

A list of policy recommendations falls a little short, no? What's more, Congress would have to pass these recommendations, something they've shown no inclination of doing in the past. It's just more smoke and mirrors.

"The DOGE subcommittee just discovered $2.7 trillion in improper payments in Medicare and Medicaid overseas, to people who should not have gotten it.” That seems unlikely, doesn't it? In fact, this is since 2003, so it comes to about $120 billion per year. That's not peanuts, but here are the real numbers:

• Medicare: 5.3%
• Medicaid: 3.5%
• Social Security: 0.8%

Entitlement fraud is a real thing, but it's only a few percent of total spending, not $2.7 trillion. These guys are lunatics.