We take for granted the various safety measures and health protections the collective intelligence of humans has come up with over the years, so we take an axe to those measures to “save money.”

At least, some of us do, and unfortunately the some of us who do are busy with those axes.

Over a thousand (1300) probationary workers at the Center for Disease Control are being let go by the Trump administration, representing about 45% of all probationary workers at the CDC.

Being fired. I dislike that “being let go” euphemism, especially in cases like this where the firings are wholly arbitrary and reckless. There’s no room for euphemisms here.

Among those laid off include all 50 first-year officers of the CDC’s Epidemic Intelligence Service, and perhaps some second-year officers. The EIS, established in 1951, recruits some of the brightest public health leaders into a two-year program to train healthcare professionals to identify and respond to disease outbreaks.

And that’s a good thing. We need healthcare professionals who can identify and respond to disease outbreaks. Does Idiot Musk really want more disease outbreaks? Probably not; probably he’s just too reckless and power-drunk to pay attention to the details.

EIS officers have historically identified and controlled important health threats like COVID-19 and Zika. Their expertise allows for rapid response to emerging infectious diseases, which ultimately prevents widespread transmission. Firing frontline workers will have devastating consequences for public and global health, and will hinder the CDC’s ability to respond to outbreaks in a timely fashion.

In other words EIS officers make things not happen, and because the things don’t happen, we don’t realize the EIS officers stopped them, so we feel very clever when we fire them all to save $$$.

This comes at a time where there is no shortage of public health threats. Currently, the flu is surging in America, with up to 23 million hospital visits for the flu and at least 370,000 hospitalizations, according to the CDC. In addition, the bird flu is spreading uncontrollably in animals and has killed one man in Louisiana. An Ebola outbreak has also been reported in Africa. America and the world are in desperate need of qualified public health practitioners who can manage all of these public health threats.

Naaaah. Just drink an extra glass of orange juice and you’ll be fine.

Maybe the CDC isn’t the right branch of government to slash? Maybe disease control is not actually a bad thing?

The Trump administration slashed hundreds of employees at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — including dozens of workers crucial to public health safety — as the country grapples with a potential “quad-demic,” according to reports.

As part of an effort led by the Department of Government Efficiency, which billionaire Elon Musk heads, thousands of probationary workers within the Department of Health and Human Services were told they were being terminated over the weekend, including 1,300 at the CDC.

According to NBC News, those departures included around two dozen workers at the Laboratory Leadership Service, a two-year fellowship program that trains scientists to address public health threats.

So Musk and Trump want disease to spread unchecked?

Other axed workers include half of the Epidemic Intelligence Service program, CBS News reported. EIS is another two-year fellowship program that trains health care professionals to become “disease detectives,” investigating public health threats, identifying their cause, and implementing control measures.

Trump and Musk want to stop investigating public health threats, identifying their cause, and implementing control measures? They want public health threats to go unnoticed, unidentified, uncontrolled?

As of Friday, the Trump administration planned to gut the CDC by 10 percent, slashing 1,300 probationary employees, the Associated Press reported. The Department of Health and Human Services is expected to see more than 5,200 cuts to its 80,000-person workforce, the outlet reported.

Also: don’t you dare get vaccinated, and don’t even think about wearing a mask. Peasants.

Sometimes the bafflegab is so extensive that the reader literally cannot tell what the reporter is saying.

Scots councillor claims he faces disciplinary hearing for calling non-binary child a boy

Well which kind of “non-binary child”?

Astoundingly, the Scottish Express doesn’t say. The result is a dense fog where a news item should be.

A Scots councillor claims he is facing potential disciplinary action for allegedly calling a non-binary child a “boy.” Controversial independent representative Alastair Redman will be hauled in front of Standards Commission chiefs next week to face accusations that he has breached the code of conduct.

The Argyll and Bute councillor was embroiled in a row in 2023 about parents complaining to a secondary school about a non-binary child allegedly gaining access to the girls’ changing rooms. The school investigated and concluded that this didn’t happen, and police probed a second allegation that the kid had placed a recording device in the same facilities.

That seems to imply that the “non-binary child” is a boy, but news stories shouldn’t be implying crucial facts about what they’re reporting on, they should report them. It’s so stupid, as well as so amateurish and hostile to the reader and generally not what they’re supposed to be doing.

