The VA cancelled a $56,000 contract to water ~8 plants for 5 years. This is ~$1400/plant/year. The contract has been canceled and DOGE will water the plants free of charge. pic.twitter.com/CAj8xINzJG
— Department of Government Efficiency (@DOGE) March 7, 2025
Social Security is as big as government programs get. Naturally, even a glance at it with DOGE’s magnifying glass found plenty that seemed — charitably — not quite right.
“According to the Social Security database, these are the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE,” Department of Government Efficiency chief Elon Musk stated via X on February 16. “Maybe Twilight is real, and there are a lot of vampires collecting Social Security.”….
Trump critics insist that there is nothing to see here and that Musk and President Donald J. Trump are lying when they say that dead people are collecting Social Security — or that crooks are harvesting those checks on behalf of the deceased. …
Even if Trump and Musk are wrong, and Social Security is graft-free, what does it say about this federal database — and Uncle Sam’s technological prowess in general — if it “merely” is clogged with fake data about people who have been dead for centuries (if they ever even existed)?
“The fact that we are even discussing whether 1.3 million Americans over the age of 150 are receiving Social Security shows how antiquated the federal government’s IT systems are and how they need a dire update,” U.S. Senator Marsha Blackburn (R – Tennessee) told me. The member of the Senate Finance Committee added: “That is exactly why President Trump has launched DOGE and brought in Elon Musk, who often jovially refers to himself as tech support. We need to make the Social Security Administration more efficient and improve its technology so we have transparency into who is receiving government benefits.”
Blackburn’s comment is, so far, the understatement of the year.
The Los Angeles Daily News reports the city’s Chief of Police advising citizens that, despite an $11.8 billion budget and 9,974 officers and 3,000 civilian staff, the third largest police department in the united States cannot protect you. Don’t wear valuable stuff, don’t drive expensive cars. The criminals rule the city.
People move to Los Angeles from all over the world for the weather, glitz, glamour and a Hollywood lifestyle that only the City of Angels can offer.
However, our crime problem is now so out of control that we are now being told to leave our watches, expensive cars and wallets at home in order to protect ourselves from emboldened criminals.
We have essentially collectively thrown in the towel on trying to do something to catch and punish the criminals and instead just resorted to hiding everything that they might want to steal from us.
On March 24 of last year, LAPD Chief Michel Moore told Angelenos to leave their flashy jewelry and cars at home.
“What we’re asking the public to do with these crime increases is if they’re going to wear expensive jewelry or drive high-end cars, when leaving restaurants, taverns and other locations, they need to be mindful of their surroundings, and be in well lit areas. [We ask that] they recognize there are opportunists that are willing to take advantage of them and many times, these individuals are armed with firearms,” said Moore.
Moore said the LAPD is “tracking the increase in armed robberies.” Armed robberies are up 44% since last year, the police department reported.
So, let me get this straight — With armed robberies at an all-time high, Los Angeles residents are being warned by LAPD not to go out in public while prominently displaying lots of expensive jewelry.
So … what? Mr. T isn’t supposed to leave his house for months?
We’re also being advised not to drive expensive-looking cars, which would explain the uptick in Prius sales.
Remember those bumper stickers that read, “My Other Car Is A Mercedes”? Who knew those people were just trying to not get carjacked?
Even wearing well-fitting, stylish, expensive-looking clothes can get you robbed. So I guess Rihanna has nothing to worry about.
At an LAPD press conference on Jan. 12 of this year, the public was told to leave literally nothing visible in the car.
The LAPD’s campaign to get law-abiding citizens to hide their valuables is known as “Stash It Don’t Flash It,” which is better than the more accurate name, “We Give Up.”
“It could be anything from a phone charger to change in the cup holder, that they’re gonna break the window out and take,” said Sgt. Gordon Helper, leader of the campaign.
“Absolutely, they’ll even break a window to get a bottle of water so they can recycle its container, whether it’s aluminum or plastic,” added Capt. Elaine Morales.
Of course, in reality, those nearly ten thousand cops certainly could stop crime in Los Angeles. Their government won’t let them. City government is controlled by a machine that stays in office by relying on a voting base whose foundation is the criminal/welfare class. That base is allied –of course– to precisely the same ideologically-deluded wet liberals who are the former predator’s natural prey. In US cities today, it’s as if the wildebeast and gazelles could be counted to vote against hunters harvesting lions and leopards.
And, as Jeffrey Carter notes, everywhere you look you can see Ayn Rand’s fictional vision of the future coming visibly to life.
If you look at Minneapolis, Chicago, and San Francisco, it is a race to see who can be Detroit first. NYC is terrible right now when it comes to crime and daily living. So is Los Angeles. New Orleans is the murder capital of the country. Memphis, St. Louis, Louisville? Please spare me the Chamber of Commerce pitch. No doubt, tourists are balking at going to those places due to fear of crime.
Name an urban area that is a delightful place to live, has great public schools, doesn’t have rising crime, and you can build wealth right now. The only ones I can think of are in the Old Confederacy.
