Birthday time of year for me … and so a trip to the DMV in Topsham. I was there a couple of hours. People were so kind and careful with each other. An older couple joking about a crooked painting “I didn’t hang it!” the group of waiters laughing as an examiner lost track of her teen charge “I can’t take the test without you!” What I am saying is we are still here, at least in Maine. Kindness is on the rise. It is an act of rebellion.
Muskrat thinks empathy is the downfall of western civilization. I strongly disagree with him. It’s the only thing that keeps us from total collapse under attacks from barbarians like Musk and Trump,
He is the most deluded man on the planet. Chump seems to have a sliver of recognition that he is a phony, but muskrat has a confidence that can only come from his core. He actually said that he is one of the “good guys.” He doesn’t know why so many people hate him. He has almost shedded any reality. He is evil and has no idea. Chump has an idea, me thinks. As to Vance, thought he was just an opportunist. But one with an under belly of Nazi ideology. A fault in every Republican these days.
Heather writes- "Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change."
Having worked and managed hundreds of IT projects and observed hundreds of others, this is absolutely 100% going to fail. The question isn't "if it will", but "when it will". And how are we going to feed, house and clothe the tens of millions of people/families that rely on their SS funds when the money doesn't come.
The first and most important part of a conversion is the analysis and planning of the project. This process includes users that understand the business and the people that are familiar with ALL of the peripheral systems as well as IT.
One of the clients I worked for issued anywhere from 4-10 new products every year. They had 3 administration systems and 5 insurance companies that all had to be modified to support each new product. 27 different peripheral systems were involved in the process and the users and agents had to be trained on the new products and how to administer them. They had the process down to a science and it still took about 5 months to roll a new product out the door.
Musk is a delusional moron who knows virtually nothing about the SSA database and the programs. Him and his little DOGE boys are going to fuck this up. And then they will blame Biden and all of the bobble heads in Congress and the Administration will agree that it's all the Democrats fault.
Trump/Musk have been defunding food banks and school cafeterias right and left for months now, so it is going to fall on ALL OF US to insure that no one starves to death or becomes homeless due to the fucking Republicans.
Gary, I know. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The titanic is tilting as the band strikes up a tune. My admonishment call on the good generals to save up failed for some unknown reason. Now, Dante’s Inferno awaits. I’m a pessimist by nature so maybe I wrong. Reaching for biblical metaphor, perhaps this will be a Noah’s Flood and a rebirth after the dove flies by after the storm. But the rains will wash away and the suffering will be monumental.
Bill Katz, End Time ideology is definitely at play here. David Troy wrote an interesting observation of this yesterday in his America2.0news article “Why ‘Signalgate’ Marks Our Decent into End Time Ideology”. He writes: “… The Confluence of End Times Ideas
This all might be easier to counter if there was just one ideology in play, but there are several converging at once. Regular readers of America 2.0 know that we have been documenting these parallel forces and how they are pulling us towards a moment of reckoning. Those forces include:
Russia's war in Ukraine: Russia sees this war as a broader conflict with the entire Western world.
Project Russia: Kremlin books that outline a detailed rationale for the eventual and inevitable fall of the godless West, as a byproduct of 'decadent' democracy and capitalism.
Threat of Nuclear Annihilation: Belief that all earthly conflict is destined to ultimately erupt into nuclear conflict.
Fiat Currency vs. Cryptocurrency + Gold: Russia and Christian Nationalists see the dollar as fundamentally corrupt and would prefer to replace it with gold and crypto, to curb American dollar hegemony.
Network State Movement: Movement to break down nation states into a disaggregated bundle of 'startups' and through that process birth new countries, competing as fiefdoms for the 'business' of citizens who can exercise 'exit' rights to choose between them.
White Supremacy and Nazi ideology: Belief that a return to traditional ideology will lead to racially pure ethnostates and elimination of harmful races, religions, and ideologies. See also Kali Yuga and the Yuga cycle, a cyclical theory of history from Hinduism borrowed by the Nazis.
US Debt Ceiling and Default: The idea that US sovereign debt is a "sin" that requires an eventual reckoning, vs. the more pragmatic view that it represents investment through the monetary supply that has not yet been taxed out.
Deep State vs. MAGA/DOGE: Envisions dismantling the government as a solution to an ever-growing and bureaucratic "nanny state."
Theosophy and the Return of 'Maitreya': The idea that Matreiya, the final Buddah, will return to Earth to impart wisdom and help establish Shambhala as paradise on earth.
Teilhard, Vernadsky, and the Noosphere: The theory that the Earth would evolve into a higher level of consciousness and develop a Noosphere, a manifestation of that global consciousness.
Libertarian Exit (Galt's Gulch): The idea that anti-state libertarians will exit from society, thus remaking it; Ayn Rand borrowed this idea in Atlas Shrugged as "Galt's Gulch."
Woke vs. Traditionalism: A biblical conflict between worldviews to secure the final victory of traditional culture.
Thalassocracy vs. Tellurocracy: Prominent in the writing of Aleksandr Dugin, a civilizational conflict between seafaring and agricultural societies.
Battle of Gog vs. Magog: Another Dugin fetish, lifted from the Book of Revelation — the end times battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
TESCREAL ideologies: the technological destiny of mankind as seen through Transhumanism, the Singularity, and our transition into a spacefaring species.
Wikileaks vs. Five Eyes: Application of cyberlibertarian dogma to the practice of intelligence, and the assertion that 'leaking' is preferable to secrecy.
'Anonymous' vs. Organized Protest: Posits that anonymous, unaccountable, hive-mind emergent organization is preferable to explicit, accountable organized protest.
Charismatic Christianity vs. Secular Society: Assertion that loosely defined notions of generic "Christian" faith carry more value than secular "Godless" ways of being.
Hegelian synthesis: Hegel's idea that thesis and antithesis would, through dialectics, give way to synthesis, an evolution towards a new kind of understanding.
Seven Mountains Dominionism: Belief that charismatic Christians will eventually capture the "seven mountains" needed to control society, culture, and government.
UFO cults and "disclosure": Belief that truth about alien species and UFOs will be disclosed, altering humanity's perception permanently.
Opus Dei: Catholic cult intent on obtaining full control of the Church and other organs of power, including government.
Fourth Turning: Widely debunked pseudohistorical theory popularized by William Strauss & Neil Howe (and promoted by Steve Bannon) that asserts that civilization is governed by a fixed generational pattern, and that a "Fourth Turning" (period of chaos) is imminent.
Israel and Armageddon: Dispensational belief among some Evangelical Christians that events in Israel and Palestine will bring about Armageddon, the return of Christ, and the final rapture.
In common across all of these is prophecy about some future time when the foretold will be realized. The ideologues who have captured our government believe that future is happening now — and it's impossible to overstate the danger we are in. They believe they have permission to follow their own rules — which they are making up on the fly.”
Because of a medication, I now eschew alcohol. However, should certain people drop dead or be killed in some way, i intend to have a wee dram of single malt, neat. I have a good supply so will not be have to pay tariffs.
In 2018 when he proposed tariffs on French wine, I went to Costco the next morning and bought a bald dozen cases of the best Bordeaux for $7 a bottle and I sorry I didn’t take the whole pallet.
Fascinating list of belief systems! Here's the rub that I see: when people die, many see it as part of God's plan but 'engineering' a death is a no-no, i.e. it's considered murder or suicide. I wonder how God (assuming such a being exists) would see the 'engineering' of the End Times that is happening.
Check; I agree. If you've noticed, over and over again I've pointed out to folks that "OiD" is only a 'tool' in all this - hell he's just happy to stay out of jail and debt long enough to thumb his nose at the justice system and laws. I haven't gone into great detail as you have, but I regularly remind folks that it's not just cfg, it's way bigger, it is indeed a coalition - the vilest coalition ever imaginable. Bravo friend....
This is a good accounting for why current MAGA Republicans are ideologues following at least one if not several of these end times fantasies, and not true conservatives who look to see what works in human nature and make gradual changes for improvement. They all also completely lack a growth mindset.
Conservatives? There are no longer any conservatives in the Republican Party. That ended with Reagan when the plundering of the national treasury began. The wealthy have siphoned $37 trillion out of the economy and they hunger for more. They lose sight of the fact that they are billionaires only because of the masses. If the U.S. population were only 3.3 million instead of 330 million, there would be no billionaires.
Well said. Now I will say a few things that I will be thoroughly chastised for. If I do something wrong I ask myself what was it that I did wrong. So I ask us collectively what was it that we did wrong? And there is plenty. We have used or allowed forces to divid us even though we have always been divided. I refuse to name the issues because I will only get critized. One issue I will state is Biden’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and stop hundreds of thousands from running over hot sands. And I am not unsympathetic to the needs of the dispossessed. But I am first an American. And I was 100% in favor of stopping illegal border entries. And Trump took full advantage of it. So would I if I had been running. Anytime I ask why the Trump vote, it’s always border border border. I mention in my book how ancient Egyptian pharaohs often had the noses of previous rulers smashed off because they believed cutting the air flow even to a statute ended the leaders force. In essence, this is one reason I believe Biden didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of Trump. Yes this is simplified but it’s my understanding of events.
Biden and Harris DID do a lot to stop illegal immigration from the top countries (Venezuela and Guatemala and I forget the 3rd) of 2022. They had a multi-pronged approach that wasn't solely focused on the border. Immigration dropped by well over half, maybe 75+% though I don't remember numbers well. I even recall seeing 90% bandied about after the introduction of the asylum appt. app that kept migrants in Mexico or their home countries until their appointment. (Trump canceled that program after completely missing its efficacy.) Then, other countries replaced the top 3 and numbers increased again. Meanwhile, Trump had so decimated the border staffing and especially the asylum judges, that it took time to clear the backlog as well as handle new arrivals. What we need is legislative change to restrict asylum laws. But Republicans blocked all efforts so they could run on their version of "border failure" and the lie about "immigrant crime." (Immigrant crime is far lower than native born crime.)
Trump appealed to those among us who are racists, misogynists, xenophobes and homophobes. They were poisoning our blood. Trump's support is principally from the bigots. The immigrants were and are a great benefit to us. Germany, Scandinavia and Japan should have our luck. We had the strongest economy in the world at the end of Biden's term in office. The MAGATS didn't know this because Fox never revealed it, though the Wall Street Journal (4-14-2024) and the other news media did.
"One issue I will state is Biden’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and stop hundreds of thousands from running over hot sands. And I am not unsympathetic to the needs of the dispossessed." I'm calling bullshit on that mixed message.
Gary, you are so right. I was in IT from the early 70s until my retirement. Generally, people have no idea (nor should they, really) of the intensely complicated nature of a system of the age and size of the SSA system.
It is probably near 50 million lines of COBOL. It is organized in tens of thousands of modules. Over its life there have been dozens of approaches to writing and organizing COBOL code. Some of the coding styles are no doubt mysterious and teasing out the logic can be the work of weeks. (I once inherited maintenance of a commercial loan system. Some previous programmer had written a module containing 200 undocumented, nested if-then-else statements. It took me a month to re-write the module, test and install it. And I was pretty good back then. Half of that time was just teasing out all the logic).
Maintenance and further development of the code has been in the hands of generations of programmers and analysts, thousands of them, some great, some poor. System documentation—english explanations of what the code is doing—is no doubt great in a few places, absent in many, and on average, rather poor.
The approach Musk wishes to try, if tried, say, in a bank, would literally put the bank out of business. Bank regulators would issue lifetime bans from the banking industry to all execs and managers involved.
A bank I once worked for tried just this approach in one of its subsidiaries, a former finance company that had evolved into a subprime mortgage unit. They got what they deserved, with a $100 million out-of-balance situation, thousands of payments that couldn’t be applied, mortgages that just disappeared, and big-name outside corporate auditors who threatened to disavow the bank’s looming annual report if the loss wasn’t charged off against earnings.
To even float this idea reveals (to those of us who really know what these issues are) how complete a fool Musk is. Enormous ego, willing to risk the livelihoods of millions completely unnecessarily. This won’t be just an empty rocket blowing up in the stratosphere. This will be an explosion that strikes at the heart of 70 million seniors.
My Social Security payments go directly to my checking account. The last two have come in right on time. In fact, I don't need that money. I live simply and I have no debt. But what about those for whom these payments are an absolute necessity? I am livid beyond description that a billionaire would do this to anyone, and in particular those living from hand to mouth. It's obscene and cruel.
Tom, I'm sure you've seen this. The “six phases of a project” have been jocularly described as:
1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
I don't see anything that Musk/Trump participate in having "Praise and honor for the nonparticipants" because they all end in failure.
And I agree. Musk is a fool and a narcissist just like Trump.
I just retired this week, but I worked for a life insurance company that installed SAP without the help of any existing users or programmers with experience on the current GL systems. There were at least a dozen people with the expertise to assist with the project and they chose to do it with outside consultants that knew nothing about the current GL and very little about SAP. They implemented the system 3 years ago and they are still finding problems. Ultimately, they fired the project manager and most of the people that worked on the project, but not until months after 6. Praise and honor for the participants and none for the nonparticipants.
And yet with the Brains in charge of SSA Payments did not update to later technology. In fact, the oldest American is 114 years old. The idiots currently running SSA are sending checks to 3.2 million people in the system thinking they are 120+ years old. So you still don't see the need for DOGE?????
Completely wrong. By law, Social Security can’t make payments to anyone over 115 years old. There are 48 million people on the Social Security rolls who are over 100 years old because SSA has never received a death notice, but according to a 2014 audit, none of these people have applied for benefits and none are receiving them.
Did you just make this up, or did you get this from some MAGA crack-brain?
George. Don't drink the Musk/Trump kool-aid. The moronic DOGE boys were only looking at the database and not at the actual payment programs or the age of people that actually get paid.
Many of us here have been in one to many IT projects and realize the myriad lies they are telling us about all of the systems.
If the SSA tried to run their payment programs on the hardware available in 1995 it would take about 20 times as long to run a single program and all of the payments would be on hard-copy checks.
I know about 20 different computer language that run on 5 different hardware platforms from COBOL to JAVA. Without Moore's law we would be living in a completely different world.
I think it came from Trump's speech when he was quoting more Musk misinformation. I'm assuming your asking George?
Anyway, see the SOTU speech or whatever it's called the first year a Prez is in office. He lies over and over again including the gaslighting about the SSA database. Keep in mind, it's the programs that check age and birthdates, not the data base.
It's like everything he's done. Make these incredibly impossible to achieve goals, then backtrack when they don't happen. Over and over and over. Anyone who thinks he's so smart, isn't very smart themselves. This will be a disaster for all those relying heavily on SS and SSI payments.
Unfortunately the majority of those people don’t have the ability to survive even a month without their checks. I hit the age when I just automatically converted from disability to regular social security. Thank goodness because I’m sure they’ll be dropping people off disability first and say you have to prove some extreme circumstances to get it.
I'm trying to even imagine this scenario- a large amount of people in this country in sudden crisis- unable to pay for food, medications, utilities, and rent or mortgages. Would it be worse than 1929 and the years that followed? Not hard to imagine is the response of this administration and congress. In the immediate aftermath, it will fall on every individual to respond to their fellow community members needs to survive until we can depose of those who engineered this calamity. I hope the silver lining is a deep and lasting change of hearts and minds in this country.
On my mind as well. I was imagining soup lines yesterday. You are more hopeful than I about the possibilities. Empathy is not in the Conservatives/MAGAs/Christian Nationalist vocabulary.
Yes, if one loses hope. I was born skeptical. Tried to be Pollyanish and failed. Fewer disappointments in life that way as my expectations for others aren't very high.
I think it would be worse. The millionaires can’t wait for the poor to suffer and die off even though they depend on them for their luxuries. The rest of us will be so busy trying to keep our heads above water it will be hard to help. Farmers won’t have crops because they don’t have the money or workers to plant and harvest. There is already a housing shortage and venture capitalists are buying up housing and businesses that they then suck all the money out of and shut down. There will be no jobs.
I have no idea how this would look in actuality- everyone would certainly be scrambling to stay afloat. But we will all sink eventually if we are only willing to keep our own heads above water. I am willing to be available for what that may entail. What is that expression- put your own oxygen mask on first and then help the one next to you?
I agree. My parents were born in 1929. My mom used to tell me stories. None of them were awful. My dad never said anything but we found out as adults that he was sent to a foster home so my grandmother could work.
It will be the poor helping the poor- as it usually has been. Predict there will be warehouses to hold the disabled, ill, starving people that result from the 'budget' cuts.
Gary, I am a computer dolt, but even I know this will be a giant failure because what muskrat and his minions have is lots of hubris and not knowledge of the how the system works. I have been thinking along the same lines that we need to start regular donations to the local food bank. This is just amazing to me, that these dopes would actually do this to elders and children. Well, not really, but it is truly horrible.
Gary, I really don’t disagree with what you have written, but (yeah, I know, that sounds like I disagree) the FIRST QUESTION that should be asked is WHY do we need a new computer system at SSA? What is WRONG - specifically - about the “old” system? Is the system not functioning properly (not withstanding the crap that is presently being thrown at it)?
1. OLD is not the issue. (I’m 80 and I can still compute.)
2. I’ve been satisfied with my SS for 18 years, including—-
3. My recent experience with the Biden era cancellation of WEP & GPO - which has eliminated the penalty (that I have SUFFERED*) for those 18 years.
* the SUFFERED part is just a joke, because my wife & I are doing fine, but Trumpians should get behind me when I declare that the Feds have been robbing me for 18 years!!!
For those who don’t know: WEP & GPO were programs that were in place since 1983 that prevented some “public” employees (police, fire, and teachers, etc.) who had fully paid into SS (40+ quarters) but also into another retirement systems.
Done right, here is why you need to replace the system.
The software technology is old. COBOL is hard to maintain, not widely taught, and the best programmers prefer to work in a language that has a future for new development.
The system is hard and expensive to maintain. It has decades of software changes, some large, some small, written to add function, to support new regulations, to fix errors, and to fix the fixes (no doubt).
It is expensive to run. It runs on mainframes ( probably multiple logically partitioned mainframes) meaning that the computing environment is as complex, maintenance intensive, and expensive as the software system itself.
So continuing to run this system is equivalent to deciding that your home entertainment system will be a 1970 console stereo, and that you are fine with the limited offerings, limited functionality, and willing to spend s lot of money to find some elderly guys to maintain it.
And Musk’s AI is definitely less expensive and totally risk-free, right, Tom?
In my recent experience with COBOL, I saw in two months, the reinstatement of my full SS pension. Tom are you saying that is shitty and “old” technology just plodding along?
And “programmers today” prefer to work in a “new”language and can’t figure out the “old” language.
Expense?
Your last paragraph (about 1970 home entertainment is BS. Have you experienced streaming lately? Vs cable?
Again, and let me say it LOUDER, Tom: MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH MY SS SITUATION TOTALLY AMAZED ME. Talk about RAPID RESPONSE???
Paul, you’re a bit unnecessarily insulting, especially since you’re arguing about something you seem to be completely ignorant of.
Whatever change or correction you received no doubt required no programming. Just an accounting change that was accommodated within the existing system. If every account change or fix required programming, the Social Security system would be unworkable, since the “analysis-coding-testing-moving into production cycle” can take a month for even a small fix.
That having been said, all the reasons for moving from an old, inflexible, hard to maintain software technology are still valid. And, of course, it’s just a matter of time. Do you imagine we’ll still be using this antiquated system in 50 years? When no one even makes replacement parts for the hardware? Of course not. So the answer comes down to sooner or later. Not if.
As for programmers, very few schools still teach COBOL, and those that do can’t teach the 50 years of styles and approaches to using the language that you will find peppered throughout a decades-old system.
As for the analogy I used, you made my point. You can’t stream on an old console anymore than you can do sophisticated management data reporting using the VSAM file system undoubtedly used in a COBOL system.
The key is taking the time and effort to replace the system to make a smooth transition. That’s a very large, multi-year project. Not one attempted on a fast track through AI and a pack of ignorant DOGE-bags.
Check below. Anything you want to rethink? (Hope I’m not being “unnecessarily insulting.”)
COBOL
it worth it to study COBOL?
Most people have broader interests and do not have access to mainframes, and most companies are not interested in introducing mainframe-related technology in their landscape. It is possible for people to learn COBOL using available resources and it can be a good way to get a stable career.Jan 25, 2024
COBOL a dying language?
It's safe to say that COBOL isn't going away any time soon. 'There's no future in that ancient technology' - Today's COBOL is far from the stereotypical green screens you see in the movies - it can do anything a 'modern' programming language can do.Sep 19, 2023
How much do COBOL programmers make?
AI Overview
As of March 2025, COBOL programmers in the US can expect an average annual salary of around $114,400, with entry-level positions starting at roughly $97,500 and experienced workers potentially earning up to $140,400.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of COBOL programmer salaries:
* Average Salary: The average salary for a COBOL programmer in the US is around $114,400 per year.
* Hourly Rate: The average hourly pay for a COBOL programmer is around $55 per hour.
* Entry-Level Salaries: Entry-level COBOL programmers can expect to earn around $97,500 per year.
* Experienced Salaries: Experienced COBOL programmers can earn up to $140,400 per year.
* Salary Range: COBOL programmer salaries can range from $80,000 to $125,000 per year.
* Additional Pay: COBOL programmers may also receive additional pay in the form of bonuses, commissions, tips, or profit sharing.
* Factors Affecting Salary: Factors such as experience, location, and skills can influence a COBOL programmer's salary.
* High Demand: COBOL programmers are still in high demand, especially for maintaining legacy systems.
All the organizations I monitored about the programming change required by the elimination of WEP and GPO reported that they were accomplished in record time.
I can tell you know nothing about this area of technology beyond an hour’s research on google.
Don’t bother answering-I won’t be reading. I scarcely read HCR’s comments because there are so many of you crack-brained kooks lurking here.
Please go misunderstand the posts of others and apply your google-fueled research to them. But understand, those who know a topic in depth can easily spot even a voluble bullshitter with ease.
Paul, I know exactly what you're saying. I was one of the last Civil Service "dinosaurs" hired into the Postal service four years before they switched to FERS (their version of Social Security.) My reimbursement from the Biden era withdrawal of WEP means I will actually see $100 a month rather than have every cent go to pay all but $700 out of pocket for my Medicare benefits each year. My husband and I have managed to keep our heads above water over the years by being frugal with our combined pensions. My biggest concern right now, is that my tiny boost, which is far below the average, will be considered "overpayment" by the PINO puppet show.
Kathy, 4 weeks ago, SS deposit ed my 2024 reimbursement for my WEP penalty. The notification also explained that my April SS deposit (the March payment) will reflect my new SS payment amount.
