2:00PM Water Cooler 2/21/2025 | naked capitalism

By Lambert Strether.

Bird Song of the Day

Allisa Linfield, University Ridge – The University of Wisconsin Golf Course, Dane, Wisconsin, United States.

In Case You Might Miss…

1. Who were the strategists who put DOGE together?
2. Should somebody check in on Elon?
3. Meta’s original accumulation of training sets

Politics

“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles

DOGE

“How DOGE cracked Washington: A focus on arcane agencies gave Musk and his allies swift control of government nerve centers” [CNN]. This is good reporting, worth reading in full. “CNN interviews with multiple government officials, plus a review of hundreds of court documents, employment agreements, agency directories and executive branch memos shed new light on the behind-the-scenes preparation and strategy behind DOGE, choreographed, structured, and executed to take swift control of Washington nerve centers…. That plan has undeniably – and intentionally – minimized transparency while also maximizing the free rein Musk’s allies have wielded across the federal bureaucracy…. Despite their relative lack of government experience, political appointees with deep ties to Musk, his companies or other major tech firms now sit in key leadership positions across agencies that comprise the federal government’s personnel, technology, property and acquisition operations. The organization that works day-to-day at DOGE’s official home hasn’t been publicly laid out by the White House. But according to multiple sources familiar with the organization, the operation is lean by design, with its central office populated primarily by lawyers and younger staff members…. A cadre of young technology engineers have fanned out across multiple agencies over the past month, appearing in organizational directories with different agency-specific email addresses. Some of those engineers, according to disclosures made public in court filings the last several weeks, are detailed to operate in multiple agencies simultaneously…. Their work has been accelerated by political appointees who took control of agencies including the General Services Administration and Office of Personnel Management on Inauguration Day. OPM in particular has served as a cornerstone of a carefully calibrated interplay between Trump’s expansive executive orders and DOGE’s role in carrying out – or in many cases, enforcing – their intent.” Critically: “Musk’s official position as a special government employee operating within the White House and not tied explicitly to DOGE, appears intentional in its design. A special government employee is allowed to maintain their private sector employment – which in Musk’s case include a collection of space, electric vehicle, AI and social media companies worth billions of dollars. While DOGE may be ‘overseen’ by Musk, as [press secretary] Leavitt says, the official DOGE apparatus is outwardly leaderless and under the umbrella of the White House. The effect is an operation difficult to penetrate through public records requests, difficult to pin down for lawmakers pledging oversight, and more complicated to challenge via the legal process.” • Again, worth reading in full. And I do wonder who the Republican strategists were who crafted the parasitoid entity that inserted its ovipositor into OPM’s head. (Trump does have the ability to pick highly competent people and leave them alone, as for example his excellent Texas-based national polling operation in 2016, only reported after the election; so it looks like that happened here). This is not the Project 2025 blueprint (contrast Project 2025’s views on USAID with what DOGE actually did). I don’t think Susie Wiles has the resumé. I don’t think the Peter Thiel axis has the knowledge base, though of course Thiel (or Musk) can buy whoever he wants. So, who?

“DOGE’s Millions: As Musk and Trump Gut Government, Their Ax-Cutting Agency Gets Cash Infusion” [ProPublica]. “Most of DOGE’s money, records show, has come in the form of payments from other federal agencies made possible by a nearly century-old law called the Economy Act. To steer those funds to the new department, the Trump administration has treated DOGE as if it were a federal agency. And by dispatching members of its staff to other agencies and having those staffers issue edicts about policy and personnel, DOGE has also behaved as if it has agency-level authority. The use of the Economy Act would seem to subject DOGE to the same open-records laws that cover most federal agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency or the State Department. However, DOGE has refused to respond to Freedom of Information Act requests, saying it operates with executive privileges. Musk has also flip-flopped about whether DOGE’s staff members are paid. Initially he said they were not, but earlier this week he said some of them were. The conflicting stances put the Trump administration in a bind, legal experts say. If DOGE is a federal agency, it can’t shield its records from the public. If it’s not an agency, then DOGE’s tens of millions of dollars in funding weren’t legally allocated and should be returned, some contend. ‘The administration can’t have it both ways,’ said Adam Grogg, a former deputy general counsel at OMB and now the legal director at Governing for Impact, a left-of-center think tank. ‘Either it’s an agency covered by FOIA with the authority to do what it’s doing, or it’s purely advising the president and can’t be directing agencies in the way it now is.’” • Again, who was the strategist who worked this out? I mean, decapitating the Federal Government is an enormous techical achievement, so who’s the technician?

