Month: March 2025

For some reason MAGAnauts are suddenly highlighting a Gallup poll from October about trust in media. "Americans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low," reads the headline.

But that's dead wrong. As usual, trust in media is fine among Democrats. The only true statement is "Republicans' Trust in Media Remains at Trend Low":

Nobody should pretend this is some kind of organic change, either. Conservatives have spent the past 30 years setting up an alternate mediaverse—ranging from Fox News to Breitbart to Mark Levin—whose explicit goal has been to persuade Republicans that only they can be trusted. This is why it's nearly impossible to even converse with MAGAnauts: there's no common ground. If all you can do is point to facts and figures from the New York Times or the Department of Labor, you've lost already. The MAGA crowd doesn't believe that stuff anymore, and therefore they don't believe you either.

Our economic betters speak their wisdom:

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said Sunday that government spending could be separated from gross domestic product reports in response to questions about whether the spending cuts pushed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency could possibly cause an economic downturn.

“You know, that governments historically have messed with GDP,” Lutnick said on Fox News Channel’s “Sunday Morning Futures.” “They count government spending as part of GDP. So I’m going to separate those two and make it transparent.”

I suppose Lutnick, whose own Commerce Department calculates GDP every quarter, doesn't realize they already separate these figures every quarter too. For the federal share of GDP, it's line 51 in Table 3. There's no need for Lutnick to do anything more than hop over to FRED and look it up:

But what does this get you? Lutnick apparently doesn't understand that GDP is GDP no matter where it comes from. He can separate the federal share all he wants, but government activity still counts as activity whether he likes it or not. If you cut it back, GDP really does go down, just the same as if Walmart sales decreased. Reality remains unchanged no matter how hard you try to play games with it.

A conversation about airline safety in the era of DOGE and Elon Musk:

Rolling Stone: FAA Officials Ordered Staff to Find Funding for Elon Musk’s Starlink

James Fallows, longtime private pilot: Corrupt? Sure.

But also directly dangerous? And how!

FAA has done careful, long testing /study of new tower-communication system. Now a rush to switch to system that *just happens* to be owned by Mr. Efficiency himself, Elon. (Has he even been to an ATC facility? Probably like Vance re Ukraine)

Regan Wilks: In boardrooms around the world, airline executives are discussing what will be more harmful to their share prices: sounding the alarm on this, or the inevitable plane crashes

Fallows: I think this is correct.

Everyone involved in aviation KNOWS FOR SURE that reckless/ rampant changes of past six weeks will, *for sure,* make airplane crashes more likely. But no airline exec wants to be the first to say this in public.

Here's a change: For years I'd say that the more people knew about aviation, the more they'd reassure you about the safety of airline flights.

Now, the more people know about aviation, the more concerned they are about Doge FAA/ATC/NOAA/NWS assault.

Do you feel safer now?

I admit that the contest for stupidest idea of the Trump administration is heated and contentious. But surely this must be strongly in the running:

Crypto prices surged Sunday after President Trump said he would move forward on a U.S. crypto strategic reserve that will include bitcoin and ether, as well as three smaller and riskier tokens.

“A U.S. Crypto Reserve will elevate this critical industry after years of corrupt attacks by the Biden Administration,” said Trump in a Sunday post on his social-media platform Truth Social. “I will make sure the U.S. is the Crypto Capital of the World.”

Questions abound. How big will the CSR be? Where is the money coming from? I don't recall Congress passing an appropriation. How can it make sense to create a crypto reserve out of deficit spending? Why does the US need a crypto reserve? It's not something we'll ever be short of.

Is there any legitimate argument at all for this? Anything?

Here's the plan:

1. Put me back on high-flow oxygen.
2. Slam me with IV steroids. Quadruple the dose and administer every six hours.
3. If that doesn't work, slam me with antibiotics.
4. If that doesn't work, intubate me and do a broncoscopy.

There are further options after that, but not good ones. Bottom line: doctors just don't know what's going on and are worried about secondary infections.

