There is a good discussion of the recent Munich Security Conference on the Bulwark site:
An American Blunder in Munich - The Bulwark
The podcast hosts are Eric Edelman and Elliot Cohen. the podcast is a bit long but worth listening to. However there is a transcript, if you just want to skim and not listen to the whole thing. I will have a few comments, and a quote or two from the transcript.
Following is the print summary on Bulwark.
"Eliot and Eric discuss the Munich Security Conference including its background and history. They review the contradictory signals sent by the many Trump officials who have been in different parts of Europe in the run-up to and aftermath of the Munich conference. They discuss Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth's comments, Vice President J.D. Vance's lamentable, off-key speech to the conference, the predatory agreement for the US to colonize Ukraine's raw materials that Secretary of the Treasury Bessent presented to Zelensky in Kyiv and the announcement of US-Russian talks (excluding Ukraine and Europe) to be held this week in Saudi Arabia. They discuss the dangers of a foreign policy carried out by Presidential whim and whether the potential Ukraine War ceasefire will be a bad deal or a catastrophic one and the knock on consequences in Europe, the Indo-Pacific, and for the global nuclear non-proliferation order. They focus on the human consequences of the rampage through government that Elon Musk and his "muskovites" are conducting. They praise the conservative prosecutors in the Southern District of New York who have resigned rather than carry out instructions that they considered corrupt and offer advice to those in government struggling with the moral dilemmas created by the current Trumpian chaos."
This bit is from the transcript, speaking about Vice President JD Vance's speech:
Raber listens to The Bulwark people on YouTube. I find them a bit self-indulgent and lose interest after about 10 minutes. Their response to Trump often becomes the focus of the story vs what was actually said and how that affects listeners in a tangible way besides making them ashamed of their leaders.
ReplyDeleteThat said, they are right about the "audience of one," a point they hit many times.
Congress reps holding town halls recently have gotten an earful that might help shake them out of the idea that they only have to please Trump. A lot of them are getting hammered about Musk's gleeful destruction of govt agencies.
They are also getting panned for not rounding up more immigrants. Apparently the taste for seeing brown people led in chains off to airplanes bound for Gitmo is insatiable.
Latest on the federal worker front. On the weekend, not the last work day, they all received an email that they’re all supposed to show up physically at work on Monday. They all are supposed to email back a list of five things they did that week to fulfill government goals. Looking back at my own career, I would possibly have had only one thing like: using the Zemax optical design program, redesigned a legacy mortar sight so that obsolete glasses can be replaced by currently manufactured ones without having to make physical changes in the body of the sight snd maintaining original optical performance. That’s only one thing so I guess I should have been fired. It is obvious that these sociopaths are having great fun terrorizing the federal workforce. Labelling them as “bureaucrats” while the vast majority are just plain workers is really nasty. Kick a federal employee, get a MAGA cheer. Fire him or her, get two MAGA cheers.
DeleteThe man cannot think outside his Silly-Con Valley Bullsh*t Box.
DeleteStanley, that makes me so angry. Musk has no right to be making people justify their job. I was not a federal employee, and the company I worked for was not always that great for worker rights. After all, they set up shop (actually they bought an existing company) in a so called "right to work" state. They had some layoffs during economic downturns. But the managers talked to the people who got laid off, they didn't do it by text or e-mail. People got severance and back vacation, if they had any left. They could pick up COBRA, which was expensive, but at least it continued health coverage. There is no indication that the people Musk fired got any of this, and they had the legal right to it. I hope there are bazillion class action lawsuits taking the government to the cleaners. Obviously they won't get anything out of Musk. Richest man is hanging on to every penny of his billions.
DeleteI'm predicting that as soon as Musk gets everything he can data-mine out of the government to use in AI, and gets his tax breaks sewed up, he will get bored and bail. None of his relationships last. And the rest of us will be left to pick up the pieces, if there is anything left from his wrecking ball.
If Elon really wanted to reduce bureaucracy and had any real faith in AI and his nerdy systems, he would be working on streamlining the IRS such that, when you filed your taxes, the program would automatically slot you into and pay out any government assistance you were eligible for.
DeleteI also don't believe that Social Security is inefficient. Never had probs with direct deposit, good communication of benefits chages, and when my parents died, SS had retracted their last month's payments out of their account before I was done notifying relatives.
Making millions of fed employees send in "what I did this week" activity reports that no one will read strikes me as the epitome of useless bureaucracy. This is not about government efficiency. It's about terrorizing federal workers for fun.