And then there’s also the total submission to woo. There’s no such thing as a “non-binary child” ffs.

Maybe don’t take any plane trips for the next four years or so.

The Trump administration has begun firing several hundred Federal Aviation Administration employees, upending staff on a busy air travel weekend and just weeks after a January fatal midair collision at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport.

Probationary workers were targeted in late-night emails Friday notifying them they had been fired, David Spero, president of the Professional Aviation Safety Specialists union, said in a statement.

The impacted [fired] workers include personnel hired for FAA radar, landing and navigational aid maintenance, one air traffic controller told The Associated Press. The air traffic controller was not authorized to talk to the media and spoke on condition of anonymity.

A Transportation Department official told the AP late Monday that no air traffic controllers were affected by the cuts, and that the agency has “retained employees who perform critical safety functions.” In a follow-up query the agency said they would have to look into whether the radar, landing and navigational aid workers affected were considered to handle critical safety functions.

Oh we’ll look into that for you, would you like some tea or coffee?

Other FAA employees who were fired were working on an urgent and classified early warning radar system the Air Force had announced in 2023 for Hawaii to detect incoming cruise missiles, through a program that was in part funded by the Defense Department. It’s one of several programs that the FAA’s National Defense Program manages that involve radars providing longer-range detection around the country’s borders.

Due to the nature of their work, staff in that office typically provide an extensive knowledge transfer before retiring to make sure no institutional knowledge is lost, said Charles Spitzer-Stadtlander, one of the employees in that branch who was terminated.

The Hawaii radar and the FAA National Defense Program office working on it are “about protecting national security,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “I don’t think they even knew what NDP does, they just thought, oh no big deal, he just works for the FAA.”

“This is about protecting national security, and I’m scared to death,” Spitzer-Stadtlander said. “And the American public should be scared too.”

Musk is just sending his underlings in to fire as many people as possible, without any attention to what the people do and why and what kind of hell will result from firing them all.

The employees were fired “without cause nor based on performance or conduct,” Spero said, and the emails were “from an ‘exec order’ Microsoft email address” — not a government email address. A copy of the termination email that was provided to the AP shows the sending address “ASK_AHR_EXEC_Orders@usfaa.mail.outlook.com.”

The firings hit the FAA as it is facing a shortfall in controllers. Federal officials have been raising concerns about an overtaxed and understaffed air traffic control system for years, especially after a series of close calls between planes at U.S. airports. Among the reasons they have cited for staffing shortages are uncompetitive pay, long shifts, intensive training and mandatory retirements.

See, you don’t want that. You don’t want to get rid of the people who keep planes from crashing into each other. They serve a purpose.

Man who pretends to be a woman and abuses any woman who points out he is a man tells JK Rowling to stop doing something she isn’t doing.

The three pleases are a nice touch though. One would have been cold, two would have been pushy, but three are just right.

Guy whines about not enough attention being paid to him our trans family especially the male part.

His name under the story is Jenny Maguire. He’s a man.

We must examine why a group that represents less than 1pc of the population now takes up such a large slice of the political and media landscape – and more importantly, what is being ignored as a result.

Well one major reason the group takes up so much space is the fact that it takes it up. It demands it, it grabs it, it camps out in it. The trans movement loves attention and can never ever get enough of it. If it had wanted to take up little space it would have gone about things very differently.

Mr Maguire goes on to explain that politicians should “protect women” rather than “bash” the sainted trans communniny. By calling them “terfs” perhaps?

Bottom row, left side – that’s our hero protecting women.

Seeking a way through:

Employers have handled disputes involving transgender issues “really badly”, the general secretary of the UK’s largest trade union has said.

Unison’s Christina McAnea said unions have a responsibility “to try and make sure that we find a way through this” and she would be happy to work with organisations on the issue. Speaking exclusively to The Scotsman, she referenced the need to ensure trans people are not discriminated against while also ensuring women with concerns are “listened to and heard”.

But what does “the need to ensure trans people are not discriminated against” mean? What does “discrimination against trans people” consist of?

That’s the problem. It doesn’t mean what it means in the case of subordinated groups such as women or workers or people of color or LGB. They’re not confined to ghettos or systematically paid less or confined to menial jobs. It generally appears to mean they should be instantly and unconditionally believed when they say they are the opposite sex. But there are many compelling reasons that is not a right. It’s not invidious discrimination to need to know which people are male; that’s especially true in the case of women.

