Why I Believe Elon Musk

When Elon Musk said the treasury had set up payments to go through without verifying they were for actual things done, I realized that this fit in with the metaphysics of bureaucracy.  Bureaucracy is a form of government, not merely a synonym for a department or institution.  Bureaucracy is what happened when the French king started paying 'experts' to run the French government.  The system of nobility had previously enjoyed a distribution of power among them, but the monarch wanted to centralize power.

So the bureaucrats got rid of the nobles, and when the time was right, the monarch.  Eventually they went so far as to attempt to get rid of God.  In reality, they just killed a lot of Christians and left most of the remaining ones weak to the bureaucratic mindset.  This is why you are meant to forget all the formal relationships- and the formal titles that suggest various obligations, and just have a personal relationship with Jesus.  Professionals do not interrupt the meeting with personal relationships.  

The bureaucracy must liberate itself from oversight because it must insulate itself from consequences.  Once it has achieved this objective, it must then grow- for one's status in a bureaucracy comes from the number of bureaucrats beneath oneself.   And it doesn't really matter if those beneath you are government, non-profit, or even for profit.  USAID ought to be illustrative here.  Look at the web of bureaucracies they funded.  

I've seen a few of the more 'thoughtful' criticisms of DOGE, but what I initially thought was that these authors had not actually listened to Elon.  But then I realized they were assuming bureaucracy had a different metaphysics, one more consistent with the reasons these institutions were created in the first place.  Of course these authors also must have kept their eyes shut to the monstrous growth of bureaucracy- I don't know how anyone can interface with the medical industry and not notice this is egregious.

Once the bureaucracy is in full, metastatic growth mode, well, it is just more efficient to have the treasury just pay.  It is all fiat anyway, so they can just make more money, cause inflation, and thereby steal whatever value we have left in our pockets.  It doesn't really make sense to the common man, but it makes all sorts of sense in a bureaucracy, which is funny, because the bureaucrats are often more or less common men, but they must suppress their sense of unease and do what was decided by the committee so they can get their paychecks and eventually their pensions.

USAID: A GOOD FIRST STEP

I am happy about what has happened with USAID.  As a first step, something like this has to happen across most U.S. institutions- including state and local institutions.  It is simple really, the bureaucracy has become criminal- in many cases criminal via routine.  This is a simple side effect of being insulated from consequences for not actually paying attention to whatever it is the institution was made for.  If not kept on a short leash, and constantly refocused on the purpose, well the institution itself becomes the purpose. 

And bureaucrats create prestige for themselves by producing more bureaucrats.  This is one of the reasons so many organizations welcomed DEI posers with open arms.  Here are yet another group of bureaucrats with professional sounding titles.  It seems almost preposterous, even to me, as this is obviously racist, incites conflict, and reduces an organization's ability to do whatever it is they became organizations to do.

Yet they did it anyway.

But I digress.

The important step now, one I do hope is coming- I expect perhaps I will have to wait until all these appointees are safely ensconced in their new roles- is criminal investigations.  I would like to point out a key issue here- it should not be merely the obvious prosecutions of people who took bribes or obviously abused the system.  

No, it should be bureaucrats who 'faithfully' followed the processes laid down by their departments.  I hear a lot of these payments were overseen by people who never once questioned a payment.  Perhaps it was even in their employee handbook to behave this way.

The key point is that we will never reign in this type of thinking unless and until it is obvious to everyone that just following the bureaucracies rules will not shield you from criminal law.

Normal people know, for instance, that mutilating a child is child abuse.  But some people appear to be affected by certain framing- call it a therapy (even though it doesn't meet that definition even for adults) and suddenly we have many people thinking that it is a kindness.  We even have people opposed to it who think we somehow need new laws to address the issue because of the new framing.  

So, in an ideal world, many of the bureaucrats who had worked in USAID would be being interrogated over many of these egregious payments right now.  The F.B.I. should be chasing down the paper trail, going through the various departments, contractors, and NGOs.  

