Hypnotisim is a very, very serious matter. Oh yeah? Oh yes! Although it has found some practical application in today's modern science and medicine, it is still a potentially leathal form of Black Magic! Oh yeah? Cool! #CowboyWho
Following a national search, the Rothko Chapel in Houston has selected Abdullah Antepli as its new leader. Mr. Antepli, who will hold the title of President, succeeds David Leslie, who retired in June 2025 after ten years at the Chapel.
In a Rothko Chapel press release, Mr. Antepli is identified as “One of the world’s most respected leaders in cross-cultural and cross-religious dialogue.” The Houston Chronicle called him “a Turkish-born ordained imam and globally recognized interfaith leader,” and “one of the only imams to pray before Congress, and a man who has been banned from multiple countries” — including his home country — “for his criticism of religious extremism.”
Abdullah Antepli. Photo: Courtesy of Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy
Duke University reports that Mr. Antepli is leaving his position as Professor and Director of the Polis Center for Politics at the Sanford School of Public Policy. He was the university’s first Muslim chaplain, and later served as Chief Representative for Muslim Affairs and associate director of the Duke Islamic Studies Center. The Rothko Chapel reports that Mr. Antepli was honored by the Anti-Defamation League with the Daniel Pearl Award for his work to build bridges of understanding between Jews and Muslims and for promoting peace and religious tolerance.
Mr. Antepli said, “It is with great excitement and a deep sense of purpose that I join the Rothko Chapel — a sanctuary where the sacred, the artistic, and the just converge. … At a time when the world is fracturing along religious, partisan, and ideological lines, the Rothko Chapel dares to offer a sacred space where art, silence, and justice meet, and I am humbled to help steward that space forward.”
The Rothko Chapel is a non-denominational spiritual venue built around 14 monumental abstract paintings by the late American painter and Jewish immigrant Mark Rothko, who died in 1970.
Mr. Antepli will lead the Chapel amid a $42 million expansion project that includes two new buildings — a program center and an administrative and archive building — slated to open in 2026.
Christopher Rothko, son of Mark Rothko and former Chair of the Board, said, “Abdullah Antepli’s work embodies the essence of the Rothko Chapel mission — to strive for justice through listening, understanding, and collaboration. We have hired a superb leader.”
To learn more about the Rothko Chapel, which recently launched a restoration project for paintings damaged during Hurricane Beryl in 2024, visit the nonprofit organization’s website.
5 years folks, its been 5 years since covid. Its also been 541 million years since the cambrian, can you believe it? Time sure does fly. It feels like just yesterday it was only 540.99999 million years ago. watch my evolution simulator video and enjoy the pixels and audio waves. im sleepy.
In brief: Invest 96L is not a concern for land. The wave behind does bear watching for much of the Atlantic basin, and today’s post walks through the process over the next 5 to 7 days. Back on land, more serious flooding risks are in the cards today for Iowa and Wisconsin in particular.
Happy Saturday! Let’s get you caught up on all things tropics and flooding.
Invest 96L
It’s been an interesting ride for Invest 96L. Once the darling of some weather models in the open Atlantic, support for development of this one has floundered for now.
Invest 96L has thunderstorms but little to no organization right now. (Tropical Tidbits)
Over the next few days, 96L is going to turn northwest or northward into the open Atlantic. More than likely, it will head out to sea, though a couple models do kind of keep some fingerprint of the system hanging around in the central Atlantic for a bit. Either way, this one is not a concern for land, and it is unlikely to really develop much, if at all.
Next tropical wave
The National Hurricane Center added an area of interest yesterday for the tropical wave that is emerging off Africa this weekend. No development is expected initially, but by next week, development is becoming increasingly likely.
40% odds of development are noted from the tropical wave emerging off Africa, a percentage that will probably further increase this weekend. (NOAA NHC)
Many of you have been monitoring the progress of this one since earlier this week, as modeling has been periodically going ballistic with development once in the western Atlantic. Let’s focus on what we can actually realistically discuss first, then we can talk about what comes next.
First, the wave emerging off Africa has what you’d want to see from a tropical wave that may develop. It’s got thunderstorm activity. There’s a whiff of “spin” evident. Modeling shows a good deal of mid-level vorticity as it is emerging. Basically, it’s the initial seeds you’d want to see for a development candidate.