People gripe and complain about how awful government programs are, but this rapid response - given that TRUMP is now the President - astounded me. And, especially, since this SS action was signed into law by Sleepy Joe in early January of 2025.
No, I do not expect to receive any additional funds for the 17 years that I was penalized by Ronald Reagan’s WEP & GPO debacle. (The new law states that the only back payment will be for 2024.)
The bottom line is that I paid into SS while I was still in high school and during summers while I was in college (and paid for half of my tuition and room and board and all of my student loans five years after graduation). Plus, I worked at SS jobs during summers and then after I retired after 35 years of teaching. I paid 10% of my teaching salary into my retirement system.
Reagan referred to my situation as a WINDFALL that he was going to ELIMINATE. He must have thought my work was merely sucking off the Government’s Teat, huh?
I've twice worked at companies whose management decided to upgrade software just because it was available. In both cases, none of us who used the programs were consulted (in one case not even informed until it was a done deal) and the resulting chaos cost tens of thousands of dollars and days' worth of effort, and ultimately, the previous version was reinstalled at additional expense.
The objective is to shut down Social Security payments. This is the process by which Musk will do it and blame it on the computer system. Musk's evil may not match Hitler's yet - it would be too unpopular. But, it has the same roots. This is evil personified.
Someone needs to copy the entirety of the SSA systems and databases. Muskers little hack squad is going to delete everything and replace it all with crap.
I'm sure they either have mirroring in place so that every transaction is applied to databases in multiple locations and/or they do daily, monthly, quarterly, annual backups. But once they pulled the plug on the programs, everything will grind to a halt.
Trump and Musk are clueless about how the programs interact with the databases.
It's likely Musk doesn't even understand the calculation of the monthly payment each person receives and how it can vary from one year to the next based on multiple criteria such as COLA.
Any system Musk/Trump are involved in is going to be a disaster.
A century ago, a German sociologist explained precisely how Donald Trump thinks about the world, @jon_rauch writes. Understanding this view is essential to defeating it.
I have a longtime acquaintance. I can’t quite call him a friend. He was the cop that busted me when I was a kid for selling weed. I hired him once to find out where a non paying tenant worked. So we have a tentative relationship. Leo is an avowed MAGA. We have already tussled over it. Since he is a vet I brought to his attention how the veterans administration is being chopped up. He counters that it’s contracted help being cut. I will need to probe weaknesses in his beliefs because he is blinded in support of MAGA. Recently we toyed with a possible business plan of his as partners which I nixed for now. He wants to meet Trump and he might just get an opportunity. I almost invited him to accompany me to DC on April 5 and he could go knocking on the White House door while I performed my anti trump melodies in front of the White House. Nah. He is solid working class. But he is committed to getting drug smugglers off the streets even as an eighty year old private eye. I respect him for that. When I ask him why he supports Trump, one word is his response; Border. Of course I wrote a song about him and the drug bust and he got a big kick out of it titled, “Conviction, Conviction, Conviction.” (I channeled Johnny Cash when I wrote it) All those 150 hit or listeners were cop friends of his. He told me so.
I now have reserved a room in Silver Spring, Maryland on April 4 so I can get a good night's rest for the protests the next day. Join us if you can in any of the 50 state capitals. I decided to try and get a place to perform at the main rally but if not, I’ll sit at my table in Lafayette Square with my books and guitar and hope Parks Service still honors 1st amendment rights. I'm not too sanguine about it, however.
Me too, at least we have some recognition and ownership of our foibles. They have none. In fact chump said in the Sun on Sept 12, 2005, that if he did anything wrong, he would find somebody else to blame. I don’t think muskrat would ever consider the possibility that he did anything wrong. What parenting failures they had. Usually kids can learn from sane others if their parents failed. But I read somewhere that what parents fail to teach, no one else ever can. I hope that is not true. May be a rarity…
JD, sometimes I think script writers for European series are tuned to the awfulness happening here. Last night we watched a Tatort episode which was about a right wing party in Germany with all sorts of devious stuff going on and the bad guys included a person from Russia. The candidate was really just a figurehead for the people who intended to take control.
Oh Kathy I agree with you so much. I think empathy is really the only thing that matters. Nothing else works without it, practically speaking, and if we are all trapped here in this timespace together, is it too much to ask to be kind?
On intentional Tariff Chaos, I signed up Today for "Reuters Tariff Watch"' The only data you must supply is an email address.
On Elon Musk's 120 Day Must-Pull-Date, Politico's Dasha Burns & Jake Taylor cite a White House "Official saying there is no known end date".
Related: Musk & T 2.0 lawyers are regularly pummeled in federal court by the hard question, "Who is DOGE?'. So MUSK went to his Temp Actor Supply & came up with AMY GLEASON "a former health care executive " [NOT] as the "acting administrator".
But, you knew that was comin'. Well, so do federal judges.
We Mapped DOGE’s Silicon Valley and Corporate Connections
What Happened: WIRED has mapped the backgrounds of dozens of operatives working inside unauthorized DOGE, revealing a deep network of ties to Musk, his companies, and his allies. At least 49 DOGE staffers have links to Musk’s empire—SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, Neuralink, and X—as well as to allies like Peter Thiel and firms like Palantir.
Why It Matters: This is cronyism disguised as reform. Musk’s tech allies are being embedded deep inside federal agencies, turning public institutions into tools of a private billionaire’s agenda. It’s not about efficiency—it’s a hostile takeover that blurs the line between government and corporate power.
They are the masterminds behind it all - Trump is just the figurehead - he gets to stay our of jail - extort as much money as he can get his greedy little hands on and spend as much of our tax money on his golf and other excursions as he like and the bonus is he gets to use his DoJ attorney and FBI henchman to go after anyone who has ever hurt his feelings.
Yes. Anyone could see these past years and during the election season he has lost his mind. A puppet of Russia and the Oligarchs sits in our White House. A madman exacts the revenge he stewed over for 4 years.
Republicans like to rationalize that Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating tool. No one wants to negotiate with a terrorist. The threats to take over other countries by force are so petty and Vance went in to Greenland regurgitating the same garbage Trump does that they’re being treated very badly. After all they convinced MAGA the economy was so bad under Biden and it worked so why not try it there. He is rude, uncouth and a diplomatic disaster. Each time he opens his mouth it’s worse.
Musk's behavior during the 2024 campaign and as the architect of DOGE indicate that he is a very disturbed man., and one who should not hold any position of authority.
bbb, I don't want to get you more bbb but, Musk "rewarded" a Wisconsin voter $1M for his Wisconsin "vote" in the 4/1/25 WS Supreme Court election coming up in 4 days.
First, as an old fashioned computer programmer that used to punch key cards, let me say that if you need artificial intelligence to write your code you shouldn’t be writing computer systems. These guys Musk hires agent geniuses, they’re hacks. The systems will be worthless, they’ll likely destroy all the old COBOL and social security will be dead. But that’s their goal right?
I also see every one of these systems that Musk touches having a back door to let his allies, our adversaries, in. They will also be funneling money into their own pockets in a way that’s hard to find.
Second, if he “leaves” in May he will still be directing everything. He’s installed all his people as regular government employees. My husband read yesterday that he rolled Xitter into his XAI company to protect Tesla because of the falling stock prices. These guys always have a way to cheat the system.
Third, when Republicans lose the military they should know they’re screwed. Allowing Hegseth to violate our laws with his brother, and I read he’s been raking his wife into meetings, is a sure sign the country will have a tough time recovering.
Thinking more seriously about where to send my grandson to live now that he’s finished college. And just in time it seems.
Yes. Traditional and historical literature hold the receipts for the virtues, of which empathy and justice lead the list. Civilizations are marked by kindness and empathy and justice. This regime we are currently in, like 1930s Germany, will never hold those receipts.
I second with my sincere thank you to Professor for working hard everyday faithfully warning us what is going on with our government. And today I am very much alarmed with her reporting that "Elon Musk’s DOGE is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change." Professor says 67 millions of residents in America are receiving SS. They coud all lose the payments as the software transition can be sabotaged. How to stop this? It is URGENT.
And yet he is out there on talk shows looking for empathy from everyone because people are pressing against him and his companies cause his stock to take a nose dive. You cannot have it both way Elon. Just sayin’
After the election I changed my car bumper stickers: 1) Humankind, Be both; 2) Choose Civility; 3) The greatness of a nation and it's moral progress can be judged by the way, its animals are treated. By Mahatma Gandhi.4)a floral license holder that says KINFNESS MATTERS.
I second and am so grateful to Professor for faihtfully reporting to the readers signfinficant developments in our government to warn us. And for today, my immediate concern is the following: "Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change. The letter continues to state that some 67 millions could
I have always tried to be kind, others used to as well. The coarse and the vulgar ascended with the repubs and especially when our MSM followed Fox down the money/entertainment/self-righteous rabbit hole. Now much of the citizenry is aligned with the cult. Kindness gets harder, even with those I still love who have taken their masks off (ironic twist) to reveal people I don’t know anymore…
The evil from the GOP has created a paradoxical effect for many us in aiding us in naturally seeking an antidote to the great harm they are doing to all humanity through their shear ignorance. An ignorance born of fear, fear of never having enough. I have a good Kurt Vonnegut story pertaining to FOMO. Fear of never having enough. Trump, Musk, their minions are eaten alive with it. FOMO, fear of missing out.
I hate that they have started with the most vulnerable and am wondering how long it will be before they come for all the other groups of non white Christians. What really bites is the top dogs are all married to immigrants. Legal immigrants?
I make an effort to smile and be kind to everyone. I work especially hard at the clerks and office staff that have scowls. When I make phone calls to resolve problems I make sure the representative knows I don’t blame them personally for the problem and ask them to pass it on to their supervisors.
Ditto. With the terrible USPS, I haven’t yet received my photo card which the DMV told me they mailed 4 weeks ago after I renewed my license online. They had confirmation of that and very nicely told me what to do if that card doesn’t arrive in time!
Nothing puzzles nasty people more than a kindly response. Although you have to be careful how you use it - being so unused to how to handle it, it can drive them mad with rage!
Strangely enough, Michael, it's the sort of reaction you get in any war zone - once the danger of ACTUAL death is past. People come together as a result of shared travail. And humor comes to the fore as a defence. It's one of the reasons older Brits still talk with fondness about the days of the Blitz. Memories of having sing alongs two hundred feet underground in the subway tunnels still resonate - along with laughter about the hygiene facilities!
I think this very impulse, which is recorded again and again in history, is absolute proof that kindness and empathy are what lie at our core selves, and exist to ensure our collective survival. Proof, I say, Lady Emsworth, and I thank you!
Human-kind would 'not' have survived otherwise. Likewise, they would not have survived feudal societies, monarchies, etc., etc., without the social invention / creation of the modernizing invention of improvable governance; A social and governing compact that we mostly agree upon. Perfect ? Hell no, but we can improve it, or regress. Regressing seems to be the shakeup that all those extremists long for. To what end ? I know with some certainty. I think most herein can imagine as well. I'm pretty sure that the right way to combat this, is not to shout back - where possible, but to 'ask the right questions' to lead some to make more correct, objective decisions. There is a very real absence of objective, critical thinking in this country and world at large, that I would never have believed until the past 10 years or so; Thinking, acting, and voting on emotions rather than logic. Not even connecting the most obvious of 'dots.' More and more I'm thinking that one thing that must happen is the replacement of the electoral college. I understand why it was thought to be, or construed to be a fairness to small states, and minorities as something of a counterbalance to any "tyranny of a majority", but it seems we've checked that box the wrong way, especially now that we've lived the proof, that it can be "gamed." I also think we have to stand the strongest against any losses of unalienable rights of any whole person / human being. I'm willing yet again to perish for those rights - otherwise what sort of 'life' would that be ? Would it be worth living ? Personally, I am sure not. For those opposed, like me, it appears we all must make that decision. I'm sure the bullies think that anyone who would oppose them are nothing but sissies and easily brought to heel. They won't find that in me.
Whatever this nightmare is, it's not just here in the U.S. It seems to have metastasized worldwide. We watch BBC news quite a lot, to keep up with the bigger picture.
I don't find it very hard to connect those dots. Ask yourself, what are the common denominators ? What do these countries we're hearing about have in common ? I find that the ones that concern me are first, western democracies, 2.) Countries that practice relatively loosely regulated capitalism. The exception of course is the happier Scandinavian countries who have long seen and accepted that capitalism must have reins and a bridle, lest it self destruct. Consider all that and let me know what you think Janet; I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Cheers ~
indeed, considering about 43,000 died across Britain in the blitz, most in London i think. The sobering offset was that the allies bombed the bejesus out of German cities subsequently. Lots have had worried consciences about that, though I'm sure there was little of that on the part of the German military.
US and China in the biggest race, America want to retain global dominance, after all it outspends everyone else combined almost, Chinese are on a tear to get Taiwan back and dominate the south china sea.... but with the huge investment in modern technology to support manufacturing, trade, and the absolutely huge levels of trade between US and China, you really gotta wonder "what's up"
I don't wonder at all Frank. Our 'devil may care', toxic capitalists thought among themselves, "Well here's an opportunity to kill several 'birds' with one stone; cripple unions, make obscene money on cheap labor, and after we get them hooked on our money we start running the roost there." Nope; They have pretty much had their azzes kicked there. Chinese are fast learners and out 'capitalist the capitalists' to my view. That's not to say all is well, sunshine and butterflies in China. They have suffering too, financial and otherwise.
Good point …dominate and out capitalize the capitalists …the chess game since day one , different but really ways to control. It’ll not be this brain that find a solution creating peace , or balance, and why we have to have to be a …what do they call it ..rules based economy?
Was not these last 50 years pretty smooth? A little maybe becoming complacent? A very obvious shift of upwards mobility eliminating half of poverty? Technology advancing close to too fast?
But there’s always a few who want more…usually the ones that have the most ,ironic huh? But the playing field STILL doesnt get leveled, not happy yet, I guess. So throw it all out and start, all over again..
I like the question- what’s really up? Something doesn’t add up…I agree….the end game? Though no plan ‘dept “we’re just gonna be so rich though” ..never sufficed before. Somebody always wants more.
New World Order ?
So what exactly is that…anyone been briefed?
How about all needs get met….?
Equality for all?
Oh wait …someone tried that already and it didn’t work?
Some people so impatient their status quo couldn’t ahh… wait?
I was thinking more in terms of "War AND Peace" so to speak, political rhetoric defining China as "our greatest enemy" while maintaining huge and currently necessary trading relationships. I had the impression the Chinese "managed" what American corporations could manage to do in China while developing their own long term goals. Now they are entangled in world trade, both as producers and distributors.
"...Now they are entangled in world trade, both as producers and distributors." And as 'kings of the manufacturing world" Frank. We've even (U.S.) allowed them to become sole manufacturers and distributors in now limited supply chains. We still have medical shortages of IV saline and IV iron, things I need on a regular basis, and much more. Like I said, they 'out capitalist the capitalists', and have us by the short hairs.
A sense of humor , mixed liberally with compassion, add a bit of wisdom and the best of us rise above the din.
The civil war is long forgot but rumbles with poverty topping first glances.
The fight feathers many a red cap who will buy ,trade,lie, or steal your soul on bended knees whilst still smiling .
How long will it take before the undone rears up ? The slapping the faces with deadly results from the knife placed in the back of America shows …our past rewritten, the fantasies fare , futures bleak in the never ending reconstruction . 12 year reigns history says.
I’m seeing it in Boston too! Total strangers on the street stopping to talk, and not about politics. Friendliness and kindness are up. Acts of rebellion indeed!
I retired from working as a mainframe programmer for the Knights of Columbus insurance company which provides life insurance and annuities to their members at competitive rates.
I drove down to New Haven from Maine and I noticed the same thing. People all over New England exhibited kindness and empathy everywhere I went. For years, people have complained about the "terrible" drivers in Massachusetts. I have driven in 49 states since 1970 and several foreign countries and I would rank them among the best. Several times different drivers let me in when I was turning into traffic. And that was just in my car. I met with four different groups of co-workers to say farewell and they restaurant staffs were all very friendly and warm.
I'm not sure if kindness is on the rise, but I sure had a wonderful experience in my New England adventure the past few days.
Us Mainers do tend to help each other out. Here in Harpswell I’ve worked with a bunch of retirees that go out and fix neighbors homes who can’t afford contractors. Called Harpswell Aging at Home. Together with Habitat for Humanities, a nationwide organization, we see the benefits of cooperation and helping each other out as opposed to destruction and tearing down good programs. I’m with Janet and Angus, and HCR, and other Mainers that stand against the “horror” that is gripping this country. Good deeds, actions, and words will eventually win out, but how long will it take?
The number of protests nationwide and filled to capacity townhall meetings are very encouraging. But will we have the energy to continue to dissent for the next 3 1/2 years? An article showed his poll numbers are decreasing, however, he is still receiving support - way too much in my opinion - in states that remain red. I guess our vision of what makes a decent person has changed, is wrong, is bad.
I’m currently in a rehab facility following a light stroke. I’ve been cared for by a whole panoply of kind, caring, generous people. My lived experience is so remote from the cruelty and chaos I see on my television screen here. It’s very hard to reconcile this disparity.
Thank you for sharing a quiet moment of real “Americana,” Michael. We live in Belfast, Maine and experience similar exchanges every day: interactions of simple human kindness. For anyone who has read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and wonders how Vance came to be where he is now…despite all that “liberal education,” pick up Jedediah Purdy’s thoughtful antidote to “Elegy,” For Common Things. Here is one quick quote from Purdy’s preface.
“We live in the disappointed aftermath of a politics that aspired to change the human predicament in elemental ways, but whose hopes have resolved into heavy disillusionment. We have difficulty trusting the speech and thought that we might try to use to make sense of our situation. We have left behind and unreal hope to fall into a hopelessness that is inattentive to — and mistrustful of — reality. What we might hope for now is a culture able to approach its circumstances with attention and care, and a politics that, as part of a broader responsibility for common things, turns careful attention into caring practice.” [Jedediah Purdy. For Common Things. Alfred A. Knopf; New York; 1999. Preface, page xxii-xxiii.]
Some of what I am sharing here on Substack in short essay form are stories about my enormous Appalachian families. We are all from where the VP attempts to claim heritage. Even the very conservative among us knew him for what he was instantly.
Most people live by the Golden Rule. But there are Bad People out there. They reveal themselves by their bad deeds. Taking food away from poor children and families is a Bad Thing. So when you see a Bad Person doing Bad Things, call it out for what it is. The Democratic Party can’t bring themselves to tell this truth. Trump and Musk are Bad Men. They are not legitimate leaders. Say it out loud and demand they stop harming people.
I have discovered quite late in the game that I can somehow manage both. I can identify, condemn and deny, and do it from a place where my compassion and empathy keep me from having to join my target in their anger and rage, if only in my efforts to refute it. This has been helpful and a skill I am trying to cultivate. And thank you Burke, because no, there are no “both sides,” here for me, either.
“My Struggle” is hundreds of pages of confusing ideology and the whinging of white privilege unable to fail upward despite its advantages … compare with a carefully crafted and well articulated instruction manual on how to erase all parity among people and enslave them (more firmly and permanently) to the oligarchy for all time using the very systems put in place to protect against this.
I am so glad to be here with you in the middle of the night, Sabine.
Late afternoon here in Australia - that's probably why I'm always one of the first to comment ☺️ - but I'm happy too about all the good people on the planet - the majority I hope!
I didn't say it is exactly like Hitler's elaborations, but it's also something that should be seen as a warning for things to come and people have probably ignored it for too long. Now it's here.
Got that a lot, hits me hard when I go back and look at things I posted in 2016. Finally got banned from T and FB in 2020 for repeating that chump was using nazi playbook.
Afraid you hit it on the head, JD. The Dems' warnings in Nov 2024 went unheeded it seems. Just "politics" they said. Now that politics has come to roost in the systematic deconstruction of American government on an unheard of scale.
2015 and 2024 - even before then by me personally. That's what I can speak to with certainty. But no one, even elected dems were listening. We have an infected cadre even among them that believe themselves superior and above reproach. My gut tells me the main infection stems from money - ala "Citizens United." What a misuse of the mother tongue is that one ?
No Lady Em; Don't you believe that for a minute; Keep pushing back with the right questions. I have whole new habitat of trolls I fence with - within limits now on social media. I laugh my ass off when responding at some of the idiocy, but I still strive to ask the right questions. On the more personal, I've had folks that I 'thought' I knew ringing into my spaces with silly azz stuff. For instance, a few thought they could gang up on me with some silly crap about LGBTQ's as though it was some meaningful response to the "Signal Gate" cluster eff. My question: "What has A loving A, or B loving C got to do with anything ? What does that take away from your life, liberty, and security ?
I am so glad you circled back because a) I realized you weigh in about the time my friends in Australia come online (I have simply given up sleeping) and b) absolutely this … not apples to apples and I apologize for inferring so! I think the scariest thing for me is plans like P2025 must have existed for the N*zis, but they never published them in a book and shared them with the general public before enacting them. Really mind melting stuff happening here.
Yes, they explained clearly. All we had to do as a society was to listen.
The Fascists explained what they would do and then they did it. And there are still people applauding the rape of a nation. What will become very clear soon, if not already, is that just as in previous fascist style coups, the naive, uneducated angry young males will follow the bullies.
On April 5th, millions of us will be protesting across the nation. My sense of it is that it will be heavily attended by "mature" adults. Not the ones who listen to Joe Rogan. His followers may be the counter protesters. A battle of generations, if you will.
I have been mystified by the amount of support hate has been given. But I think the country has betrayed its youth. The ways are many and complex to include primarily a lack of hope for the future. It has been an American truism that with hard work, the next generation would be more prosperous than the previous one. Not anymore.
Which sets the stage for the blame game that Republicans are especially good at. But we are all to blame. For eons, a young person could develop a trade or skill and use it to work at an employer (or two) for a lifetime. Then retire with a pension - not rich - but combined with Social Security, a modicum of comfort and security.
Now, technology is moving faster than a person can complete a resume. To work at the same place for more than two or three years can be a sign of a lack of ambition. And even if one were to hang at the same company for a while longer, he/she/they would probably feel the ax as the place is gobbled up by another and the inevitable (previously denied) thinning of the ranks occurs. "RIF" has been trending for some time now. Think Blue Star Airlines, "Greed is Good". Private equity vampires on the prowl.
My Dad worked for the same company (with a brief hiatus of a year or two) from the time he returned from fighting Nazis until retirement. I started with a local company when I was 18 - stayed until I was 46 when they succumbed to overwhelming competition by a national firm. They taught me, cultivated me, promoted me. It was paternalistic. The loyalty flowed both ways.
Now. Go to college because that is the ticket. But by the time you are a grad, the field you thought you liked is either morphing into something you dislike or vanishing altogether to automation and/or AI. And you owe a shitload of money.