It comes amid an ongoing employment tribunal involving NHS Fife that centres on a trans doctor’s use of a female changing room.

Always the same sneaky refusal to state the facts. Upton is not a “trans doctor”; he’s a trans woman, aka a man. The tribunal centers on a male doctor’s use of a female changing room. The relevant adjective is not “trans” but “male.”

Unison’s women’s conference, which was held in Edinburgh from Thursday until Saturday, backed a motion stating “trans women are women and trans men are men” and supporting the controversial policy of self identification.

Which is both an insult and a threat to women.

The Scotsman asked Ms McAnea whether a woman should have a right to a single-sex space, such as a changing room, which excludes trans women or those born male.

She said: “I think it’s hard to come down hard and fast on some of this.

Well think again, then. Of course it’s not hard. Men should not invade women’s spaces. End of story.

“I just cannot believe it’s not within the grasp of managers in a big organisation to find a way through this that both satisfies the need to ensure that trans women aren’t discriminated against, and ensures that the voices of women who have got concerns about some of these things are listened to and heard.”

Well that depends on how you define “discriminated against.” If men who claim to be trans women would stop invading women’s spaces then yes, there could be a way through, but there is no sign that that’s happening, and union bosses like this one are zero help.

Ms McAnea said the women’s conference had carried the motion “because they take the view that giving trans women rights doesn’t take away rights from women”. She said: “That’s not to say it’s not legitimate to have a discussion when women raise issues about safety and single-sex spaces.

In other words she’s just spouting easy platitudes that contradict each other. The view that giving trans women rights doesn’t take away rights from women is flatly contradicted by those issues about safety and single-sex spaces – and there are also the issues about sports and prizes and hiring and promotion and all the rest of it. “Giving trans women rights” in the sense of ordering everyone to agree that they’re actual women obviously takes away myriad rights from women. That’s why we object to it!

“But there’s all these definitions about what does that mean that I think need to be discussed. And what is the actual problem we’re trying to address?”

Hello? We’ve been doing that. For years. We get called names for doing that. Pay attention.

Tom Nichols points out that we’re all the prisoners of Musk’s resentment and egomania.

One of the greatest tricks that Donald Trump and Elon Musk ever pulled is to convince millions of people that DOGE, the self-styled Department of Government Efficiency, is about government efficiency.

DOGE isn’t really a department; it’s not an agency; it has no statutory authority; and it has little to do with saving money, streamlining the bureaucracy, or eliminating waste. It is a name that Trump is allowing a favored donor and ally to use in a reckless campaign against various targets in the federal government. The whole enterprise is an attack against civil servants and the very notion of apolitical expertise.

But it must be a department – it says so itself! The D in DOGE stands for “department.” What more do you want?

Populists are generally wary of experts, especially those who work for the government, but Musk is no man of the people: He is the richest human being in the world, and he runs major companies that rely both on government-provided expertise and significant government subsidies. As my colleague Anne Applebaum wrote, “Musk has made no attempt to professionally audit or even understand many of the programs being cut”—a willful indifference that gives away the game.

Well he’s that kind of man of the people – the kind who doesn’t care how ignorant he is, because he’s a man of the people. You may say that’s circular but I say it’s just good common sense.

Musk’s assault on expertise is coming from the same wellspring that has been driving much of the public’s irrational hostility toward experts for years. I have been studying “the death of expertise” for more than a decade, and I have written extensively about the phenomenon in which uninformed laypeople come to believe that they are smarter and more capable in almost any subject than experts. The death of expertise is really about the rise of two social ills: narcissism and resentment.

Hey you know what else fits that description? Trans “activism.” Makes ya think.

Eventually, such attacks run out of steam when the costs begin to accumulate. No matter how many times Stalin told his scientists to plant wheat in the snow so that it could evolve to grow in the winter, the wheat (which had no political allegiances) died. Today, vaccine refusal might seem like a brave stand against white-jacketed overlords—until your children are stricken with measles or whooping cough.

Modern societies, as Americans are soon to learn, cannot function without experts in every field, especially the many thousands who work in public service. The first step in containing the damage is to see Trump’s and Musk’s goals for DOGE clearly: It is a project rooted in resentful arrogance, and its true objective is not better government, but destruction.

And there’s not a damn thing we can do to stop it.