The suspect area emerging in the Atlantic on Saturday morning. (Weathernerds.org)
Over the next 2 to 3 days, the wave will continue to march west, eventually passing the Cabo Verde Islands (which may see some hefty rainfall) and settling just west of there. Interestingly, this wave is emerging around 9 to 10 degrees North latitude, but it probably won’t establish itself before curling a little to the north, up around 15 degrees or so North. This is somewhat important information for the rest of the system’s life, as where it establishes latitudinally could play a role in ultimately where it goes. For example, in the western Gulf, it would be exceptionally rare for a Cabo Verde storm establishing north of about 13°N to make it there. Ike was the one exception to that rule in 2008, so it serves as a reminder that rules are made to be broken, but the odds would not favor that part of the world if this is indeed where this wave establishes.
By Monday evening, we should expect to see at least a tropical wave setup north of 15°N, with only slight chances it has formed into a depression yet.
The next tropical wave will establish west of the Cabo Verde Islands by Monday evening. (Weathernerds.org)
Heading out to day 5, we still don’t see a ton of development with this one, but we see a pretty strong signal over the central Atlantic, east northeast of the Lesser Antilles.
Various ensemble members from the European model and AI models show pretty good overall agreement in a general location east northeast of the Lesser Antilles by Wednesday evening. (Google Weather Lab)
There are still a number of differences in placement, speed, etc. that we can’t quite resolve yet, but the general trend is pretty much in okay agreement through day 5. From this point, let’s look at the upper pattern.
The overall setup of the upper pattern that may steer the disturbance around midweek next week. (Tropical Tidbits)
Initially, the disturbance will be steered around the base of high pressure east of Bermuda. This should allow it to turn more west-northwest or northwest even by mid to late next week. However, high pressure over Florida may flex later next week, which could jam up the disturbance just northeast of the Leeward Islands and Virgin Islands. Particularly if this remains fairly weak through late week, this would be the case.
From this point, it becomes a little more difficult to project where the disturbance goes. High pressure may retreat into the western Gulf by next weekend, which may open the exit door back up, allowing the system to head out to sea. Or if it holds a little firmer and longer, we could see the system get closer to the Bahamas or Florida. Or perhaps it turns north and threatens Bermuda. Or it could drift closer to the East Coast. There are many, many possibilities beyond day 5-7 right now. European ensemble member solutions range from something near Hispaniola or the Bahamas to something already halfway to Europe out to sea. There are just a ton of options out there.
So, what can we say right now? We expect a disturbance to pass the Cabo Verde Islands by Monday. From there, it will come west across the Atlantic, settling about 1,000 miles east of the Leeward Islands by Wednesday. Limited development is expected through Wednesday. From that point, the upper pattern suggests a slower movement that may adjust the disturbance some. Beyond day 7, the forecast turns sharply chaotic with numerous possibilities, intensities, locations, and tracks. Folks from the Caribbean up the East Coast and out to Bermuda should continue to monitor the progress of this tropical wave over the coming days.
Iowa and Wisconsin flooding risks
Hey, remember when I said we finally broke the streak of days without a “slight” risk of excessive rain and flooding earlier this week? Yeah, that was incorrect. A slight risk (2/4) was issued later that day. So the streak continues. And today, it’s a moderate risk (3/4).
A moderate risk (3/4) exists for flooding in much of eastern Iowa into southwest Wisconsin today. (NOAA WPC)
Heavy rainfall is moving eastward this morning across Wisconsin, as well as northern Iowa. Additional heavy rain is falling in southern Iowa.
Heavy rainfall is already underway in the Upper Midwest. (College of DuPage)
As the day progresses, heavy rain will march east, new heavy rain will follow, and rain amounts of 3 to 5 inches and locally higher amounts are possible across eastern Iowa and southwest Wisconsin.
(NWS Quad Cities)
Some parts of Iowa have seen 3 to 6 inches or more over the last 2 weeks, so the ground is already primed for flooding here, especially in southeast Iowa. Folks in that region should use caution today and tonight.