John Galt is shrugging. He is moving places. It’s not the weather.
Last November, the information came out in connection with a secret internal report that Yale now had more administrators than faculty or students:
The numbers:
4,664 undergraduate students
4,962 faculty
5,042 administrators
——————————————
“I think we don’t yet have a Vice President for the rights of the left-handed, but I haven’t checked this month.” — Professor Leslie Brisman.
——————————————
The report discussing this astounding proliferation of bureaucracy (and its negative impact on teaching) was never released and quickly swept deeply under the Woodbridge Hall rug.
But these things have a way of coming out, despite coverup efforts and, what do you know? somebody evidently leaked the damaging report to the alumni reform organization “Fight for Yale.”
Sample:
“[T]here are currently 31 people with the title of ‘Vice President’ (or ‘Associate Vice President’) at Yale and also 7 with the title of ‘Vice Provost’; this may be compared to only 5 Vice Presidents in 2003-4 and 14 in 2012-13. Table 4 provides some
other counts of people with titles with the words ‘student affairs,’ ‘student engagement,’ ‘student life,’ ‘diversity,’ ‘strategic initiatives,’ or ‘sustainability’ in their job titles. …”
The AR-15’s .223 Remington cartridge (the virtually identical civilian version of the 5.56x45mm NATO cartridge) fires a 60 grain bullet at roughly 3000 feet per second.
The .30-06 Springfield’s (used in WWI and WWII) 110 grain service round bullet was fired at 3400 feet per second. A deer hunter is likely to use a 150 grain bullet (2900 feet per second) or a 180 grain bullet (2700 feet per second).
Correction: US service rounds were primarily 150 gr. I guess the 110 gr. surplus ammo I remembered must have been from some other country. Thanks for the correction in Comments. Complete .30-06 data here.
Governments world-wide have spent billions and billions to get you to switch from using gasoline refined from petroleum to electricity produced in plants that burn coal to power your car. Pure genius!
In Los Angeles, city officials grappling with an ongoing homelessness crisis have turned to an idea that for decades was politically unpopular and considered radical: a government-funded tent encampment.
Other cities, including San Francisco, Seattle and Tampa, Fla., have opened similar programs in recent years. But the high public cost of LA’s first sanctioned campground — more than $2,600 per tent, per month — has advocates worried it will come at the expense of more permanent housing.
The campsite opened in late April on a fenced-in parking lot beside the 101 freeway in East Hollywood. The lot-turned-campground can accommodate up to about 70 tents in 12-by-12-foot spots marked by white squares painted on the asphalt.
What a minute—what? $2,600 per month, per tent?!?!
As the kids say, AYFKM!? Only government could spend more for tents than you’d have to pay for a rental apartment even in high-priced Los Angeles. You can shoplift ten tents from a store (without risk of prosecution in California right now) for that amount.
But let’s keep going with the NPR story:
On a recent afternoon, the site was nearly full. A row of port-a-potties stood along one side of the camp. The program also provides showers, three meals a day and 24-hour security. Campers get entered into the county’s database for matching unhoused people with social services and housing resources. . .
According to a report by the city administrative officer, the new East Hollywood campground costs approximately $2,663 per participant per month. That’s higher than what a typical one-bedroom apartment rents for in the city, according to the website RentCafe. While the per-tent cost covers services, meals, sanitation and staffing, some are concerned that the city is investing too much in short-term Band-Aids over long-term solutions.
I’d love to see a genuine audit of this homelessness spending to see how much the bureaucracy, consultants, administrators, and others in the “caring professions” chain of being skim off the top.
But this is obviously no accident or oversight, it’s simply the looting pf the public treasury undertaken behind the facade of an idealistic cause. You can bet that those tents are being rented by the brother-in-law or pal or corporate shell actually owned by some influential democrat panjamdrum.
John Hinderaker has a really spectacular horror story of official stupidity, petty tyranny, and self-importance.
This is the most infuriating news story I have read in a while, and it comes, surprisingly, from the New York Times. The protagonist is Dr. Hasan Gokal, a Houston physician. He had a limited quantity of the Moderna covid vaccine to distribute, and rather than throw some of it away, he found qualified patients to receive it. For that, he was fired from his job and criminally prosecuted.
The Texas doctor had six hours. Now that a vial of Covid-19 vaccine had been opened on this late December night, he had to find 10 eligible people for its remaining doses before the precious medicine expired. In six hours.
Scrambling, the doctor made house calls and directed people to his home outside Houston. Some were acquaintances; others, strangers. A bed-bound nonagenarian. A woman in her 80s with dementia. A mother with a child who uses a ventilator.
After midnight, and with just minutes before the vaccine became unusable, the doctor, Hasan Gokal, gave the last dose to his wife, who has a pulmonary disease that leaves her short of breath.
For his actions, Dr. Gokal was fired from his government job and then charged with stealing 10 vaccine doses worth a total of $135 — a shun-worthy misdemeanor that sent his name and mug shot rocketing around the globe.