DeleteJean, I think Musk is totally lacking in empathy, and worse than that, like you said, enjoys terrorizing people.
DeleteIt’s definitely sadistic harassment. The guy I was taking Polish lessons with just dropped out of the classes. He’s a manager in some government organization in the DC area and is dealing with this stuff head on for himself and the employees under him. Anyway, everyone is supposed to roll over for all this. We shall see.
DeleteGermans voting today. Add looks like a second-place finisher.
ReplyDeleteAfD. Stupid auto correct.
DeleteA break from the news. As a Washingtonian who sometimes reads the food critic for entertainment ( we seldom went out to eat except when traveling) I found this story in today’s WaPo to be entertaining. Some of the restaurants he reviews are uber - expensive and over the top foodie ridiculous. Some anre small, local, and affordable choices. But I aLeo enjoy reading comments from the food snobs. This is not a restaurant for tourists though 😉
ReplyDeletehttps://wapo.st/4bbyCbz
Uh oh. It looks like the link won’t work.
DeleteMaybe it will if you provide an email address.
DeleteLink worked for me, maybe bc I am a subscriber. I thought the info about security at the CIA lunchroom was interesting. The toffee pudding sounds good!
DeleteA friend's father worked for the OSS, precursor of the CIA, as a Nazi hunter in the 1940s thru early 60s. Stationed in Italy, Turkey, Lebanon, and Switzerland. He later was some kind of special analyst for the State Dept.
She said she remembers the day she and her three sisters found out what his real occupation was; they found his fake passports other spyware in a dresser drawer. Outside of the dresser drawer with the secret compartment, they could not exactly reconcile their dad's schlumpy middle aged persona to James Bond.
Reality was much more George Smiley than 007!
I read the article about the CIA dining room. The food sounded interesting, and it didn't seem like the prices were really that high. It is interesting that it's cash only, and they don't do tips. Agree with Jean that the toffee pudding sounds good.
DeleteLoved the BBC TV series with Alec Guiness. So much more fun than the silly James Bond movies. I liked Sean Connery as an actor IN SPITE of his role as Bond, not because of it.
DeleteThe first time I had toffee pudding about 4 years ago, I couldn’t believe how good it was. I have no idea why I had never heard of it until then. Katherine, CIA employees often have false identities, even among those they know well. Credit cards are in their real names usually and so cash ensures anonymity. One of my sisters roommates when she first came to DC got an administrative assistant job at the CIA. She did not have a fake name. One night they went to the local movies and she saw someone she knew from work and started chatting. He reminded her in no uncertain terms that she must never speak to other employees in public. He had a fake name, fake job etc. that his neighbors knew him by. If she used his real name in public it would he bad. I worked with a former CIA employee who was a courier, flying back and forth to Paris with documents. She had been out for years and was now allowed to talk about her job. She had a fake name, a fake parking sticker for a local military base on her car, and a fake job. None of her friends and neighbors knew what she really did. She was very normal, somewhat overweight, middle aged woman just like those we all see every day.Or even look like, and the first thing that comes to mind isn’t courier for the CIA. She was almost exposed once in a similar way as the guy at the movies.She ran into a neighbor at the bakery who called her by her fake name just as she had given an order for a cake using her real name. The baker looked a bit confused but didn’t ask questions.
DeleteAs I understand it, the spooks don't know exactly what they're doing half the time. They watch Mr X and pass info up the line. Keeping people silo'd prevents info from leaking.
DeleteThe silos are important. I knew a couple of other spooks. They weren’t CIA. One was allegedly a diplomat - military attaché ( Air Force) at our embassy in Moscow. Lots of “ diplomats” from every country are spooks. Mostly meant to cultivate possible sources they meet at various functions. The other was with the US Information Agency, attached to various embassies abroad. The USIA is supposed to promote American tourism, provide general information to the locals, host cultural activities etc. They are also supposed to cultivate the locals. At some point they were merged with the State Dept. Sometimes some of the CIA or other intel agency employees would say they worked for the State Dept at social events (the first question around this town at social events is usually Where do you work?)
DeleteLOL, glad I just had an ordinary job!
DeleteI had a great-uncle who did a lot of work similar to USAID stuff, he was an agricultural engineer. He was stationed in places like Laos, Thailand, Lesotho, Haiti, etc. One of my brothers joked that it seemed like he might be doing some stuff for the CIA, given those locations. Turned out he actually was.