The current attempt at defense from the left is that Trump didn't follow the bureaucratic process, and maybe broke a law or two.  But this ignores the evidence that DOGE now has.  I'm pretty sure a law or two was broken by the bureaucracy as they funneled funds to Wuhan in order to get gain of function work done on COVID. 

This is what is in Trump's favor- the deep state is so corrupt that they found actionable evidence of misdeeds in under two weeks.  And these crimes are not related to the ones Trump had to live through being enacted against him personally in recent years.  

Perhaps we must wait for Kash Patel to get into the FBI, and then take whatever agents left after that place is cleaned out, and put them on these investigations, non-stop, for four years.  They might even need a court just dedicated for these particular trails. I don't know if it will go this way, but it should.  People might laugh off ridiculous amounts of money going to buy condoms for people in Palestine, but that would be a mistake.  I don't care whether or not the criminal looks like the bad guy from my favorite TV show or not- I care that the crime has been committed.  

Twelve Federal Reserves

 One of the potential ways of rehabilitating at least part of our economy is to force the Fed to be what it was supposed to, if I remember the concept correctly.  Of course, the main call to do anything to the Federal Reserve in recent years has been to end it- an idea I am partial to, but I have worries about who ends up essentially controlling the U.S. Dollar if we don't in some way.  

The Fed is comprised of 12 regional banks, and they should be setting policies based on the needs of their individual regions.  The venture capitalist era in California, inflated asset prices on Wall Street- most of the money goes to big players.  Then, when they decide to raise the interest rate- they are rather obviously trying to effect the people- they focused on making people lose their jobs.

But what if there were 12 independent reserve banks?

NY sees the inflation in the stock market and sets its rates higher.  Meanwhile, another reserve bank is in a region where the cost of living is cheaper, and it seems clear there is room for actual productivity rather than glorified casino games.  Not only will the people in the poorer region benefit from the lower rate, but it also incentivizes the East and West Coast financiers to start projects in the poorer region.  It would have a decentralizing effect.

Incidentally, a micro-version of this problem lies in Korea.  Seoul is so absolutely dominant that everyone wants to live in Seoul, but housing prices have risen to insane levels.  This is one of the reasons their fertility rates are so low- they feel it necessary to live in Seoul, but the prices are so high, the idea of having children there seems absurd.  Similar issues in Japan, Singapore, etc...

The big cities are good to have if people are going to the big city, making money, finding a compatible spouse, and then returning to a location more suitable for raising children.  If people feel stuck in the city, well, it seldom encourages large families.  

But these economies ultimately need families as they are little better than ponzi schemes, given that they are based on forever growth, and, ultimately, the only way you get real growth is with more people.  It would be good to fix the economy so it wasn't so directly dependent on growth, but that's going to take a bit more time to fix.  Since we have an economy so heavily based on debt, price signals are more than a bit fuzzy right now.  

I think this was the way the Fed was originally conceived.  I suspect it is more politically feasible to reform it along the lines of its original charter than it is to end it.  We haven't even been able to audit it.  But there are likely legal means to force it to behave as it was conceived.

Fighting Multiple Enemies With A House Divided

https://youtu.be/V-iA4mmPlYM?si=nYzy0gs5GuUShWfA

The above video has me more sure than ever that Israel is suffering from a color revolution.  It went from the usual suspicious protests in the streets to some unknown quantity of Israeli bureaucrats actively subverting Netanyahu's government, and is currently in a poor situation were they are fighting enemies with a house divided.

The reason this video reinforces my suspicions is that the pagers and the walkie-talkies gave the Israelis a high level of surveillance over their enemies.  If I had that system, and was about to go invade, I would keep the system functioning.  Malcolm seems place a high value on killing the leadership structure, possibly forgetting to think about how intelligent (or not) that particular leadership structure was, and, in any case, how significant knowing what the enemy is doing as you try to slog through their territory.  

