I do not want to spend a lot of time on this current administration and its goals, but I think it’s important to read articles about what’s happening. Over the weekend, an article appeared that outlines, with the receipts, what exactly is happening and not happening with Elon Musk’s quasi-governmental Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE).

It’s important to note that Musk is not a government employee. He’s not even an American citizen. I know everyone is tired of politics, and I am, too, but this is not good.

Writing in The New York Times, Aatish Bhatia, Emily Badger, David A. Fahrenthold, Josh Katz, Margot Sanger-Katz, and Ethan Singer conducted a complete investigative report on DOGE and found it lacking.

Elon Musk and his Department of Government Efficiency say they have saved the federal government $55 billion through staff reductions, lease cancellations and a long list of terminated contracts published online this week as a “wall of receipts.”

President Trump has been celebrating the published savings, even musing about a proposal to mail checks to all Americans to reimburse them with a “DOGE dividend.”

But the math that could back up those checks is marred with accounting errors, incorrect assumptions, outdated data and other mistakes, according to a New York Times analysis of all the contracts listed. While the DOGE team has surely cut some number of billions of dollars, its slapdash accounting adds to a pattern of recklessness by the group, which has recently gained access to sensitive government payment systems.

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. In others, contracts the group said it had closed were actually ended under the Biden administration.

The canceled contracts listed on the website make up a small part of the $55 billion total that the group estimated it had found so far. It was not possible to independently verify that number or other totals on the site with the evidence provided. A senior White House official described how the office made its calculations on individual contracts, but did not respond to numerous questions about other aspects of the group’s accounting. But it is clear that every dollar the website claims credit for is not necessarily a dollar the federal government would have spent — or one that can now be returned to the public.

This whole process is illegal and unconstitutional. However, it’s easy to see that they are planning on just bulldozing, and then when they lose in court, the damage has already been done.

Adam Serwer, writing in The Atlantic, has an alarming story about how this administration is promoting a racist, misogynistic agenda to destroy civil rights in this country.

In August, speaking with someone he believed to be a sympathetic donor, one of the Project 2025 architects, Russell Vought, said that a goal of the next Trump administration would be to “get us off of multiculturalism” in America. Now Vought is running Donald Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, and the plan to end multiculturalism is proceeding apace. Much of the chaos, lawlessness, and destruction of the past few weeks can be understood as part of the administration’s central ideological project: restoring America’s traditional hierarchies of race and gender. Call it the “Great Resegregation.”

Since taking office, Trump has rescinded decades-old orders ensuring equal opportunity in government contracts and vowed to purge DEI from the federal government, intending to lay off any federal worker whose job they associate with DEI. Yesterday evening, Trump fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Charles Q Brown, and replaced him with a lower ranking white official, a retired three-star Air Force officer named Dan Caine. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth had previously attacked Brown as an unqualified diversity hire based on the fact that he is Black. Trump’s Department of Justice has implied that it will prosecute or sue companies that engage in diversity outreach. Elon Musk’s DOGE is attempting to purge federal workers “that protect employees’ civil rights and others that investigate complaints of employment discrimination in the federal workplace,” the Washington Post reported. Colleges and universities are being threatened with defunding for any programming related to DEI, which the free-speech organization PEN America has noted could include “everything from a panel on the Civil Rights Movement to a Lunar New Year celebration.”

Trump has also signed executive orders that threaten government funding for scientific research on inequality or on health issues that disproportionately affect nonwhite ethnic groups, and has imposed censorious gag orders that could block discussion of race or sex discrimination in American classrooms. During her confirmation hearing, Trump’s education-secretary nominee, Linda McMahon, said she did not know if schools could lose funding for teaching Black-history classes under the order. The legality of the order over K–12 curricula is unclear, but the chilling effects are real nonetheless.

Under the Trump administration, schools within the Department of Defense system that serve military families—American service members are disproportionately Black and Hispanic—have torn down pictures of Black historical figures and removed books from their libraries on subjects such as race and gender. This record, within a school system entirely under the administration’s control, offers an alarming preview—one in which a historical figure like Harriet Tubman is no longer a welcome subject in educational settings because she was a Black woman.