If I were to be 18 again, I would become a plumber. But I would be selective as to the podcasts I'd listen to. I'd lean towards the ones that talk about kindness, fairness, empathy, science, democracy, and yes: Diversity and Equity and Inclusion! And of course, History. Because we seem to be woefully ignorant of such right now. It's really irritating, isn't it?
Plumbing requires knowledge of physics, math and engineering and knowledge of local codes. It is also hard on one's knees and shoulders. The electrical trade is kinder to your body. But, when a fella stands back and looks how clean and thoughtful he has plumbed a boiler room, that is pretty gratifying, I must say.
I think a serious heartbreak began as I started to listen to the Native people I have been fortunate enough to meet in Maine through my work. They tell me that the whole mass genocide paradigm, complete with all of the necessary apparatus … the record keeping, the death machinery, the experiments and eugenics, the portability of the horror, all come from here in the US. Its modern expression is a wholly US Made export. We wonder why we have problems.
I think we need an entirely new system in the West - and we're very far away from getting there - a form of sortition democracy with direct involvement of people into their own governance would be preferable, I think. But first it would need to recognise and accept of who we really are as nations - most of us - in Australia as much as Canada and the US - are descendants of white Europeans who went around the world murdering and pillaging at their heart's content - we built our nations on ruthless and brutal genocides - we never were the "good guys", we just got comfortable in our role as oppressors and lied ourselves a nice history together.
Once you accept that for yourself, it makes it much easier to really listen to other points of view, eg Russia's or China's, even if you don't agree with them.
This is a perfect description, Michael! Project 2025 as"... a carefully crafted and well articulated instruction manual on how to erase all parity among people and enslave them (more firmly and permanently) to the oligarchy for all time using the very systems put in place to protect against this."
Welcome Michael. You'll find that this is a great little community here - not without it's 'moments' and trolls now and then, but they don't last long here.
A good friend here in Maine, who is a from-childhood bestie of Heather’s from Round Pond, brought me to her work when we met many years ago. I have been reading since, but subscribed and came to engage with you all when I discovered that I need to write as well.
Ditto Michael; I've been reading her since she began doing it on FB. Skeptical at first, especially considering the medium, I fact checked every footnote, attribution, etc. She always passed with flying colors, so now, she's become one of my 'North Stars.' Though I can scarcely afford the subscription, it's been necessary for my mental health and only thus justifiable. The community as you will find is welcoming and on the whole, very bright, welcoming, educated. I'm humbled to be so welcome among them.
Sadly — frighteningly sadly — IT IS! But what’s probably much, more frighteningly sadder is the number, the size of the American population and especially of its legally registered voters who have no clue as to what "Mein Kampf" is and/or those who’ve likely never heard it!
The problem Democrats seem to have is that they/WE give the voting and non-voting American populace too much credit…by-and-large trump and his party recognize the degree of ignorance of the American electorate and populace and they aren’t afraid to exploit it…WAKE UP DEMOCRATS!!! People remember, FOX is primarily for entertainment — not news and HCR has enlightened us to that fact!
“Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.” So says, David Pepper an Ohio Democrat. Good man, Pepper, I guess, but I don’t know who he’s talking about. This is what a 15-point majority of white voters, a 40-point majority of white working class voters, and a 60-point majority of white evangelical voters voted for. On purpose.
Not directly, but magats are fine with that as long as Republicans continue to deliver on their promise to step up the persecution of people magats don’t like. Republicans have made their living since 1968 by making good on that promise. That gets them 70% of white working class votes and makes it possible for Republican honchos to pursue their primary goal of shifting more and more wealth to people who are already obscenely wealthy.
If they didn't, they obviously voted wilfully ignorant, which is probably not better - just exchanges malice with profound stupidity. Although - thinking about the only strong MAGA supporter I know personally - my cousin in Tennessee - there it's malice.
It's going to be interesting - over the next couple of months I'll have first a couple from California staying at my Airbnb, then one from Texas - I just hope none of them are MAGAs!
With full-blown coup underway, who now owns the United States?
That’s the Q America’s longest-held allies have been asking, as all now seek new and newly-funded national security and military alternatives.
Heather spoke to this, to whom the country now belongs, yesterday, March 28. In shocking detail, she concluded it’s being turned over to: 1) the U.S.’s billionaire oligarchs, 2) Silicon Valley techies, also billionaires, and 3) the embitterment making MAGA of the tens of millions of former working-class Americans who saw their jobs offshored and communities destroyed by still other tranches of billionaires.
Heather left out Putin and his hate-filled, jewelry-bedecked eastern orthodox priests. She left out Netanyahu and his equally hate-fueled, far-right settlers. Mohammed bin Salman and his murder squads. Xi and his communist cadres who took on, thank-you, many millions of those former U.S. working class jobs.
She left out, too, the world’s biggest vortex of vulgarities: all the owners of standardized testing who first killed humanities in U.S. schools and then began its neutered, depersonalized juggernaut of packaging, abstracting, categorizing, and labeling worldwide.
Maybe in the near short term a few remaining decent U.S. Republicans can team with Dems, staunch the coup.
But in the long term there’s no health till we restore the world’s schools – infuse all again with humanities, open anew to the writing of essays seeing “others.”
Not just the schools though. For too long we have waited for our kids to save us from our own failures; even though they are obviously vital to a worthwhile future. We the people need to work on our humanity. We the people need to work on a society we would be happy to bequeath for posterity to build on. Not just a compulsive rat race to the bottom.
Obviously, Trump never learned anything in school, he surrounds himself witty people who are as ignorant as he is, some of whom attended prestigious schools, and he and his cronies want people who are taught not to question things. Destroying the department of education will ensure this happens, and it will lead to neglect of students with special educational needs.
When future generations study this time they will be baffled and weirdly amused by the fact that the person leading the charge in tossing out support for special needs kids is one of the neediest on the planet.
Imagine yourself a grade school teacher and you are cursed with having little Donnie in your classroom. He can't read (dyslexia or something else). He won't use a pencil or pen - just dull sharpies. He won't use the laptop or tablet provided by the school. He insists on staring at and tapping his phone. You let him do that a lot because when he isn't on his phone he is bullying and/or mocking his classmates.
Again. This gets so little attention. We have a president who doesn't read or use a computer. He doesn't read his briefings. He watches TV and launches insults on his phone. He is a broken child. All made worse by the love withheld by his brutal parents - hence his pathetically desperate need for attention - ANY kind of attention - no matter how awful.
Decades from now, won't they ask why would so many Americans vote for such a painfully handicapped individual? What does that say about the needs or mentality of people living in this time?
It's complicated. For the most part, I'd follow the money.
What seems to me a hallmark of a civilized society is in the degree of management of abuses of power. As I would not be a slave I would not be a master. Those who counsel restraint of abuses of power tend to be mocked by those less so inclined. Some of the most salient of peacemakers even killed. I still say follow the money, and the other sorts of power that go with it.
Actually - I find the indisputably smart ones of the MAGA \ GOP movement even worse - like Stephen Miller etc, even worse because they are truly malicious. Musk is probably as well, just hard to tell because he's an autistic moron as well (by now I don't care about p.c. much anymore - he is a stuttering, embarrassing, autistic moron)
Do republicans even care about their children and grandchildren ? Do they expect to jump on a muskrat shuttle and move to Mars when they destroy this planet? The environmental destruction alone makes the future questionable. Back to rivers on fire, pesticides in food and dangerous air quality?
Most of them think they'll be fine, don't accept climate change, and only think bad things will happen to "those people." They likely weren't ever taught about pollution and the Clean Air Act.
I think it is more about social isolation. Despite his claims, I doubt you would even run into Clarence Thomas is a Walmart, of see Harlan Crow in the bleachers at a game. A fair sample of billionaires already prepping for the apocalypse their extractions seem likely to trigger. I think that they suppose that they will always have the opportunity to purchase what ever remnants of nice may remain; the last pleasant microclimate, the last of the strawberries. I'm sure that Trump does.
Re "For too long we have waited for our kids to save us from our own failures": you want to tell me exactly how those kids are going to bail us out when all they do, 24 hours a day, is sit hunched over their "screens"?! An ATOM BOMB could go off 2 miles away and they wouldn't miss a beat in their numbingly-mindless, round-the-clock texting!
Good teachers never see negative sides of kids as final givens.
Key is modeling. If a teacher models particular behaviors, many more kids will trust trying that. If a teacher cites a good novel (very old or very new), and puts it in apt contemporary context -- as suitable for some kids also in the class, given their personal themes and interests -- that novel will be more attractive for more to try.
Many teachers, however, have this imaginative curiosity beaten out of them by the black hole death trip of standardized testing. Rather as, in public life, monsters such as Trump want to beat out democracy, and decency, from the lives of Americans. And push instead weird combos of the goofus, the vengeful, and the criminal.
"Good teachers never go cynical." I love that! Thanks, Phil.
A college professor I read about has his students put their cell phones in their backpacks for class. The students who talk to him report being very happy about it, and pleased with how it lifts their engagement. The professor says that 100% of students that he talks with want to be on their phones less.
I think the question is more - why should they bother bailing the older generations out? They'll have enough on their plate to get their own lives sorted, they've no obligation to bail anybody out.
That's it. Musk has telegraphed his plan by talking about moving the SS system to a new version. He's nuts if he thinks it can be done quickly, unless he's planning on setting it up so he can steal from it. The war is on.
So, by trade, I am a software developer, and very specifically, my niche is infrastructure and "glue" and special projects around those things.
When he bought Twitter, he made a lot of absolutely stupid choices and said a lot of things that really demonstrated that his success has been entirely around hiring people smarter than he is. He said things that anyone with the not-even-a-decade I have in my field would immediately recognize as wrong, uselessly vague, or so hilariously misguided and not-even-looking-at-best-practices that it became incredibly apparent that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing. This is what happened at PayPal as well, and that's a whole other story.
Fun fact: a good COBOL developer can command incredible salaries. I know a few in my circles who make 300K+. It's a specialized language at this point.
Their reasoning for this is that it's "efficient" and that the government should be run like a business. Do you know who else uses COBOL extensively and would be *extremely* sensitive to efficiency gains? Banks. The basis of the checking/direct deposit system has historically been COBOL.
The only people who think that transition can be done in months are people who don't know what they're doing. An actual army of coders couldn't get through that project in a few months.
Musk is where he is because he used his dodgy family's dodgy fortune in dodgy Conflict Gems and Blood Diamonds to buy companies built by others, then run them out and claim credit for himself. he didn't even finish any of the schools he attended. At best, he's a mediocre coder, not the Chief Engineer of anything. What he is, is a takeover artist.
His sociopathy and narcissism enables him to promote himself as a genius. Trump shares the same narcissism and sociopathy, and he’s constantly bragging about his own presumed intelligence, Trump is actually very ignorant, and no one can convince him otherwise. John Kelly and Rex Tillerson learned that first hand when serving in his first maladministration.
I think Trump is ignorant by choice. Having bales of cash allowed him to skate as a lazy fake. He is good at pitching snake oil, and the modern GOP has a lot of it to sell.
I see a glimmer of some practical talent in him, but like many of his ilk, his principal talent seems to be having been born rich. He is for sure a wealthy takeover bully.
I think it might be called throw in some experimental AI, close the lid, and see what happens. And what could possibly go wrong for a gazillionaire, with absolutely no accountability to the public? Anyway, some other gazillionaires were talking about it and thought it might be fun to try.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Muskrat wants to get the credit, but he wants a free hand to take the credit for the work his employees do and treat them like garbage. That is why he uses H1B workers, as they are essentially indentured servants who can’t leave his companies and will lose their visas if they try. He and Trump talk trash about their critics, but don’t like it if their targets call them out on their own faults.
Thanks Sidney... Having participated in Platform Transitions as well, 'Cranking Code' is the easiest part... Elon Musk has sold MAGA that his xAI platform can Revolutionize the USG to the ill-informed... It is the data-interfaces, and testing that are the hardest... Seems that Musk's transition timeline was hallucinated during one of his Ketamine Benders... If Elon Musk walks away from this in May, he will not look back, or be held accountable for the Deep Damage that Elon Musk has inflicted on Us.... We will be used as Crash Test Dummies like Tesla Cars...
Thank you to HCR for doing the hard work and presenting the information in a way that sparks intelligent dialogue and discourse. Thank you Apache and Sydney for your insights into the coding world. It helps me wrap my head around this whole topic.
Testing is the success or failure of any system. If you can’t even write your own code and need the AI to do it for you then you have no clue how to test.
Thanks Sharon... There is an Art to Testing, and reaching Predictability... Teslas may be the most Recalled Cars... They usually only Serviceable at Tesla Dealers... Their After-Market worth is plunging... SpaceX Rockets blow-up alot... The 'Starship' Rocket which Elon hopes will take him to Mars, is marginally more powerful than the 'Saturn-V' that took us to the Moon, and is a lot less reliable... The 'Saturn-V' was designed, and tested using SLIDE-RULES!!! Elon is mostly Marketing, and Salable Concepts... IMHO: He is a Genius only to the Uninformed...
Thanks Talia... Many Legacy USG Applications are IBM Cobol based... They have aggregated for Decades by Generations of Programmers.... That is what makes them so hard to replace... They can be composed of layers, and layers of Kluges... OBW: JAVA, which is IMHO, is the new COBOL...
Muskrat isn’t really that familiar with COBOL. If he had been, he would have learned that there are no people who are born 140 years ago who are getting social security. Social Security has little fraud, and investigators are always looking out for receipt of benefits in the name of dead people. What often tips them off is that the supposed recipients aren’t using Medicare. This involves an issue of dead payee fraud, where relatives claim the deceased person’s benefits. They eventually get caught and have to pay restitution and sometimes get probation or jail time. When my mother died, we filed a form with the Social Security Administration to notify them immediately.
When my mom passed, a simple phone call took care of it. The SS person on the line expressed sympathy, asked some simple questions, and it was done. Auto deposits stopped before the next payment went out and no restitution was owed. Case closed with empathy and efficiency. I wonder what would happen now.
When my father died, the funeral director notified Social Security. He died April 25 and they clawed back his entire April payment from his joint account with my mother.
Really, any time someone thinks that it's just a matter of writing code, you should ignore them. These are systems with decades of hardening and lessons learned.
I think the most illustrative thing is called Chesterton's Fence -- you shouldn't dismantle something until you know why it exists.
Thank you. I thought it was old and out of date. Sounds like old still is better. He is a moronic muskrat whose blastoff to Mars can’t come fast enough.
These systems aren't better because they're old. One of the biggest things I have to figure out as an engineer is "I can improve this thing, but is the juice worth the squeeze?"
These old mainframe systems are older than me most of the time, but they are built to be as absolutely rock-solid as is physically possible. On some of them, the odds of having a total failure of a transaction is something like picking a grain of sand on the other side of the world and waiting for someone to grab it and mail it to you. They are *extremely* reliable.
Even if a new system could be designed that would be perfectly reliable like these systems have been for decades, even if it performed better, even if it cost less -- how much better is it, really? If it's 5% better, is it really worth all the cost, frustration, and risk? Probably not.
I know well someone who worked for Musk. You are correct: he takes credit for the work, discoveries, innovations that his employees are responsible for creating and doing.
I suspect the point of all this is to make SSA so crippled and dysfunctional that Congress will vote to privatize it and put it in the hands of the financial analysts who will use it to make money for themselves and abandon those who have contributed throughout their careers and who have relied on it to be there for their retirement. Congress is so dysfunctional that they will not act in the public’s interest.
In 1979 they knew that SS would run out of money by 2036 but no one has the guts to get real about saving it because it will cost someone to pay more into it. Simply put, if they raise the cap on payroll taxes or eliminate the cap altogether, there would be plenty of money to cover everyone and possibly bring millions of children out of poverty. This is the thing that is so infuriating- we are a rich nation, we can afford to take care of everyone. But we don’t have the will to do it. It’s so disheartening. #taxtherich
Totally agree - but also the standard answer for people wanting to sell software developments "we can do that for you in this time for that dollars" and you better go and at least tripple the timeframe and double the dollar amount (if not more in a project like this) to come even close to a realistic quote.
I am so glad you (someone) is speaking up about this - another of Musk's massive wildfire actions destroying a company he purchased with his obscene wealth/resources. His takeover of Twitter was brutal and rife with deleterious consequences. It absolutely predicted the harms of giving him power over Trump (who isn't interested in the JOB of President, just the power, greed and Immunity from prison.) It sickens me that so many of their actions will result in actual deaths! I can't even bear to continue my comment...
There is a reason why they all think it's so easy. They have no idea what is involved. Most of these are kids who think because they wrote a CRUD app they're gods of the universe, they've never actually had to deal with anything more annoying that sharding a database, they don't know how to do real bleeding engineering.
A business that consistently rips out battle-hardened code is a business that is going to fail. All of that business logic encodes *thousands* of rules and regulations and needs and, most importantly, lessons.
Unfortunately, there's a *lot* more to this than just backups. The infrastructure is an absolute nightmare for these systems, and changing any of it is going to be horrid.
If indeed Elon gets his crew to begin this project, it actually won’t take so very long. The notion that it would take a long time is premised on an expectation of the goals.
Consider the course we find ourselves on. If one wants to sack Rome, by way of example, why should it take much time at all? If the goal were to dump many trillions of dollars into Wall Street, the niceties of engineering go by the wayside.
Just think of all the new friends one could make by that bold maneuver. If anyone believes this administration is aiming for improved performance, they could possibly pay a bit closer attention.
True, yes. An actual migration would be years, to clarify, but this is pretty much exactly how you'd do it if you were a) an idiot surrounded by sycophants or b) a jackass surrounded by sycophants.
One of Elon's "products was a $500 junior "flamethower" name "Not a Flamethower"; not the military kind anyway) that emitted a gigantic jet of flame, of which he sold something like 20,000. Tesla was an existing company Musk took over, but the (not) flamethower sounds like the essential Musk.
Seems to be a web that weaves in and out of many critical areas. Meaning that it can do max damage. But then, damage is the goal. I expect such a mess that people (some) will welcome muskrat’s redoing the whole thing. With their power in mind. Just like the reason they are firing so many is to replace them with MAGAts. I think the vetting for “their” people started before Jan 20. Thank you for enlightening us, although the computer world left me behind when the tower became a thing of the past. Still interested though.
I don't know the full complexities about these systems, but even in my industry, where we are doing things much less vital than SSA does, it's so easy to miss a downstream effect. We are doing things that have fewer rules, fewer requirements, less impact on daily life, and we still test and step things in slowly. I have had projects that were maybe a few hundred lines of code overall, but still took months for validation, testing, understanding.
They'll be the ones getting hurt if they aren't careful. There's a lot of pissed off people and the number grows daily. The Tesla demonstrations are only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone paying attention can hear the angry grumbling getting louder.
Yes, I was thinking - so far we haven't really heard much from the business world, which doesn't only consist of megalomaniac Silicon Valley nut jobs. I wonder when they will wake up and hopefully stand up against the growing fascism.
"SSS" The Steal of SS. That's the plan. They want to be able to stop the payment of Social Security beneits to selected "enemies" with a simple push of a button anywhere in their government.
I just don’t understand how he can unilaterally make these decisions! Aren’t there people in government who can stop this? Go to the courts for an injunction? Don’t these decisions to overhaul a working system require more input and decision making? Where is the challenge to this insanity? We the people can protest but I don’t see where marching in the streets can save Social Security when the damage will already be done. Proactive Legal action and pushback needs to happen. Seems like there is just a lot of hand-wringing
James, I was debating what to put on my "Hands Off" sign. Until I read about Musk's moving the SS system off COBOL to something else. Of course, that could and should have been accomplished - carefully - years ago. But Congress wouldn't spend the money - kicked the can down the road.
And TC is correct, Musk is no genius. A junior in high school would know how challenging such a switch would be. Musk is a buyer and a user and a bully who is too stupid and too impatient to know how little he knows. And he shares a mental illness with $Trump. He doesn't care who or what he hurts. They are like Sherman tanks plowing through a Pottery Barn.
I'll be in a Boston suburb. My sign will say "Hands Off Social Security" on one side. The other will be: "Elon Musk - You Are Fired!"
Destroy it is the goal. And of course, tell all us “gullibles” that he is improving it. Guess COBOL and those 150 year old recipients stung and made him look like a fool instead of a genius. Carefully planned chaos, never doubt it for a nanosecond
A very good network engineer that I know, when praised for a successful network cutover on the first try, stated that it was because he’d tested it and the first five SIMULATED test cutovers failed. I don’t expect that kind of testing with the Social Security system with Muskrat at the helm, so we need to expect the realtime failures.
They don't care if they collapse it. We're getting ready for the probability of having erratic or no SS deposits. We can survive that, but millions can't.
Resist! Hands Off protest April 5 nationwide. Go to Indivisible or Mobilize.us for one near you if you can’t get to Washington DC. I am going with my daughter and her partner to TWO that day, one at our County Seat and one at our worthless congressman’s office. We need to peacefully protest in huge numbers! If you’re disabled, you can make calls or share protest info, or even donate a small amount to Democracy Forward, Indivisible, or the ACLU.
Just one letter. One damn letter amongst a hundred or more other letters. And in every single one the news gets worse. There were so many things in THIS letter that I wanted to respond to, I started taking notes.
After I filled a page, I gave up. . .
So here's a precis:
1) The stock market drops - again. What's happening to people's 401's? Don't MAGAS have them? Or don't they care when their pensions disappear?
2) The SS system is being "redesigned" - by AI! Oh, great. AI currently works even less well than Musk's self crashing - sorry, driving, cars. The SS offices already take TWO HOURS to get through to - what's it going to be like after "The Great Awakening"?
3) Musk steps down from DOGE in May - "to avoid financial disclosure." So we don't get to see what he's made from our taxes? And who will run DOGE AFTER he leaves? Another Kindergarten Kid?
4) They're using USAID a s a "test case" to see if trump can shuffle even more power into his grubby little hands. Nice choice of victim - the poor and starving of the world. Soft power, anybody? China? Russia? You want to step in?
5) Three cheers for Peter Marks, resigning rather than agreeing with Kennedy's Krazy. And three boos for Kennedy, for carrying on with the insane autism research.
6) Hegseth's nepo brother - anyone going to do anything about that? or will Pete just raise a glass to "Keeping it all in the family!"?
7) And finally Musk - again. Please, please, somebody - send him back to South Africa. Or El Salvador, I don't really care. To paraphrase Winston Churchill "Never, in the course of human history, has so much damage been done to so many people by so few."
And finally - thank you SO much, Heather, for keeping us all so well informed. If your work is exhausting to read, I can't imagine how tiring it is to research and write - every single day.
