By Lambert Strether.
Bird Song of the Day
Brown Thrasher, Indian Springs WMA, two-track road, Washington, Maryland, United States. “Adult male Brown Thrasher singing from lower branches of a Sycamore tree near the road.”
In Case You Might Miss…
- Court filing: Who’s in charge at DOGE? If not Musk, who?
- Ed Zitron: “The Generative AI Con.”
- The value of note-taking.
Politics
“So many of the social reactions that strike us as psychological are in fact a rational management of symbolic capital.” –Pierre Bourdieu, Classification Struggles
DOGE
“Declaration of Joshua Fisher” (PDF) [State of New Mexico, et al., v. Elon Musk, in his official capacity, et al., United States District Court for the District of Columbia]. Fisher is director of the White House Office of Administration. Amazing stuff:
A few days ago, we showed how Trump’s Executive Orders establishes DOGE teams as a Bolshevik-style parallel structure to existing goverment agencies. And now we learn that DOGE has nobody in charge? No “service administrator”? Bolsheviks, but no Lenin? Or does Fisher know who the extremely transparent DOGE’s boss is, but he’s just not telling us? Certainly President Trump believes Musk is in charge:
Well, this is awkward. https://t.co/M2QfO8w5q0
— Scott Greenfield (@ScottGreenfield) February 18, 2025
So who is in charge of DOGE? Big Balls?
“Who’s in charge of DOGE? Not Elon Musk, White House says” [Politico]. “The technical designation does not mean Musk is not, for all practical purposes, the key decision-maker for DOGE, which has been staffed full of his allies and may still ultimately be fueled by his influence in the White House. Musk has eagerly touted DOGE’s work, described his influence over its operations and appeared alongside Trump to talk about its mission. Trump himself has credited Musk with leading DOGE. ‘I’m going to tell [Elon Musk] very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education,’ Trump said in a Super Bowl interview with Fox News anchor Bret Baier. ‘He’s going to find the same thing … Then I’m going to go, go to the military. Let’s check the military.’ But the Fisher filing suggests a technical degree of separation that raises new questions about accountability for DOGE’s operations — a breakneck effort that has alarmed federal employees and raised fears about data breaches in some of the federal government’s most closely guarded databases.” • Recall once more (cited here) Madison’s fundamental architectural principle for devising checks and balances: “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.” And I wrote: “[T]he President’s actions in creating DOGE and setting it in motion run counter to Madison’s principle; ‘places’ [offices] are unclear, hence interests are unclear, hence checks are unclear, hence ‘interior structure of the government’ is out of whack.” Here we have a place (“Services Administrator”) with no “man” in it. And yet that Service is putatively auditing the Federal Government! It’s extraordinary.
“DOGE’s ‘Nerd Army’ Is Breaking the Government by Threatening to Snitch to Elon” [Rolling Stone]. “When security officials, for instance, at several departments and agencies have responded that they need to check to ensure these young Musk allies have proper clearance to view sensitive databases, DOGE staff have routinely erupted in fury. Some have told these security officials that if they don’t give them what they want immediately, they’ll call Musk’s cellphone and give him the officials’ names — and have the richest man in the world call and yell at them, or get them reprimanded or fired. ‘‘ one DOGE member barked at a federal security official while demanding access to sensitive information at one agency this month, a source familiar with the exchange tells Rolling Stone. This has happened repeatedly since the dawn of the second Trump administration — at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), the Treasury Department, at the Office of Personnel Management, and elsewhere. It has become a cruel punchline within the federal bureaucracy, four sources familiar with the matter tell Rolling Stone, that ‘some child’ from the DOGE team ‘will threaten to call Elon Musk, if you don’t do what the child wants,’ as one federal career official describes it. So far, it’s working.” • DOGEbags indeed. And they seem to know who their boss is. Why doesn’t the White House?
“The Elon DOGE Emperor Has No Clothes” [TechDirt]. Excellent article. This caught my eye: “If the Justice Department’s declaration is true and Elon really isn’t running DOGE, then federal employees should immediately stop bowing down to these threats. After all, why would anyone need to worry about a call from someone who (according to the DOJ) has no official role or authority over the DOGE team? In fact, given this declaration, shouldn’t security officials be asking DOGE staff who actually has the authority to override their security protocols? (Good luck getting an answer to that one.)?” • It might be fun if some clever lawyer turned this into a lawsuit.