The ability to blow up these pagers and walkie-talkies could have also been more effective in certain combat situations.  If you were fighting a particular battle, and the people you were fighting were mostly cut off from the rest of their compatriots, you could explode them and them use the fog of war to make your enemy assume they were killed in more normal battle circumstances.

But when your government is filled with color revolution people, they don't tell you Oct 7th is about to happen, and then they do stuff to make you look bad.  Blowing up all the pagers and walkie-talkies meant the Israelis went into Lebanon blind- more blind than they would have if they kept the pagers working as a surveillance tool.  

The invasion isn't working particularly well- I think they are doing worse than they did last time.  It is also a bit worrying that Netanyahu and others haven't given particular thought to how to work with factions in Lebanon in order to make sure there isn't a next time.  They probably would have made better progress if they took the time and money they invested in these explosive devices and made friends in Lebanon rather than playing this slick game of consumer terrorism.  Sure, as a surveillance system, this could have been pretty valuable, but the value of the Lebanese government rooting Hezbollah out of southern Lebanon for you is probably higher.

Netanyahu should have stifled his bellicose instincts and first tried to clean house in his own government.  His war goals aren't particularly clear, and the internal forces trying to attack him are so ideologically committed that they are willing to allow and even commit atrocities on all sides to achieve their political goals.  And now he is under a perverse incentive to not stop the wars.  I assume once he does so he will be weak to the political or legal attempts to oust him and put him in jail.  

The color revolution stuff started as Netanyahu tried to reform the Israeli supreme court.  I have no idea if there was much involvement from the U.S. government types who have promoted all the other ones, but I am aware that Israel suffers from the leftist/woke mind virus- likely to a greater degree than the U.S.  

Probabilities Regarding China, Russia, and Trump

 I've had this thought:

The best time for China to take over Taiwan is right after Trump is sworn in.

This assumes they've done a lot of other things, like stock up on supplies in case of sanctions or whatever, but the timing is ideal from the standpoint of what exactly the U.S. government is likely to do.

Even though Trump erroneously employed people like John Bolton, Trump still tended to not do crazy military things that would lead to a great amount of death in other countries.  I remember some issue with some Middle Eastern country (probably Iran) shooting something or other down (probably a drone).  Many officials were quite bellicose about what the U.S. response should be, but Trump decided such a response was not proportional.  

So it is unlikely Trump would try to do something really horrific, like blowing up that huge damn and wiping a bunch of mainland Chinese people who didn't have anything to do with the decision to invade Taiwan.   I suppose there's a really small chance he'd decide this or that general was responsible and try to have him assassinated, but the most likely possibility is that Trump will want to make a deal.  

There's already enough information possessed by the Russians to start a large investigation into all sorts of criminality various members of the deep state have been up to over the years.  Just the bioweapon labs in Ukraine alone ought to be enough.  But obviously there is more than that.  The younger generation of Biden, Pelosi, Romney- were all in Ukraine getting paid for something or other.  

This makes me think back to when Pelosi made that random but highly visible visit to Taiwan.  I would assume that, if they had got up to anything in Taiwan, it would be a kinder, gentler version of the sort of criminality they got up to in Ukraine, but it is quite possible the same sort of crew who got up to no good in the Ukraine also did something in Taiwan.

But all of the nonsense various deep state people got up to means Russia and, possibly, China have a stockpile of information that would make very useful legal ammunition for Trump.  He could have a real chance of draining the swamp with this stuff.  And I suspect that this 'stuff' points directly to things that are illegal to do in the U.S.- not just stuff that Russia and China didn't want them to do.

Zelenskyy is in big trouble and may want to rat out some of these deep state actors in order to secure himself a chance to live out his life somewhere outside of a jail.  This is not going to happen in Ukraine where even a very anti-Russian person would have several reasons to hate him.