Disney spent 18 months negotiating to create a digital version of Dwayne Johnson for the live-action Moana film. Johnson agreed. The technology was ready. Then Disney’s lawyers killed the whole thing—not because of privacy concerns or actor rights, but because they worried parts of the film might end up in the public domain.
This is exactly what we predicted would happen. While everyone obsessed over whether AI training infringes copyright, the more fascinating question was always what happens when AI-generated works can’t get copyright protection at all. Early cases established that copyright only covers human-created works, and the Copyright Office has since clarified that most AI-generated images have no copyright protection (with limited exceptions depending on human creativity added). This should be a boon for the public domain.
Remember the Hollywood strikes from a few years ago? Actors demanded stronger copyright protections, convinced that was their shield against AI replacement by the studios. At the time, I argued they had it backwards. The lack of copyright in AI-generated works actually served to protect actors better than any new law could—because copyright-obsessed studios would never risk having their precious IP fall into the public domain.
Turns out I was right. A new report reveals that Disney—the company that spent decades lobbying to extend copyright terms to protect Mickey Mouse—abandoned a deepfake Dwayne Johnson project purely over public domain fears.
Johnson approved the plan, but the use of a new technology had Disney attorneys hammering out details over how it could be deployed, what security precautions would protect the data and a host of other concerns.They also worried that the studio ultimately couldn’t claim ownership over every element of the film if AI generated parts of it, people involved in the negotiations said.
Disney and Metaphysic spent 18 months negotiating on and off over the terms of the contract and work on the digital double. But none of the footage will be in the final film when it’s released next summer.
This is kind of hilarious on multiple levels. As predicted, that one simple trick (AI-generated works being in the public domain) actually acts as a tool against Hollywood relying on AI tools. The actors who called for stronger copyright got it backwards. Stronger copyright would, as always, give more power to the studio who would control the copyright and use it to squeeze more out of actors for less.
The fact that it’s public domain actually gives the actors much more power over how studios can use AI.
Of course, studios shouldn’t be so damned afraid of using public domain works. If some bits of the movie are not covered by copyright it’s not going to diminish people’s interest in seeing the full official release via authorized means. It might just mean that some clips are used by fans to remix it in fun ways, possibly driving more attention.
This is the beautiful irony of copyright maximalism eating itself: Disney’s own obsession with controlling every frame of content now prevents them from using the very technology they hoped would let them replace human performers. The actors who called for stronger copyright protections got exactly what they needed—just not how they expected.
Once again, weaker copyright serves creators better than the iron grip of the middlemen who profit from aggregating and controlling their work.
OTTAWA – Following Canadian tennis phenom Victoria Mboko’s victory at the National Bank Open final, the Canadian Association Of Pressuring Mothers has proclaimed her as their new baseline example of impossible achievement against which you will be measured. “Only 18 years old, and with both of her parents watching in the stands,” announced Paulette Wilkes, […]
Even lifelong Texans may not have heard of my hometown of Lindale. With just under 5,000 people while I lived there, Lindale sits roughly 90 miles east of Dallas and bears many hallmarks of a small Texas town: more than three churches per square mile, roads dominated by trucks, and packed football stadiums on Friday nights. It’s also overwhelmingly white. On paper, Lindale might seem an unlikely home for an Indian-American kid. In reality, it was great to me.
Whether playing basketball nearby or attending a debate tournament out of town, my friends’ parents looked after me like I was their own—including by scolding me when needed. Teachers occasionally drove me home after late practice for a math or band competition—teachers who were as impressive as they were kind. My debate coach could easily help me with a speech or Algebra II homework; my calculus teacher excelled at explaining differential equations and coaching soccer.
My path to medicine began in Lindale, too. I went to college at the University of Texas at Austin (hook ’em), but my interest in becoming a doctor developed through working with clinicians at Lindale Medical Clinic and hospitals in nearby Tyler. I never dreamed these experiences would take me to Harvard Medical School. But my teachers did. After I competed in a debate tournament at Harvard University, one joked, “You could end up in school there; just be a smart, well-rounded, hard-working liberal.” The joke did not surprise me—Lindale sits in Smith County, a deep-red county in East Texas where more than 70 percent of voters backed Donald Trump in the last election. Politics aside, the people of Lindale saw Harvard as an incredible place to learn. They were right. Their belief helped propel me to the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program.