One to watch:

Trump’s administration has asked the supreme court to approve the firing of the head of a federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers in the first appeal of Trump’s new term and a key test of his battle with the judicial branch.

It’s pretty tricky – aka impossible – to have a federal agency dedicated to protecting whistleblowers if the Big Boss is free to meddle with said agency. Trump wants to get rid of anyone who did or does or could blow a whistle on him, and that’s unfortunate, because he’s breaking rules and laws and constitutional norms all over the shop. Trump is the last person on the planet who should be able to fire all the whistleblowers.

Hampton Dellinger, the head of the office of the special counsel (OSC), is among the fired government watchdogs who have sued the Trump administration, arguing that their dismissals were illegal and that they should be reinstated.

That’s one reason right there. They think they can fire anyone they want to. That would be a dictatorship, not a presidency.

The OSC is an independent federal agency that serves as “a secure channel for federal employees to blow the whistle by disclosing wrongdoing”.

It is also intended to enforce the Hatch Act, a 1939 law designed to ensure that government programs are carried out in a nonpartisan way, and to enforce a merit system by investigating and prosecuting racial discrimination, partisan political discrimination, nepotism and coerced political activity. [I guess sex discrimination is allowed?]

Dellinger has said his office’s work was “needed now more than ever”, noting the “unprecedented” number of firings, in many cases without any specified cause, of federal employees with civil service protections in recent weeks by the Trump administration.

On Wednesday, the federal judge Amy Berman Jackson reinstated Dellinger to his position pending a 26 February court hearing, writing that the language of the 1978 law that created Dellinger’s position “expresses Congress’s clear intent to ensure the independence of the special counsel and insulate his work from being buffeted by the winds of political change”.

How about the tornados of political change?

According to that law, the special counsel “may be removed by the president only for inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office”.

As the Trump administration implements sweeping firings throughout the federal government, Dellinger has argued that his dismissal, via a one-sentence email that did not specify the cause, was unlawful.

Also damn rude.

Wait who’s the joke?

That’s so dumb it’s hard to believe. Maya doesn’t say “he’s tall therefore not a woman.” Her point is that a lot of newspapers apparently took great care to hide the fact that Upton towers over Peggie, presumably because that fact hints at the malicious absurdity of Upton’s claim that Peggie bullied and harassed him.

Magic Gender Ideology is so stuffed with lies and manipulations like this it’s a wonder anyone takes it seriously.

snerk

Oh wait, now the NHS is threatening Sandie Peggie with even more punishment for knowing that a man is a man. You’d think they could at least do them one at a time.

A nurse who challenged a trans doctor for using women’s changing rooms is being threatened with the sack by the NHS after “misgendering” her colleague, The Telegraph can reveal.

Sandie Peggie, who brought a landmark employment tribunal against NHS Fife and Dr Beth Upton, is understood to have been told to attend a conduct hearing on Friday which her employer has warned could lead to her dismissal.

They want to fire an experienced nurse because she knows that a man is a man. Wouldn’t you think knowing which sex people are would be pretty crucial in medical work? Wouldn’t you think the bosses would want the nurses to know which is which, as opposed to punishing them for knowing that very basic medical fact?

Experts told The Telegraph that the move from NHS Fife to push ahead with possible dismissal was “extraordinary” given that Jane Russell, the lawyer representing the health board and Dr Upton, had publicly accused the nurse of harassment and bullying towards Dr Upton in tribunal proceedings.

It is claimed that this pre-judged the outcome of the health board’s own investigation process, and would hand Ms Peggie strong legal grounds to challenge the outcome and any sanction.

A senior MSP said it was “beyond belief” that a nurse with three decades of experience was facing the sack for speaking out in defence of single-sex spaces.

It’s beyond belief, it’s evil, and it’s laced with sadism.

Margaret Gribbon, Ms Peggie’s solicitor, said that new legal proceedings had now been launched against NHS Fife as a result of their actions.

Git him.

“I can confirm that the handling of the investigation and the decision to proceed to a disciplinary hearing with the allegations will now be the subject of separate legal proceedings in the employment tribunal against Fife Health Board,” Ms Gribbon said.

Doesn’t make you want to move to Fife, does it.

The nurse has been told she could receive a final written warning, alternatives to dismissal or be fired.