“Pentagon seeks to shift $50B in planned funding to new priorities in FY26” [Breaking Defense]. “Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth has ordered a review of the department’s fiscal 2026 budget plans in order to shift funds from legacy programs towards President Donald Trump’s priorities, including border security and the Iron Dome for America. The goal: Find roughly $50 billion, or 8 percent of the FY26 plan, and reprioritize it.” I had tbought 8% was to be cut (CBS). Oh well. More: “This effort would seem to be a parallel but different one from the cuts expected to be pushed by the Elon Musk-led DOGE office, which arrived this week at the Pentagon. Those in defense circles are bracing for a wave of personnel cuts, perhaps as soon as this week, as probationary employees in the civilian workforce have been early targets of DOGE during their other stops. How the idea of cuts lines up with proposals in Congress to increase the department’s budget by either $100 billion or $150 billion through the reconciliation process is unclear, nor is it clear how members of Congress will react to having programs — potentially major ones — in their districts impacted. It’s also uncertain when the FY26 budget might actually be delivered to Congress.” • No, totally not clear…

“DOGE Staffer Behind Racist Posts Reinstated at Social Security” [Bloomberg]. “The staffer with billionaire Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency who resigned after a report that linked him to racism and eugenics has been reinstated at the Social Security Administration, according to people familiar with the move. Marko Elez, who reportedly advocated for a ‘eugenic immigration policy’ and argued against mixed-race relationships in posts on X, received support from Musk, President Donald Trump and Vice President JD Vance after his departure earlier this month.” Because who doesn’t support eugenics, especially for the very rich?

Is Elon OK (1):

Is Elon OK (2):

Is Elon OK (3):

I asked @grok to analyze the last 1,000 posts from Elon Musk for truth and veracity. More than half of what Elon posts on X is false or misleading, while most of the “true” posts are simply updates about his companies. pic.twitter.com/WSe9Nj3XC1

— Isaac Saul (@Ike_Saul) February 20, 2025

Is Elon OK (4):

See the moment President Trump’s billionaire adviser on government spending, Elon Musk, was given a “chainsaw of bureaucracy” by Argentina’s President Javier Milei at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in the US. pic.twitter.com/N4AeGy3VaV

— Al Jazeera English (@AJEnglish) February 21, 2025

Yeah, but what’s with the sunglasses?

Then again:

Then again:

Democratic Rep. Robert Garcia has published a letter sent to him by Trump’s Department of Justice threatening to potentially prosecute him for criticizing Elon Musk. pic.twitter.com/fCVYBPcj6m