An OMB memo ordering a federal-funding freeze illustrates the ideological vision behind these decisions. The memo states that the administration seeks to prevent the use of “federal resources to advance Marxist equity, transgenderism, and green new deal social engineering policies,” Acting Director Matthew Vaeth wrote. Equal opportunity in employment is described here as “Marxist,” because it affirms what the desegregators see as an unnatural principle: that nonwhite people are equal to white people, that women are equal to men, and that LGBTQ people deserve the same rights as everyone else.

If the Great Resegregation proves successful, it will restore an America past where racial and ethnic minorities were the occasional token presence in an otherwise white-dominated landscape. It would repeal the gains of the civil-rights era in their entirety. What its advocates want is not a restoration of explicit Jim Crow segregation—that would shatter the illusion that their own achievements are based in a color-blind meritocracy. They want an arrangement that perpetuates racial inequality indefinitely while retaining some plausible deniability, a rigged system that maintains a mirage of equal opportunity while maintaining an unofficial racial hierarchy. Like elections in authoritarian countries where the autocrat is always reelected in a landslide, they want a system in which they never risk losing but can still pretend they won fairly.

These people are racists and misogynists. They absolutely want to reverse the civil rights movement. Like Critical Race Theory or Wokeness before it, DEI has become conservatives’ go-to cover for their discriminatory actions.

The term DEI, frequently invoked by the Trump administration, functions as a smoke screen. It allows people to think that the Trump administration’s anti-DEI purge is about removing pointless corporate symbolism or sensitivity trainings. Although it is easy to find examples of DEI efforts that are ill-conceived or ill-applied, some conservatives have leveraged those criticisms to pursue a much broader agenda that is really about tearing anti-discrimination laws out at the roots, so that businesses and governments are free to extend or deny opportunities based on race, gender, and sexual orientation if they so choose.

Pay attention.

In middle school, my favorite band, KISS, released a concept album called “Music from The Elder.” It was odd, like a soundtrack to a non-existent movie. I was 13 then, and I didn’t care about any of that. All I listened to was KISS, and this was the newest one, so the cassette was played pretty constantly.

I sorta could follow the story. Mr. Blackwell was a cool bad guy name (years before I had ever heard of the real Mr. Blackwell.). “The Oath” had a rocking riff running through it. My pump myself up song was “I,” and I must have played it a thousand times before sporting events I was participating in, especially basketball.

KISS was desperately trying to do their version of Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.” They were chasing respectability, but that would never happen for the band. The makeup, the dolls, and the lunch boxes made that a practical impossibility.

Over the years, I have gained a greater appreciation for the album. Contrary to Chuck Klosterman’s opinion, it’s not among my top ten favorites, but I think the songwriting is better than anyone cares to admit.

Lately, a YouTube personality named franKENstein Creations has released several reimaginings of KISS. From a reworking of the KISS Largo concert to a practically new version of Hotter than Hell, he’s been hard at work creating new, interesting arrangements that are, dare I say it, better than the originals.

His latest video takes “The Elder,” a few demos recorded then, a sprinkling of other KISS tracks, and other artists' covers of songs from “The Elder” and creates a new musical experience unlike anything KISS or producer Bob Ezrin ever conceived.

I was either smiling, or my jaw dropped with every new song, change, or musical arrangement. This fan remix is an incredible audio journey. “Music from the Elder” is now on par with “The Wall.”

It ain’t for everyone, but the ones who know… know.

My wife and I bought the Park Street Deli Snickerdoodle Cannoli Dip from Aldi on a whim. It might be the tastiest dip I’ve ever had. Maria wanted to try it, and I thought it sounded great. We used Meijer Honey Graham Sticks for the dip, and it was an utterly delightful experience. It was difficult, but we restrained ourselves from eating the whole thing in one sitting.

My experience with cannoli consists of Clemenza telling Rocco to “Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.” after killing Paulie. It’s one of the best improvised lines ever in a movie.

But I digress.

In case you need a new T-shirt: READ BOOKS PUNCH NAZIS.

I immediately felt the need to buy this shirt and was suddenly reminded of the cover of Captain America #1 and this scene from The Blues Brothers. We need more of this.