For the next few days, my new favorite chart is for C-Reactive protein:

Still going up. What a disaster. I'm huffing and puffing a storm.

About a month ago a fellow named Luke Rosiak, author of a book on the Deep State, decided to tweet about 18F, "GSA's tech arm, a far-left agency that viciously subverted Trump during his first term." He followed up with stuff like this:

Elon Musk follows Rosiak on Twitter, but it was only a couple of days later, after getting retweeted by "American Supremacist" ALX, that Musk responded. "That group has been deleted," he said, even though it hadn't been. Its Twitter site had been shut down, but 18F itself continued to operate.

This couldn't last and it didn't. Saturday morning at 1 am the entire group of 90 was laid off. But why? 18F, far from being "GSA's tech arm," is a small, elite group of coders that helps other federal agencies roll out better projects. By all accounts they did a top notch job. At the time they were let go, they say, they were working on "including improving access to weather data with NOAA, making it easier and faster to get a passport with the Department of State, supporting free tax filing with the IRS, and other critical projects with organizations at the federal and state levels."

In other words, 18F was "the gold standard of civic tech," exactly the kind of bang-for-the-buck group that Musk claims the government needs more of. But they're gone.

The lesson is pretty obvious here: It doesn't matter how good a job you do. If your group has a reputation for being LGBT or trans friendly, or even just too woke in general, you can lose your job. Welcome to Donald Trump's government.

Donald Trump signed an executive order today making English the official language of the US. But it was surprisingly diffident:

Nothing in this order, however, requires or directs any change in the services provided by any agency. Agency heads should make decisions as they deem necessary to fulfill their respective agencies’ mission and efficiently provide Government services to the American people. Agency heads are not required to amend, remove, or otherwise stop production of documents, products, or other services prepared or offered in languages other than English.

Trump EOs tend to be full of blustery, maximalist language, but not this time. Trump goes out of his way to say that the EO doesn't require any change. In fact, agencies should actively keep doing whatever they're doing.

Perhaps surprisingly, I'm generally in favor of this EO. In the US it's mostly symbolic and doesn't really matter much, but in broader terms it's always struck me that having multiple languages is bad for a country. I don't mean this in any kind of chauvinistic or exclusionary sense. It's just that in practical terms language is a powerful binding force for a nation, and likewise, having multiple languages can be a powerful disruptive force. Better to take no chances if you can.

A pair of DOGE bros want access to IRS data to check for benefit cheating:

Kliger and Corcos, according to records obtained by The Post, specifically mentioned investigating eligibility and fraud within student loan and grant programs and SNAP, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program formerly known as food stamps, which serves nearly 42 million Americans.

This would be illegal in eleventy different ways, since tax data is protected under numerous privacy statutes that the IRS takes very seriously. What's more, we already know how much SNAP fraud there is: about $10 billion according to the latest GAO report. This is mostly because states do a poor job of verifying eligibility, not because individuals are deliberately trying to scam the system.

In any case, it's entirely expected that Elon Musk's gang of libertarians would target the relative pittance of improper SNAP payments to poor people while leaving alone a completely legal and legitimate use of IRS data: auditing tax fraud among high-income taxpayers. This could produce hundreds of billions of dollars, but for precisely that reason Republicans have always been furiously dead set against it. Gotta protect their base of rich donors, after all.

I've had a bit of a setback. Normally, physical therapy means walking over to a chair and sitting for an hour. This produces a small amount of huffing and puffing, but it goes away quickly after I get back in bed.

Not yesterday. I got back in bed and my breathing never caught up. I huffed and puffed all night. The answer probably lies here:

When I first got to the hospital my inflammation level was sky-high. An IV steroid quickly got that down. But a couple of days ago, in their rush to discharge me, they switched to an oral steroid. Bad idea. The next day they switched back, but it was too late. Now we have to wait a few days for everything to come back down. In the meantime I'm gasping for breath.

This is so frustrating I could scream. Everything has improved tremendously except the one thing that really matters: my breathing. It stays stubbornly shallow and weak. What's going on?