(City of Lindale)
This rigorous program bridges clinical medicine and research. Students complete the first two years of medical school, earn a PhD, then finish the final two years of medical school. Most often, graduates continue to hospital residency and careers at academic medical centers, where they care for patients while pursuing new cures, treatments, and diagnostic tools. In the process, they improve the health of individual patients and the future of medicine itself.
To enable this mission, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds 57 MD-PhD programs through its Medical Scientist Training Program. These grants, which totaled $4 million for the current academic year,come with strict requirements to ensure that spending aligns with the NIH’s ultimate goal of improving human health through science.
On May 15, 2025, both NIH grants that support the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program were terminated as part of a broader attempt by the federal government to terminate direct NIH funding to Harvard Medical School. Thirty-two students who spent countless hours applying for and earning NIH F30 fellowships saw their awards vanish. These decisions affect not just the archetypal Harvard student many imagine—they affect people who grew up in Lindale, people whose parents are not doctors or scientists, people who attended public schools their entire lives, people who tirelessly pursued a career in service of others, and people who often decline lucrative private practice and dedicate their lives to life-saving research.
My classmates are among the hardest-working people I know. Publishing a peer-reviewed biomedical research paper routinely demands years of perseverance and troubleshooting. In 2024 alone, the Harvard/MIT MD-PhD Program’s 208 students co-authored more than 180 peer-reviewed publications. Those students regularly work more than 12 hours a day conducting and repeating experiments in laboratories followed by continued reading, writing, and coding at home. Instead of halting this work, the government should support it—it’s an investment in our collective health as a country.
Consider Dr. Arlene Sharpe and Dr. Vijay Sankaran. Sharpe, who obtained her MD and PhD from Harvard Medical School, made discoveries critical to the development of cancer immunotherapy drugs that have redefined cancer treatment. Sankaran, while still a student in the program, contributed to a discovery that led to the first FDA-approved CRISPR/Cas9 gene therapy for sickle cell disease. Such life-changing research takes time. More than a decade passed between each discovery and drug approval. And not every story ends in success. Research can fail, scientists’ hypotheses can turn out to be wrong, and a discovery’s long-term importance may not immediately be clear. Yet, losing patience or faith in the research process risks failing to provide improved treatments for patients everywhere.
Whether a biomarker can improve the diagnosis of pancreatic cancer, a genetic mutation affects a person’s risk of Alzheimer’s disease, or a molecule kills an antibiotic-resistant superbug is not political. My classmates and I are working on each of these problems and countless others.
Our mentors apply for and win government grants that fund this research for the benefit of all Americans. Terminating those grants threatens our ability to do this research and, with it, the promise of making discoveries that will one day improve and save lives.
Commissioners this week approved new staff positions for the county's Holistic Assistance Response Team, which will expand the program to serve all parts of unincorporated Harris County.
Most victims were Texans, but some were visiting from other states like California, Florida and Alabama. The youngest victims were 1 year old; the oldest was 91.
Arrest/ticketing quotas have almost always been found illegal by courts. They used to be commonplace, but courts (at all levels) have generally ruled that quotas pervert incentives so much they encourage open, deliberate abuse of constitutional rights.
Enter the Trump administration, which only considers the Second Amendment to be sacrosanct. Trump deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller has spent the early months of his return to office berating ICE for not being willing to raid more Home Depots while pressuring immigration agencies to deliver 3,000 migration-related arrests per day.
Obviously, this means DHS components no longer need to concern themselves with finding dangerous criminals. Anyone looking Latino enough is grist for the deportation mill, which leverages the inherent bigotry of the current administration, along with tons of questionable law enforcement techniques, to generate hundreds of arrests per day, with most of those slated for immediate removal.
Even so, ICE has still failed to hit the 3,000/day quota. And that means every day moves it further away from the Trump administration’s desire to remove 1,000,000 migrants a year from the United States. (*Brown people only. White “refugees” are welcomed to exploit white flight conspiracy theories to secure protective asylum.)
