The Artful DOGE-er

Slava Ukraine

The big mystery for me about Mayor Adam’s is how, exactly, the axe will fall.
He’s a politically dead man walking. As Olbermann often quotes from some movie, “You’re dead, son…..get yourself buried.”
—Sturgeone, AKA Anonymouse

“Amazon is changing its Kindle policy by removing the option to download purchased books to a computer starting February 26, 2025. This means users will only be able to access their Kindle books on Amazon-approved devices, limiting their ability to back up or transfer books to non-Amazon devices.”

Attention, anyone with a Kindle! Back up your collection elsewhere now. If something you own ends up in a banned book list, they can remove it. If Bezos wants to replace a book with an edited version, they can do that, too.

ps – Boycott Amazon & Whole Foods!

Mapquest
Make your own map of the gulf and call it what you will.

Works as advertised.
—John Scalzi

Just reminded myself of that day I answered the Cabinet Hotline and the man says, “Hi, this is Mike Luciano.” He pronounced it Lucy-ANN-no.
So me thinking I’d be kinda cute, I say to him, “Ahhh, Loo-CHA-no.”

There is a loooong pause.

He says flatly but firmly, “Lucy-ANN-no.”

Haha I immediately ceased all traces of cuteness.

https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/elon-musk-doge-neo-apartheid/

“Elon Musk’s Vision Is Coming Into Focus—and It Looks a Lot Like Neo-Apartheid”
“Apartheid was, first and foremost, a business plan—one that the South African–born Musk seems to be reworking for the modern age.”

“The juxtaposition of Trump gleefully deporting actual Black and brown refugees already in the United States with his order throwing open the borders to white South Africans is the reason I know that Trump is racist, not just as a matter of policy but as a matter of personality. It’s also the reason I know that Trump is not fully in charge; Trump is just a puppet dictator, while the real power behind the throne is the white South African Elon Musk. It’s Musk’s language and framing that Trump merely parroted in his orders and tweets about South Africa.”

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-terminating-new-york-citys-congestion-pricing-2033320

“The Trump administration cited two main reasons for ending the pilot program, arguing the program’s scope was unprecedented, failing to provide a toll-free option for drivers, and that the toll rate was primarily set to generate revenue for public transit.
The decision comes just weeks after the program launched and despite early MTA data showing it was exceeding expectations.”

Well, of course a “drill, baby, drill” idiot wants to kill public transportation.

And, I understand that the bridge-and-tunnel commuters get hit the hardest, but maybe knock it down to $5 unless they are d-bags driving teSSlas. They can pay a $50 toll.

The “king” thing is another distraction from the meat of the story. Hochul needs to dump Adams, ASAP.

https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/transportation/2025/02/19/nyc-congestion-pricing-stopped-trump/79201318007/

“Broadway shows are selling out and foot traffic to local businesses is spiking. School buses are getting kids to class on time, and yellow cab trips increased by 10%,” Hochul said. “Transit ridership is up, drivers are having a better experience, and support for this program is growing every day.”

This guy Mike had SERIOUS money. He liked piano music but didn’t like records so he had a Steinway Grand, full sized which had a digital gizmo where you could pop in a cd which would actually PLAY THE PIANO. It was the spookiest thing I’ve ever seen to stand there and watch Mozart, Chopin, and Ludwig actually playing that piano.
Spooky, baby.

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/30/curtis-yarvins-ideas-00201552

“On the weekend of Donald Trump’s inauguration, the neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin traveled to Washington, D.C., for the Coronation Ball, a glitzy inaugural gala hosted by the ultraconservative publishing house Passage Press.”

“Even the ball’s name spoke to Yarvin’s outsize influence over the Trumpian right: For over a decade, Yarvin, an ex-computer programmer-turned-blogger, has argued that American democracy is irrevocably broken and ought to be replaced with a monarchy styled after a Silicon Valley tech start-up. According to Yarvin, the time has come to jettison existing democratic institutions and concentrate political power in a single “chief executive” or “dictator.”

Yarvin is skeptical that Trump can actually carry out the type of regime change that he envisions, but he told me that there are signs the new administration is serious about concentrating power in the executive branch.

Instead of a left party and a right party, we have an inner party [a bipartisan elite] and an outer party [the anti-establishment insurgents]. This outer party is basically the party that exists to collect and market the votes of unfashionable America.

“Look, D.C. is run by Congress, not by the president.” The president stands in front of it and waves his hands and watches the system go, but the real decisions are funding decisions, and those kinds of decisions are made by Congress or the agencies. Actually, if the White House didn’t exist, America would still work.

“Look, the [Federal Reserve] is clearly under executive authority.” It’s clearly not part of the legislative branch, it’s clearly not part of the judicial branch, so it’s clearly part of the executive branch. And because the Fed actually controls the monetary system, I can order it to mint the trillion-dollar coin, or more to the point, I can basically order the Fed to buy assets. And because I can order the Fed to buy assets, I can order the Fed to buy notes issued by new institutions.