All proceeds from this T-shirt campaign go to SafePlace International in Oakland, so there’s some good behind this outside of capitalism.

I remember the first time I ever saw Space Invaders. It was in a small room off to the side in a bowling alley. I instinctively understood how to play it and could not acquire enough quarters.

As a teenager, the arcade was the place to hang out, find friends, and play games. In my hometown, there was a massive area in the middle of an indoor mall with tons of video games, pinball machines, and a counter to order an array of junk food.

I played Defender, Gorf, Galaga, Donkey Kong, Tron, and dozens of other games at that arcade. Among my favorites were Asteroids and Centipede.

I must be getting old because the AARP website now has playable versions of Centipede, Breakout, Missile Command, and Asteroids. There’s even a version of Pong, the first arcade home system my family ever owned.

I’m not sure how I feel about all of this. Nostalgic. Wistful.

James Whitbrook, writing for io9, has the scoop, err, press release, on the latest happening with Batman comics.

A Batman #1 doesn’t come along very often. Well, unless you’ve been reading comics for the past 15 years, in which case, it’s come along a couple times already. Modern comic books! But even then, in what is about to be eight-and-a-half-decades of Batman that’s still not a lot of relaunches–and DC is going all-in to make this fourth one stand out.

Last night at ComicsPro DC confirmed that the fourth-ever relaunch of the primary, solo Batman book (there are of course, dozens upon dozens upon dozens of other Bat-titles, the publisher has printed in the last 80-odd years, but they don’t count here) will begin this fall, but which point Bruce Wayne will be well and truly into his 85th anniversary year. Batman kicked off in 1940, and would only be relaunched with a new #1 for the first time 71 years later with the dawn of the New 52 in 2011–and subsequently relaunched again for DC Rebirth in 2016, which will now give way to the newest relaunch in September 2025.

The new series will be penned by writer Matt Fraction, and feature art from Jorge Jiménez, as well as colors by Tomeu Morey and lettering by Clayton Cowles, who will usher in the new era with a new visual style for Bruce, the city he defends as the dark knight, and all those wonderful toys he gets to play with. While DC is currently staying quiet on its plans to revamp the designs of the Batmobile and Gotham City itself, the first preview for the series did confirm that Batman will get a new costume refresh: one that firmly brings back the iconic blue, grey, and yellow-accented colors of some of his classic suits, over a modernized design.

I like Fraction’s writing style. I wonder if it will flow more like his Hawkeye run or something else. Interesting that they are leaning into the blue. That at least feels more comic book-y.

In any case, I won’t be buying any copies. I might buy a trade paperback if it’s good, but even then… probably not.

Justin Kroll for Deadline has the shocking story:

In news that will surely send shock waves through the industry, Michael G. Wilson and Barbara Broccoli are longtime producers of the James Bond franchise are stepping back in the creative process and handing over control to Amazon MGM Studios. The new venture was announced by the studio along with Wilson, and Broccoli today that they have formed a new joint venture to house the James Bond intellectual property rights, and those parties will remain co-owners of the franchise. Under the terms of the new venture, Amazon MGM Studios will gain creative control of the James Bond franchise following closing of the transaction.

Basically, Jeff Bezos, a real-life James Bond villain, owns the James Bond franchise. Sigh.

There has been all kinds of tension and bad-mouthing between Wilson and Broccoli and Amazon MGM since Amazon bought MGM for $8.45 billion. I thought for sure Wilson and Broccoli would force Amazon and Bezos to sell the rights to Bond to a third party, but it looks like they found some sort of compromise. I’m dismayed that they gave up full creative control.

In my opinion, Amazon has mismanaged the Tolkien property with a ridiculously expensive television show that people hate-watch. I don’t anticipate this franchise going any better. It feels like a disaster waiting to happen.

Imagine… coming soon to Amazon Prime: The James Bond Universe (JBU)

• MI6 Series
• Female Double-O spin-off series from the MI6 show
• Origin stories for Q, M, Moneypenny, Leiter, etc.
• Deep personal stories about Jaws or Oddjob explaining why they are henchmen written just like Joker.
• Young James Bond

I could keep going, but this is making me depressed.