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) February 20, 2025

Democrats en déshabillé

“Democrats May Risk Their Own Tea Party Moment” [Split Ticket]. “The scenario I am speculating on here is one where a whole ton of established lawmakers, such as 80-year-old Dick Durbin, are forced to the exits and are replaced by younger, more outwardly-idealistic “fighters”, whether by means of retirement or primary challenges. You may call it a revolution on an age-based axis, or on a ‘combativeness’ axis, rather than one waged on the traditional, ideological ‘leftist vs centrist’ front.” Yes, because the left has been run out of the party. More: “The data suggests that an insurgency is quite possible…. To us, this is wholly unsurprising. For years, Democratic politicians have sold the public on Trump being a unique threat to democracy. Now that he’s in power, does it make sense to suddenly sit back, let him dominate the news, and “wait for him to screw up”? Regardless of the merits of the statement or the strategy, the new message is clearly at odds with what the party has done for a long time, especially as voting Democrats fear the potential long-term consequences of an unbridled Trump administration.” And: The Democrat leadership argues that “Trump isn’t behaving in a manner consistent with the smallest popular vote victory since 2000…. and this will likely lead to broad overreach and chaos that swing voters will quickly sour on. There are signs this approach is working — as Trump and Musk continue to make news, the President’s approval is rapidly decreasing and is now almost back to neutral, as per FiveThirtyEight’s tracker, which is down from the +8 he began his term with. And as a public opinion and polling nerd, I think this approach actually has the potential to create larger and more lasting gains, so I’m more understanding of it. What I also think is true, however, is that most Democratic voters are not okay with this approach. And right now, there are simply too many people that hate both Donald Trump and the Democratic Party for this equilibrium to remain.” • I think it’s pretty simple: The Republicans are directly assaulting the economic capital of the Democrat base, the PMC, by taking their jobs away. This is true whether the assault be on NGOs (foreign and domestic), DEI administrators, or government workers, including scientists (with more assaults on teachers to come). In addition, the PMC face the ascendancy, indeed the formidable combination, of two demon figures: Putin and Trump. We also have AI looming in the background, threatening to eat all the jobs, but especially those that involve the creation of documents (i.e., the work of trained, credentialled professionals). So PMC fear is existential, and they are demanding that their party protect them now, while they still have their jobs, instead of later, when the midterms roll around. For example–

“‘Cowardliness at the top’: Science agency staff revolt over cuts” [Politico]. “The National Science Foundation went beyond the staff cuts demanded by the Trump administration in a move that set off a frenzied backlash at the science funding agency. NSF fired about 10 percent of its staff at the end of Tuesday, removing 168 people who included most of the agency’s probationary employees and all of its experts, a class of contract workers who are specialists in niche scientific fields. The agency didn’t have to fire its experts but decided to in the interest of fairness, a top NSF official told staffers in an emotionally charged hybrid meeting Tuesday morning at its Alexandria, Virginia, headquarters. Fired NSF staffers were instructed to stop working by 1 p.m. Tuesday, at which point they would be locked out of the agency’s computer network. They had until the end of the day to clean out their desks. To avoid having the stain of a firing on their resumes, staffers were told they could resign. But then they would not be eligible for unemployment payments.” Ouch! More: “The announcement prompted outrage, confusion and concern from people at the meeting, resulting in a string of scathing all-staff emails from impacted workers. ‘You are presenting us as trophies in front of OPM,’ one angry employee said in the meeting, referring to the Office of Personnel Management, according to the transcript. ‘I don’t want to hear anything about how you are sad, how you feel bad for everyone who’s losing their job today.’ ‘You screwed people, hardworking people, who trusted the word of this agency, left their careers, wherever they came from,’ they added. ‘That’s on all of you. Take some accountability.’ An NSF official apologized to the fired workers, noting that they were ‘following orders’ from the Trump administration.” • “Only following orders” is a rather unfortunate locution!

“One Simple Question for Democrats” [Ruy Teixeira, The Liberal Patriot]. The deck: “What would the working class say?” And: “It needn’t be. There’s one simple question—a sort of test—that would illuminate the path forward for Democrats. What would the working class say (WWWCS)?” • The Democrats would rather die as a party than do this. NOTE Well… The counter-argument is that Democrats have a leader-shaped hole in their heads. A candidate (?) they accepted as a leader — changing direction all at once, like a school of fish, as they did with Kamala when given permission — could ask that. But nobody else, and probably nobody on the way up. Anyhow, highly theoretical, since I see nobody in the offing.

Republican Funhouse

“DOGE bites Republicans” [Politico]. “A number of Congressional Republicans are starting to flee the blowback of his Department of Government Efficiency’s slash-and-burn approach to federal budget cuts, driven by growing evidence of a groundswell of concern among groups of ordinary voters. And if you think this is only a dynamic in moderate swing seats, consider this morning’s newsletter a wake-up call.” And:

In an R+18 district: Speaking at a business luncheon yesterday in Westerville, Ohio, GOP Rep. Troy Balderson “described President Donald Trump’s flurry of executive orders as ‘getting out of control’ …. [and] expressed some pushback to the idea of sole decision-making power lying with Trump and billionaire advisor Elon Musk,” the Columbus Dispatch’s Samantha Hendrickson reports. “‘Congress has to decide whether or not the Department of Education goes away,’ Balderson asserted. ‘Not the president, not Elon Musk.’”