A lot of moving parts here, and not really even a good idea about what sort of deal Trump would make, assuming we are talking about China taking Taiwan.  But Trump is smart enough to have actually noticed all of our war gaming research has shown we can't do a damn thing about China taking Taiwan.  China worries about two things- being cut off from trade and the extremely damaging but ultimately pointless carnage a dying empire can inflict on their population.  Trump is the least likely to do the latter.  And in terms of trade, regardless of whatever sanctions he might put on initially, he loves making deals.  So he would also be the fastest to try and get back to some sort of trading agreement.

And if, in the process, a whole bunch of  the swamp gets convicted and shunted out of Trump's way here in the U.S.- well, I suspect Trump would be rather appreciative.

Data Apocalypse

 I've been thinking about data breaches and whatnot.  It seems to me the 'know your customer' laws, healthcare laws, etc...  well, they are all making things worse.   The government has basically forced everyone to build these databases of data, and that means there are more chances for data theft.  There are also more chances for those companies with the data to do naughty things with the data.  

Of course, the government sometimes steps in with some more laws or more exhortations for better security, but I haven't seen this turn out to be all that great.  Usually just more regulations, potentially even more places for the data to get stolen from, and the government track record hasn't been too good either.  They've had plenty of data breaches as well.  Doesn't seem like this is getting any better.

This insistence on the proliferation of the data is the fundamental problem, and it is doubtful your average bureaucrat will come to this understanding, seeing as this is one of the fundamental job descriptions of bureaucrats.  

Even back when these records were on paper, bureaucrats had a bad habit of collecting too much data and not being careful enough about limiting access.  But at least the potential bad actor had to go find the physical paper. 

It seems to me the problem is potentially so large that even bureaucrats should realize the current trajectory isn't a good one.  We have to figure out how to do with less.  We often find out this or that perpetrator was known to the FBI, and yet, it didn't do us any good that he was known to them.  

Maybe if they collected a little less data, they'd have time to go and catch some of these people.

If Goverments Were Products...

 This post was made possible by people lying again about what Trump said.  What did he say? I don't know, because by this time I know I could go find out whatever he said and it would obviously not be what they said he said.  It doesn't really matter what he said. What matters is a fundamental error in thinking about government.

So, let's just say someone tells you- hey, just vote for me this one time and you'll never have to vote again. 

If this were a product, that someone would be selling you something- like maybe a washing machine or something- and he'd say, just buy this once.  It will just work and you won't have to meddle with this thing ever again.

But those who constantly talk about 'our Democracy' - if they were selling us a washing machine, wouldn't we be getting these mixed messages:

1: Bureaucrats/experts who will tell us how to do our laundry.

2: Constantly having to fix/meddle with the machine and/or just having to hand-wash because the machine isn't working again (and this will allegedly be a good thing because participation in this task that you just want done well with a minimum of attention or input on your part is somehow a wonderful thing).

3: Additionally, we must hear other people's voices about how to do the laundry and/or run the machine (which usually doesn't work- at least it doesn't work for our purposes).  The sort of people who absolutely fail at laundry nevertheless must be heard because everyone must have a voice- and it is very unkind to notice that they've turned all their white t-shirts pink.

Regardless of whether this analogy is functional or not, there's a key issue here- people don't like politics and most people have absolutely no skill whatsoever with that esoteric art of creating policy.  We are currently in an era of being jerked around by people skilled in emotional manipulation, and the resulting policy prescriptions tend to land in the arena of doing twice as much as whatever it was that was done before.  

This is probably because the current lunacy is still providing benefit to a few powerful people who find the situation lucrative.  

But in terms of real people, the idea of being able to stop paying attention to this governance thing sounds pretty awesome- much like if you have a good spouse competent at housework.  You are then able to go do whatever it is you are good at and not worry about the laundry.  

We would be thankful for a government we could ignore.  That would mean it was quietly doing good work and we could get on about our own work.