Murdo Fraser, Scottish Tory MSP, said SNP ministers now had serious questions to answer about how the case had been handled. It emerged on Sunday that Neil Gray, the SNP health secretary, was warned in 2024 that NHS Fife was failing to meet its legal obligations to provide single-sex facilities but apparently failed to act.

“It is beyond belief that this dedicated nurse who has given 30 years of service to the NHS is now potentially facing the sack,” Mr Fraser said. “This sorry saga exposes the stark reality of the Sturgeon-era extremist trans agenda where those who speak out in defence of women and girls’ rights to access single-sex facilities are the ones who are wrongly punished.

“Sandie Peggie has been failed by NHS Fife as well as SNP ministers who have turned a blind eye to this issue and serious questions must be answered about the handling of this case.”

Swiftly, please.

Originally a comment by Your Name’s not Bruce? on As the US hurtles toward autocracy.

The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

The democratic world must therefore regard and treat [America] as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

Why do I get the strange feeling that Canada is about to be cast in the role of “Poland” in this reboot?

So here I am, vacillating between hopeless despair and wondering if I should start making Molotov cocktails.

It makes me think of the hundreds of thousands of Canadians who fought in the two World Wars, in hopes that their children and grandchildren would never have to. They fought overseas so that we would not have to fight in the streets. How many of them would have guessed that our country would be end up being next door to an emerging dictatorship, hungrily eyeing us and repeatedly threatening our annexation? We are oceans away from the peoples we helped to liberate; we can’t expect anything more from them than moral suppport, and I can’t blame them. The nation that threatens us is the most powerful on Earth.

As a matter of realpolitik, Canadian sovereignty, such as it is, has been at American sufferance since at least 1945. There is no way that we could meaningfully defend ourselves against a country with ten times the population, armed with nuclear weapons. Not that that was, as far as I know, ever a serious consideration. Apart from the Fenian Raids of the late 19th century, defence against a serious atteck from the US stopped being a real threat with the War of 1812.

Part of our role in the early years of the Cold War was to act as the buffer zone over which Soviet nuclear bombers flying sorties against the United States would shot down. With the advent of ICBMs, and the time during which any Soviet attack might be blunted being reduced from hours to minutes (not to mention American vulnerability to Soviet submarine-launched missiles that would bypass Canada altogether), our value as a buffer zone diminished. To the degree that mutually assured destruction worked, being under the American umbrella which, geographically, would have been impossible to avoid in any case, wasn’t something we had to “choose” or do much about. Whatever happened, Canada was along for the ride, with the US in the driver’s seat. We were the polite neighbour who didn’t usually make much of a fuss, whose recognition of Cuba and Communist China, while irksome, didn’t threaten the long term strategic balance between East and West.

As far as I know, we’ve never had to think of the consequences for Canada of the breakdown of American democracy because we probably never thought it was possible. But the ascendancy of Trump has shown just how fragile the American system is. Its rules and limits only work when they are respected and enforced, and right now there seems to be precious little respect or enforcement in evidence. These are no longer normal times in the US. They are no longer our friendly neighbour. Benign, indulgent neglect has been replaced with an unconcealed, rapacious covetousness, tempered only by noises that we are to be taken over economically rather than militarily, but I can’t help but think that the former will be followed by the latter.

Perhaps the sort-of false alarms of the Reagan and Bush II presidencies (which were each portrayed as incipiently fascistic) dulled the sensibilities of the Democratic Party, but the excess of caution that resulted in the failure to successfully prosecute Trump’s insurrection was a fatal mistake. Now we suffer the consequences along with those Americans who did not vote for Trump. What they can do at this point I’m not sure, but whatever it is, it has to be more and better than what they’re doing now.

Canada is no longer in a balcony seat; we are in the splash zone. We didn’t choose this seats, but we’re in it whether we like it or not. From our perspective, the best we can hope for is that Trump loses interest in us, or that the Trump administration comes apart through some combination of self-generated implosion (Trump vs. Musk?), actual enforcement of the Separation of Powers, and or popular resistance and non-compliance. With any luck, this will happen without violence or loss of life.Trump didn’t have the guts to actually go to the Capitol on January 6, 2021; maybe he will suffer a similar failure of nerve at some critical juncture of his current coup against the Constitution.

Good luck to us all.

Andrew Coyne at the Globe and Mail says the US is no longer one of the democracies.