In deep-red Georgia: Last night in Roswell, Georgia, an overflow crowd packed into a town hall forum for GOP Rep. Rich McCormick, barraging him with pointed questions and accusatory comments about DOGE’s cuts. His staff “seemed caught off guard by the massive crowd of hundreds that gathered,” reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s Greg Bluestein. (This is a district Trump carried by 22 points just three months ago.)

“The private GOP panic over the slash-and-burn DOGE firings” [Politico]. “GOP lawmakers unleashed a frantic flurry of calls and texts after federal agencies undertook the latest firings this past weekend, with Republicans particularly worried about cuts affecting public safety and health roles. Trump’s legislative affairs team, headed by former JD Vance aide James Braid, took the brunt of the frenetic fallout, according to four Republicans granted anonymity to discuss the conversations. For the most part, Republican members are publicly cheering the administration’s push to slash the federal government, which is being led by billionaire tech mogul Elon Musk with Trump’s blessing. But privately, many are feeling helpless to counter the meat-ax approach that has been embraced so far, with lawmakers especially concerned about the dismissal of military veterans working in federal agencies as well as USDA employees handling the growing bird flu outbreak affecting poultry and dairy farms. ‘I thought we were supposed to be in a new era of meritocracy. Not the indiscriminate firing of people,’ said one Republican congressional aide granted anonymity to speak candidly.”

Syndemics

“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison

Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).

Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!

Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).

Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).

Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).

Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).

Stay safe out there!

Immune Dysregulation

“Immunological and Antigenic Signatures Associated with Chronic Illnesses after COVID-19 Vaccination” (preprint) [medRxiv]. Corresponding author kiko Iwasaki is sound, IMNHO. “COVID-19 vaccines have prevented millions of COVID-19 deaths. Yet, a small fraction of the population reports a chronic debilitating condition after COVID-19 vaccination, often referred to as post-vaccination syndrome (PVS). To explore potential pathobiological features associated with PVS, we conducted a decentralized, cross-sectional study involving 42 PVS participants and 22 healthy controls enrolled in the Yale LISTEN study. Compared with controls, PVS participants exhibited differences in immune profiles, including reduced circulating memory and effector CD4 T cells (type 1 and type 2) and an increase in TNFα+ CD8 T cells. PVS participants also had lower anti-spike antibody titers, primarily due to fewer vaccine doses. Serological evidence of recent Epstein-Barr virus (EBV) reactivation was observed more frequently in PVS participants. Further, individuals with PVS exhibited elevated levels of circulating spike protein compared to healthy controls. These findings reveal potential immune differences in individuals with PVS that merit further investigation to better understand this condition and inform future research into diagnostic and therapeutic approaches.” And from the body: “The molecular mechanisms of PVS remain largely unknown. However, there is considerable overlap in self-reported symptoms between long COVID and PVS, as well as shared exposure to SARS-CoV-2 spike (S) protein in the context of inflammatory responses during infection or vaccination. In susceptible individuals, vaccines may contribute to long-term symptoms by multiple mechanisms. For example, vaccine components, such as mRNA, lipid nanoparticles, and adenoviral vectors, trigger activation of pattern recognition receptors. Thus, unregulated stimulation of innate immunity could lead to chronic inflammation.”

TABLE 1: Daily Covid Charts

LEGEND

1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.

2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”

NOTES

[1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs.

[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.

[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.

[4] (ED) A little uptick.

[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd.

[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.

[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.

[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.

[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.

[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.

[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.

[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.

Stats Watch

There are no official statistics of interest today.