This podcast episode by Joan Westenberg addressed a lot of things I’ve been thinking about regarding information overload and the ability to think clearly.

She explores why removing friction from information consumption has led to mental overload, the illusion of being informed, and how the endless stream of news and social media impacts cognitive clarity. Additionally, she has a practical framework for cutting through the noise and reclaiming focus.

It’s just under seven minutes long and well worth listening to.

Madeleine Aggeler, writing in The Guardian, has an unsurprising story. No one can handle being bored anymore.

People hate feeling bored. We hate it so much that we spend hours mindlessly scrolling through our phones. Many of us would rather experience physical discomfort than sit quietly with our own thoughts, as a 2014 University of Virginia study found. Nearly half of participants sitting alone in a room for 15 minutes, with no stimulation other than a button that would administer a mild electric shock, pressed the button.

On the other hand, we also romanticize boredom. Philosopher Walter Benjamin once wrote in his book Illuminations: “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience.” That is: boredom is a rich, loamy soil of creativity, and stepping back from the constant stimulus of everyday life allows the mind to expand.

So which is it: a fertile, imaginative state or mind-numbing agony?

The answer, according to experts, is both. Like life’s proverbial lemons, boredom is what you make of it.

“Boredom is what you make of it” sounds about right to my ear. I admit, it has been a long time since I’ve been bored. Having a Smart phone with access to the entire planet is a boredom killer. Boredom itself isn’t bad. How you handle it can be.

A few days ago, the University of Illinois Athletics program raised a banner for Terrance Shannon Jr., which went poorly. The lead up to it was flawless. An incredible signing with Shannon happened earlier in the day. Everyone attending received Shannon T-shirts on their seats. A bobblehead was available for purchase.

Shannon came out at halftime to thunderous applause. He spoke eloquently about his love for Illinois, his time wearing the orange and blue, the coaching staff, and the fans. There was an incredible video package. It was going great.

And then he pulled the string to unfurl his banner, which was upside down.

Me and thousands of fans in attendance were in shock. Shannon laughed about it on the court, but it left an awful sour taste in everyone’s mouth.

Athletic Director Josh Whitman handled it with class and accountability with his postgame comments. On top of that, Illinois basketball lost the game after not scoring for the final nine minutes. To make matters worse, freshman rebounding machine Morez Johnson Jr. fell on his wrist and is now out indefinitely.

It was an omen. It was, dare I say it, a curse.

Shannon’s mother made a couple of warmly received tweets saying how indicative the upside-down banner was to his final year playing college ball with the rape accusation and ultimate acquittal, turning the basketball program upside down.

However, Terrence Shannon Jr. made light of the situation as he always does and broke any talk of omens or curses with one perfectly timed tweet. He turned a public relations fiasco into a way to use the spotlight that turned negative into a positive.

Selling a new shirt and leaning into the upside-down banner and upside-down final season was perfect.

You can buy the shirts at Gameday Spirit.

With Morning Pages, you can write a stream of thought journal entry, but there’s a twist. The typed letters slowly fade until they are almost completely transparent. If you look closely, you can see what you wrote, but this feature keeps you from editing or getting hung-up on your words so that you can more easily enter a flow state.

You can click the magnifying glass in the top right corner to reveal your text when you’re done and click the scissors to copy it. The thought process here is having your writing disappear (temporarily) makes it easier to just write and not think too hard about it.

I use Notion for my daily journal, but this seems like a fun place to write before I copy and paste it into my digital journal. I like how it pushes you to focus one word or thought at a time. I might have to try this for a couple of days and see how it goes.

Alan Jacobs, writing at his site, has a few thoughts on activism that I think are spot on.

I’ve pretty much stopped writing about politics, for reasons explained here, but that doesn’t mean I hold no political views and take no political action. Here’s how I think about political activism.

Premise: Every government does unjust harm to some persons and groups of persons. (One’s general political philosophy will be largely determined by how much harm one thinks that any government does as a matter of course, and one’s voting patterns will be largely determined by that philosophy, but none of that is relevant to this particular post. What I’m about to say is, I think, universally applicable.)