Even now, as the United States hurtles toward autocracy – the petty grotesqueries perhaps tell the story better than anything else: a reporter barred from the White House for not using the name “Gulf of America,” President Donald Trump naming himself chair of the Kennedy Center by a “unanimous” vote of its board – the tendency is still to describe events in relatively conventional terms. For example, the “mistakes” that Mr. Trump is said to have made in his dealings with Vladimir Putin, of the United States as an “unreliable ally” under Mr. Trump, and so forth.

The tendency in journalism, that is. The rest of us are free to call a fascist a fascist.

But that is not the situation we are now in. The policies on Ukraine announced, or rather confirmed this week by Mr. Trump and his Defence Secretary, Pete Hegseth – peace talks without Ukraine; Ukraine locked out of NATO membership indefinitely; Russia keeps all territories gained since its illegal and unprovoked invasion, because, as Mr. Trump said, “they lost a lot of soldiers” taking them – are not, as described, irresponsible concessions to Russia.

They are not concessions at all. They are demands, aimed not at Russia but at Ukraine, and presented to it jointly by the United States of Russia and America. They are of a piece with the Trump administration’s very clear signalling that it will not be bound by Article 5 of the NATO treaty – that the United States will not, as promised, come to Europe’s defence should Russia broaden its attacks on it, but will, as Mr. Trump so memorably put it, let them do “whatever the hell they want.”

That is not merely an abrogation of its treaty commitments, or an abdication of America’s historic responsibilities, or even a declaration that the way is now open for other hostile powers to launch attacks on democratic states. The United States, under Mr. Trump, cannot be considered an idle bystander in the great twilight struggle between the democracies and the dictatorships, as it was in the 1930s. It is now on the side of the dictatorships.

I wish I could say that’s over the top, but I can’t.

It is not just that the democratic world can no longer count on America. It is that America, under Mr. Trump, is no longer necessarily part of the democratic world: neither fully democratic in its own affairs, nor committed to the welfare of other democracies, but hostile to both. If the international order is to be preserved, then, it will have to be preserved, in part, from the United States. Certainly it will have to be rebuilt without it.

…

That is not our choice. That is America’s, or at least the Trump administration’s. The democratic world must therefore regard and treat it as it does the other non-democracies: not as an ally to be consulted but as an adversary to be contained.

I wish I could disagree.

Even the Spectator does it.

So the Spectator bows down to censorship AND obscures information that is central to the story. Saying “transgender doctor” is MEANINGLESS. The core fact in this whole conflict, which has been keeping a tribunal busy for days, is that a male doctor bullied a female nurse who objected to his presence in the women’s changing room. The fact that the Spectator alters Joanna Cherry’s writing such that it draws a veil over that fact is an outrage.

It’s doubly insulting and infuriating, doing this. There’s the obvious infuriating insult of changing her wording to hide the crucial fact, but there’s the slightly less obvious infuriating insult of making her say something stupid that she did not in fact say.

Alarming.

In December, more than a month before Donald Trump took the presidential oath of office, The New York Times reported a blockbuster scoop: Elon Musk and his SpaceX company had repeatedly failed to meet federal reporting requirements designed to safeguard national security despite being deeply entangled with the military and intelligence bureaucracy. These included a failure to provide details to the government of Musk’s meetings with foreign leaders, the Times reported.

Those lapses had triggered a number of internal federal reviews, according to the Times. Perhaps most interestingly, the Defense Department’s inspector general had opened a probe of the matter sometime during 2024. The Air Force and the Pentagon Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security also launched reviews in November.

Now that Trump is president and controls the executive branch—including the Defense Department—it’s time to raise what appears to be a forgotten question: What exactly is going on with these government reviews into Musk? Have they continued? Or are they effectively dead?

When Trump fired over a dozen independent inspectors general last month, one of them was the Defense Department IG, Robert Storch. We don’t know whether the Musk probe was a reason for this firing, but it now seems awfully convenient for the SpaceX billionaire, who is known to be enraged about having to face regulations and oversight while enjoying immensely lucrative contracts with the federal government.

How convenient for Musk that Trump fired the Defense Department IG.

The stakes around this question are extremely high. As the Times reported, concerns about Musk and national security have intensified so much that even some employees at SpaceX share them. With SpaceX receiving billions of dollars in contracts with the Pentagon and NASA, Musk has access to classified information, including about U.S. military technology, according to the Times.