"More than 65 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits." Social Security is a special form of life insurance where beneficiaries contribute in advance real money in order to receive real money back later in life when it is needed. That benefit must be just as secure as the money in a bank savings account.
If the government takes that money away and spends it on other things it becomes nothing but a gang of bank robbers. If we cannot stop the robbery of our money what will they rob next? Our homes? Our children? The food we need to survive?
I don't know about the rest of you but I would put as much distance as I could between myself and the bank robbers and build as strong a defense against them as I could.
Social Security pays benefits to 3.2 million people that it thinks are 120+ years old. The oldest person in the USA that is alive is 114. Doge found this and is considering that these people are NOW Dead and their payments stop. Why did it take a Rocket Scientist to find this?? It was DOGE, not an SSA employee???
George-Please get you story straight. Social Security has a legitimate setup whereby in some cases of the death of the principle recipient a dependent that is handicapped and under the care of the "principle" will continue to receive benefits after the death of the SS recipient. BTW, I welcome clarifications of what I just said. I'm not an expert.
Elon Musk couldn't understand it at first, so don't feel bad. "Rocket scientists" at the intellect level of Mr. Musk can figure that out. Mr. Musk's scientific qualifications have more to do with the money part of it than the hardware. And he has a tendency to "shoot first" with his mouth and then learn later. Wealth seems to produce a degree of personal over confidence.
It is widely perceived to be a key element of U.S. “soft power.”
Germany was severely punished in the wake of WWI and we got Hitler. We launched the Marshall Plan after WWII, blunted Soviet influence and won a lot of friends. In Iraq we let Iraqis suffer and poured cash into boondoggles. That did not go nearly so well. Being the biggest bully has limitations in the long run.
Belle of the Ranch posted a video about the drop in consumer confidence today (Friday). If Trump's goal is to crash the economy - as well as the government as a functioning entity - then he is succeeding. Why he wants to crash the economy should be the question everyone is asking. (My answer: Because Putin has promised him the world if he does this)
Thanks Steve... Today's Stock Market Plunge?... Why are We Surprised? DJT is the Supreme Wealth Destroyer... DJT is Simple-Minded, and his Dementia is getting Worse... DJT has squandered Billions of $, and has filed for Bankruptcy 6-Times... In the year 2000, the USA had a Balanced Budget, and was slated to payoff the National Debt by 2010... Then came GWB, and his Forever-Wars, GWB's Tax-Cuts for the Wealthy, and DJT's Tax-Cuts for the Wealthy... The Wealthy own the Corporations thru their Funds, and Stock Holdings... DJT was a 'Successful Businessman' only in a Simple-Minded Fantasy Reality Show.... DJT is the Perfect Orange Puppet for Putin, and Musk... Putin wants to Destroy the U.S. led Western-Order, Musk wants to Pillage the USG for his own Ends... Note which Agencies have been Crushed by Musk... Keep an Eye on China... The Chinese play an extremely Long-Game, and they are are starting to Fight Back...
Argh, after viewing Belle of the Ranch’s very informative and timely video, i went down a rabbit hole. But. Thank you anyway because it led me to more information about just how corrupt the FASCIST Trump administration truly it is and how our allies are starting to view our country as unworthy because of P.I.G* sitting behind the resolute desk and his CLOWN CAR CABINET OF IGNORAMUSES. They are a disgrace and a mockery of leadership.
Thank you Dr HC Richardson, excellent article tonight (as always).
re: “DOGE is planning to move the SSA computer system off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system.” -HCR
I’ve had a job that has paid into SSA since I was 16 years old, and now that I am a retiree on SSA, this is where we say ‘WTF Let’s get a team of engineers in here, who will take responsibility and accountability PAST May 2025 to handle this project’.
We need to demand our Congress to say NO to Elon Musk’s wrecking ball breaking down the SSA’s COBOL system in the 60 days/2-month’s before he jumps ship on this project from Trump.
I found important details from the magazine ZDNET and link is below. Read this:
If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?
Feb. 21, 2025
Written bySteven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing
…”This problem isn't limited to just the Federal government. Forty-five of the 50 states and the District of Columbia still run COBOL systems.
COBOL excels at efficiently processing large volumes of business data.
Its syntax and structure are optimized for data manipulation and batch-processing tasks. The language is also great at organizing data and indexing it for fast, efficient operations. The result is a language that excels at data accuracy and reliability. That last quality has extended COBOL's life for decades.
However, the sheer volume of COBOL code that needs modernizing is daunting. Estimates range from 220 billion to 800 billion lines of COBOL code still in use today. Decades of accumulated code, inconsistent programming styles, a lack of documentation, and inconsistent standardization make understanding and porting these systems difficult. To add to the complexity, legacy COBOL applications often contain business logic and processes intricately woven into the code.
COBOL, the first computer language for writing application software, was developed by an enterprising Naval officer. She conceived the notion that computers, which IBM had just begun to market could be used for all kinds of tasks like tracking large inventories. IBM had zero interest in developing applications for its equipment. They felt there was no money in it and their strength was hardware.
COBOL is not really very efficient as things stand and applications tend to quickly begin to resemble a Rube Goldberg invention.
The ubiquity of COBOL in government and banking is primarily the result of several factors. First, it was at the time the only applications language. Second, there grew to be a large workforce fluent in it. Third, if you’ve spent a lot of money on something that has become monstrously complicated and it pretty much works, you don’t toss it out just so you can start over. Fourth, refer back to the large workforce of COBOL programmers that understand what the Rube Goldberg parts are doing. So a combination of inertia and practical wisdom is why no one can argue for a budget to tear things down and start over as if that was easy.
“Artificial Intelligence” at this point is still largely a marketing term used to attract billions of dollars of investment into speculative projects. At this point, not only does it not produce efficient code on a large scale, it is difficult to correct bugs.
It is clear to me that what Elon produces most efficiently is “spoof”. Quite likely he simply has more semen than sense. And his intentions are ugly.
Good points Bill Pierce, thanks for sharing. I’m not a computer programmer, but I worked on the deployment team when a specific healthcare company implemented the Epic digital software in their paper records to computer records and how much planning, training, support and unavoidable downtime that deployment took. We need help to not have our seniors lose their once-a-month SSA check.
Bill, “she conceived the notion … “, who is she? Was her name published? Just curious and excited that it was a woman doing this kind of work back in those days! Brava, lady, whoever you are.
They want to break SS and cause it to fail to deliver payments that it has been reliably able to deliver on time for years now. There is a lot of money sloshing around that gets sent out every month, the repugnantkins have always wanted to have access to that trough. It’s really quite simple, they want to be able to tap into that cash flow, even if they only siphon off 1%, and we would be dreaming if we thought it would be only 1%, it would still be an enormous sum, and we who have paid into it all of our lives would be paying for it. Once the checks stop there will be an uproar like we have never seen before, and that is also part of the plan. Putin has to be way beyond delighted, there is no way that russia could have accomplished this destruction of our society on their own, certainly not militarily, they needed an insider to destroy our government from within. They got their man, he’s in the WH, and our system of government is keeping him there while he does the russian’s work. He’s gambling that he and his family will avoid the fate of the Romanov’s, with 30 million assault weapons in the hands of Americans, I think that is a very bad bet. These people are beyond stupid and are totally driven by greed. 🤬🤬🤬
Your comment led me to ask a fairly obvious question: If the government was contacting this project for SSA, what would it expect and require. They would but out a request for proposals which would have a long list of requirements and expectations. They would likely require a lengthy descritption of a detailed study of the current system, then a description of what the propsal would accomplish and how. A likely component would be the development of recovery systems to insure that neither data nor functions are lost. Numerous proposals and bids would be submitted and the gov't would undertake a lengthy review of the many many submitted, and a final decision made to award the development of the system. That has not happened. No one knows what will be done, how it will work, or what protections will be provided. But then, DoGE seems to have taken on the system of air traffic control for itself well after it was awarded to another company (Verizon, I believe). We have moved from a system that safeguards the citizenry from many hazzards to one that moves fast and breaks things. No wonder we feel uneasy.
In the mid-90’s we had a system where C generated the COBOL because COBOL was the better language for just in time scheduling systems. Extremely efficient. My husband has coded in every language except COBOL, mostly operating systems stuff, and when we met he worked on the beginning end of a product and I worked on the final customer interface. We had no idea what each other did. Made for strange conversations. He never saw the final product.
Ricardo, not that I trust the DNC, mind you, but after seeing Ben Wikler's name cited by Heather, I recalled that "Oh, yeah. He ran for head of the Party. What's the name of the guy who beat him?" I couldn't remember, had to look it up. It's Ken Martin. Anybody heard from that guy recently? Perhaps it's because I've migrated away from legacy media that I've forgotten the guy ( but know Wikler's name as well as Martin's predecessor, Jaime Harrison.)
Hey, it's encouraging to hear that the open House seats in 2 of Florida's red districts are not gimmes, and that the Dem candidates are strongly challenging, so maybe Mr. Martin is doing his job.
Doug - if you follow Ken Martin on any social media platform you’ll see what he is doing - including convening town halls in R districts where the rep won’t hold one and more - do a little research
Mary, respectfully: do a little reading before telling me to do my research.
1. My last sentence admits he may be doing something. I was speaking more generally about name recognition, and the fact that Ben Wikler's name was one I know and respect -- I wasn't happy when the Dems chose Martin over him.
2. Social media? Why aren't we all boycotting most of it (excluding Bluesky)? The billionaires who own it are have revealed themselves to be trompy toadies and make more billions by selling ads on their platforms. I've never been on FB, left Twitter after you know who did you know what. I was on Threads for about a year or more until the post-election circular firing squads sickened me. I joined Bluesky but don't think I've even opened it (and please don't tell me that it's different -- I really don't care.) I'm only on Insta because I trade reels and photos with my kids.
Funny though about Martin's town halls in R districts: I'm a paid subscriber to The Guardian, Reuters, AP, NPR, as well as several substacks. I know all about Sanders' and AOC's rallies, but haven't seen anything memorable about Martin's.
Respectfully back to you - if you are saying I (meaning you) don’t know what Ken Martin is doing even though I (you) am (are) well informed from lots of different places - all I can say is that I too am well informed and use most of the same sources as you and I know what Ken Martin is doing - sorry to have hit a nerve! I certainly couldn’t get that context from your comment. Have a good day and I’ll avoid commenting when I feel people are shooting arrows inside the tent as opposed to staying focused on the enemy. Blame it on the lack of caffeine!
(And Mary, by the way, I don't consider myself as well-informed as many of the commenters I read on substack and in journalism. If it weren't for these daily readings and the occasional — used to be regular— watching of Rachel Maddow, I'd be much less informed; I'm grateful to have these resources as long as they're available.)
Cheers, Mary. My broader point (which I didn't even touch upon) is that we need everybody who is affected/disturbed/apoplectic/fearful/{insert other adjectives here} — those in Congress, those in the courts on either side of the bench or attorney tables, those in academia, in the pundit profession, political leadership, and each of us who consider ourselves the common folk to speak up/speak out, lead/follow, march, and otherwise demand action to be taken against the free fall of our democracy and our institutions. Ken Martin is just one. Perhaps he is doing all (and as well) that/as anybody in that position can. But if it takes arrows within the tent, let them fall where they may — leaders must lead, and I’m willing to follow. (And as to whether you struck a nerve with me, yes, you did, but I woke up grouchy! I normally don't lie awake in the middle of the night (EDT) awaiting Heather’s posts so that I can comment. I woke up, couldn't get back to sleep, and made the mistake of checking my phone.) Anyway, we are all in this together, as Ms. Vance says.
Ricardo, if referring to me I'm rarely optimistic about anything these days, but Ill take it as a compliment. Cheers, wherever in the world you are right now!
Stranded in a small port town in Northern Corsica. Strong winds canceled ferry back to Corsica where I was about to return rental car and take a flight to Paris. Forcast is very windy for days. And yes Doug, I meant optimistic as a compliment. 😁
Safe travels to you, Ricardo! I've only spent 3 ½ days in Paris, hope to return next year with my granddaughter, to whom I've promised a trip to London and am planning to take the Eurostar to Paris for a day or 2. I'm envious of your journeys!
Ricardo, I consider myself equally lucky. I brought my grandson, who is interested in our family history, to France during a school vacation 3 years ago when he was 13 to visit the villages in the Perche region where one-half of our ancestors came from, and spent the rest of the time travelling to Versailles, Brittany, the D-Day beaches, Mont St. Michel, Giverney, and finally Paris. I told my other 2 grandkids that I'd do the same for them, to a place they want to visit (within reason) when they turn 13. My granddaughter chose London because of Harry Potter as well as more serious literature, so that’s next year, and my youngest grandson (who just turned 9) has been fascinated with volcanoes for years and wants to go to Pompeii. Thankfully the 3 are spaced far enough apart that we can budget for it (although my wife, who has no sense of wanderlust whatsoever, chooses to stay home.)
DNC Chair,Ken Martin is in Florida this w-end campaigning for Josh Weil.
Ways to help Gay Valimont in FL-01 (Matt Gaetz’ former seat) and Josh Weil Fl-06.My Fl Senator,Randy Fine,is Weil’s opponent.Fine is extremely toxic and if elected,Congress will not be prepared for the likes of him.He makes fellow MAGAs look like Mother Teresa!
It has become evident that the Trump Regime is paying no attention whatsoever to the polls, approval ratings, or even to the concerns of Republican and MAGA voters are voicing at their own Town Halls. The Regime appears oblivious to the concerns of ordinary Americans regarding inflation, Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ Affairs, or even the equity markets.
This tells me that the Regime has no intention of running for re-election, or of holding any elections at all. It tells me that the Regime plans -- at a time of its own convenience -- to proclaim a National Emergency under which it intends to dispense with the rule of Law and the Constitution altogether. The Regime will claim that Congress is gridlocked by Democrat leftists and the Judiciary undermined by lunatic leftwing judges interfering with domestic and foreign and policy. The Supreme Court will obfuscate in the face of having no way to enforce rulings against the Regime even if it iso inclined.
The Trump juggernaut is in a position to sweep aside everything and simply declare themselves the law of the land. So, they can ignore the outrage and upheavals, the pain and misery, the chaos and uncertainty they are inflicting in the US and around the world.
All along, Trump has wanted three things:
1) Unbridled authority & power
2) Unlimited money
3) Absolute immunity
He currently has all three. And I blame the cowards of the MAGA Republicans plus the so-called Roberts supreme court for this dire situation.
My most extreme aggravation today was as a result of The White House order blathering about restoring “truth” to American history. As an ancient person who once studied American history at Cal, I can only say bunk.
A couple of years ago a friend and I visited the African- American museum. I could have spent all day. Fascinating! Looks like Cheeto has never visited and has it on the chopping block along with the Women’s museum. And the National Zoo!? Maybe Cheeto’s parents never took him.
Gail, at the risk of repeating myself, Donald's mother was a house cleaner. His father was a slumlord whose father was a pimp. Education and culture were foreign to the Trump family.
The only times any of these low-brow posers might have darkened the doors of a museum or other cultural center was for a fundraiser where they were desperate to rub shoulders with NYC aristocracy. They embarrassed themselves and didn't even know it.
Birthday time of year for me … and so a trip to the DMV in Topsham. I was there a couple of hours. People were so kind and careful with each other. An older couple joking about a crooked painting “I didn’t hang it!” the group of waiters laughing as an examiner lost track of her teen charge “I can’t take the test without you!” What I am saying is we are still here, at least in Maine. Kindness is on the rise. It is an act of rebellion.
And thank you, Heather, as always … such difficult and necessary work.
Muskrat thinks empathy is the downfall of western civilization. I strongly disagree with him. It’s the only thing that keeps us from total collapse under attacks from barbarians like Musk and Trump,
He is the most deluded man on the planet. Chump seems to have a sliver of recognition that he is a phony, but muskrat has a confidence that can only come from his core. He actually said that he is one of the “good guys.” He doesn’t know why so many people hate him. He has almost shedded any reality. He is evil and has no idea. Chump has an idea, me thinks. As to Vance, thought he was just an opportunist. But one with an under belly of Nazi ideology. A fault in every Republican these days.
Heather writes- "Makena Kelly of Wired reported today that billionaire Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change."
Having worked and managed hundreds of IT projects and observed hundreds of others, this is absolutely 100% going to fail. The question isn't "if it will", but "when it will". And how are we going to feed, house and clothe the tens of millions of people/families that rely on their SS funds when the money doesn't come.
The first and most important part of a conversion is the analysis and planning of the project. This process includes users that understand the business and the people that are familiar with ALL of the peripheral systems as well as IT.
One of the clients I worked for issued anywhere from 4-10 new products every year. They had 3 administration systems and 5 insurance companies that all had to be modified to support each new product. 27 different peripheral systems were involved in the process and the users and agents had to be trained on the new products and how to administer them. They had the process down to a science and it still took about 5 months to roll a new product out the door.
Musk is a delusional moron who knows virtually nothing about the SSA database and the programs. Him and his little DOGE boys are going to fuck this up. And then they will blame Biden and all of the bobble heads in Congress and the Administration will agree that it's all the Democrats fault.
Trump/Musk have been defunding food banks and school cafeterias right and left for months now, so it is going to fall on ALL OF US to insure that no one starves to death or becomes homeless due to the fucking Republicans.
Causing chaos in SSA is the whole point of introducing a new system.
I think that's the strongest possibility George.
I do beleive it's true! Mangey Musk understands what kind of crap he's pulling w/ the computer system.
Gary, I know. This is the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The titanic is tilting as the band strikes up a tune. My admonishment call on the good generals to save up failed for some unknown reason. Now, Dante’s Inferno awaits. I’m a pessimist by nature so maybe I wrong. Reaching for biblical metaphor, perhaps this will be a Noah’s Flood and a rebirth after the dove flies by after the storm. But the rains will wash away and the suffering will be monumental.
Bill Katz, End Time ideology is definitely at play here. David Troy wrote an interesting observation of this yesterday in his America2.0news article “Why ‘Signalgate’ Marks Our Decent into End Time Ideology”. He writes: “… The Confluence of End Times Ideas
This all might be easier to counter if there was just one ideology in play, but there are several converging at once. Regular readers of America 2.0 know that we have been documenting these parallel forces and how they are pulling us towards a moment of reckoning. Those forces include:
Russia's war in Ukraine: Russia sees this war as a broader conflict with the entire Western world.
Project Russia: Kremlin books that outline a detailed rationale for the eventual and inevitable fall of the godless West, as a byproduct of 'decadent' democracy and capitalism.
Threat of Nuclear Annihilation: Belief that all earthly conflict is destined to ultimately erupt into nuclear conflict.
Fiat Currency vs. Cryptocurrency + Gold: Russia and Christian Nationalists see the dollar as fundamentally corrupt and would prefer to replace it with gold and crypto, to curb American dollar hegemony.
Network State Movement: Movement to break down nation states into a disaggregated bundle of 'startups' and through that process birth new countries, competing as fiefdoms for the 'business' of citizens who can exercise 'exit' rights to choose between them.
White Supremacy and Nazi ideology: Belief that a return to traditional ideology will lead to racially pure ethnostates and elimination of harmful races, religions, and ideologies. See also Kali Yuga and the Yuga cycle, a cyclical theory of history from Hinduism borrowed by the Nazis.
US Debt Ceiling and Default: The idea that US sovereign debt is a "sin" that requires an eventual reckoning, vs. the more pragmatic view that it represents investment through the monetary supply that has not yet been taxed out.
Deep State vs. MAGA/DOGE: Envisions dismantling the government as a solution to an ever-growing and bureaucratic "nanny state."
Theosophy and the Return of 'Maitreya': The idea that Matreiya, the final Buddah, will return to Earth to impart wisdom and help establish Shambhala as paradise on earth.
Teilhard, Vernadsky, and the Noosphere: The theory that the Earth would evolve into a higher level of consciousness and develop a Noosphere, a manifestation of that global consciousness.
Libertarian Exit (Galt's Gulch): The idea that anti-state libertarians will exit from society, thus remaking it; Ayn Rand borrowed this idea in Atlas Shrugged as "Galt's Gulch."
Woke vs. Traditionalism: A biblical conflict between worldviews to secure the final victory of traditional culture.
Thalassocracy vs. Tellurocracy: Prominent in the writing of Aleksandr Dugin, a civilizational conflict between seafaring and agricultural societies.
Battle of Gog vs. Magog: Another Dugin fetish, lifted from the Book of Revelation — the end times battle between the forces of Christ and the Antichrist.
TESCREAL ideologies: the technological destiny of mankind as seen through Transhumanism, the Singularity, and our transition into a spacefaring species.
Wikileaks vs. Five Eyes: Application of cyberlibertarian dogma to the practice of intelligence, and the assertion that 'leaking' is preferable to secrecy.
'Anonymous' vs. Organized Protest: Posits that anonymous, unaccountable, hive-mind emergent organization is preferable to explicit, accountable organized protest.
Charismatic Christianity vs. Secular Society: Assertion that loosely defined notions of generic "Christian" faith carry more value than secular "Godless" ways of being.
Hegelian synthesis: Hegel's idea that thesis and antithesis would, through dialectics, give way to synthesis, an evolution towards a new kind of understanding.
Seven Mountains Dominionism: Belief that charismatic Christians will eventually capture the "seven mountains" needed to control society, culture, and government.
UFO cults and "disclosure": Belief that truth about alien species and UFOs will be disclosed, altering humanity's perception permanently.
Opus Dei: Catholic cult intent on obtaining full control of the Church and other organs of power, including government.
Fourth Turning: Widely debunked pseudohistorical theory popularized by William Strauss & Neil Howe (and promoted by Steve Bannon) that asserts that civilization is governed by a fixed generational pattern, and that a "Fourth Turning" (period of chaos) is imminent.
Israel and Armageddon: Dispensational belief among some Evangelical Christians that events in Israel and Palestine will bring about Armageddon, the return of Christ, and the final rapture.
In common across all of these is prophecy about some future time when the foretold will be realized. The ideologues who have captured our government believe that future is happening now — and it's impossible to overstate the danger we are in. They believe they have permission to follow their own rules — which they are making up on the fly.”
Oh shit, I need a fricken drink and I don’t drink much.
I've had that response for months now and I haven't had a drink in 39 years.
Because of a medication, I now eschew alcohol. However, should certain people drop dead or be killed in some way, i intend to have a wee dram of single malt, neat. I have a good supply so will not be have to pay tariffs.
I never eschew it. I just eswallow it.
Moi aussi - my Lagavulin supply should last 4 years (as a light drinker) but not sure my sanity will.
In 2018 when he proposed tariffs on French wine, I went to Costco the next morning and bought a bald dozen cases of the best Bordeaux for $7 a bottle and I sorry I didn’t take the whole pallet.