* * *
* * * “Elon Musk’s wrecking ball” [Ed Luce, Financial Times]. Ed Luce is Ed Luce, so there’s nothing readers don’t already know, but this sentence caught my eye: “Take nothing at face value.” • In the pages of the FT! Everybody in the DOGE flexnet — the bent squillionaires, the “old heads”, the feral/incel engineers — lie like they breathe. No, that’s not fair. It takes no audacity to breathe. For example–
“No, 150-Year-Olds Aren’t Collecting Social Security Benefits” [Wired]. “Musk first made the claims during his Oval Office press conference last week, when he claimed that a ‘cursory examination of Social Security, and we got people in there that are 150 years old.’” Cursory is right. More: “While no evidence was produced to back up this claim, it was picked up by the right-wing commentators online, primarily on Musk’s own X platform, as well as being reported credibly by pro-Trump media outlets. Computer programmers quickly claimed that the 150 figure was not evidence of fraud, but rather the result of a weird quirk of the Social Security Administration’s benefits system, which was largely written in COBOL, a 60-year-old programming language that undergirds SSA’s databases as well as systems from many other US government agencies. COBOL is rarely used today, and as such, Musk’s cadre of young engineers may well be unfamiliar with it. Because COBOL does not have a date type, some implementations rely instead on a system whereby all dates are coded to a reference point. The most commonly used is May 20, 1875, as this was the date of an international standards-setting conference held in Paris, known as the ‘Convention du Mètre.’ These systems default to the reference point when a birth date is missing or incomplete, meaning all of those entries in 2025 would show an age of 150. That’s just one possible explanation for what DOGE allegedly found. Musk could also have simply looked up the SSA’s own website, which explains that since September 2015 the agency has automatically stopped benefit payments when anyone reaches the age of 115. However, on Monday morning Musk doubled down, posting a screenshot of what he claims were figures from ‘the Social Security database’ to X, writing that ‘the numbers of people in each age bucket with the death field set to FALSE!’ The figures suggested that over 10 millions people aged over 120 were collecting benefits…. The fact that the Social Security system contains millions of entries from people who are dead is likely distinct from a potential COBOL-caused error, and also not news. A report written by the SSA’s inspector general in 2023 found that 98 percent of those aged 100 or older in the Social Security databases are not in receipt of any benefits. The report added that the database would not be updated because it would cost too much money to do so.” • Dealing with Elon is like dealing with Ukrainian propaganda. It’s really good propaganda, it comes in great volume, and its amplified by an army of bots and shills. Also, any hint of DOGEbags messing with Social Security gives me the creeps. As it should you, no matter your age. NOTE: My recollection is that Elon’s first series of lies was based solely on Social Security records aged 150, for which Wired — only an actual Social Security maintainer could give definitive evidence — gives an account. Elon then embarked on a second series of lies with additional records, showing other out-of-band values. The following gives an account for both campaigns (Occam’s razor slicing toward the datatype side rather than the fraud side, it seems to me).
“1875 Social Security rumor” [Keith Thompson, GIthub]. “Musk didn’t directly say that payments were being made to people who are 150 year old, but that’s almost certainly what we were supposed to infer. In response to this, it was claimed to be a result of a feature of the COBOL programming language, that supposedly specifies 1875-05-20 as a base date, used to mark an unknown date. This is not the case; the COBOL standard does not refer to 1875. But this false explanation spread quickly through both social media and news outlets, being reported by Rachel Maddow among others. Another alleged explanation is that that date is specified by ISO 8601, the standard that gave us the YYYY-MM-DD date format.” And as far as payments go:
“There was an audit in 2023 by the SSA Inspector General about number holders over the age of 100 with no record of death on file. They identified just shy of 19 million. They were able to find death certificates and records for a couple million, but most couldn’t be verified. But here’s the important part that Musk is omitting: Of the 19 million over the age of 100 without a verified death record, only 44,000 number holder accounts were actually drawing social security payments. That means only 44k people aged 100+ still collecting SS, which is a more logical situation.”
“Statistically, it is reasonable there are 44K people older than 100. It represents .013% percent of the population which is in line with the 100+ populations in the UK, France and Germany.”