As such, Musk—who has top-secret security clearance at SpaceX—is supposed to be subject to continuous vetting by the government. That requires him to report certain details of his private life and travel abroad, enabling the government to gauge whether he’s fit to have access to that classified info.

Yet Musk has failed to meet these reporting requirements since at least 2021, the Times reported, noting that Musk and his team haven’t provided the government with “some details of his travel” and “some of his meetings with foreign leaders.” The paper reported that SpaceX employees who are supposed to ensure adherence to these rules have complained to the IG about Musk’s and SpaceX’s lax compliance.

“Lax compliance” is one way to describe it. Another would be “criminal refusal.”

Meanwhile, back in October, The Wall Street Journal reported that Musk has had numerous conversations with Russian President Vladimir Putin. This included ones in which Putin asked Musk to use his technology to do Russia geopolitical favors, such requesting that Musk “avoid activating his Starlink satellite internet service over Taiwan as a favor to Chinese leader Xi Jinping.”

So Musk is doing “favors” for Putin and Xi at the expense of Taiwan and Ukraine to name only two.

Musk doesn’t believe he should deign to submit to such scrutiny. When the news broke in December that he was the subject of these reviews, he raged that “deep state traitors are coming after me.” In short, when Musk talks about destroying the “deep state,” what he really means (among other things) is that he hopes to destroy any and all mechanisms of transparency and accountability that might restrain him. This, even as he enjoys billions in federal contracts and has been empowered by Trump to reshape the U.S. state to an extraordinarily radical degree, despite not being elected or appointed to a real government position.

All of this is happening in plain sight but it seems nobody can stop it.

Occupy Democrats wrote on Facebook:

BREAKING: Donald Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center implodes in humiliating fashion as droves of talented celebrities abandon the legendary performing arts center in protest.

Trump is radioactive with the people he wants to impress most…

Actress Issa Rae announced on Instagram in a brief statement that she is cancelling her “An Evening With Issa Rae” event slated for next month. Tickets will be refunded.

“Unfortunately, due to what I believe to be an infringement on the values of an institution that has faithfully celebrated artists of all backgrounds through all mediums, I’ve decided to cancel my appearance at this venue,” she wrote.

Trump made himself chairman of the center on Wednesday. Earlier this week he removed Biden appointees from the board and rammed in unqualified cronies including Second Lady Usha Vance and White House Chief of staff Susie Wiles.

Mega-successful television producer and writer Shonda Rhimes — the woman behind hit shows like Grey’s Anatomy, Bridgerton, and Scandal among others — resigned as treasurer of the center’s board yesterday.

She posted a quote from JFK on her Instagram: “If art is to nourish the roots of our culture, society must set the artist free to follow his vision wherever it takes him.”

Legendary soprano Renée Fleming resigned as artistic advisor to the center and while she avoided naming Trump, she praised David M. Rubenstein — the center’s former chairman who was ousted.

Singer and songwriter Ben Folds stepped down from his role as advisor to the National Symphony Orchestra, which the Kennedy Center oversees.

“Given developments at the Kennedy Center, effective today I am resigning as artistic adviser to the N.S.O. Mostly, and above all, I will miss the musicians of our nation’s symphony orchestra — just the best!” Folds wrote on Instagram.

Adam Weiner of the band Low Cut Connie has also canceled an appearance at the center next month.

“Upon learning that this institution that has run nonpartisan for 54 years is now chaired by President Trump himself and his regime, I decided I will not perform there,” he wrote on social media, adding that friends and fans were going to be “directly negatively affected by this administration’s policies and messaging.”

This is the kind of rejection that infuriates Donald Trump more than anything. He has long wanted to be accepted by America’s cultural elites. Instead, they see him for the cruel, fascist, incompetent failure he truly is.

So progressive.

Vance drops in on Europe to yell “You all suck!!!”

In a chastising speech on Friday that openly questioned whether current European values warranted defence by the US, he painted a picture of European politics infected by media censorship, cancelled elections and political correctness.

Arguing that the true threat to Europe stemmed not from external actors such as Russia or China, but Europe’s own internal retreat from some of its “most fundamental values”, he repeatedly questioned whether the US and Europe any longer had a shared agenda.

Well no, and that’s because the US now = Trump.