The administration is turtles all the way down, but with racist garbage instead of turtles. Deputy Ghoul Miller thinks 3,000 racially motivated arrests is good government business. Donald Trump – who’s always been a fan of unreasonable numbers so long as they’re big enough — thinks the Land of Free should just push Lady Liberty’s corpse into the sea and send at least 1,000,000 people seeking a better life to whatever hellhole is willing to turn deportees into dead people. And that’s why this government is doing steady migration business with places like El Salvador (overseen by another authoritarian “populist”) and South Sudan (Vietnam circa 1967 but with less water and more random missile fire).
Courts have been kind of reluctant to engage with the Trump administration. There are several reasons for this.
First, some courts seem actually gobsmacked that an American administration would do the sorts of things the Trump regime has been willing to do.
Second, courts are having trouble squaring this new reality with far more sedate court filings by litigants, meaning the government tends to be given more space to operate, even when it’s clearly in the wrong.
Third, courts are seeing their orders ignored by the Trump administration, which is extremely demoralizing for courts, not to mention for the hundreds of millions of Americans the courts are supposed to be protecting.
And that brings us to the Supreme Court. More courts are being dissuaded from challenging the open consolidation of executive power because it’s become extremely clear that the nation’s top court doesn’t really consider itself to be part of the checks and balances envisioned by the Founding Fathers. Instead, this lying ass court touts “originalism” in support of its action/inaction in subservience to the Second Coming of King George III, embodied by a guy in an ill-fitting white polo who openly cheats while playing a game no one but the people playing actually care about.
Not breaking news by Trump has been caught cheating at golf again. In just 7 months, he’s spent 43 days on the course, costing US taxpayers $60.2M. Golf courses are widely known as hotspots for organized crime and clandestine meetings or information drop offs.
The Trump administration internally has set a goal of deporting 1 million people during Trump’s first year and has changed ICE leadership personnel three times, according to the Washington Post.
At the end of May 2025, “Stephen Miller, a senior White House official, told Fox News that the White House was looking for ICE to arrest 3,000 people a day, a major increase in enforcement. The agency had arrested more than 66,000 people in the first 100 days of the Trump administration, an average of about 660 arrests a day,” reported the New York Times. Arresting 3,000 people daily would surpass 1 million arrests in a calendar year.
If there’s no actual quota, Trump admin officials wouldn’t be doing the things they’re doing. Getting 3,000 arrests per day would accomplish 1,000,000 arrests per year. Miller has applied pressure of his own, demanding to know why ICE isn’t just raiding any place that might contain non-whites, including (direct quote) “Home Depot.” And that’s why we were unfortunate enough to witness a Fallujah-style raid of a Los Angeles swap meet with plenty of military troops in tow. Unfortunately for the reanimated corpse that is Stephen Miller, this massive raid only resulted in a handful of arrests.
[W]hen federal judges pressed for details about that figure last week [3,000 per day arrest quota], the administration denied any such quota existed. The contradiction came in a lawsuit that alleged the intense pressure to rack up arrests had led ICE to conduct illegal sweeps in Los Angeles.
Judge Jia Cobb has already declared this quota to be illegal, ruling against the Trump administration in a lawsuit filed in Washington. Another federal judge in California (Trina Thompson) came to the same conclusion while blocking the administration’s arbitrary decision to end the protected status of thousands of refugees.
What does the administration have to say in response to these obvious rulings in favor of justice? Not much, actually. Just more of the same “might means right” wet-brain thinking that has always defined any Trump administration:
[O]n Friday, the Justice Department said no such orders had ever been given.
“DHS has confirmed that neither ICE leadership nor its field offices have been directed to meet any numerical quota or target for arrests, detentions, removals, field encounters, or any other operational activities that ICE or its components undertake in the course of enforcing federal immigration law,” a Justice Department attorney reported to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Wednesday.
It’s all a lie. And it’s an obvious lie. DOJ lawyers claim the quota directly attributed to Stephen Miller on multiple occasions is nothing more than conjecture by journalists quoting “anonymous sources.” It’s nice to know the Trump administration doesn’t actually believe Fox News employs any journalists, because this is what always goes ignored when Trump officials start pretending there are no deportation/arrest quotas in place:
While DOJ attorney Yaakov Roth attributed the quota claim to “anonymous reports in the newspapers,” he didn’t mention that Miller — Trump’s deputy chief of staff and homeland security adviser — had publicly confirmed the 3,000-daily-arrest “goal” in the televised interview on Fox.