Katherine, you are right. A lot of contractors are also workin for the spooks. I took four years off when our first two sons were born 19 months apart. When I answered someone with I stay at home now with our two young sons one person actually walked away and said That’s nice. A friend who had 5 sons told me that she would answer “I raise boys”. She later went back to work after #5 was in school.
DeleteAbout the toffee pudding, I looked up a recipe. I had in mind that it would be something like Swiss Miss butterscotch pudding. Turns out its more of a a British type of pudding, with kind of a cake base with toffee sauce. I might try making it sometime.
DeleteMonday morning in the Trumpocene Era. Apparently, DoD employees were told NOT to respond to the DOGE email regarding accomplishments. This came from the DoD’s Office of Personnel Management which is Hegseth’s. To collect that amount of data in one comprehensive database is a danger to national security. Is this a breach in the Trump administration? I certainly hope so. Trump likes chaos and fighting in his organizations. I have no idea how this will play out. But I definitely prefer a chaotic Trump organization full of internecine conflict to a coherent one.
ReplyDeleteThe DOGE-induced chaos is pure Trump. It's inherent to his vision of how to lead, which is roughly the way Tony Soprano led his crew, er "family".
DeleteI still don't understand how switching sides and aligning with Putin isn't treason.
DeleteMost of trumps staff and trump himself would be rejected for security clearances. But they are exempt from those requirements.
DeleteSomebody, maybe Jim, observed early on after November election, that Trump's damage tends to be self-limiting because of the chaos. Comfirting notion, but that has not been true so far, with Musk pulling the guts out of federal programs and having fun firing people.
DeleteManagers in fed agencies may be starting to push back a little, telling employees to ignore some of these arbitrary directives. But they mostly seem to be waiting for the courts to act. A ruling in favor of employees will be moot once the Mike Johnson's spending bill passes because there won't be $$ for rehires.
Yesterday I came home to five emails telling me somebody at various foreign locations tried to hack my X.com account, apparently the old Twitter acct where I used to follow Sen Chuck Grassley.
I deleted the account. Sadly, Grassley was nowhere in sight bitching about the History Channel, one of his favorite topics. But my feed was full of messages from Elon: There was a photo of him roaring in triumph with a bejeweled chain saw, links to the DOGE web site, an AI picture of him roaring in triumph dressed as a gladiator with his face youth-ified, and several very phallic slo-mo shots of his rockets launching triumphally thru a blaze of red and yellow cloud.
Maybe it's the autism, Ketamine, and psilocybin combo, but the guy seems to be cosplaying some kind of Marvel Comix stud muffin.
Dude, you're over 50, can't grow a decent beard, and have 11, maybe 13, kids strewn around the world, and half their mothers want full custody because you ignore them and don't pay up on time. Grow the eff up.
Anyhow, the hacking attempts have never happened with any other social media platform. Not reassuring that the same goon who runs X is also in charge of our national DBs.
So that's today's freak out. Imma go clean some drawers out now.
I'm guessing that most people who voted for Trump didn't realize they'd be getting Musk, cosplaying the Cat in the Hat, the Grinch, and Betelgeuse, running rampant through the government. And didn't realize that we'd be siding with Putin against our allies in the UN.
DeleteTo quote Stein's law, when something can't go on forever, it will stop. This level of chaos can't go on forever, and none of the ways it could stop are pretty.
In the first Trumping, the state was allowed to function for the most part. In this second one, Trump’s style is being pushed to the max. Federal employees are being given totally contradictory orders directly from Musk versus those through the chain-of-command. It all pops up in their emails. Meanwhile, the Trump White House praises Musk while saying responding to his emails is voluntary.
DeleteI never subscribed to Twitter so I was definitely not going to subscribe to X. No tik- tok. No instagram. Just FB which is dead among most of those younger than 50 and almost dead among the old folk friends.
DeleteElon often looks manic in his photos. Maybe add bi- polar to his illnesses. And a refusal to take his meds.
In religion news, Pew has its latest study out. Good news for Jim. It appears that the dramatic fall in religion has stabilized. I was interested in the 19% Catholic figure. For many years it was ~25% before slowly dropping. Given that tens of millions of Latino Catholic immigrants have kept the RC numbers up in the pews, it seems that the loss in euro- descended cradle Catholics is very large. I haven’t read the detailed report yet.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2025/02/26/decline-of-christianity-in-the-us-has-slowed-may-have-leveled-off/
Oh I'm sure Elon is taking his meds. They're just not prescribed ones!
DeleteGlad to hear that the fall in religion is stabilizing. Maga-ized Christianity notwithstanding, we need the relationship with God in troubled times (and times that aren't as troubled).