Fascinating list of belief systems! Here's the rub that I see: when people die, many see it as part of God's plan but 'engineering' a death is a no-no, i.e. it's considered murder or suicide. I wonder how God (assuming such a being exists) would see the 'engineering' of the End Times that is happening.
Check; I agree. If you've noticed, over and over again I've pointed out to folks that "OiD" is only a 'tool' in all this - hell he's just happy to stay out of jail and debt long enough to thumb his nose at the justice system and laws. I haven't gone into great detail as you have, but I regularly remind folks that it's not just cfg, it's way bigger, it is indeed a coalition - the vilest coalition ever imaginable. Bravo friend....
This is a good accounting for why current MAGA Republicans are ideologues following at least one if not several of these end times fantasies, and not true conservatives who look to see what works in human nature and make gradual changes for improvement. They all also completely lack a growth mindset.
Conservatives? There are no longer any conservatives in the Republican Party. That ended with Reagan when the plundering of the national treasury began. The wealthy have siphoned $37 trillion out of the economy and they hunger for more. They lose sight of the fact that they are billionaires only because of the masses. If the U.S. population were only 3.3 million instead of 330 million, there would be no billionaires.
Well said. Now I will say a few things that I will be thoroughly chastised for. If I do something wrong I ask myself what was it that I did wrong. So I ask us collectively what was it that we did wrong? And there is plenty. We have used or allowed forces to divid us even though we have always been divided. I refuse to name the issues because I will only get critized. One issue I will state is Biden’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and stop hundreds of thousands from running over hot sands. And I am not unsympathetic to the needs of the dispossessed. But I am first an American. And I was 100% in favor of stopping illegal border entries. And Trump took full advantage of it. So would I if I had been running. Anytime I ask why the Trump vote, it’s always border border border. I mention in my book how ancient Egyptian pharaohs often had the noses of previous rulers smashed off because they believed cutting the air flow even to a statute ended the leaders force. In essence, this is one reason I believe Biden didn’t want to follow in the footsteps of Trump. Yes this is simplified but it’s my understanding of events.
Biden and Harris DID do a lot to stop illegal immigration from the top countries (Venezuela and Guatemala and I forget the 3rd) of 2022. They had a multi-pronged approach that wasn't solely focused on the border. Immigration dropped by well over half, maybe 75+% though I don't remember numbers well. I even recall seeing 90% bandied about after the introduction of the asylum appt. app that kept migrants in Mexico or their home countries until their appointment. (Trump canceled that program after completely missing its efficacy.) Then, other countries replaced the top 3 and numbers increased again. Meanwhile, Trump had so decimated the border staffing and especially the asylum judges, that it took time to clear the backlog as well as handle new arrivals. What we need is legislative change to restrict asylum laws. But Republicans blocked all efforts so they could run on their version of "border failure" and the lie about "immigrant crime." (Immigrant crime is far lower than native born crime.)
Trump appealed to those among us who are racists, misogynists, xenophobes and homophobes. They were poisoning our blood. Trump's support is principally from the bigots. The immigrants were and are a great benefit to us. Germany, Scandinavia and Japan should have our luck. We had the strongest economy in the world at the end of Biden's term in office. The MAGATS didn't know this because Fox never revealed it, though the Wall Street Journal (4-14-2024) and the other news media did.
"One issue I will state is Biden’s reluctance to follow in the footsteps of his predecessor and stop hundreds of thousands from running over hot sands. And I am not unsympathetic to the needs of the dispossessed." I'm calling bullshit on that mixed message.
It’s opinion time.
Gary, you are so right. I was in IT from the early 70s until my retirement. Generally, people have no idea (nor should they, really) of the intensely complicated nature of a system of the age and size of the SSA system.
It is probably near 50 million lines of COBOL. It is organized in tens of thousands of modules. Over its life there have been dozens of approaches to writing and organizing COBOL code. Some of the coding styles are no doubt mysterious and teasing out the logic can be the work of weeks. (I once inherited maintenance of a commercial loan system. Some previous programmer had written a module containing 200 undocumented, nested if-then-else statements. It took me a month to re-write the module, test and install it. And I was pretty good back then. Half of that time was just teasing out all the logic).
Maintenance and further development of the code has been in the hands of generations of programmers and analysts, thousands of them, some great, some poor. System documentation—english explanations of what the code is doing—is no doubt great in a few places, absent in many, and on average, rather poor.
The approach Musk wishes to try, if tried, say, in a bank, would literally put the bank out of business. Bank regulators would issue lifetime bans from the banking industry to all execs and managers involved.
A bank I once worked for tried just this approach in one of its subsidiaries, a former finance company that had evolved into a subprime mortgage unit. They got what they deserved, with a $100 million out-of-balance situation, thousands of payments that couldn’t be applied, mortgages that just disappeared, and big-name outside corporate auditors who threatened to disavow the bank’s looming annual report if the loss wasn’t charged off against earnings.
To even float this idea reveals (to those of us who really know what these issues are) how complete a fool Musk is. Enormous ego, willing to risk the livelihoods of millions completely unnecessarily. This won’t be just an empty rocket blowing up in the stratosphere. This will be an explosion that strikes at the heart of 70 million seniors.
My Social Security payments go directly to my checking account. The last two have come in right on time. In fact, I don't need that money. I live simply and I have no debt. But what about those for whom these payments are an absolute necessity? I am livid beyond description that a billionaire would do this to anyone, and in particular those living from hand to mouth. It's obscene and cruel.
Tom, I'm sure you've seen this. The “six phases of a project” have been jocularly described as:
1. Enthusiasm,
2. Disillusionment,
3. Panic,
4. Search for the guilty,
5. Punishment of the innocent, and
6. Praise and honor for the nonparticipants.
I don't see anything that Musk/Trump participate in having "Praise and honor for the nonparticipants" because they all end in failure.
And I agree. Musk is a fool and a narcissist just like Trump.
I just retired this week, but I worked for a life insurance company that installed SAP without the help of any existing users or programmers with experience on the current GL systems. There were at least a dozen people with the expertise to assist with the project and they chose to do it with outside consultants that knew nothing about the current GL and very little about SAP. They implemented the system 3 years ago and they are still finding problems. Ultimately, they fired the project manager and most of the people that worked on the project, but not until months after 6. Praise and honor for the participants and none for the nonparticipants.
Love the six phases…
And yet with the Brains in charge of SSA Payments did not update to later technology. In fact, the oldest American is 114 years old. The idiots currently running SSA are sending checks to 3.2 million people in the system thinking they are 120+ years old. So you still don't see the need for DOGE?????
Completely wrong. By law, Social Security can’t make payments to anyone over 115 years old. There are 48 million people on the Social Security rolls who are over 100 years old because SSA has never received a death notice, but according to a 2014 audit, none of these people have applied for benefits and none are receiving them.
Did you just make this up, or did you get this from some MAGA crack-brain?
George. Don't drink the Musk/Trump kool-aid. The moronic DOGE boys were only looking at the database and not at the actual payment programs or the age of people that actually get paid.
Many of us here have been in one to many IT projects and realize the myriad lies they are telling us about all of the systems.
If the SSA tried to run their payment programs on the hardware available in 1995 it would take about 20 times as long to run a single program and all of the payments would be on hard-copy checks.
I know about 20 different computer language that run on 5 different hardware platforms from COBOL to JAVA. Without Moore's law we would be living in a completely different world.
Where can I find that information? What is your source?
I think it came from Trump's speech when he was quoting more Musk misinformation. I'm assuming your asking George?
Anyway, see the SOTU speech or whatever it's called the first year a Prez is in office. He lies over and over again including the gaslighting about the SSA database. Keep in mind, it's the programs that check age and birthdates, not the data base.
It's like everything he's done. Make these incredibly impossible to achieve goals, then backtrack when they don't happen. Over and over and over. Anyone who thinks he's so smart, isn't very smart themselves. This will be a disaster for all those relying heavily on SS and SSI payments.
Unfortunately the majority of those people don’t have the ability to survive even a month without their checks. I hit the age when I just automatically converted from disability to regular social security. Thank goodness because I’m sure they’ll be dropping people off disability first and say you have to prove some extreme circumstances to get it.
I'm trying to even imagine this scenario- a large amount of people in this country in sudden crisis- unable to pay for food, medications, utilities, and rent or mortgages. Would it be worse than 1929 and the years that followed? Not hard to imagine is the response of this administration and congress. In the immediate aftermath, it will fall on every individual to respond to their fellow community members needs to survive until we can depose of those who engineered this calamity. I hope the silver lining is a deep and lasting change of hearts and minds in this country.
On my mind as well. I was imagining soup lines yesterday. You are more hopeful than I about the possibilities. Empathy is not in the Conservatives/MAGAs/Christian Nationalist vocabulary.
Agreed but, for me, hope is a starting point to counter my skepticism and close-mindedness toward the "other side".
Yes, if one loses hope. I was born skeptical. Tried to be Pollyanish and failed. Fewer disappointments in life that way as my expectations for others aren't very high.
I think it would be worse. The millionaires can’t wait for the poor to suffer and die off even though they depend on them for their luxuries. The rest of us will be so busy trying to keep our heads above water it will be hard to help. Farmers won’t have crops because they don’t have the money or workers to plant and harvest. There is already a housing shortage and venture capitalists are buying up housing and businesses that they then suck all the money out of and shut down. There will be no jobs.
Where will the MAGA's, 'christian' nationalists & the insanely rich people get their food & other goods? What a wakup call this will be.
I have no idea how this would look in actuality- everyone would certainly be scrambling to stay afloat. But we will all sink eventually if we are only willing to keep our own heads above water. I am willing to be available for what that may entail. What is that expression- put your own oxygen mask on first and then help the one next to you?
I agree. My parents were born in 1929. My mom used to tell me stories. None of them were awful. My dad never said anything but we found out as adults that he was sent to a foster home so my grandmother could work.
I think this will be horrific.
It will be the poor helping the poor- as it usually has been. Predict there will be warehouses to hold the disabled, ill, starving people that result from the 'budget' cuts.
We are not going to eliminate the bigots and the racists. What we must do is out vote them every single time.
Gary, I am a computer dolt, but even I know this will be a giant failure because what muskrat and his minions have is lots of hubris and not knowledge of the how the system works. I have been thinking along the same lines that we need to start regular donations to the local food bank. This is just amazing to me, that these dopes would actually do this to elders and children. Well, not really, but it is truly horrible.
Failure is the whole point.
Gary, I really don’t disagree with what you have written, but (yeah, I know, that sounds like I disagree) the FIRST QUESTION that should be asked is WHY do we need a new computer system at SSA? What is WRONG - specifically - about the “old” system? Is the system not functioning properly (not withstanding the crap that is presently being thrown at it)?
1. OLD is not the issue. (I’m 80 and I can still compute.)
2. I’ve been satisfied with my SS for 18 years, including—-
3. My recent experience with the Biden era cancellation of WEP & GPO - which has eliminated the penalty (that I have SUFFERED*) for those 18 years.
* the SUFFERED part is just a joke, because my wife & I are doing fine, but Trumpians should get behind me when I declare that the Feds have been robbing me for 18 years!!!
For those who don’t know: WEP & GPO were programs that were in place since 1983 that prevented some “public” employees (police, fire, and teachers, etc.) who had fully paid into SS (40+ quarters) but also into another retirement systems.
Done right, here is why you need to replace the system.
The software technology is old. COBOL is hard to maintain, not widely taught, and the best programmers prefer to work in a language that has a future for new development.
The system is hard and expensive to maintain. It has decades of software changes, some large, some small, written to add function, to support new regulations, to fix errors, and to fix the fixes (no doubt).
It is expensive to run. It runs on mainframes ( probably multiple logically partitioned mainframes) meaning that the computing environment is as complex, maintenance intensive, and expensive as the software system itself.
So continuing to run this system is equivalent to deciding that your home entertainment system will be a 1970 console stereo, and that you are fine with the limited offerings, limited functionality, and willing to spend s lot of money to find some elderly guys to maintain it.
And Musk’s AI is definitely less expensive and totally risk-free, right, Tom?
In my recent experience with COBOL, I saw in two months, the reinstatement of my full SS pension. Tom are you saying that is shitty and “old” technology just plodding along?
And “programmers today” prefer to work in a “new”language and can’t figure out the “old” language.
Expense?
Your last paragraph (about 1970 home entertainment is BS. Have you experienced streaming lately? Vs cable?
Again, and let me say it LOUDER, Tom: MY RECENT EXPERIENCE WITH MY SS SITUATION TOTALLY AMAZED ME. Talk about RAPID RESPONSE???
Paul, you’re a bit unnecessarily insulting, especially since you’re arguing about something you seem to be completely ignorant of.
Whatever change or correction you received no doubt required no programming. Just an accounting change that was accommodated within the existing system. If every account change or fix required programming, the Social Security system would be unworkable, since the “analysis-coding-testing-moving into production cycle” can take a month for even a small fix.
That having been said, all the reasons for moving from an old, inflexible, hard to maintain software technology are still valid. And, of course, it’s just a matter of time. Do you imagine we’ll still be using this antiquated system in 50 years? When no one even makes replacement parts for the hardware? Of course not. So the answer comes down to sooner or later. Not if.
As for programmers, very few schools still teach COBOL, and those that do can’t teach the 50 years of styles and approaches to using the language that you will find peppered throughout a decades-old system.
As for the analogy I used, you made my point. You can’t stream on an old console anymore than you can do sophisticated management data reporting using the VSAM file system undoubtedly used in a COBOL system.
The key is taking the time and effort to replace the system to make a smooth transition. That’s a very large, multi-year project. Not one attempted on a fast track through AI and a pack of ignorant DOGE-bags.
Check below. Anything you want to rethink? (Hope I’m not being “unnecessarily insulting.”)
COBOL
it worth it to study COBOL?
Most people have broader interests and do not have access to mainframes, and most companies are not interested in introducing mainframe-related technology in their landscape. It is possible for people to learn COBOL using available resources and it can be a good way to get a stable career.Jan 25, 2024
COBOL a dying language?
It's safe to say that COBOL isn't going away any time soon. 'There's no future in that ancient technology' - Today's COBOL is far from the stereotypical green screens you see in the movies - it can do anything a 'modern' programming language can do.Sep 19, 2023
How much do COBOL programmers make?
AI Overview
As of March 2025, COBOL programmers in the US can expect an average annual salary of around $114,400, with entry-level positions starting at roughly $97,500 and experienced workers potentially earning up to $140,400.
Here's a more detailed breakdown of COBOL programmer salaries:
* Average Salary: The average salary for a COBOL programmer in the US is around $114,400 per year.
* Hourly Rate: The average hourly pay for a COBOL programmer is around $55 per hour.
* Entry-Level Salaries: Entry-level COBOL programmers can expect to earn around $97,500 per year.
* Experienced Salaries: Experienced COBOL programmers can earn up to $140,400 per year.
* Salary Range: COBOL programmer salaries can range from $80,000 to $125,000 per year.
* Additional Pay: COBOL programmers may also receive additional pay in the form of bonuses, commissions, tips, or profit sharing.
* Factors Affecting Salary: Factors such as experience, location, and skills can influence a COBOL programmer's salary.
* High Demand: COBOL programmers are still in high demand, especially for maintaining legacy systems.
You didn’t convince me, Tom.
All the organizations I monitored about the programming change required by the elimination of WEP and GPO reported that they were accomplished in record time.
Well at least you are a well-informed idiot.
I can tell you know nothing about this area of technology beyond an hour’s research on google.
Don’t bother answering-I won’t be reading. I scarcely read HCR’s comments because there are so many of you crack-brained kooks lurking here.
Please go misunderstand the posts of others and apply your google-fueled research to them. But understand, those who know a topic in depth can easily spot even a voluble bullshitter with ease.
Paul, I know exactly what you're saying. I was one of the last Civil Service "dinosaurs" hired into the Postal service four years before they switched to FERS (their version of Social Security.) My reimbursement from the Biden era withdrawal of WEP means I will actually see $100 a month rather than have every cent go to pay all but $700 out of pocket for my Medicare benefits each year. My husband and I have managed to keep our heads above water over the years by being frugal with our combined pensions. My biggest concern right now, is that my tiny boost, which is far below the average, will be considered "overpayment" by the PINO puppet show.
But, realistically, do you think that we will ever see the reinstatement of our SS funds now that Musk is in charge?
Kathy, 4 weeks ago, SS deposit ed my 2024 reimbursement for my WEP penalty. The notification also explained that my April SS deposit (the March payment) will reflect my new SS payment amount.
People gripe and complain about how awful government programs are, but this rapid response - given that TRUMP is now the President - astounded me. And, especially, since this SS action was signed into law by Sleepy Joe in early January of 2025.
No, I do not expect to receive any additional funds for the 17 years that I was penalized by Ronald Reagan’s WEP & GPO debacle. (The new law states that the only back payment will be for 2024.)
The bottom line is that I paid into SS while I was still in high school and during summers while I was in college (and paid for half of my tuition and room and board and all of my student loans five years after graduation). Plus, I worked at SS jobs during summers and then after I retired after 35 years of teaching. I paid 10% of my teaching salary into my retirement system.
Reagan referred to my situation as a WINDFALL that he was going to ELIMINATE. He must have thought my work was merely sucking off the Government’s Teat, huh?
A couple years ago my sibling's employer migrated to a new system and that took months of planning and implementation to do so successfully.
I've twice worked at companies whose management decided to upgrade software just because it was available. In both cases, none of us who used the programs were consulted (in one case not even informed until it was a done deal) and the resulting chaos cost tens of thousands of dollars and days' worth of effort, and ultimately, the previous version was reinstalled at additional expense.
Gary, Musk and his “team” shall now be called “The Nerd Reich”. Your 5th paragraph says it all.
:-)
The objective is to shut down Social Security payments. This is the process by which Musk will do it and blame it on the computer system. Musk's evil may not match Hitler's yet - it would be too unpopular. But, it has the same roots. This is evil personified.
The objective is to kill off all of us parasites.
Someone needs to copy the entirety of the SSA systems and databases. Muskers little hack squad is going to delete everything and replace it all with crap.
I'm sure they either have mirroring in place so that every transaction is applied to databases in multiple locations and/or they do daily, monthly, quarterly, annual backups. But once they pulled the plug on the programs, everything will grind to a halt.
Trump and Musk are clueless about how the programs interact with the databases.
It's likely Musk doesn't even understand the calculation of the monthly payment each person receives and how it can vary from one year to the next based on multiple criteria such as COLA.
Any system Musk/Trump are involved in is going to be a disaster.
A century ago, a German sociologist explained precisely how Donald Trump thinks about the world, @jon_rauch writes. Understanding this view is essential to defeating it.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/02/corruption-trump-administration/681794/?gift=x145pGiPRPXxX1toMfahSAF-X0TFpfkXe3ZQcich-o4
Ah! Big Daddy Dictator….got it! Didn’t know there was actually a name for it!
Gary, as a retired senior computer programmer analyst who specialized in COBOL projects, I completely agree with you!
Gary, how can this be prevented? The courts?
I have a longtime acquaintance. I can’t quite call him a friend. He was the cop that busted me when I was a kid for selling weed. I hired him once to find out where a non paying tenant worked. So we have a tentative relationship. Leo is an avowed MAGA. We have already tussled over it. Since he is a vet I brought to his attention how the veterans administration is being chopped up. He counters that it’s contracted help being cut. I will need to probe weaknesses in his beliefs because he is blinded in support of MAGA. Recently we toyed with a possible business plan of his as partners which I nixed for now. He wants to meet Trump and he might just get an opportunity. I almost invited him to accompany me to DC on April 5 and he could go knocking on the White House door while I performed my anti trump melodies in front of the White House. Nah. He is solid working class. But he is committed to getting drug smugglers off the streets even as an eighty year old private eye. I respect him for that. When I ask him why he supports Trump, one word is his response; Border. Of course I wrote a song about him and the drug bust and he got a big kick out of it titled, “Conviction, Conviction, Conviction.” (I channeled Johnny Cash when I wrote it) All those 150 hit or listeners were cop friends of his. He told me so.
Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0kdMkgTMgc
I now have reserved a room in Silver Spring, Maryland on April 4 so I can get a good night's rest for the protests the next day. Join us if you can in any of the 50 state capitals. I decided to try and get a place to perform at the main rally but if not, I’ll sit at my table in Lafayette Square with my books and guitar and hope Parks Service still honors 1st amendment rights. I'm not too sanguine about it, however.
https://ncrpermits.nps.gov
Oh really? I wouldn’t bet on it.
If he’s a good guy then I’m a saint and I’ve done plenty wrong in my life.
Me too, at least we have some recognition and ownership of our foibles. They have none. In fact chump said in the Sun on Sept 12, 2005, that if he did anything wrong, he would find somebody else to blame. I don’t think muskrat would ever consider the possibility that he did anything wrong. What parenting failures they had. Usually kids can learn from sane others if their parents failed. But I read somewhere that what parents fail to teach, no one else ever can. I hope that is not true. May be a rarity…
JD, sometimes I think script writers for European series are tuned to the awfulness happening here. Last night we watched a Tatort episode which was about a right wing party in Germany with all sorts of devious stuff going on and the bad guys included a person from Russia. The candidate was really just a figurehead for the people who intended to take control.
Oh Kathy I agree with you so much. I think empathy is really the only thing that matters. Nothing else works without it, practically speaking, and if we are all trapped here in this timespace together, is it too much to ask to be kind?
I have a hat that says MAKA. Make America Kind Again. How about "kind and fair"? How about loving thy neighbor? How about welcoming the stranger?
Where have all the preachers gone
Long time passing
Where have all the preachers gone
Long time ago
Where have all the preachers gone
The Fascists have picked them every one
Oh when will they ever learn
Oh when will they ever learn?
(All but Jon Pavlovitz :)
",,,nothing wondrous can come in this world unless it rests on the shoulders of kindness." Barbara Kingsolver, The Lacuna
So good. So true.
https://mullen324.substack.com/p/thoughts-on-politeness#:~:text=Thoughts%20on%20Politeness
Probably because you are upset, you forgot the one i think it's the worst, if that's possible, the Manchurian J V Vance.
On intentional Tariff Chaos, I signed up Today for "Reuters Tariff Watch"' The only data you must supply is an email address.
On Elon Musk's 120 Day Must-Pull-Date, Politico's Dasha Burns & Jake Taylor cite a White House "Official saying there is no known end date".
Related: Musk & T 2.0 lawyers are regularly pummeled in federal court by the hard question, "Who is DOGE?'. So MUSK went to his Temp Actor Supply & came up with AMY GLEASON "a former health care executive " [NOT] as the "acting administrator".