“There are the elves — the blue state, [professional managerial class], ruling-class people — and the hobbits, the ruled-over lower-middle-class. The fear among elves that the hobbits will organize and come and kill them with pitchforks — because there’s a lot of goddamn hobbits — has driven a lot of things in the 20th century.”

“But what happens when you have a group of people who are elves either by education or by background — because, of course, we have this remarkable system called “college” for promoting people in the elf aristocracy — is that you have a certain set of people who, like me, are dark elves who dissent from the [progressive] Obama worldview, right? They don’t believe in the state religion anymore.”

“But Bannon has a kind organic connection with MAGA world. He has an organic connection with the great American hobbit. He really loved those people, and there’s something sort of right about that.
The way the relationship between the dark elf and the hobbits should work is [based on the understanding] that [the hobbits] have been pouring their energy and their hope and their fear for decades into shit that doesn’t work.”

“What Trump is showing in his effort to sort of reactivate all of these incredibly rusty, broken levers of the top-down control of the New Deal, is just like, “Wow, the president can do this.” The president can cancel the 1965 affirmative action executive order and nobody questions that legally he can just do that. Imagine if you’d suggested that in a meeting of the Bush administration. You would be on the next plane out. So what I think that the MAGA people are going to see is that shit is happening.”

”[The New Right] is still a vanguard, which means it’s still fundamentally oligarchical in a lot of ways. I don’t need to name names, but there’s a guy in D.C. who has a big house which a lot of the revolutionary vanguard hangs out in. He’s not in government. He’s a lawyer. But this is a tradition that goes way back in D.C., with the House of Truth — where Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Hay and those guys hung out [during the Progressive Era]. Always, in a town like [D.C.], you’ll have this vibe of a society of young, smart people. When you’re at this place, maybe you’ll run into a Clarence Thomas clerk or someone like that. There’s this whole world of people in their 20s and 30s who are basically arriving to take jobs in D.C. now. And a lot of these dark elf-y people are hanging out in various places. Not that many of these people are not Christians — many of them are Christians, of course, but they’re more likely to be like TradCaths than cradle Catholics, right?” (*TradCatholics like Chiefs kicker, Butker, who told female graduates to get married & have babies, and male students to embrace their masculinity.)

“…basically, in almost every way, JD is perfect. One of the perfect things about him is that he has this deeply American background, and then he was just completely re-socialized into the American elite. It’s like, the Marines taught him how to hold a fork or whatever, and then he’s graduated from Yale Law School, and he knows exactly how to eat at the right banquets. He’s more comfortable with elite liberal Americans than Trump will ever be, and Trump just doesn’t care. JD is more analytical. He’s much younger, so he has more IQ points left. As you get older, you feel your IQ points going away, but they get replaced by wisdom.” (*Ha! He didn’t have many IQ points to trade for wisdom.)

“There’s an old blog post of mine from 2011 where I talk about kingship and the vibe of being a king, and I’m basically like, the guy in America who has this vibe is Donald Trump — and this is well before there was any serious talk of him having a political career, if I can pat myself on the back for that. Trump has this incredible energy — he’s the guy who Ali G’s bullshit doesn’t work on. Cutting through bullshit is his strength.”

“..,look at Russ Vought at the Office of Management and Budget — another person whose hand I maybe shook once but who I haven’t talked to. Impoundment is a perfect example of an issue where in the first Trump administration, the Office of Legal Counsel would have said, “Oh, you can’t do that — there’s a law.” Well, is the law constitutional? I don’t think the law is constitutional. I think the law is clearly a straight-up violation of the Constitution.”

“The courts are still a question here, and the idea that we control the court — I think anyone on the Supreme Court would resist that description, certainly the swing centrist bloc on the Supreme Court would resist it. Among his mistakes in his first term was that Trump basically appointed three centrists [to the Supreme Court] — so I don’t know if Amy Coney Barrett is going say, “Hey, let’s revisit this birthright citizenship question.” But when it comes to the anti-impoundment act, it seems very plausible you could get that through the Supreme Court. And even if you can’t, why not ask?”

“If you’re going to defy the court, it has to feel unifying above all. If you’re going to say, “Hey, you know what? Marbury v. Madison was wrongly decided, the Constitution actually does not specify the precedence of the branches, judicial review was just this invented thing,” it has to be the right moment. If you’re doing that in a situation where the vibe is like, “This is going to be the first shot in the civil war between red America and blue America” — if you’re doing that as part of a divisive path where you have an opposition — I think it’s bad.”

JFC! Is this Elon’s puppet master?

https://www.newsweek.com/who-curtis-yarvin-conservative-linked-jd-vance-wants-monarchy-2017221

“Who Is Curtis Yarvin? Conservative Linked to JD Vance Wants ‘Monarchy’
“Yarvin, 51, is a software engineer who started blogging under the pen name Mencius Moldbug in 2007. He has since started a new blog and made numerous appearances on online platforms and podcasts to discuss political theory and what is now known as “dark enlightenment” thinking.
He largely argues that governmental bureaucracy should be stripped, and that the U.S. should be replaced with a more centralized “monarchy” run by as a corporation with a chief executive officer.”