I have not read the PEW report yet, but the bottom line of stabilization for Catholics is what CARA, the Georgetown group that does research for the church is reporting.
DeleteThey are saying that actual church attendance is at same level as before the pandemic. They are concluding that the drops in actual church attendance during the pandemic were mainly people choosing to watch at home. In other words, pretty much no change in the past five years. Of course, the bishops will probably congratulate themselves that their three-year program on the Eucharist brought people back to church.
A couple of random thoughts:
ReplyDelete1. Of all the troubling things the Trump administration has done, the worst, by far, is his alignment with Putin. I had been prepared to vote for Joe Biden - which, for me, would have been monumental, even apart from his evident decline - because of Biden's commitment to our alliances. My saying the Putin alignment is the worst by far is not to underestimate the damage he's doing domestically, but simply to call out the magnitude of his disastrous foreign policy
2. I am not sure we've reached a Constitutional crisis yet. But his neutering of Congress suggests that the thugs on his political team and in the conservative media complex (I am not certain there is a clear demarcation between the two) have found a way to, in effect, break Congress's Constitutional check on the excesses of the president.
3. I read something today that DOGE stooges are canceling USAID disbursements that have been ordered by courts to continue. The DOGEes are doing this by intervening in the technology workflows used to process disbursements and overriding payment authorizations that already have been approved by the authorized USAID executives. In other words, the DOGE dopes are checking the "Not Approved" box. DOGE is not actually an authorized government agency and it has no authority to intervene in these workflows. This may constitute a Constitutional crisis.
Some additional random thoughts:
Delete4. Trump's attempts to freeze out the mainstream media are on the edge of a Constitutional crisis, or so it seems to me.
5. It seems to me the obvious counterstrategy for the Democratic Party is to pull its advocacy for worker rights out of mothballs. This so-called populist president is actively working to cancel many thousands of jobs of federal worker bees. I see a NY Times item this morning that Republicans in Congress are getting an earful in local-district town halls. Good! Much more needs to be done in this respect.
Jim, I agree with all your points.
DeleteI'm reading that Trump's approval numbers are plummeting. People are getting riled up. Good. The electorate is going to have to raise hell and put a brick under it.
Trump thinks he is asbestos, that impeachment is off the table. It won't be if his own party brings the articles.
Tsla stock just registered below 300. Woohoo! I know the stock market is as irrational as a herd of stampeding ungulates, but Woohoo! Get your email, Elon?
DeleteJim makes some real good points. I read about Trump's $5 Million Gold Card with some trepidation. Apparently he wants to let immigrants who can pay for this card to come in with automatic Green Card privileges. The cards will attract top people and the $5 Million will go to the debt. Companies who want these top people can pay the $5 Million on behalf of job candidates. I if we're talking constitutional crisis, I think that Trump's doing end runs around rules, laws, and accepted practices to enlarge the already too-powerful executive branch certainly qualifies.
DeleteI think he’s doing a whole lot of unconstitutional stuff and so do many others. That’s why there are a lot of lawsuits pending now.
DeleteI do know that trumps gold card idea isn’t rare . Just more expensive than most . Many countries allow foreigners to 8nvest a specific sum of money to get automatic residency. Usually they require a purchase of property but some take pure cash. Maltas was a mi,,ion US dollars. Few years ago, but you could buy your way into Spain with as little as a $300k property purchase. It’s gone up since then.
Although I think birthright citizenship is part of the Constitution, most western democracies do t have that. Two of our grandsons were born in Australia, but did not get citizenship because neither of their parents are Australian. But they did get American, French and Polish citizenship immediately . How many passports does a non- spook need?
Like all Trump's ideas, the Gold Card is a half-baked idea and likely he thought it up in hopes of favoring rich white Europeans. Remember during his first admin when he was fantasizing about big blond Norwegians coming in?
DeleteWhen I looked at immigration to New Zealand 40 years ago, you needed $40k plus fluent English, a job offer in an essential skill area, and could not be over 32 years old (because you needed to be working at least 30 years to pay for their version of Social Security). I remember that preschool teachers, carpenters, and librarians were on the list. The majority of jobs were in rural areas. It was all very well organized and strict.
By contrast, moving to Iceland was pretty much open at that time, but unemployment was extremely high.
If you are born in Canada to foreigners, you get dual citizenship but have to declare one or the other at age 18. A lot of my friends in the UP had their babies over there in case the US ever brought the draft back. A few kids chose Canadian citizenship and got a great deal on college (much less expensive) and married Canadians.