Dr. Gokal was charged by a Democratic Party prosecutor in Houston. The charge was so absurd that it was dismissed by a disbelieving judge, but the prosecutor “vowed to present the matter to a grand jury.”
You should read the whole story, if you can get past the Times paywall. (Protip: clear your cache of Times cookies.) This is another sign of the times:
The officials maintained that he had violated protocol and should have returned the remaining doses to the office or thrown them away, the doctor recalled. He also said that one of the officials startled him by questioning the lack of “equity” among those he had vaccinated.
“Equity” doesn’t mean what you probably think it does. “Evil” is a pretty good shorthand translation.
“Are you suggesting that there were too many Indian names in that group?” Dr. Gokal said he asked.
Exactly, he said he was told.
In today’s fallen world, being fired and charged with a crime is by no means the end of the ordeal:
On Jan. 21, about two weeks after the doctor’s termination, a friend called to say that a local reporter had just tweeted about him. At that very moment, one of his three children answered the door to bright lights and a thrust microphone. Shaken, the 16-year-old boy closed the door and said, “Dad, there are people out there with cameras.”
This was how Dr. Gokal learned that he had been charged with stealing vaccine doses.
Harris County’s district attorney, Kim Ogg, had just issued a news release that afternoon with the headline: “Fired Harris County Health Doctor Charged With Stealing Vial Of Covid-19 Vaccine.”
The next person who needs to be fired is Harris County’s District Attorney.
My father used to say: “The continent slopes, and all the fruits and nuts roll out to California.” And there, they wind up in public offices, like the school board of San Francisco which recently decided it needs to rename 44 schools on the basis of bizarre leftist grievances and animosities. Dianne Feinstein is not left-wing enough? What did Robert Louis Stevenson ever do? Was he guilty of stereotyping pirates?
The names of presidents, conquistadors, authors and even a current U.S. senator will be removed from 44 San Francisco school sites after the city’s school board Tuesday deemed the iconic figures unworthy of the honor.
The 6-1 vote followed months of controversy, with officials, parents, students and alumni at odds over whether Abraham Lincoln and George Washington high schools, Dianne Feinstein Elementary and dozens of others needed new names with no connection to slavery, oppression, racism or similar criteria.
Critics called the process slapdash, with little to no input from historians and a lack of information on the basis for each recommendation. In one instance, the committee didn’t know whether Roosevelt Middle School was named after Theodore or Franklin Delano.
“I must admit there are reasons to support this resolution, but I can’t,” said community member Jean Barish, who said the process has been flawed and based on emotion rather than expertise. “These are not decisions that should be made in haste.”
School board members, however, have insisted that the renaming is timely and important, given the country’s reckoning with a racist past. They have argued the district is capable of pursuing multiple priorities at the same time, responding to critics who say more pressing issues deserve attention.
The San Francisco school board voted to change the following school names:
Balboa High School, Spanish explorer Vasco Nunez de Balboa
Abraham Lincoln High School, U.S. president
Mission High School, Mission Dolores
George Washington High School, first U.S. president
Lowell High School, poet/critic James R. Lowell
James Denman Middle School, founder of first S.F. school
Everett Middle School, Edward Everett, American statesman
Herbert Hoover Middle School, U.S. president
James Lick Middle School, land baron
Presidio Middle School, S.F. military post
Roosevelt Middle School, Theodore or F.D., both U.S. presidents
Lawton K-8, U.S. Army officer Henry Ware Lawton
Claire Lilienthal (two sites), S.F. school board member
Paul Revere K-8, American Revolution patriot
Alamo Elementary, a poplar tree or the site of Texas Revolution battle
Alvarado Elementary, Pedro de Alvarado, conquistador
Bryant Elementary, author Edwin Bryant
Clarendon Elementary Second Community and Japanese Bilingual Bicultural Program, Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, English politician
El Dorado Elementary, mythical City of Gold
Dianne Feinstein Elementary, U.S. senator and former S.F. mayor
Garfield Elementary, James Garfield, U.S. president
Grattan Elementary, William Henry Grattan, Irish author
Jefferson Elementary, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. president
Francis Scott Key Elementary, composer of “Star Spangled Banner”
Frank McCoppin Elementary, S.F. mayor
McKinley Elementary, William McKinley, U.S. president
Marshall Elementary, James Wilson Marshall, sawmill worker at Sutter’s Mill
Monroe Elementary, James Monroe, U.S. president
John Muir Elementary, naturalist
Jose Ortega Elementary, Spanish colonizer
Sanchez Elementary, Jose Bernardo Sanchez, Spanish missionary
Junipero Serra Elementary, Spanish priest
Sheridan Elementary, Gen. Philip Sheridan
Sherman Elementary, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman
Commodore Sloat Elementary, John Sloat, Navy officer
Robert Louis Stevenson Elementary, author
Sutro Elementary, Adolph Sutro, S.F. mayor
Ulloa Elementary, Don Antonio de Ulloa, Spanish general
This Breitbart story demonstrates that the SF school board looney tunes were frequently confused or misinformed, but were sufficiently self-infatuated and intoxicated with power that they didn’t care.
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