But, you knew that was comin'. Well, so do federal judges.
From Trump Tyranny Tracker: Day 68
March 28, 2025
Olga Lautman
We Mapped DOGE’s Silicon Valley and Corporate Connections
What Happened: WIRED has mapped the backgrounds of dozens of operatives working inside unauthorized DOGE, revealing a deep network of ties to Musk, his companies, and his allies. At least 49 DOGE staffers have links to Musk’s empire—SpaceX, Tesla, xAI, Neuralink, and X—as well as to allies like Peter Thiel and firms like Palantir.
Why It Matters: This is cronyism disguised as reform. Musk’s tech allies are being embedded deep inside federal agencies, turning public institutions into tools of a private billionaire’s agenda. It’s not about efficiency—it’s a hostile takeover that blurs the line between government and corporate power.
As time goes on we will learn of all the pieces to this. Where do Harlan Crow, The Heritage Foundation and others like them figure in this web?
They are the masterminds behind it all - Trump is just the figurehead - he gets to stay our of jail - extort as much money as he can get his greedy little hands on and spend as much of our tax money on his golf and other excursions as he like and the bonus is he gets to use his DoJ attorney and FBI henchman to go after anyone who has ever hurt his feelings.
Yes. Anyone could see these past years and during the election season he has lost his mind. A puppet of Russia and the Oligarchs sits in our White House. A madman exacts the revenge he stewed over for 4 years.
Justice dept has become his Gestapo!
Republicans like to rationalize that Trump is using tariffs as a negotiating tool. No one wants to negotiate with a terrorist. The threats to take over other countries by force are so petty and Vance went in to Greenland regurgitating the same garbage Trump does that they’re being treated very badly. After all they convinced MAGA the economy was so bad under Biden and it worked so why not try it there. He is rude, uncouth and a diplomatic disaster. Each time he opens his mouth it’s worse.
tRump doesn't know what the word negotiate means. He's a bully who threatens!
Musk's behavior during the 2024 campaign and as the architect of DOGE indicate that he is a very disturbed man., and one who should not hold any position of authority.
Yeah, just like his co-president. Birds of a feather. No insult intended to birds- THEY are wonderful.
bbb, I don't want to get you more bbb but, Musk "rewarded" a Wisconsin voter $1M for his Wisconsin "vote" in the 4/1/25 WS Supreme Court election coming up in 4 days.
Where to start…
First, as an old fashioned computer programmer that used to punch key cards, let me say that if you need artificial intelligence to write your code you shouldn’t be writing computer systems. These guys Musk hires agent geniuses, they’re hacks. The systems will be worthless, they’ll likely destroy all the old COBOL and social security will be dead. But that’s their goal right?
I also see every one of these systems that Musk touches having a back door to let his allies, our adversaries, in. They will also be funneling money into their own pockets in a way that’s hard to find.
Second, if he “leaves” in May he will still be directing everything. He’s installed all his people as regular government employees. My husband read yesterday that he rolled Xitter into his XAI company to protect Tesla because of the falling stock prices. These guys always have a way to cheat the system.
Third, when Republicans lose the military they should know they’re screwed. Allowing Hegseth to violate our laws with his brother, and I read he’s been raking his wife into meetings, is a sure sign the country will have a tough time recovering.
Thinking more seriously about where to send my grandson to live now that he’s finished college. And just in time it seems.
Empathy is what makes us caring, compassionate HUMAN beings. Simple kindness can go a long ways.
Thom Hartmann published "Even Mice Have More Humanity than Trump, Musk, and the GOP" yesterday. https://hartmannreport.com/p/even-mice-have-more-humanity-than-e10?utm_campaign=email-half-post&r=zc69i&utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Check out my comments.
Random acts of kindness from an unknown source works very well.
We are no longer hunter-gatherers. We need to learn to live in a society
I don’t know how far down the evolutionary tree you have to go until you can’t find empathy, but it is way below our species.
Musk is defective.
Yes. Traditional and historical literature hold the receipts for the virtues, of which empathy and justice lead the list. Civilizations are marked by kindness and empathy and justice. This regime we are currently in, like 1930s Germany, will never hold those receipts.
Barbarians is the right word for them!
I second with my sincere thank you to Professor for working hard everyday faithfully warning us what is going on with our government. And today I am very much alarmed with her reporting that "Elon Musk’s DOGE is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change." Professor says 67 millions of residents in America are receiving SS. They coud all lose the payments as the software transition can be sabotaged. How to stop this? It is URGENT.
And yet he is out there on talk shows looking for empathy from everyone because people are pressing against him and his companies cause his stock to take a nose dive. You cannot have it both way Elon. Just sayin’
''Kindness is on the rise. It is an act of rebellion.'' - Michael McConaha
Thank you, Michael! Resistance should be, at least partly, leading by example.
After the election I changed my car bumper stickers: 1) Humankind, Be both; 2) Choose Civility; 3) The greatness of a nation and it's moral progress can be judged by the way, its animals are treated. By Mahatma Gandhi.4)a floral license holder that says KINFNESS MATTERS.
I second and am so grateful to Professor for faihtfully reporting to the readers signfinficant developments in our government to warn us. And for today, my immediate concern is the following: "Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) is planning to move the computer system of the Social Security Administration (SSA) off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system. In 2017, the SSA estimated that such a migration would take about five years. DOGE is planning for the migration to take just a few months, using artificial intelligence to complete the change. The letter continues to state that some 67 millions could
Agreed very concerning! This is not something to “monkey” around with!!
agree.
I had the same experience at my local DMV this week! It was the best DMV visit I've ever had - kindness is still here in upstate NY also
Kindness is kind of the name of the game for us. Niceness? Eh... debatable.
I have always tried to be kind, others used to as well. The coarse and the vulgar ascended with the repubs and especially when our MSM followed Fox down the money/entertainment/self-righteous rabbit hole. Now much of the citizenry is aligned with the cult. Kindness gets harder, even with those I still love who have taken their masks off (ironic twist) to reveal people I don’t know anymore…
The evil from the GOP has created a paradoxical effect for many us in aiding us in naturally seeking an antidote to the great harm they are doing to all humanity through their shear ignorance. An ignorance born of fear, fear of never having enough. I have a good Kurt Vonnegut story pertaining to FOMO. Fear of never having enough. Trump, Musk, their minions are eaten alive with it. FOMO, fear of missing out.
DOnt let kindness go; it is part of living the moral life.
I hate that they have started with the most vulnerable and am wondering how long it will be before they come for all the other groups of non white Christians. What really bites is the top dogs are all married to immigrants. Legal immigrants?
All should have found a sugar daddy. Yes, very puky. And of course, it’s immigrants now but will be the rest of us soon.
I love this distinction so much. Thank you. I am really not very nice.
I make an effort to smile and be kind to everyone. I work especially hard at the clerks and office staff that have scowls. When I make phone calls to resolve problems I make sure the representative knows I don’t blame them personally for the problem and ask them to pass it on to their supervisors.
I have to go soon, too & this makes me feel a lot better! Thanks!
Ditto. With the terrible USPS, I haven’t yet received my photo card which the DMV told me they mailed 4 weeks ago after I renewed my license online. They had confirmation of that and very nicely told me what to do if that card doesn’t arrive in time!
Oh I love that, “kindness as an act of rebellion!!!”
Nothing puzzles nasty people more than a kindly response. Although you have to be careful how you use it - being so unused to how to handle it, it can drive them mad with rage!
Strangely enough, Michael, it's the sort of reaction you get in any war zone - once the danger of ACTUAL death is past. People come together as a result of shared travail. And humor comes to the fore as a defence. It's one of the reasons older Brits still talk with fondness about the days of the Blitz. Memories of having sing alongs two hundred feet underground in the subway tunnels still resonate - along with laughter about the hygiene facilities!
I think this very impulse, which is recorded again and again in history, is absolute proof that kindness and empathy are what lie at our core selves, and exist to ensure our collective survival. Proof, I say, Lady Emsworth, and I thank you!
Michael McConaha, you are a good influence here in the Comments section. Thanks!
Human-kind would 'not' have survived otherwise. Likewise, they would not have survived feudal societies, monarchies, etc., etc., without the social invention / creation of the modernizing invention of improvable governance; A social and governing compact that we mostly agree upon. Perfect ? Hell no, but we can improve it, or regress. Regressing seems to be the shakeup that all those extremists long for. To what end ? I know with some certainty. I think most herein can imagine as well. I'm pretty sure that the right way to combat this, is not to shout back - where possible, but to 'ask the right questions' to lead some to make more correct, objective decisions. There is a very real absence of objective, critical thinking in this country and world at large, that I would never have believed until the past 10 years or so; Thinking, acting, and voting on emotions rather than logic. Not even connecting the most obvious of 'dots.' More and more I'm thinking that one thing that must happen is the replacement of the electoral college. I understand why it was thought to be, or construed to be a fairness to small states, and minorities as something of a counterbalance to any "tyranny of a majority", but it seems we've checked that box the wrong way, especially now that we've lived the proof, that it can be "gamed." I also think we have to stand the strongest against any losses of unalienable rights of any whole person / human being. I'm willing yet again to perish for those rights - otherwise what sort of 'life' would that be ? Would it be worth living ? Personally, I am sure not. For those opposed, like me, it appears we all must make that decision. I'm sure the bullies think that anyone who would oppose them are nothing but sissies and easily brought to heel. They won't find that in me.
Whatever this nightmare is, it's not just here in the U.S. It seems to have metastasized worldwide. We watch BBC news quite a lot, to keep up with the bigger picture.
I don't find it very hard to connect those dots. Ask yourself, what are the common denominators ? What do these countries we're hearing about have in common ? I find that the ones that concern me are first, western democracies, 2.) Countries that practice relatively loosely regulated capitalism. The exception of course is the happier Scandinavian countries who have long seen and accepted that capitalism must have reins and a bridle, lest it self destruct. Consider all that and let me know what you think Janet; I'd be interested to know your thoughts. Cheers ~
Yep, humor is the sign of intelligence. And you know who has not NO sense of humor.
I once saw a published picture of donthecon smiling and it was Halloween level scary. 🎃💩🤡
Unless their "owning the libs." Not even having a clue as to what their 'really' saying, they erupt in bully belching.
A perspective that leaves me speechless, considering the horrible losses they suffered. Any silver lining, I guess..
When everything else is gone, all you have left is love - or hate. And love is the MUCH nicer choice.
indeed, considering about 43,000 died across Britain in the blitz, most in London i think. The sobering offset was that the allies bombed the bejesus out of German cities subsequently. Lots have had worried consciences about that, though I'm sure there was little of that on the part of the German military.
War is endlessly stupid except for those who seek control. You’d think we would have come to that conclusion by now…..😂😂😂 NAH……
US and China in the biggest race, America want to retain global dominance, after all it outspends everyone else combined almost, Chinese are on a tear to get Taiwan back and dominate the south china sea.... but with the huge investment in modern technology to support manufacturing, trade, and the absolutely huge levels of trade between US and China, you really gotta wonder "what's up"
I don't wonder at all Frank. Our 'devil may care', toxic capitalists thought among themselves, "Well here's an opportunity to kill several 'birds' with one stone; cripple unions, make obscene money on cheap labor, and after we get them hooked on our money we start running the roost there." Nope; They have pretty much had their azzes kicked there. Chinese are fast learners and out 'capitalist the capitalists' to my view. That's not to say all is well, sunshine and butterflies in China. They have suffering too, financial and otherwise.
Good point …dominate and out capitalize the capitalists …the chess game since day one , different but really ways to control. It’ll not be this brain that find a solution creating peace , or balance, and why we have to have to be a …what do they call it ..rules based economy?
Was not these last 50 years pretty smooth? A little maybe becoming complacent? A very obvious shift of upwards mobility eliminating half of poverty? Technology advancing close to too fast?
But there’s always a few who want more…usually the ones that have the most ,ironic huh? But the playing field STILL doesnt get leveled, not happy yet, I guess. So throw it all out and start, all over again..
I like the question- what’s really up? Something doesn’t add up…I agree….the end game? Though no plan ‘dept “we’re just gonna be so rich though” ..never sufficed before. Somebody always wants more.
New World Order ?
So what exactly is that…anyone been briefed?
How about all needs get met….?
Equality for all?
Oh wait …someone tried that already and it didn’t work?
Some people so impatient their status quo couldn’t ahh… wait?
Cause they didn’t have enough?
Yea…what’s up with that?
Yes indeed Patricia.
I was thinking more in terms of "War AND Peace" so to speak, political rhetoric defining China as "our greatest enemy" while maintaining huge and currently necessary trading relationships. I had the impression the Chinese "managed" what American corporations could manage to do in China while developing their own long term goals. Now they are entangled in world trade, both as producers and distributors.
"...Now they are entangled in world trade, both as producers and distributors." And as 'kings of the manufacturing world" Frank. We've even (U.S.) allowed them to become sole manufacturers and distributors in now limited supply chains. We still have medical shortages of IV saline and IV iron, things I need on a regular basis, and much more. Like I said, they 'out capitalist the capitalists', and have us by the short hairs.
A sense of humor , mixed liberally with compassion, add a bit of wisdom and the best of us rise above the din.
The civil war is long forgot but rumbles with poverty topping first glances.
The fight feathers many a red cap who will buy ,trade,lie, or steal your soul on bended knees whilst still smiling .
How long will it take before the undone rears up ? The slapping the faces with deadly results from the knife placed in the back of America shows …our past rewritten, the fantasies fare , futures bleak in the never ending reconstruction . 12 year reigns history says.
Most people I know, long dead, who survived the war in Europe did not talk about it. Massive death. They ate their horses to survive.
I know the horror was there. Some have written about it.
We like our comfort zones
I’m seeing it in Boston too! Total strangers on the street stopping to talk, and not about politics. Friendliness and kindness are up. Acts of rebellion indeed!
I like it: Kindness as an act of rebellion
Killing them with kindness…🎶
Michael-
I retired from working as a mainframe programmer for the Knights of Columbus insurance company which provides life insurance and annuities to their members at competitive rates.
I drove down to New Haven from Maine and I noticed the same thing. People all over New England exhibited kindness and empathy everywhere I went. For years, people have complained about the "terrible" drivers in Massachusetts. I have driven in 49 states since 1970 and several foreign countries and I would rank them among the best. Several times different drivers let me in when I was turning into traffic. And that was just in my car. I met with four different groups of co-workers to say farewell and they restaurant staffs were all very friendly and warm.
I'm not sure if kindness is on the rise, but I sure had a wonderful experience in my New England adventure the past few days.
Us Mainers do tend to help each other out. Here in Harpswell I’ve worked with a bunch of retirees that go out and fix neighbors homes who can’t afford contractors. Called Harpswell Aging at Home. Together with Habitat for Humanities, a nationwide organization, we see the benefits of cooperation and helping each other out as opposed to destruction and tearing down good programs. I’m with Janet and Angus, and HCR, and other Mainers that stand against the “horror” that is gripping this country. Good deeds, actions, and words will eventually win out, but how long will it take?
The number of protests nationwide and filled to capacity townhall meetings are very encouraging. But will we have the energy to continue to dissent for the next 3 1/2 years? An article showed his poll numbers are decreasing, however, he is still receiving support - way too much in my opinion - in states that remain red. I guess our vision of what makes a decent person has changed, is wrong, is bad.
Push back.. ask the right questions.
It's true, I notice it as well. Random conversations with pleasant people in public places.
I’m currently in a rehab facility following a light stroke. I’ve been cared for by a whole panoply of kind, caring, generous people. My lived experience is so remote from the cruelty and chaos I see on my television screen here. It’s very hard to reconcile this disparity.
It sounds like empathy and respect were part of the setting also. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing a quiet moment of real “Americana,” Michael. We live in Belfast, Maine and experience similar exchanges every day: interactions of simple human kindness. For anyone who has read J.D. Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” and wonders how Vance came to be where he is now…despite all that “liberal education,” pick up Jedediah Purdy’s thoughtful antidote to “Elegy,” For Common Things. Here is one quick quote from Purdy’s preface.
“We live in the disappointed aftermath of a politics that aspired to change the human predicament in elemental ways, but whose hopes have resolved into heavy disillusionment. We have difficulty trusting the speech and thought that we might try to use to make sense of our situation. We have left behind and unreal hope to fall into a hopelessness that is inattentive to — and mistrustful of — reality. What we might hope for now is a culture able to approach its circumstances with attention and care, and a politics that, as part of a broader responsibility for common things, turns careful attention into caring practice.” [Jedediah Purdy. For Common Things. Alfred A. Knopf; New York; 1999. Preface, page xxii-xxiii.]
Some of what I am sharing here on Substack in short essay form are stories about my enormous Appalachian families. We are all from where the VP attempts to claim heritage. Even the very conservative among us knew him for what he was instantly.
Michael, lovely post. Thank you. It is so nice to hear a story about kindness.
Wow: Kindness is an act of rebellion. Beautiful. Thank you.
Most people live by the Golden Rule. But there are Bad People out there. They reveal themselves by their bad deeds. Taking food away from poor children and families is a Bad Thing. So when you see a Bad Person doing Bad Things, call it out for what it is. The Democratic Party can’t bring themselves to tell this truth. Trump and Musk are Bad Men. They are not legitimate leaders. Say it out loud and demand they stop harming people.
I have discovered quite late in the game that I can somehow manage both. I can identify, condemn and deny, and do it from a place where my compassion and empathy keep me from having to join my target in their anger and rage, if only in my efforts to refute it. This has been helpful and a skill I am trying to cultivate. And thank you Burke, because no, there are no “both sides,” here for me, either.
Thank you, Michael, for giving us your example, that skill is worth a lifelong effort in developing.
"Project 2025" is for the US what "Mein Kampf" was for Germany it seems.
I think it is much more dangerous.
“My Struggle” is hundreds of pages of confusing ideology and the whinging of white privilege unable to fail upward despite its advantages … compare with a carefully crafted and well articulated instruction manual on how to erase all parity among people and enslave them (more firmly and permanently) to the oligarchy for all time using the very systems put in place to protect against this.
I am so glad to be here with you in the middle of the night, Sabine.
Late afternoon here in Australia - that's probably why I'm always one of the first to comment ☺️ - but I'm happy too about all the good people on the planet - the majority I hope!
I didn't say it is exactly like Hitler's elaborations, but it's also something that should be seen as a warning for things to come and people have probably ignored it for too long. Now it's here.
"people have probably ignored it for too long"
Glad to say that people have FINALLY stopped saying "Oh, you're paranoid. . ." when I post a warning. . .
Got that a lot, hits me hard when I go back and look at things I posted in 2016. Finally got banned from T and FB in 2020 for repeating that chump was using nazi playbook.
Afraid you hit it on the head, JD. The Dems' warnings in Nov 2024 went unheeded it seems. Just "politics" they said. Now that politics has come to roost in the systematic deconstruction of American government on an unheard of scale.
2015 and 2024 - even before then by me personally. That's what I can speak to with certainty. But no one, even elected dems were listening. We have an infected cadre even among them that believe themselves superior and above reproach. My gut tells me the main infection stems from money - ala "Citizens United." What a misuse of the mother tongue is that one ?
No Lady Em; Don't you believe that for a minute; Keep pushing back with the right questions. I have whole new habitat of trolls I fence with - within limits now on social media. I laugh my ass off when responding at some of the idiocy, but I still strive to ask the right questions. On the more personal, I've had folks that I 'thought' I knew ringing into my spaces with silly azz stuff. For instance, a few thought they could gang up on me with some silly crap about LGBTQ's as though it was some meaningful response to the "Signal Gate" cluster eff. My question: "What has A loving A, or B loving C got to do with anything ? What does that take away from your life, liberty, and security ?
LOL. And I needed that!
It just so happened that it came up on my social media in the form of a lame attack yesterday Michael - and from people I 'thought' I knew.
I am so glad you circled back because a) I realized you weigh in about the time my friends in Australia come online (I have simply given up sleeping) and b) absolutely this … not apples to apples and I apologize for inferring so! I think the scariest thing for me is plans like P2025 must have existed for the N*zis, but they never published them in a book and shared them with the general public before enacting them. Really mind melting stuff happening here.
Yes, they explained clearly. All we had to do as a society was to listen.
The Fascists explained what they would do and then they did it. And there are still people applauding the rape of a nation. What will become very clear soon, if not already, is that just as in previous fascist style coups, the naive, uneducated angry young males will follow the bullies.
On April 5th, millions of us will be protesting across the nation. My sense of it is that it will be heavily attended by "mature" adults. Not the ones who listen to Joe Rogan. His followers may be the counter protesters. A battle of generations, if you will.
I have been mystified by the amount of support hate has been given. But I think the country has betrayed its youth. The ways are many and complex to include primarily a lack of hope for the future. It has been an American truism that with hard work, the next generation would be more prosperous than the previous one. Not anymore.
Which sets the stage for the blame game that Republicans are especially good at. But we are all to blame. For eons, a young person could develop a trade or skill and use it to work at an employer (or two) for a lifetime. Then retire with a pension - not rich - but combined with Social Security, a modicum of comfort and security.
Now, technology is moving faster than a person can complete a resume. To work at the same place for more than two or three years can be a sign of a lack of ambition. And even if one were to hang at the same company for a while longer, he/she/they would probably feel the ax as the place is gobbled up by another and the inevitable (previously denied) thinning of the ranks occurs. "RIF" has been trending for some time now. Think Blue Star Airlines, "Greed is Good". Private equity vampires on the prowl.
My Dad worked for the same company (with a brief hiatus of a year or two) from the time he returned from fighting Nazis until retirement. I started with a local company when I was 18 - stayed until I was 46 when they succumbed to overwhelming competition by a national firm. They taught me, cultivated me, promoted me. It was paternalistic. The loyalty flowed both ways.
Now. Go to college because that is the ticket. But by the time you are a grad, the field you thought you liked is either morphing into something you dislike or vanishing altogether to automation and/or AI. And you owe a shitload of money.
If I were to be 18 again, I would become a plumber. But I would be selective as to the podcasts I'd listen to. I'd lean towards the ones that talk about kindness, fairness, empathy, science, democracy, and yes: Diversity and Equity and Inclusion! And of course, History. Because we seem to be woefully ignorant of such right now. It's really irritating, isn't it?
Plumbing requires knowledge of physics, math and engineering and knowledge of local codes. It is also hard on one's knees and shoulders. The electrical trade is kinder to your body. But, when a fella stands back and looks how clean and thoughtful he has plumbed a boiler room, that is pretty gratifying, I must say.
Love this!!
The Nazis modeled their plans on American slavery (Caste by Isabel Wilkerson).