And:
The critical importance of domain knowledge can never be overstated when it comes to data scientific research. You’ll never get good (and truthful) results if you don’t have a deep understanding of the intricacies of the specific data sets under investigation. And, those of us who’ve done this for a while know that pretty much every data set (especially those that live in databases whose ages are measured in decades) tend to have boatloads of “interesting” aspects that make straightforward analysis challenging at best.
(I found the Github gist by starting at this Stack Exchange thread. I’m still waiting for a real data analyst smarter than me to explain it to me like I’m give, but the bottom line is that Musk screaming fraud is a lie, and his motive for doing so should be questions).
Stack Exchange
Syndemics
“I am in earnest — I will not equivocate — I will not excuse — I will not retreat a single inch — AND I WILL BE HEARD.” –William Lloyd Garrison
Covid Resources, United States (National): Transmission (CDC); Wastewater (CDC, Biobot; includes many counties; Wastewater Scan, includes drilldown by zip); Variants (CDC; Walgreens); “Iowa COVID-19 Tracker” (in IA, but national data). “Infection Control, Emergency Management, Safety, and General Thoughts” (especially on hospitalization by city).
Lambert here: Readers, thanks for the collective effort. To update any entry, do feel free to contact me at the address given with the plants. Please put “COVID” in the subject line. Thank you!
Resources, United States (Local): AK (dashboard); AL (dashboard); AR (dashboard); AZ (dashboard); CA (dashboard; Marin, dashboard; Stanford, wastewater; Oakland, wastewater); CO (dashboard; wastewater); CT (dashboard); DE (dashboard); FL (wastewater); GA (wastewater); HI (dashboard); IA (wastewater reports); ID (dashboard, Boise; dashboard, wastewater, Central Idaho; wastewater, Coeur d’Alene; dashboard, Spokane County); IL (wastewater); IN (dashboard); KS (dashboard; wastewater, Lawrence); KY (dashboard, Louisville); LA (dashboard); MA (wastewater); MD (dashboard); ME (dashboard); MI (wastewater; wastewater); MN (dashboard); MO (wastewater); MS (dashboard); MT (dashboard); NC (dashboard); ND (dashboard; wastewater); NE (dashboard); NH (wastewater); NJ (dashboard); NM (dashboard); NV (dashboard; wastewater, Southern NV); NY (dashboard); OH (dashboard); OK (dashboard); OR (dashboard); PA (dashboard); RI (dashboard); SC (dashboard); SD (dashboard); TN (dashboard); TX (dashboard); UT (wastewater); VA (wastewater); VT (dashboard); WA (dashboard; dashboard); WI (wastewater); WV (wastewater); WY (wastewater).
Resources, Canada (National): Wastewater (Government of Canada).
Resources, Canada (Provincial): ON (wastewater); QC (les eaux usées); BC (wastewater); BC, Vancouver (wastewater).
Hat tips to helpful readers: Alexis, anon (2), Art_DogCT, B24S, CanCyn, ChiGal, Chuck L, Festoonic, FM, FreeMarketApologist (4), Gumbo, hop2it, JB, JEHR, JF, JL Joe, John, JM (10), JustAnotherVolunteer, JW, KatieBird, KF, KidDoc, LL, Michael King, KF, LaRuse, mrsyk, MT, MT_Wild, otisyves, Petal (6), RK (2), RL, RM, Rod, square coats (11), tennesseewaltzer, thump, Tom B., Utah, Bob White (3).
Stay safe out there!
| Wastewater | |
| This week[1] CDC February 10 | Last week[2] CDC (until next week): |
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| Variants [3] CDC February 15 | Emergency Room Visits[4] CDC February 8 |
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| Hospitalization | |
| ★ New York[5] New York State, data February 14: | National [6] CDC February 13: |
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| Positivity | |
| National[7] Walgreens February 17: | ★ Ohio[8] Cleveland Clinic February 8: |
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| Travelers Data | |
| ★ Positivity[9] CDC January 27: | ★ Variants[10] CDC January 27 |
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| Deaths | |
| Weekly Deaths vs. % Positivity [11] CDC January 25: | Weekly Deaths vs. ED Visits [12] CDC January 25: |
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LEGEND
1) ★ for charts new today; all others are not updated.
2) For a full-size/full-resolution image, Command-click (MacOS) or right-click (Windows) on the chart thumbnail and “open image in new tab.”