From this premise I think some questions should arise:

1. In the current regime, what persons or groups are most harmed or most likely to be harmed?
2. Where can I find those vulnerable people in my community?
3. What organizations serve and seek to protect those people?
4. How can I (placed as I am, with certain specific gifts and resources) assist those organizations?

Once I have answered those questions, I have a plan for meaningful political action. Note that this plan will differ according to the political party that happens to be in charge.

This is the way. I’m going to talk with my wife about these steps and what we might do in our community. One thing we’ve already done is join our local YMCA. It has, among many other things, a dedicated program for people with special needs and that’s incredibly important to my family.

Seth Godin on smartphones:

The smartphone is the most expensive device most people own, and the one they use the most.

Here’s everything you can’t have, can’t afford and won’t get, right here.

Here’s everyone you want to have an argument with, one click away.

Here is every piece of bad news we can imagine, much of it imagined instead of real.

Connection is powerful and magical. It’s also enervating, subject to manipulation and addictive.

SNL’s Season 50 Anniversary Special was alot of fun. Here are a lot of highlights on YouTube.

If you missed it or just want to relive it, I’d start with the monologue, Weekend Update, Audience Q&A, Chad in 8H, New York Musical, Adam Sandler’s song, then watch Paul Simon and Paul McCartney sing and marvel that they are both in their 80s.

Herman Martinus, the creator of Bear blog, had an interesting thought on spending time in silence.

I’ve come to appreciate time spent with nothing but my thoughts. It’s something I’d escaped for years. In the modern age it’s so easy to always have some kind of entertainment streaming.

I don’t often do this. It’s not that I can’t be alone with my thoughts, but I find when I’m relatively alone, such as when I’m driving to work or walking the dog, I like to listen to a podcast or music.

However, when I’m alone in my car, and I’m on the interstate, I often turn off the podcast or the music and enjoy the silence. Again, this doesn’t happen often, but I enjoy the silence and the solitude. It’s interesting to me that it isn’t that I’m actively trying to be bored or to let my mind rest. I believe the act of driving on the interstate specifically allows me to escape more readily.

Cultivating more times that I can experience silence and solitude would likely do wonders for my mental health.

M.G. Siegler, writing on his site Spyglass, has found a new word that perfectly describes the here and now.

Warning: I may have found my new favorite word to use in relation to various tech topics. At least my favorite since “anagnorisis”.¹ “Ultracrepidarian”, beyond being an awesome word, is defined as follows: someone who has no special knowledge of a subject but who expresses an opinion about it. I mean, how is this not the main word for the entire internet? Certainly social media. And actually, in the age of AI, I think we can even bend the idea of “someone” to include machines.

I believe that social media, while still fun in ways, has gotten worse over time when it comes to sharing actual information. Some of this is intentional product and policy decisions, but some of it is also just the fact that charlatans have gotten more emboldened with time to spew nonsense to their followings. And this has bred more charlatans as a result. Because there’s no downside to spouting bullshit. The only thing that matters is the volume.

Right or wrong, say it loud. Time has revealed the ultimate truth: no one remembers when you’re wrong and you’ll remind everyone when you’re right. That mixed with the fact that news cycles move at lightspeed these days just exacerbates it all. People want bold stances that rise above the noise, no matter how ludicrous. In fact, the more ludicrous the better.

And that, in turn, has fueled the rise of ultracrepidarians. If someone is known to be knowledgeable (or at the very least sounds knowledgeable) talking about a topic, people will tend to listen to that person on other topics. There’s absolutely nothing to suggest they should be trusted for anything beyond their area of expertise, but it doesn’t matter. The press has long played to this notion by giving us various celebrity opinions on the big issues of the day. And politics has always dabbled in this idea. But now it has seemingly become the M.O. of the current administration.

Look, nominating obviously unqualified people to important positions is not going to end well. I just hope it doesn’t mean the end of everything.

Paul Krugman, writing on his Substack email, has a useful analogy to what Musk is currently doing to our government.

Last month SpaceX carried out a test launch of its in-development Starship rocket. Liftoff was achieved, but as the company later announced, “Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn.” In other words, it exploded.