Manufacturing: “Tesla recalls 376,000 vehicles in US over power steering, shares drop” [Reuters]. “The recall follows a more than year-long probe by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration after some Tesla owners reported steering failures. Some were unable to turn the wheel while others cited increased effort. More than 50 vehicles were allegedly towed due to the issue, NHTSA said last year. Reuters reported in late 2023 that tens of thousands of owners had experienced premature failures of suspension or steering parts since 2016, citing Tesla documents and interviews with customers and former employees. In a filing with NHTSA, Tesla said some 2023 Model 3 sedans and Model Y crossovers running older software could face an overvoltage breakdown, potentially overstressing motor drive components on the printed circuit board. Tesla said that if this overstress condition occurs while the vehicle is in motion, steering remains unaffected, and a visual alert is triggered. But once the vehicle stops, the steering assist may fail and remain disabled when it moves again. As of January 10, Tesla has identified 3,012 warranty claims and 570 field reports that may be related to the condition but said it had no reports of any crashes related to the condition. Tesla said the recall is not in response to NHTSA’s investigation of allegations of loss of steering control, which remains open.” • Oh no, of course not, because otherwise regulation might be a good thing.

Tech: “Meta claims torrenting pirated books isn’t illegal without proof of seeding” [Ars Technica]. “Seeding refers to sharing a torrented file after the download completes, and because there’s allegedly no proof of such ‘seeding,’ Meta insisted that authors cannot prove Meta shared the pirated books with anyone during the torrenting process. Whether or not Meta actually seeded the pirated books could make a difference in a copyright lawsuit from book authors including Richard Kadrey, Sarah Silverman, and Ta-Nehisi Coates. Authors had previously alleged that Meta unlawfully copied and distributed their works through AI outputs—an increasingly common complaint that so far has barely been litigated. But Meta’s admission to torrenting appears to add a more straightforward claim of unlawful distribution of copyrighted works through illegal torrenting, which has long been considered established case-law. Authors have alleged that “Meta deliberately engaged in one of the largest data piracy campaigns in history to acquire text data for its LLM training datasets, torrenting and sharing dozens of terabytes of pirated data that altogether contain many millions of copyrighted works.” • The Bearded One refers to this sort of theft as “original accumulation,” and IMNSHO it’s the basis of AI, given that no training sets = no AI. Here is a massive thread of internal technical communication at Meta:

Worth a read!

Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 41 Fear (previous close: 45 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 44 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 21 at 1:06:14 PM ET.

Gallery

“Rooms and Buildings Have a Life of Their Own in Eamon Monaghan’s Uncanny Dioramas” [This is Colossal]. “In the artist’s current solo exhibition, Under the Floorboards at Moskowitz Bayse, the sculptures jump off the wall, angles jutting this way and that. Beams intersect with appliances; floor boards bend; stairways emerge from nowhere and terminate in open space; and radiator steam infiltrates everything in its path. ‘Foggy Pipes’ (2025), cardboard, tin foil, aluminum wire, epoxy clay, and watercolor, 34 x 70 x 18 inches Monaghan draws on the work of 20th-century underground legends like cartoonist R. Crumb or clay animator Bruce Bickford.”

Like MC Escher. But cute.

News of the Wired

“Ancient switch to soft food gave us an overbite—and the ability to pronounce ‘f’s and ‘v’s” [Science]. “Don’t like the F-word? Blame farmers and soft food. When humans switched to processed foods after the spread of agriculture, they put less wear and tear on their teeth. That changed the growth of their jaws, giving adults the overbites normal in children. Within a few thousand years, those slight overbites made it easy for people in farming cultures to fire off sounds like “f” and “v,” opening a world of new words. The newly favored consonants, known as labiodentals, helped spur the diversification of languages in Europe and Asia at least 4000 years ago; they led to such changes as the replacement of the Proto-Indo-European patēr to Old English faeder about 1500 years ago, according to linguist and senior author Balthasar Bickel at the University of Zurich in Switzerland. The paper shows ‘that a cultural shift can change our biology in such a way that it affects our language,’ says evolutionary morphologist Noreen Von Cramon-Taubadel of the University at Buffalo, part of the State University of New York system, who was not part of the study.” • Fast! Whether Jackpot-fast is another question.

“Reality has a surprising amount of detail” [John Salvatier]. The author begins with the example of building a set of stairs. But: “If you’re a programmer, you might think that the fiddliness of programming is a special feature of programming, but really it’s that everything is fiddly, but you only notice the fiddliness when you’re new, and in programming you do new things more often.” • This is why my aesthetic stresses depth of field; to capture the detail. Reality is more a like a super-detailed model railroad than not.

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