The Orwellians are alive and well. But they’re not the “Deep State.” They’re the officials demanding everyone acknowledge their version of the truth — the ones who view us as millions of inconvenient Winston Smiths that should be humiliated and silenced for daring to question the state. We are subject to a succession of racist, lying fucks. Meanwhile, Second Amendment enthusiasts are uttering their full support for encroaching authoritarianism, practically daring us to follow through with the prying of the guns from their cold, dead fingers.
We’ve talked plenty about how Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” (DOGE) was always more about performative cruelty than actual efficiency. But a new Senate report reveals just how spectacularly DOGE failed at its supposed core mission while causing immeasurable human suffering in the process. The entire concept blew up more spectacularly than one of Musk’s Starships.
The numbers are damning. The report from the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations shows that DOGE wasted at least $21.7 billion in just six months—between January 20 and July 18, 2025. But hey, at least they got to feel like they were “draining the swamp,” right?
As Senator Richard Blumenthal put it in the report’s release:
“This report is a searing indictment of DOGE’s false claims. At the very same time that the Trump Administration is cutting health care, nutrition assistance, and emergency services in the name of ‘efficiency’ and ‘savings,’ they have enabled DOGE’s reckless waste of at least $21.7 billion dollars.”
To recap the “efficiency”: Musk promised to save trillions, actually wasted over $21 billion. That’s some galaxy-brain efficiency right there.
To be fair, much of that “waste” comes from Musk’s Twitter-style “resign now and we’ll pay you for many months” plan to rid the government of employees. As the report notes, that cost the government $14.8 billion in salaries of people who couldn’t actually do any work and then another $6.1 billion from people DOGE fired. And I’m sure that DOGE-supporting MAGA types will try to claim that this is fine, because it’s a one-time cost and will lower government expenses going forward.
But that is untrue. Part of the problem here is that—contrary to the popular belief in MAGA circles—most people in the government were actually doing important work that the government needs to do. Firing all of them doesn’t change that. Every few weeks there are another set of stories about how the Trump admin has to scramble to try to rehire the people that DOGE fired.
Doing things that way almost certainly increases costs, because of the level of painful inconsistency and the need to convince workers to come back to this shitshow after being treated so horribly. And, when they won’t come back, then the government has to go out and find new people to fill those roles, which is also a very expensive proposition—and one the report didn’t even explore.
Not only was much of this wasteful, it was wasteful for the stupidest of reasons: much of this destruction was based on conspiracy theories that Musk found on social media.
The destruction of USAID was remarkable in that it did not reflect any sort of broad-based consensus. While other actors in Trump’s political environment—such as the Project 2025, or the budget blueprint from the Center for Renewing America, led by Trump’s budget chief Russ Vought—called for reductions in USAID spending, they did not seek to eliminate it. The assault on USAID seemed disproportionately driven by the beliefs of one person, Musk. And those beliefs were largely disconnected from the reality of what USAID did.
For example:
Musk said that 90% of USAID spending never reaches communities, implying that most funding was wasted. But this claim demonstrates a misunderstanding of the budget. While 10% of the budget goes to direct payments to local organizations, another 46% goes to funding to multilateral agencies and 31% to American companies and nonprofits, much of which goes to direct provision, such as HIV programs, anti-malaria products, and emergency food services.
Musk claimed that $50 million was spent to send condoms to Hamas. Trump repeated this false claim, as did members of Congress. The organization that receives the funds does provide family planning, but its USAID funds were providing emergency health support to refugees in Gaza.
Musk has repeated other conspiracy theories about USAID found online including that it helped to create COVID-19, is rigging elections, and manufacturing media consent.
Musk elevated claims that USAID was protected by journalists because it had been secretly funding the media, based on government subscription services to media outlets.
Musk was not atypical of the broader Trump movement, which held conspiratorial worldviews about other parts of government it labeled as “the deep state,” but the effect on USAID was the most immediate and consequential. Such views could have been easily debunked, had DOGE been willing to talk to and trust career officials. But Musk displayed deep distrust of civil servants, labeling USAID “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America,” and “a criminal organization.”