“Yarvin, meanwhile, has also garnered support from Silicon Valley leaders, including Peter Thiel, the co-founder of PayPal and a friend of Vance’s, among others, and Trump’s incoming top State Department official Michael Anton. Yarvin spoke about installing an “American Caesar” on Anton’s podcast.”

*Hmmm, and with the Ides of March right around the corner.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/mike-pence-slaps-down-trump-over-his-sucking-up-to-putin/

“Incensed Mike Pence Slaps Down Trump For Sucking Up to Putin”

“Mr. President, Ukraine did not ‘start’ this war,” he wrote. “Russia launched an unprovoked and brutal invasion claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. The Road to Peace must be built on the Truth.”

https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/15/i-went-to-greenland-to-try-to-buy-it-meet-the-founder-who-wants-to-re-create-mars-on-earth/

“A 28-year-old deboarded, ready to march into the Nordic parliament building with a bold proposition: “I went to Greenland to try to buy it,” Praxis founder Dryden Brown wrote in a viral tweet later. 

So, rather than buying Greenland, he wondered whether he could work with the government to create a new city, purposefully built on uninhabitable land. “What if we can sort of build a prototype of Terminus?” he said, referencing Elon Musk’s preferred name for a city on Mars.

Brown wants the potential Greenland city to be a bastion of technological experimentation, specifically drawing on the community of young male hardtech founders that have gathered in El Segundo. Imagine, he said, a city that can create rain on demand using Rainmaker technology, a cloud-seeding startup, or a community powered by nuclear technology from Valar Atomics. 

Brown’s main takeaway was that many residents would like Greenland to be free from Denmark, but the government feels bound by the roughly $500 million that Denmark gives to the country every year. 
“If we could replace the $500M with another revenue source — taxes from a new city, mining, and tourism post-terraforming — we could derisk accession, and get Greenlanders get their long-sought independence — and with it vast wealth,” Brown tweeted. 

A member of the Danish parliament was not amused. “Greenlandic independence requires approval by the Danish parliament and a change of our constitution,” politician Rasmus Jarlov tweeted. “I can guarantee you that there is no way we would approve independence so that you could buy Greenland.” 

For the last five years, Brown, along with co-founder Charlie Callinan, has been at the helm of Praxis, a network state startup with the explicit goal of creating a city. He emphasized Praxis as an internet-first ideology — one that has courted controversy, like when a Praxis member guide reportedly said that “traditional, European/Western beauty standards on which the civilized world, at its best points, has always found success.”

Despite the controversy, the Peter Thiel-backed project recently raised $525 million, with a major asterisk: The startup has the ability to draw down the money as it hits specific milestones in its city-building project. 

The group hosted 250 Praxis-supporters in Punta Cana, Dominican Republic, earlier this month, where attendees like Bedrock’s Geoff Lewis and Mamuka Bakhtadze, former prime minister of Georgia, were presented with different location options for Praxis. 

Praxis is one of the prominent examples of a “network state,” a term defined by former a16z investor Balaji Srinivasan, as an internet community that acquires a physical home and “gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states,” he wrote. Marc Andreessen has praised the concept, and Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin created his own network state experiment.”

https://wsvn.com/news/politics/trump-speaks-at-saudi-investment-conference-in-miami-beach-after-golfing-at-doral-resort-visit-leads-to-traffic-delays/

“Trump speaks at Saudi investment conference in Miami Beach after golfing at Doral resort; visit leads to traffic delays”
Can we get reimbursed for his personal sh/t, please.

“any and all, living or dead, even if they only voted for him once, 2016, 2020, 2024”

…honestly willing to forgive 2016

if you voted for him in 2024 with everything known you are a major-league asshole

Lots of Tories fled to Newfoundland after the Revolution, like a bunch of confederate fled to Brazil after the “Late Unpleasantness” in 1865. .

abandoning an ally is one thing, stabbing them in the back and lying is not something i want to be associated with as an American, which is why i resent trump voters for making me so, whether i like it or not

George Conway
‪@gtconway.bsky.social‬
With all due respect, Congressman, he’s not trying to distract from anything here.

He’s a grandiose pathological narcissist. A narcissistic sociopath. A malignant narcissist. A psychopath. A megalomaniac.

This is what he thinks of himself. And what he wants others to think of him.
https://cdn.bsky.app/img/avatar_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:w5b63ubrl3kpz2aeqf5uyhoz/bafkreiefqnwn3gvx533rysbp5rw4p4q3ksvakzictgnyzpod2xvtoorlry@jpeg
‪Daniel Goldman‬ ‪@danielsgoldman.dg4ny.co‬
·
4h
Dear media:

Please do not waste time hyperventilating about this dumb comment.

It’s intended to be a distraction from all of the damaging actions he’s taking.

Focus on those.

I’m not cutting Medicaid. YOU’RE cutting Medicaid!

Better things.