I think a serious heartbreak began as I started to listen to the Native people I have been fortunate enough to meet in Maine through my work. They tell me that the whole mass genocide paradigm, complete with all of the necessary apparatus … the record keeping, the death machinery, the experiments and eugenics, the portability of the horror, all come from here in the US. Its modern expression is a wholly US Made export. We wonder why we have problems.
I think we need an entirely new system in the West - and we're very far away from getting there - a form of sortition democracy with direct involvement of people into their own governance would be preferable, I think. But first it would need to recognise and accept of who we really are as nations - most of us - in Australia as much as Canada and the US - are descendants of white Europeans who went around the world murdering and pillaging at their heart's content - we built our nations on ruthless and brutal genocides - we never were the "good guys", we just got comfortable in our role as oppressors and lied ourselves a nice history together.
Once you accept that for yourself, it makes it much easier to really listen to other points of view, eg Russia's or China's, even if you don't agree with them.
I hate the sound of this. But unfortunately, it kind of rings true.
This is a perfect description, Michael! Project 2025 as"... a carefully crafted and well articulated instruction manual on how to erase all parity among people and enslave them (more firmly and permanently) to the oligarchy for all time using the very systems put in place to protect against this."
Welcome Michael. You'll find that this is a great little community here - not without it's 'moments' and trolls now and then, but they don't last long here.
Thank you so much for the welcome, D4N.
A good friend here in Maine, who is a from-childhood bestie of Heather’s from Round Pond, brought me to her work when we met many years ago. I have been reading since, but subscribed and came to engage with you all when I discovered that I need to write as well.
It is good to know you.
Ditto Michael; I've been reading her since she began doing it on FB. Skeptical at first, especially considering the medium, I fact checked every footnote, attribution, etc. She always passed with flying colors, so now, she's become one of my 'North Stars.' Though I can scarcely afford the subscription, it's been necessary for my mental health and only thus justifiable. The community as you will find is welcoming and on the whole, very bright, welcoming, educated. I'm humbled to be so welcome among them.
Great minds think alike! Just yesterday I proposed a T-shirt to a printer:
PROJECT 2025
IS ENGLISH FOR
MEIN KAMPF
Sadly — frighteningly sadly — IT IS! But what’s probably much, more frighteningly sadder is the number, the size of the American population and especially of its legally registered voters who have no clue as to what "Mein Kampf" is and/or those who’ve likely never heard it!
The problem Democrats seem to have is that they/WE give the voting and non-voting American populace too much credit…by-and-large trump and his party recognize the degree of ignorance of the American electorate and populace and they aren’t afraid to exploit it…WAKE UP DEMOCRATS!!! People remember, FOX is primarily for entertainment — not news and HCR has enlightened us to that fact!
“Have some pride, America. We are so much better than this guy thinks we are.” So says, David Pepper an Ohio Democrat. Good man, Pepper, I guess, but I don’t know who he’s talking about. This is what a 15-point majority of white voters, a 40-point majority of white working class voters, and a 60-point majority of white evangelical voters voted for. On purpose.
Not many voted for Project 2025 and the dismantling of our government.
Not directly, but magats are fine with that as long as Republicans continue to deliver on their promise to step up the persecution of people magats don’t like. Republicans have made their living since 1968 by making good on that promise. That gets them 70% of white working class votes and makes it possible for Republican honchos to pursue their primary goal of shifting more and more wealth to people who are already obscenely wealthy.
If they didn't, they obviously voted wilfully ignorant, which is probably not better - just exchanges malice with profound stupidity. Although - thinking about the only strong MAGA supporter I know personally - my cousin in Tennessee - there it's malice.
It's going to be interesting - over the next couple of months I'll have first a couple from California staying at my Airbnb, then one from Texas - I just hope none of them are MAGAs!
Yes. Unfortunately so Sabrina.
With full-blown coup underway, who now owns the United States?
That’s the Q America’s longest-held allies have been asking, as all now seek new and newly-funded national security and military alternatives.
Heather spoke to this, to whom the country now belongs, yesterday, March 28. In shocking detail, she concluded it’s being turned over to: 1) the U.S.’s billionaire oligarchs, 2) Silicon Valley techies, also billionaires, and 3) the embitterment making MAGA of the tens of millions of former working-class Americans who saw their jobs offshored and communities destroyed by still other tranches of billionaires.
Heather left out Putin and his hate-filled, jewelry-bedecked eastern orthodox priests. She left out Netanyahu and his equally hate-fueled, far-right settlers. Mohammed bin Salman and his murder squads. Xi and his communist cadres who took on, thank-you, many millions of those former U.S. working class jobs.
She left out, too, the world’s biggest vortex of vulgarities: all the owners of standardized testing who first killed humanities in U.S. schools and then began its neutered, depersonalized juggernaut of packaging, abstracting, categorizing, and labeling worldwide.
Maybe in the near short term a few remaining decent U.S. Republicans can team with Dems, staunch the coup.
But in the long term there’s no health till we restore the world’s schools – infuse all again with humanities, open anew to the writing of essays seeing “others.”
Not just the schools though. For too long we have waited for our kids to save us from our own failures; even though they are obviously vital to a worthwhile future. We the people need to work on our humanity. We the people need to work on a society we would be happy to bequeath for posterity to build on. Not just a compulsive rat race to the bottom.
". . . compulsive," J L -- I fear this adjective best fits all Trump's collection of misfits, criminals, and clowns.
Obviously, Trump never learned anything in school, he surrounds himself witty people who are as ignorant as he is, some of whom attended prestigious schools, and he and his cronies want people who are taught not to question things. Destroying the department of education will ensure this happens, and it will lead to neglect of students with special educational needs.
Care for special with special needs is out the window with Trump 2.X, whether within the USA, or abroad, esp in Africa.
When future generations study this time they will be baffled and weirdly amused by the fact that the person leading the charge in tossing out support for special needs kids is one of the neediest on the planet.
Imagine yourself a grade school teacher and you are cursed with having little Donnie in your classroom. He can't read (dyslexia or something else). He won't use a pencil or pen - just dull sharpies. He won't use the laptop or tablet provided by the school. He insists on staring at and tapping his phone. You let him do that a lot because when he isn't on his phone he is bullying and/or mocking his classmates.
Again. This gets so little attention. We have a president who doesn't read or use a computer. He doesn't read his briefings. He watches TV and launches insults on his phone. He is a broken child. All made worse by the love withheld by his brutal parents - hence his pathetically desperate need for attention - ANY kind of attention - no matter how awful.
Decades from now, won't they ask why would so many Americans vote for such a painfully handicapped individual? What does that say about the needs or mentality of people living in this time?
It's complicated. For the most part, I'd follow the money.
What seems to me a hallmark of a civilized society is in the degree of management of abuses of power. As I would not be a slave I would not be a master. Those who counsel restraint of abuses of power tend to be mocked by those less so inclined. Some of the most salient of peacemakers even killed. I still say follow the money, and the other sorts of power that go with it.
Bill, for some reason i am no longer getting replies to my posts, just likes. No idea why.
Frank, I disabled notifications via email for substack. I monitor our discussions via the app...I check the little bell. Is that what you do?
i use email. I get likes but not "replies" anymore. My workaround is to go to my originating comment and look for replies.
Hi. There ya go.
Actually - I find the indisputably smart ones of the MAGA \ GOP movement even worse - like Stephen Miller etc, even worse because they are truly malicious. Musk is probably as well, just hard to tell because he's an autistic moron as well (by now I don't care about p.c. much anymore - he is a stuttering, embarrassing, autistic moron)
The is brain scan evidence suggesting abuse of power is literally addictive.
Do republicans even care about their children and grandchildren ? Do they expect to jump on a muskrat shuttle and move to Mars when they destroy this planet? The environmental destruction alone makes the future questionable. Back to rivers on fire, pesticides in food and dangerous air quality?
Most of them think they'll be fine, don't accept climate change, and only think bad things will happen to "those people." They likely weren't ever taught about pollution and the Clean Air Act.
I think it is more about social isolation. Despite his claims, I doubt you would even run into Clarence Thomas is a Walmart, of see Harlan Crow in the bleachers at a game. A fair sample of billionaires already prepping for the apocalypse their extractions seem likely to trigger. I think that they suppose that they will always have the opportunity to purchase what ever remnants of nice may remain; the last pleasant microclimate, the last of the strawberries. I'm sure that Trump does.
Re "For too long we have waited for our kids to save us from our own failures": you want to tell me exactly how those kids are going to bail us out when all they do, 24 hours a day, is sit hunched over their "screens"?! An ATOM BOMB could go off 2 miles away and they wouldn't miss a beat in their numbingly-mindless, round-the-clock texting!
Good teachers, David, never go cynical.
Good teachers never see negative sides of kids as final givens.
Key is modeling. If a teacher models particular behaviors, many more kids will trust trying that. If a teacher cites a good novel (very old or very new), and puts it in apt contemporary context -- as suitable for some kids also in the class, given their personal themes and interests -- that novel will be more attractive for more to try.
Many teachers, however, have this imaginative curiosity beaten out of them by the black hole death trip of standardized testing. Rather as, in public life, monsters such as Trump want to beat out democracy, and decency, from the lives of Americans. And push instead weird combos of the goofus, the vengeful, and the criminal.
"Good teachers never go cynical." I love that! Thanks, Phil.
A college professor I read about has his students put their cell phones in their backpacks for class. The students who talk to him report being very happy about it, and pleased with how it lifts their engagement. The professor says that 100% of students that he talks with want to be on their phones less.
I think the question is more - why should they bother bailing the older generations out? They'll have enough on their plate to get their own lives sorted, they've no obligation to bail anybody out.
HCR is fortunate to have so many knowledgeable and thoughtful readers. She works very hard for you and truly not only for the nation but for humanity.
If each day each individual strove to become a bit better version of themselves than the day before, what would transpire?
Yes, Bill, and I consider hers yesterday greatest ever.
She sees, deadly up close, the horror and fully intended evil of the coup underway.
And she stays steady. "The key is modeling," as you said above. She is a beautiful teacher.
Hope we don’t depend on decent repubs. Two of my sisters don’t claim that mantle anymore. Bros still do, and they won’t budge…
Here in NC, I am celebrating your sisters' conversion! Tiny steps. This is the way the war is won.
"we" are supposed to restore the world's schools? I think the folks in Finland are doing fine without "we" taking over their school system.
That's it. Musk has telegraphed his plan by talking about moving the SS system to a new version. He's nuts if he thinks it can be done quickly, unless he's planning on setting it up so he can steal from it. The war is on.
So, by trade, I am a software developer, and very specifically, my niche is infrastructure and "glue" and special projects around those things.
When he bought Twitter, he made a lot of absolutely stupid choices and said a lot of things that really demonstrated that his success has been entirely around hiring people smarter than he is. He said things that anyone with the not-even-a-decade I have in my field would immediately recognize as wrong, uselessly vague, or so hilariously misguided and not-even-looking-at-best-practices that it became incredibly apparent that he has absolutely no idea what he's doing. This is what happened at PayPal as well, and that's a whole other story.
Fun fact: a good COBOL developer can command incredible salaries. I know a few in my circles who make 300K+. It's a specialized language at this point.
Their reasoning for this is that it's "efficient" and that the government should be run like a business. Do you know who else uses COBOL extensively and would be *extremely* sensitive to efficiency gains? Banks. The basis of the checking/direct deposit system has historically been COBOL.
The only people who think that transition can be done in months are people who don't know what they're doing. An actual army of coders couldn't get through that project in a few months.
Musk is where he is because he used his dodgy family's dodgy fortune in dodgy Conflict Gems and Blood Diamonds to buy companies built by others, then run them out and claim credit for himself. he didn't even finish any of the schools he attended. At best, he's a mediocre coder, not the Chief Engineer of anything. What he is, is a takeover artist.
His sociopathy and narcissism enables him to promote himself as a genius. Trump shares the same narcissism and sociopathy, and he’s constantly bragging about his own presumed intelligence, Trump is actually very ignorant, and no one can convince him otherwise. John Kelly and Rex Tillerson learned that first hand when serving in his first maladministration.
I think Trump is ignorant by choice. Having bales of cash allowed him to skate as a lazy fake. He is good at pitching snake oil, and the modern GOP has a lot of it to sell.
His explanations are atrocious...very similar to Trump's.
Now that takes some flim flam skill. He and chump are the perfect tools for Putin and the P2025 cadre of vipers.
I see a glimmer of some practical talent in him, but like many of his ilk, his principal talent seems to be having been born rich. He is for sure a wealthy takeover bully.
I think it might be called throw in some experimental AI, close the lid, and see what happens. And what could possibly go wrong for a gazillionaire, with absolutely no accountability to the public? Anyway, some other gazillionaires were talking about it and thought it might be fun to try.
So think! What is the political reason for Republicans to want to convert the SS database programming?
Very scary to have Musk responsible for any kind of technology used by the government. He will first and foremost make it useful for himself…
To kill it.
This doesn’t surprise me at all. Muskrat wants to get the credit, but he wants a free hand to take the credit for the work his employees do and treat them like garbage. That is why he uses H1B workers, as they are essentially indentured servants who can’t leave his companies and will lose their visas if they try. He and Trump talk trash about their critics, but don’t like it if their targets call them out on their own faults.
Thanks Sidney... Having participated in Platform Transitions as well, 'Cranking Code' is the easiest part... Elon Musk has sold MAGA that his xAI platform can Revolutionize the USG to the ill-informed... It is the data-interfaces, and testing that are the hardest... Seems that Musk's transition timeline was hallucinated during one of his Ketamine Benders... If Elon Musk walks away from this in May, he will not look back, or be held accountable for the Deep Damage that Elon Musk has inflicted on Us.... We will be used as Crash Test Dummies like Tesla Cars...
Exactly. People think my job is all writing code. My job is like 10% writing code.
Thanks Sydney... And how much time in Testing, Documentation, and Meetings?... ;-)
Relatively low for me in comparison, surprisingly. A lot of my time is digging into things proactively.
Thank you to HCR for doing the hard work and presenting the information in a way that sparks intelligent dialogue and discourse. Thank you Apache and Sydney for your insights into the coding world. It helps me wrap my head around this whole topic.
Excellent analogy, more than a tad scary…
Testing is the success or failure of any system. If you can’t even write your own code and need the AI to do it for you then you have no clue how to test.
Thanks Sharon... There is an Art to Testing, and reaching Predictability... Teslas may be the most Recalled Cars... They usually only Serviceable at Tesla Dealers... Their After-Market worth is plunging... SpaceX Rockets blow-up alot... The 'Starship' Rocket which Elon hopes will take him to Mars, is marginally more powerful than the 'Saturn-V' that took us to the Moon, and is a lot less reliable... The 'Saturn-V' was designed, and tested using SLIDE-RULES!!! Elon is mostly Marketing, and Salable Concepts... IMHO: He is a Genius only to the Uninformed...
I lived in the COBOL/banking world for a while, much of the time maintaining old code. Definitely not my happy place!
Thanks Talia... Many Legacy USG Applications are IBM Cobol based... They have aggregated for Decades by Generations of Programmers.... That is what makes them so hard to replace... They can be composed of layers, and layers of Kluges... OBW: JAVA, which is IMHO, is the new COBOL...
Yeah, the only reason to do it anymore is the money, it's just too good for some people.
Muskrat isn’t really that familiar with COBOL. If he had been, he would have learned that there are no people who are born 140 years ago who are getting social security. Social Security has little fraud, and investigators are always looking out for receipt of benefits in the name of dead people. What often tips them off is that the supposed recipients aren’t using Medicare. This involves an issue of dead payee fraud, where relatives claim the deceased person’s benefits. They eventually get caught and have to pay restitution and sometimes get probation or jail time. When my mother died, we filed a form with the Social Security Administration to notify them immediately.
When my mom passed, a simple phone call took care of it. The SS person on the line expressed sympathy, asked some simple questions, and it was done. Auto deposits stopped before the next payment went out and no restitution was owed. Case closed with empathy and efficiency. I wonder what would happen now.
When my father died, the funeral director notified Social Security. He died April 25 and they clawed back his entire April payment from his joint account with my mother.
Whatever story that they need, they create. Example: people who were born 140 years ago are getting social security. Crazy talk!
Sydney, thanks for the insights. Please expound in the future on any other such software related orange ca ca droppings.
Really, any time someone thinks that it's just a matter of writing code, you should ignore them. These are systems with decades of hardening and lessons learned.
I think the most illustrative thing is called Chesterton's Fence -- you shouldn't dismantle something until you know why it exists.
That's a lesson I learned when I was six.
Took my grandma's clock to pieces. . .
And for years after that, when i asked " When's lunch?" she'd say " I don't know, I don't have a clock. . ."
Hilarious
oh my, great lesson learned!
😂
LOL!
I can't really say anything, my family went through multiple VCRs because I loved taking them apart. Putting them back together, not so much.
My husband had learned that as a teen. Critical lesson…
Thank you. I thought it was old and out of date. Sounds like old still is better. He is a moronic muskrat whose blastoff to Mars can’t come fast enough.
These systems aren't better because they're old. One of the biggest things I have to figure out as an engineer is "I can improve this thing, but is the juice worth the squeeze?"
These old mainframe systems are older than me most of the time, but they are built to be as absolutely rock-solid as is physically possible. On some of them, the odds of having a total failure of a transaction is something like picking a grain of sand on the other side of the world and waiting for someone to grab it and mail it to you. They are *extremely* reliable.
Even if a new system could be designed that would be perfectly reliable like these systems have been for decades, even if it performed better, even if it cost less -- how much better is it, really? If it's 5% better, is it really worth all the cost, frustration, and risk? Probably not.
Thank you for your informative posts, Sydney.
"An actual army of coders couldn't get through that project in a few months."
Well, there's ten teenagers in Elon's team. That enough?
I know well someone who worked for Musk. You are correct: he takes credit for the work, discoveries, innovations that his employees are responsible for creating and doing.
I suspect the point of all this is to make SSA so crippled and dysfunctional that Congress will vote to privatize it and put it in the hands of the financial analysts who will use it to make money for themselves and abandon those who have contributed throughout their careers and who have relied on it to be there for their retirement. Congress is so dysfunctional that they will not act in the public’s interest.
In 1979 they knew that SS would run out of money by 2036 but no one has the guts to get real about saving it because it will cost someone to pay more into it. Simply put, if they raise the cap on payroll taxes or eliminate the cap altogether, there would be plenty of money to cover everyone and possibly bring millions of children out of poverty. This is the thing that is so infuriating- we are a rich nation, we can afford to take care of everyone. But we don’t have the will to do it. It’s so disheartening. #taxtherich
At any rate this is a lovely side-effect for them, isn't it?
Thank you for this perspective and information that banks use COBOL.
Pretty much everything that was computerized around that time and uses old mainframe tech is using COBOL or something similar.
Totally agree - but also the standard answer for people wanting to sell software developments "we can do that for you in this time for that dollars" and you better go and at least tripple the timeframe and double the dollar amount (if not more in a project like this) to come even close to a realistic quote.
They’re going to use AI 😂. Not a single one of them is a coder. Every one of them is a hack.
I am so glad you (someone) is speaking up about this - another of Musk's massive wildfire actions destroying a company he purchased with his obscene wealth/resources. His takeover of Twitter was brutal and rife with deleterious consequences. It absolutely predicted the harms of giving him power over Trump (who isn't interested in the JOB of President, just the power, greed and Immunity from prison.) It sickens me that so many of their actions will result in actual deaths! I can't even bear to continue my comment...
Musk & DOGE have to go!
I see fools rushing in where angels would be extremely cautious lest someone get hurt. That's not a problem for psychopaths.
There is a reason why they all think it's so easy. They have no idea what is involved. Most of these are kids who think because they wrote a CRUD app they're gods of the universe, they've never actually had to deal with anything more annoying that sharding a database, they don't know how to do real bleeding engineering.
A business that consistently rips out battle-hardened code is a business that is going to fail. All of that business logic encodes *thousands* of rules and regulations and needs and, most importantly, lessons.
I can only hope that there is a full back-up of the COBOL OS!
Unfortunately, there's a *lot* more to this than just backups. The infrastructure is an absolute nightmare for these systems, and changing any of it is going to be horrid.
The have no idea what is involved and seemingly no incentive to care, including the guidance of conscience.
NO INCENTIVE TO CARE. And proud of that very thing
Worse: they have a disincentive.
If indeed Elon gets his crew to begin this project, it actually won’t take so very long. The notion that it would take a long time is premised on an expectation of the goals.
Consider the course we find ourselves on. If one wants to sack Rome, by way of example, why should it take much time at all? If the goal were to dump many trillions of dollars into Wall Street, the niceties of engineering go by the wayside.
Just think of all the new friends one could make by that bold maneuver. If anyone believes this administration is aiming for improved performance, they could possibly pay a bit closer attention.
True, yes. An actual migration would be years, to clarify, but this is pretty much exactly how you'd do it if you were a) an idiot surrounded by sycophants or b) a jackass surrounded by sycophants.
You nailed them
And c, literally want it to fail.
Hmm, not much to choose between those 2 options ;-D
They want to destroy, takes way less time.
One of Elon's "products was a $500 junior "flamethower" name "Not a Flamethower"; not the military kind anyway) that emitted a gigantic jet of flame, of which he sold something like 20,000. Tesla was an existing company Musk took over, but the (not) flamethower sounds like the essential Musk.
I wonder who designed and made the silly thing for him. Are his rockets the MAGA (sic) models?
💯
I especially like that you mentioned the “lessons” part. All the rest too.
Seems to be a web that weaves in and out of many critical areas. Meaning that it can do max damage. But then, damage is the goal. I expect such a mess that people (some) will welcome muskrat’s redoing the whole thing. With their power in mind. Just like the reason they are firing so many is to replace them with MAGAts. I think the vetting for “their” people started before Jan 20. Thank you for enlightening us, although the computer world left me behind when the tower became a thing of the past. Still interested though.
My understanding is that these systems are so tied up together that the downstream effects will be devastating. Comments, Sydney?
I don't know the full complexities about these systems, but even in my industry, where we are doing things much less vital than SSA does, it's so easy to miss a downstream effect. We are doing things that have fewer rules, fewer requirements, less impact on daily life, and we still test and step things in slowly. I have had projects that were maybe a few hundred lines of code overall, but still took months for validation, testing, understanding.
They'll be the ones getting hurt if they aren't careful. There's a lot of pissed off people and the number grows daily. The Tesla demonstrations are only the tip of the iceberg. Anyone paying attention can hear the angry grumbling getting louder.
Yes, I was thinking - so far we haven't really heard much from the business world, which doesn't only consist of megalomaniac Silicon Valley nut jobs. I wonder when they will wake up and hopefully stand up against the growing fascism.
Dropping profits perhaps.