Musk elevated these conspiracy theories to the mainstream on his social media platform X, reposting a small group of fringe accounts on X and promoting posts from Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official and key voice behind USAID conspiracy theories. Benz has argued that “USAID is notorious for funding the darkest, most controversial, most horrifying projects known to all of mankind” and Musk believed him. In the space of a year, Musk engaged with or elevated Benz’s messaging160 times. Unsurprisingly, Benz has also embracedwhite supremacypolitics.
The richest man in the world, put in charge of government efficiency, made life-and-death decisions based on conspiracy theories from fringe social media accounts. What could go wrong?
Well, everything, as it turns out.
DOGE’s crown jewel achievement was completely destroying USAID based on—and I feel the need to repeat this—conspiracy theories. A study published in The Lancet found that USAID had prevented 92 million deaths between 2001 and 2021. The agency’s destruction is now projected to cause 14 million avoidable deaths over the next five years, including 4.5 million children under age 5.
This is blood on the hands of Musk and the ridiculous nonsense peddlers he believed, rather than talking to actual experts.
In the southeastern African country of Malawi, U.S. funding cuts to the United Nations’ World Food Programme have “yielded a sharp increase in criminality, sexual violence, and instances of human trafficking” within a large refugee camp, U.S. embassy officials told the State Department in late April.
[….]
“We are living off the fumes of what was delivered in late 2024 or early 2025,” Landis said. On a recent visit to a facility treating malnourished children younger than 5, she said she saw kids who were “walking skeletons like I haven’t seen in a decade.”
Makwindi says the termination of funding “was a shock” that baffles him to this day. He takes a generous view of the U.S. motivation: “I still believe that someone didn’t do due diligence and just terminated us.” Nuha Ceesay, Eswatini country director for the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS), has a harsher assessment. What the Trump administration has done is akin to saying, “I am going to unplug this life support machine from you,” he says. “It is up to you to find an alternative, and whether you perish or not, that’s not my business.”
The “efficiency” here is breathtaking. Rather than deliver emergency food supplies to starving people, the Trump administration chose to incinerate them instead. According to the Senate report, $110 million worth of food aid and medical supplies are spoiling in warehouses, with some literally being trucked to France to be burned at taxpayer expense.
The waste caused by lost investment is perhaps most starkly illustrated by supplies purchased by USAID sitting in warehouses around the globe that sat rotting rather than supporting their intended recipients. In February, the USAID Office of Inspector General warned that hundreds of thousands of tons of goods were at risk of spoilage as a result of DOGE’s attempt to shutter the agency. By May, 66,000 metric tons of food valued at $98 million remained warehoused at multiple facilities in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai and Houston. Recent reporting indicated that a portion (approximately 622 metric tons) of the 1,100 metric tons of food aid stored in Dubai was spared from destruction in June but the remaining 496 metric tons valued at $793,000.00 are to be “turned into landfill or incinerated” at a cost of $100,000.00 to taxpayers. Additionally, as of June, USAID had abandoned approximately $12.4 million worth of “contraceptives and HIV-prevention medications” in Belgium and Dubai. Approximately $9.7 million of these contraceptives stuck in Belgium were being “trucked to France” to be incinerated at a cost of $160,000.00 because USAID allegedly refused to sell or otherwise transfer them to a third-party distributor at anything less than “full market value.”
But wait, there’s more! The report details how DOGE’s bureaucratic “Defend the Spend” initiative—supposedly designed to eliminate waste—actually created massive new forms of red tape. NASA employees were forced to write “several detailed paragraphs, across multiple rounds of emails” just to purchase simple fastening bolts. The FAA required written justifications for window-washing and buying pens and pencils.
Efficiency!
And let’s not forget the comedy gold of forcing nearly a million federal employees to send weekly “5-things” emails justifying their existence. The Senate report estimates this pointless exercise wasted $155 million in lost productivity. The best part? OPM had no intention of actually reviewing these emails and eventually sent auto-replies saying its mailbox was full.