It would be wrong to think of this explosion as a disaster; new products often experience failures during testing. That is, after all, why we test them. Still, the euphemistic language reeks of unwillingness to take responsibility and admit that things didn’t go as planned. But then again, what would you expect from a company owned by Elon Musk?

And here’s the thing: If a rocket blows up, you can build a new rocket and try again. “Move fast and break things” is sometimes an OK approach if the things in question are just hardware, which can be replaced. But what if the object that experiences “rapid unscheduled disassembly” is something whose continued functioning is crucial to people’s lives — say, something like the U.S. government?

This isn’t a hypothetical question: Musk, with backing from Donald Trump, is blowing up significant parts of the U.S. government as you read this. And we can already see the shape of multiple potential disasters.

The Muskenjugend — the mostly very young people Musk has hired to work at the Department of Government Efficiency, which isn’t actually a government department in any legal sense but which Trump has effectively given huge and probably unconstitutional power to remake federal agencies — generally seem to share three characteristics.

He goes on to explain exactly what Musk and his group are doing, why they are incredibly ignorant, stupid, and likely racist, and the consequences therein. I must admit I had to look up where “Muskenjugend” came from. If you don’t know, Krugman is playing with Hitlerjugend which is the German word for the Hitler Youth. So, there’s that lovely image.

The last week has shown not only how destructive this administration is, but also how incompetent. Elon doesn’t understand how COBOL works, the DOGE team doesn’t know how to secure their own website, and Trump accidentally fired the people safeguarding the country’s nuclear weapons.

If you need a short video, Hank Green describes the situation perfectly.

Basically, a lot of people are going to die from preventable mistakes in the next four years.

John Gruber has some smart insight into the reason for the meaningless renaming of the Gulf of Mexico.

It’s the smallness, the relative unimportance, the spiteful pettiness of the renaming in the first place — down to the fact that until Trump’s executive action, there was no controversy, zero, none, nada, anywhere in the world, amongst any group of people, regarding the name of the Gulf of Mexico — that makes it interesting to examine in detail how Google and Apple have chosen to deal with it. It’s only because this particular issue is so spectacularly piddling that we can consider it in full.

The motivation behind the name change is simple as well. Trump didn’t change the US’s officially recognized name of, say, the Atlantic Ocean or the continent of Africa. He just as easily could, but he won’t. And it’s not like “Gulf of Mexico” was on a list of “debatable or controversial names” until he created this controversy out of thin air. It’s just the one name on the globe that a president of the United States can change to stick it to Mexico, a country Donald Trump has objectively racist feelings toward. Trump never campaigned on building a wall at our northern border with Canada, nor has he (yet?) attempted to rename Lake Ontario. It’s about Mexico, and asserting power by fiat. Trump has a lifelong history of putting his name on buildings he didn’t own. He’d rather have his name emblazoned on a building he doesn’t own than own a building that doesn’t bear his name. To Trump, the name on the sign is more important than the deed. So too, now, with the name on a map. The Gulf of Mexico is an international body of water that belongs to no nation, but declaring this new name implies that it heretofore belonged to Mexico, and now belongs to us, which is to say belongs to him, our unquestioned dear leader. That Trump took it from Mexico, without firing a shot — when in fact all he did was order a string to be changed in a government database.

Trump is all id with an underdeveloped and fragile ego and no superego.

Warren Ellis on the news —

Dunno about you, but for me this year quickly became The Year Of I’ve Had Enough. I turned off a bunch of news service notifications, unsubbed from a few news provisions entirely, and now I skim the papers on my phone over coffee in the morning and then check out of the news entirely until the evening, when I catch up with newsletters and read some longer articles.

…

Thing is, not only is the news all the bloody same, all about the same country and the same handful of main characters, and every news service reports all the incremental updates to the same bloody stories every sixty seconds: but that constant battering tide of zone-flooding shit compresses time and shrinks space to think. And I want this year to feel like a year and not three bloody weeks.

It’s not about “taking a break from the news,” which various newsletters have suggested is now A Thing. And, you know, if you live in certain places right now, taking a break from the news might feel a luxury at best and a wilful ignoring of alarm bells at worst. On a single evening last week I talked to three people setting plans to bug out of the US..

It’s more about putting the news in its damn place and creating more space to live in.