"SSS" The Steal of SS. That's the plan. They want to be able to stop the payment of Social Security beneits to selected "enemies" with a simple push of a button anywhere in their government.
Undoubtedly the plan. That seems to be his motivation in all things. Free money. Jesus, I struggle to pay the electric bill every month.
I just don’t understand how he can unilaterally make these decisions! Aren’t there people in government who can stop this? Go to the courts for an injunction? Don’t these decisions to overhaul a working system require more input and decision making? Where is the challenge to this insanity? We the people can protest but I don’t see where marching in the streets can save Social Security when the damage will already be done. Proactive Legal action and pushback needs to happen. Seems like there is just a lot of hand-wringing
James, I was debating what to put on my "Hands Off" sign. Until I read about Musk's moving the SS system off COBOL to something else. Of course, that could and should have been accomplished - carefully - years ago. But Congress wouldn't spend the money - kicked the can down the road.
And TC is correct, Musk is no genius. A junior in high school would know how challenging such a switch would be. Musk is a buyer and a user and a bully who is too stupid and too impatient to know how little he knows. And he shares a mental illness with $Trump. He doesn't care who or what he hurts. They are like Sherman tanks plowing through a Pottery Barn.
I'll be in a Boston suburb. My sign will say "Hands Off Social Security" on one side. The other will be: "Elon Musk - You Are Fired!"
Destroy it is the goal. And of course, tell all us “gullibles” that he is improving it. Guess COBOL and those 150 year old recipients stung and made him look like a fool instead of a genius. Carefully planned chaos, never doubt it for a nanosecond
A very good network engineer that I know, when praised for a successful network cutover on the first try, stated that it was because he’d tested it and the first five SIMULATED test cutovers failed. I don’t expect that kind of testing with the Social Security system with Muskrat at the helm, so we need to expect the realtime failures.
Yep. I've done much, *much* smaller network changes than this, and I still did a few dry runs.
They don't care if they collapse it. We're getting ready for the probability of having erratic or no SS deposits. We can survive that, but millions can't.
“DOGE:” Department of Government Extermination.
The Repub plan
Resist! Hands Off protest April 5 nationwide. Go to Indivisible or Mobilize.us for one near you if you can’t get to Washington DC. I am going with my daughter and her partner to TWO that day, one at our County Seat and one at our worthless congressman’s office. We need to peacefully protest in huge numbers! If you’re disabled, you can make calls or share protest info, or even donate a small amount to Democracy Forward, Indivisible, or the ACLU.
Augusta, Maine, the B. Cross Office Bldg. See you all there!
Durham NC- By Major the Bull statue downtown.
Just one letter. One damn letter amongst a hundred or more other letters. And in every single one the news gets worse. There were so many things in THIS letter that I wanted to respond to, I started taking notes.
After I filled a page, I gave up. . .
So here's a precis:
1) The stock market drops - again. What's happening to people's 401's? Don't MAGAS have them? Or don't they care when their pensions disappear?
2) The SS system is being "redesigned" - by AI! Oh, great. AI currently works even less well than Musk's self crashing - sorry, driving, cars. The SS offices already take TWO HOURS to get through to - what's it going to be like after "The Great Awakening"?
3) Musk steps down from DOGE in May - "to avoid financial disclosure." So we don't get to see what he's made from our taxes? And who will run DOGE AFTER he leaves? Another Kindergarten Kid?
4) They're using USAID a s a "test case" to see if trump can shuffle even more power into his grubby little hands. Nice choice of victim - the poor and starving of the world. Soft power, anybody? China? Russia? You want to step in?
5) Three cheers for Peter Marks, resigning rather than agreeing with Kennedy's Krazy. And three boos for Kennedy, for carrying on with the insane autism research.
6) Hegseth's nepo brother - anyone going to do anything about that? or will Pete just raise a glass to "Keeping it all in the family!"?
7) And finally Musk - again. Please, please, somebody - send him back to South Africa. Or El Salvador, I don't really care. To paraphrase Winston Churchill "Never, in the course of human history, has so much damage been done to so many people by so few."
And finally - thank you SO much, Heather, for keeping us all so well informed. If your work is exhausting to read, I can't imagine how tiring it is to research and write - every single day.
To your first point, I have the same question. Don’t MAGAs have retirement accounts?
Lady, you are a real Lady. All true in your comment. Thanks 😁
"More than 65 million Americans currently receive Social Security benefits." Social Security is a special form of life insurance where beneficiaries contribute in advance real money in order to receive real money back later in life when it is needed. That benefit must be just as secure as the money in a bank savings account.
If the government takes that money away and spends it on other things it becomes nothing but a gang of bank robbers. If we cannot stop the robbery of our money what will they rob next? Our homes? Our children? The food we need to survive?
I don't know about the rest of you but I would put as much distance as I could between myself and the bank robbers and build as strong a defense against them as I could.
Yes, have been thinking along the same lines. If SS benefits are not safe from this wrecking ball then nothing is safe.
It’s their last chance to destroy it. A real motivator for all repubs, except the SS recipients. And they are cultified.
2nd thoughts: Signalgate and the bankrobbers. What's next?
Social Security pays benefits to 3.2 million people that it thinks are 120+ years old. The oldest person in the USA that is alive is 114. Doge found this and is considering that these people are NOW Dead and their payments stop. Why did it take a Rocket Scientist to find this?? It was DOGE, not an SSA employee???
George-Please get you story straight. Social Security has a legitimate setup whereby in some cases of the death of the principle recipient a dependent that is handicapped and under the care of the "principle" will continue to receive benefits after the death of the SS recipient. BTW, I welcome clarifications of what I just said. I'm not an expert.
Elon Musk couldn't understand it at first, so don't feel bad. "Rocket scientists" at the intellect level of Mr. Musk can figure that out. Mr. Musk's scientific qualifications have more to do with the money part of it than the hardware. And he has a tendency to "shoot first" with his mouth and then learn later. Wealth seems to produce a degree of personal over confidence.
Elon Musk: ROCKETMAN 2025!!
Up in the sky. Can you still see him?
It is widely perceived to be a key element of U.S. “soft power.”
Germany was severely punished in the wake of WWI and we got Hitler. We launched the Marshall Plan after WWII, blunted Soviet influence and won a lot of friends. In Iraq we let Iraqis suffer and poured cash into boondoggles. That did not go nearly so well. Being the biggest bully has limitations in the long run.
W/Dickie proved that, but who paid attention
Excellent point!
Belle of the Ranch posted a video about the drop in consumer confidence today (Friday). If Trump's goal is to crash the economy - as well as the government as a functioning entity - then he is succeeding. Why he wants to crash the economy should be the question everyone is asking. (My answer: Because Putin has promised him the world if he does this)
Here's Belle...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zW58bbxfJ8
Thanks Steve... Today's Stock Market Plunge?... Why are We Surprised? DJT is the Supreme Wealth Destroyer... DJT is Simple-Minded, and his Dementia is getting Worse... DJT has squandered Billions of $, and has filed for Bankruptcy 6-Times... In the year 2000, the USA had a Balanced Budget, and was slated to payoff the National Debt by 2010... Then came GWB, and his Forever-Wars, GWB's Tax-Cuts for the Wealthy, and DJT's Tax-Cuts for the Wealthy... The Wealthy own the Corporations thru their Funds, and Stock Holdings... DJT was a 'Successful Businessman' only in a Simple-Minded Fantasy Reality Show.... DJT is the Perfect Orange Puppet for Putin, and Musk... Putin wants to Destroy the U.S. led Western-Order, Musk wants to Pillage the USG for his own Ends... Note which Agencies have been Crushed by Musk... Keep an Eye on China... The Chinese play an extremely Long-Game, and they are are starting to Fight Back...
Argh, after viewing Belle of the Ranch’s very informative and timely video, i went down a rabbit hole. But. Thank you anyway because it led me to more information about just how corrupt the FASCIST Trump administration truly it is and how our allies are starting to view our country as unworthy because of P.I.G* sitting behind the resolute desk and his CLOWN CAR CABINET OF IGNORAMUSES. They are a disgrace and a mockery of leadership.
(* POMPOUS IGNORANT GRIFTER)
Nailed it. He must pay up. Remember Helsinki
Thank you Dr HC Richardson, excellent article tonight (as always).
re: “DOGE is planning to move the SSA computer system off the old programming language it uses, COBOL, to a new system.” -HCR
I’ve had a job that has paid into SSA since I was 16 years old, and now that I am a retiree on SSA, this is where we say ‘WTF Let’s get a team of engineers in here, who will take responsibility and accountability PAST May 2025 to handle this project’.
We need to demand our Congress to say NO to Elon Musk’s wrecking ball breaking down the SSA’s COBOL system in the 60 days/2-month’s before he jumps ship on this project from Trump.
I found important details from the magazine ZDNET and link is below. Read this:
If COBOL is so problematic, why does the US government still use it?
Feb. 21, 2025
Written bySteven Vaughan-Nichols, Senior Contributing
https://www.zdnet.com/article/if-cobol-is-so-problematic-why-does-the-us-government-still-use-it/
…”This problem isn't limited to just the Federal government. Forty-five of the 50 states and the District of Columbia still run COBOL systems.
COBOL excels at efficiently processing large volumes of business data.
Its syntax and structure are optimized for data manipulation and batch-processing tasks. The language is also great at organizing data and indexing it for fast, efficient operations. The result is a language that excels at data accuracy and reliability. That last quality has extended COBOL's life for decades.
However, the sheer volume of COBOL code that needs modernizing is daunting. Estimates range from 220 billion to 800 billion lines of COBOL code still in use today. Decades of accumulated code, inconsistent programming styles, a lack of documentation, and inconsistent standardization make understanding and porting these systems difficult. To add to the complexity, legacy COBOL applications often contain business logic and processes intricately woven into the code.
COBOL, the first computer language for writing application software, was developed by an enterprising Naval officer. She conceived the notion that computers, which IBM had just begun to market could be used for all kinds of tasks like tracking large inventories. IBM had zero interest in developing applications for its equipment. They felt there was no money in it and their strength was hardware.
COBOL is not really very efficient as things stand and applications tend to quickly begin to resemble a Rube Goldberg invention.
The ubiquity of COBOL in government and banking is primarily the result of several factors. First, it was at the time the only applications language. Second, there grew to be a large workforce fluent in it. Third, if you’ve spent a lot of money on something that has become monstrously complicated and it pretty much works, you don’t toss it out just so you can start over. Fourth, refer back to the large workforce of COBOL programmers that understand what the Rube Goldberg parts are doing. So a combination of inertia and practical wisdom is why no one can argue for a budget to tear things down and start over as if that was easy.
“Artificial Intelligence” at this point is still largely a marketing term used to attract billions of dollars of investment into speculative projects. At this point, not only does it not produce efficient code on a large scale, it is difficult to correct bugs.
It is clear to me that what Elon produces most efficiently is “spoof”. Quite likely he simply has more semen than sense. And his intentions are ugly.
Good points Bill Pierce, thanks for sharing. I’m not a computer programmer, but I worked on the deployment team when a specific healthcare company implemented the Epic digital software in their paper records to computer records and how much planning, training, support and unavoidable downtime that deployment took. We need help to not have our seniors lose their once-a-month SSA check.
Some will die. Some will fall seriously ill. Some will lose housing. Some will starve. Many will despair. Then some will ….
Bill, “she conceived the notion … “, who is she? Was her name published? Just curious and excited that it was a woman doing this kind of work back in those days! Brava, lady, whoever you are.
COBOL was developed by Grace Hopper, a Naval officer.
Leave COBOL alone idiots. But the mess is just what they want. Carefully planned chaos.
They want to break SS and cause it to fail to deliver payments that it has been reliably able to deliver on time for years now. There is a lot of money sloshing around that gets sent out every month, the repugnantkins have always wanted to have access to that trough. It’s really quite simple, they want to be able to tap into that cash flow, even if they only siphon off 1%, and we would be dreaming if we thought it would be only 1%, it would still be an enormous sum, and we who have paid into it all of our lives would be paying for it. Once the checks stop there will be an uproar like we have never seen before, and that is also part of the plan. Putin has to be way beyond delighted, there is no way that russia could have accomplished this destruction of our society on their own, certainly not militarily, they needed an insider to destroy our government from within. They got their man, he’s in the WH, and our system of government is keeping him there while he does the russian’s work. He’s gambling that he and his family will avoid the fate of the Romanov’s, with 30 million assault weapons in the hands of Americans, I think that is a very bad bet. These people are beyond stupid and are totally driven by greed. 🤬🤬🤬
Frighteningly true!
Wow, you have been paying attention
What you are saying JaKsa is the system needs modernization and no replacement because, even a little bit outdated, is still performing well, right?
If that's the case, maybe the reason Musk wants to replace is that he is not making money out of COBOL.
Ricardo, I’m not a computer data scientist, but the link to the detailed article I included could answer your question. Thanks
I won't even try. I'm fortunate to be able to use my phone. 😄 thanks for the good intentions.
Your comment led me to ask a fairly obvious question: If the government was contacting this project for SSA, what would it expect and require. They would but out a request for proposals which would have a long list of requirements and expectations. They would likely require a lengthy descritption of a detailed study of the current system, then a description of what the propsal would accomplish and how. A likely component would be the development of recovery systems to insure that neither data nor functions are lost. Numerous proposals and bids would be submitted and the gov't would undertake a lengthy review of the many many submitted, and a final decision made to award the development of the system. That has not happened. No one knows what will be done, how it will work, or what protections will be provided. But then, DoGE seems to have taken on the system of air traffic control for itself well after it was awarded to another company (Verizon, I believe). We have moved from a system that safeguards the citizenry from many hazzards to one that moves fast and breaks things. No wonder we feel uneasy.
In the mid-90’s we had a system where C generated the COBOL because COBOL was the better language for just in time scheduling systems. Extremely efficient. My husband has coded in every language except COBOL, mostly operating systems stuff, and when we met he worked on the beginning end of a product and I worked on the final customer interface. We had no idea what each other did. Made for strange conversations. He never saw the final product.
Had Soros acted like Musk, maga would be revolting in full 24/7. Where are the democrats?
Ricardo, not that I trust the DNC, mind you, but after seeing Ben Wikler's name cited by Heather, I recalled that "Oh, yeah. He ran for head of the Party. What's the name of the guy who beat him?" I couldn't remember, had to look it up. It's Ken Martin. Anybody heard from that guy recently? Perhaps it's because I've migrated away from legacy media that I've forgotten the guy ( but know Wikler's name as well as Martin's predecessor, Jaime Harrison.)
Hey, it's encouraging to hear that the open House seats in 2 of Florida's red districts are not gimmes, and that the Dem candidates are strongly challenging, so maybe Mr. Martin is doing his job.
Doug - if you follow Ken Martin on any social media platform you’ll see what he is doing - including convening town halls in R districts where the rep won’t hold one and more - do a little research
Mary, respectfully: do a little reading before telling me to do my research.
1. My last sentence admits he may be doing something. I was speaking more generally about name recognition, and the fact that Ben Wikler's name was one I know and respect -- I wasn't happy when the Dems chose Martin over him.
2. Social media? Why aren't we all boycotting most of it (excluding Bluesky)? The billionaires who own it are have revealed themselves to be trompy toadies and make more billions by selling ads on their platforms. I've never been on FB, left Twitter after you know who did you know what. I was on Threads for about a year or more until the post-election circular firing squads sickened me. I joined Bluesky but don't think I've even opened it (and please don't tell me that it's different -- I really don't care.) I'm only on Insta because I trade reels and photos with my kids.
Funny though about Martin's town halls in R districts: I'm a paid subscriber to The Guardian, Reuters, AP, NPR, as well as several substacks. I know all about Sanders' and AOC's rallies, but haven't seen anything memorable about Martin's.
Respectfully back to you - if you are saying I (meaning you) don’t know what Ken Martin is doing even though I (you) am (are) well informed from lots of different places - all I can say is that I too am well informed and use most of the same sources as you and I know what Ken Martin is doing - sorry to have hit a nerve! I certainly couldn’t get that context from your comment. Have a good day and I’ll avoid commenting when I feel people are shooting arrows inside the tent as opposed to staying focused on the enemy. Blame it on the lack of caffeine!
(And Mary, by the way, I don't consider myself as well-informed as many of the commenters I read on substack and in journalism. If it weren't for these daily readings and the occasional — used to be regular— watching of Rachel Maddow, I'd be much less informed; I'm grateful to have these resources as long as they're available.)
Cheers, Mary. My broader point (which I didn't even touch upon) is that we need everybody who is affected/disturbed/apoplectic/fearful/{insert other adjectives here} — those in Congress, those in the courts on either side of the bench or attorney tables, those in academia, in the pundit profession, political leadership, and each of us who consider ourselves the common folk to speak up/speak out, lead/follow, march, and otherwise demand action to be taken against the free fall of our democracy and our institutions. Ken Martin is just one. Perhaps he is doing all (and as well) that/as anybody in that position can. But if it takes arrows within the tent, let them fall where they may — leaders must lead, and I’m willing to follow. (And as to whether you struck a nerve with me, yes, you did, but I woke up grouchy! I normally don't lie awake in the middle of the night (EDT) awaiting Heather’s posts so that I can comment. I woke up, couldn't get back to sleep, and made the mistake of checking my phone.) Anyway, we are all in this together, as Ms. Vance says.
Doug, it's nice to heard from someone optimistic once in the while. 😄. Thanks
Ricardo, if referring to me I'm rarely optimistic about anything these days, but Ill take it as a compliment. Cheers, wherever in the world you are right now!
Stranded in a small port town in Northern Corsica. Strong winds canceled ferry back to Corsica where I was about to return rental car and take a flight to Paris. Forcast is very windy for days. And yes Doug, I meant optimistic as a compliment. 😁
Safe travels to you, Ricardo! I've only spent 3 ½ days in Paris, hope to return next year with my granddaughter, to whom I've promised a trip to London and am planning to take the Eurostar to Paris for a day or 2. I'm envious of your journeys!
Doug, I’m envious of your granddaughter! What a marvelous gift!
Thank you, I'm so lucky to be able to do this.
Lucky granddaughter you have Doug. It's a good plan and with your optimism it will be even better .😄
Ricardo, I consider myself equally lucky. I brought my grandson, who is interested in our family history, to France during a school vacation 3 years ago when he was 13 to visit the villages in the Perche region where one-half of our ancestors came from, and spent the rest of the time travelling to Versailles, Brittany, the D-Day beaches, Mont St. Michel, Giverney, and finally Paris. I told my other 2 grandkids that I'd do the same for them, to a place they want to visit (within reason) when they turn 13. My granddaughter chose London because of Harry Potter as well as more serious literature, so that’s next year, and my youngest grandson (who just turned 9) has been fascinated with volcanoes for years and wants to go to Pompeii. Thankfully the 3 are spaced far enough apart that we can budget for it (although my wife, who has no sense of wanderlust whatsoever, chooses to stay home.)
Lucky family!!!!!🫠
Doug, do you have any relatives in Newburyport or Amesbury MA?
Anne Marie, not that I know of, but my last name is extremely common.
Ken Martin was on Chris Hayes’s show last night.
Yes he’s in FL supporting the 2 Democrats that are running in next week’s election.
That's great, Emily. I didn't watch last night.
DNC Chair,Ken Martin is in Florida this w-end campaigning for Josh Weil.
Ways to help Gay Valimont in FL-01 (Matt Gaetz’ former seat) and Josh Weil Fl-06.My Fl Senator,Randy Fine,is Weil’s opponent.Fine is extremely toxic and if elected,Congress will not be prepared for the likes of him.He makes fellow MAGAs look like Mother Teresa!
⬇️
https://linktr.ee/fldems
They treat Soros as a demon anyway because he does not accept the rules of the club.
And then they go after Columbia on the excuse they want to purge it of 'anti-semitism'. As if.
They also bloviate about defending "Free Speech", and call Zelenskyy a "Nazi". They only tell the truth in the form of threats.
He is the exception together with a few others.
It has become evident that the Trump Regime is paying no attention whatsoever to the polls, approval ratings, or even to the concerns of Republican and MAGA voters are voicing at their own Town Halls. The Regime appears oblivious to the concerns of ordinary Americans regarding inflation, Social Security, Medicare, Veterans’ Affairs, or even the equity markets.
This tells me that the Regime has no intention of running for re-election, or of holding any elections at all. It tells me that the Regime plans -- at a time of its own convenience -- to proclaim a National Emergency under which it intends to dispense with the rule of Law and the Constitution altogether. The Regime will claim that Congress is gridlocked by Democrat leftists and the Judiciary undermined by lunatic leftwing judges interfering with domestic and foreign and policy. The Supreme Court will obfuscate in the face of having no way to enforce rulings against the Regime even if it iso inclined.
How else to explain the Regime’s imperviousness?
I couldn't agree more.
The Trump juggernaut is in a position to sweep aside everything and simply declare themselves the law of the land. So, they can ignore the outrage and upheavals, the pain and misery, the chaos and uncertainty they are inflicting in the US and around the world.
All along, Trump has wanted three things:
1) Unbridled authority & power
2) Unlimited money
3) Absolute immunity
He currently has all three. And I blame the cowards of the MAGA Republicans plus the so-called Roberts supreme court for this dire situation.
This was all spelled out in Project 2025.
As Hitler said, if you win, you don’t have to answer any questions. Why chump will never accept that he lost.
You are correct. The made up “emergency” is coming to justify martial law. Just a question of when.
I am afraid you are so right.
Great recap. Thx Dr. HCR. Will this week be the one when the truth breaks through?
Lauren, I think it's still infrastructure destruction week for the foreseeable future.
'infrastructure destruction week'. excellent description
Thank you, Nancy!
Something is rotten in the state of the union.
The smell test is proof enough JL😷
My most extreme aggravation today was as a result of The White House order blathering about restoring “truth” to American history. As an ancient person who once studied American history at Cal, I can only say bunk.
Going after Smithsonian and Kennedy Center is a clue. Long term rewriting of our culture and history. Imagine the destruction.
A couple of years ago a friend and I visited the African- American museum. I could have spent all day. Fascinating! Looks like Cheeto has never visited and has it on the chopping block along with the Women’s museum. And the National Zoo!? Maybe Cheeto’s parents never took him.
Gail, at the risk of repeating myself, Donald's mother was a house cleaner. His father was a slumlord whose father was a pimp. Education and culture were foreign to the Trump family.
The only times any of these low-brow posers might have darkened the doors of a museum or other cultural center was for a fundraiser where they were desperate to rub shoulders with NYC aristocracy. They embarrassed themselves and didn't even know it.
Destruction is easy. Rebuilding will be well nigh impossible.
I will say that also. SO many dictators have done this.
Another doozy of a day/ week. Truly appreciate your hard work in keeping us informed, Heather❤️❤️