NOTES
[1] (CDC) Down, nothing new at major hubs.
[2] (CDC) Last week’s wastewater map.
[3] (CDC Variants) XEC takes over. That WHO label, “Ommicron,” has done a great job normalizing successive waves of infection.
[4] (ED) A little uptick.
[5] (Hospitalization: NY) Definitely jumped, but no exponential growth either, Odd.
[6] (Hospitalization: CDC). Leveling out.
[7] (Walgreens) Leveling out.
[8] (Cleveland) Continued upward trend since, well, Thanksgiving.
[9] (Travelers: Positivity) Leveling out.
[10] (Travelers: Variants). Positivity is new, but variants have not yet been released.
[11] Deaths low, positivity leveling out.
[12] Deaths low, ED leveling out.
Stats Watch
Manufacturing: “United States NY Empire State Manufacturing Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NY Empire State Manufacturing Index surged 18.3 points to +5.7 in February 2025, easily surpassing market expectations of -1 and signaling a slight rebound in business activity across New York State. New orders and shipments saw moderate growth, while employment levels declined.”
Housing: “United States NAHB Housing Market Index” [Trading Economics]. “The NAHB/Wells Fargo Housing Market Index in the US fell to 42 in February 2025, the lowest in five months, compared to 47 in January, and below forecasts of 47, dragged down by concerns on tariffs, elevated mortgage rates and high housing costs. The gauge measuring current sales conditions fell four points to 46, the component measuring sales expectations in the next six months plunged 13 points to 46, and the gauge charting traffic of prospective buyers posted a three-point decline to 29.”
Manufacturing: “Judge gives Boeing and DOJ another month to negotiate 737 Max fraud plea” [FlightGlobal]. “Boeing and the US Department of Justice (DOJ) have received an extra month to negotiate a possible revised guilty plea by the company to federal fraud charges related to certification the 737 Max. US federal judge Reed O’Connor has delayed to 14 March a deadline by which Boeing and the DOJ must update the court about their efforts to reach a deal that would head off a trial, according to a 17 February court order. The company and DOJ had previously been required to submit an update by 16 February. But both requested an extension, citing the recent administration change in Washington.”
Manufacturing: “Boeing’s Air Force One program could be delayed until 2029, or later, White House official says” [Reuters]. “The Air Force One program may be further delayed until 2029 or years later, a senior administration official said, citing supply chain issues and changing requirements, after the White House said the project failed to deliver a new plane on time over the weekend. The delays are frustrating, but not much can be done to speed delivery, the official told Reuters, noting that Boeing faced problems getting components since some manufacturers had gone out of business. Some requirements for the aircraft had also changed, given evolving potential threats, the official said.”
Today’s Fear & Greed Index: 44 Fear (previous close: 46 Neutral) [CNN]. One week ago: 38 (Fear). (0 is Extreme Fear; 100 is Extreme Greed). Last updated Feb 14 at 6:59:56 PM ET.
Rapture Index: Closes down one on Food Supply. “The lack of activity has downgraded this category” [Rapture Ready]. Record High, October 10, 2016: 189. Current: 180. (Remember that bringing on the Rapture is good.) • This is a tough crowd. Surely Trump’s first month brought the Rapture closer?
Gallery
Plus ça change…
In the town of Novgorod, they sometimes come across preserved birch bark. People used this bark to write on, including Onfim! Archaeologists have found 17 pieces of bark marked with his homework. But what do these inscriptions reveal? A young boy who disliked school! 2/ pic.twitter.com/04FPOVkFvH
— Dr Hugh Thomas (@hughs_news) February 16, 2025
Musical Interlude
Reaction is where we’re at, for sure:
Which works two ways:
The Workplace
“The Ideal Candidate Will Be Punched In the Stomach” [Scott Smitelli]. • The workplace…
Especiallly for any DOGE-adjacent readers (full thread):
And:
News of the Wired
“Why can’t we remember our lives as babies or toddlers?” [Guardian]. “Ironically, for parenting influencers who post about elaborate holidays in the name of creating ‘core memories’, the early events that children retain can be surprisingly mundane – ‘things that most parents would never reminisce elaboratively about’, [Prof Elaine Reese at the University of Otago] says. ‘The classic example from my own research is a child who remembers seeing a worm on the footpath one time.’” • Hmm.
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