Speaking at the Munich Security Conference, the vice-president had been expected to address the critical question of the Ukraine war and security differences between Washington and Europe. Instead, he widely skated over these to give a lecture on what he claimed was the continent’s failure to listen to the populist concerns of voters.

Vance said of Donald Trump’s re-election: “There is a new sheriff in town.” He said: “Democracy will not survive if their people’s concerns are deemed invalid or even worse not worth being considered.”

So if the people want a genocide of immigrants that’s worth being considered?

The blistering and confrontational remarks were met with shock at the conference and were later condemned by the EU and Germany, while drawing praise from Russian state television. They signalled a deepening of the transatlantic chasm beyond different perceptions of Russia to an even deeper societal rupture about values and the nature of democracy.

Vance said: “If you are afraid of the voices, the opinions and the conscience that guide your very own people … If you’re running in fear of your own voters, there is nothing America can do for you, nor for that matter is there anything you can do for the American people.”

He doesn’t really mean “the American people” though, does he. He means the pro-Trump ones.

In Germany, a firewall has long existed preventing mainstream parties from engaging with the far-right Alternative für Deutschland owing to its Nazi origins. But Vance said there was no room for such barriers.

No room for barriers against Nazism. Thanks for the clarity.

“People dismissing voters’ concerns, shutting down their media, protects nothing. It is the most surefire way to destroy democracy.”

Is it? More surefire than embracing Nazism?

After the speech it was confirmed that JD Vance privately met the AfD leader, Alice Weidel, for 30 minutes. In a breach of previous protocol, he had declined the offer to meet the SPD leader and current chancellor, Olaf Scholz.

Fabulous. He spurned Scholz and cuddled up to Weidel. He’ll be sieg heiling any day now.

So “diversity staff” have more valuable skills than…doctors?

There have been a slew of recent job postings offering roles in equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) at salaries that exceed specialist junior doctors.

They include an NHS England EDI secondment position covering the southwest of England offering a pro rata salary of £122,000 per year, and a head of EDI role at a London trust with a salary of £91,336.

Junior doctors earn a basic salary of between £36,616 and £70,425, while consultants receive between £105,504 to £139,882 per year.

You do have to wonder what skills EDI people have that merit that kind of pay. I don’t think the NHS is wrong to want “diversity” in the sense of having staff that are not all rich white men, on account of how patients are not all rich white men. But can’t they recruit female and brown people without shelling out hundreds of thousands of £s a year?

The NHS was ordered to stop recruiting for EDI jobs in 2023 by Steve Barclay, the Conservative former health secretary, after he uncovered a £96,000 job advert for a diversity role.

Barclay also told trusts to stop paying consultancies and external organisations to provide diversity training for staff, but he said that his edict was ignored by NHS bureaucrats, who are now recruiting “even more on eye-watering salaries”.

Couldn’t they just give staff a book or two?

[Wes] Streeting highlighted “some really daft things being done in the name of equality, diversity and inclusion”, and pointed to a member of NHS staff “who was merrily tweeting a job ad online and saying part of her practice was anti-whiteness”.

He was responding to a post by Dr Florencia Gysbertha, an NHS psychologist, who wrote in a social media advert for a job placement: “The trainee will be supervised by myself, a counselling psychologist, who integrates anti-whiteness/anti-racist praxis into supervision and approaches to clinical work.”

Streeting added: “And I just thought ‘what the hell does that say to the bloke up in Wigan who’s more likely to die earlier than his more affluent white counterpart down in London?’. We’ve got real issues of inequality that affect working-class people.”

But so few working class people are trans. They’re just not fun, if you know what I mean.

However, he is not preparing to sweep the roles away even though he said it would win him “quite a lot of plaudits”.

“Ask black nurses about their experiences of being bullied in the workplace,” he said. “You look at outcomes: prostate cancer, black men twice as likely to die of prostate cancer than white men; black women three times more likely to die in childbirth than white women. We’ve got some real racial inequalities here.”

On the other hand they don’t have some real trans inequalities there.

An NHS spokeswoman said the health service “needs to take action to reduce health inequalities” and that a “diverse and inclusive workforce that better reflects the patient population leads to improved patient care”.

She added: “But equally we cannot make tokenistic gestures that don’t ultimately improve patient or staff experience.”

The grifters remind me of Robin DiAngelo, who gets huge fees for lecturing people about their white fragility. Cha-ching.