The demand for weekly accomplishment reports was an unnecessary waste of time, primarily because OPM, as an external agency outside the management chain of command, is ill-equipped to meaningfully assess the work of other agencies’ employees. Moreover, employees would be forced to redact or omit any specific details to avoid confidentiality concerns, further diminishing the utility of these reports. Beyond what should have been immediately apparent, the pointlessness of this exercise was underscored when OPM briefed agencies that it intended to do nothing with the emails, and then a few weeks later, sent automatic replies back to employees stating that its “mailbox is full and can’t accept messages now.” Although the project continued through May, approximately 13 weeks in, news emerged that this project was “dying a slow, quiet death” across the government with agencies no longer requiring weekly reports.
Want to see a bunch of inefficient waste created by DOGE?
This is what happens when you put conspiracy theorists in charge of complex systems. DOGE didn’t just fail at its stated mission—it actively made government less efficient while causing humanitarian catastrophes on a massive scale. And that’s just with USAID. We’re not even looking most of the other cuts. And the report only briefly mentions the likely impact on the economy of some of these slash and burn efforts:
The full extent of the waste and harm caused by DOGE’s disruptive activities is difficult to quantify because costs remain hidden and many of the consequences have yet to fully materialize. While some analyses, such as an independent review of DOGE’s cuts at just seven agencies—CFPB, NIH, USDA, USAID, IRS, ED, and DOJ—determined that these actions could result in over $10 billion in lost economic activity in the U.S., these figures only scratch the surface
They also note that they’re not even counting the legal costs incurred from the long and ever-growing list of lawsuits DOGE’s cuts have spurred, many of which have already resulted in losses for the federal government in court.
The broader lesson here is one we’ve seen repeatedly: when you prioritize performative cruelty over actual governance, you get neither efficiency nor effectiveness. You get waste, chaos, and suffering.
DOGE should go down in history as one of the most grotesquely incompetent government initiatives ever attempted. An agency supposedly created to eliminate waste that managed to waste billions in six months, create tremendous inefficiencies in the workforce, while destroying programs that actually worked and saved lives.
The only thing it efficiently accomplished was proving that putting conspiracy theorists and tech bros in charge of life-and-death decisions with no oversight, guardrails, or expertise is a recipe for disaster on an unprecedented scale.
But hey, at least Musk got to feel important for a few months while millions of people faced death and suffering. Efficiency!
On Friday's show: We learn why Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo was censured by members of commissioners court. And our non-experts discuss The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly of the week.
There Are Many Different Kinds of Love, Brethren Arise, Candlepower, Cylinder Five, God Be With You Till We Meet Again, I Am Running Down the…, I Dont See the Branches I See the Leaves, I Want to Fall in Love on Snapchat, Out of the Skies Under the Earth, Take off and Shoot A Zero, The House Glows with Almost No Help, There Are Many Different Kinds of Love, all by Chris Zabriskie are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...) Source: http://chriszabriskie.com/vendaface/ Artist: http://chriszabriskie.com/
Thousands of male tarantulas are expected to emerge across several south and midwestern states in search of mates, with experts recommending giving them space if encountered. What do you think?
“Don’t bother, the tarantulas here are all really stuck up.”
Humberto Cintora, Fluency Tester
“And how many of them are actually looking to settle down?”
“Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Monday ordered the civil arrest of Democratic lawmakers who fled the state to block a vote on a Republican-backed congressional redistricting plan, escalating a standoff that has stalled the legislative session.” — CBS News
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President Trump has asked me to redraw the Texas congressional district map to secure five more House seats for Republicans. Texas has always been a state defined by our rugged independence. That’s why, as governor of Texas, it is my job to do whatever President Trump thinks will protect our liberties. I can’t think of anything more Texan than obeying a powerful man in Washington, DC, in the name of individual freedoms.
Sadly, Texas Democratic legislators are trying to undermine these efforts by fleeing the state in order to break quorum. It’s despicable that these elected officials would hightail it out of Texas right when the electorate needs them the most. A Republican would never do that.
Democrats did the same thing in 2021 when they tried to block our efforts to secure our elections. They refused to acknowledge that the best way to prevent someone from voting illegally is to prevent them from voting at all. Just as I did then, I plan to bring these fugitive officials to heel. I have tasked Attorney General Ken Paxton with carrying out their civil arrests. As the Texan with the most experience on both sides of the law, he’s the perfect man for the job.
The fact that Democrats are using a tactic with over a century of legal precedent does not mean it isn’t unlawful. Political gamesmanship should be strictly reserved for righteous causes, like when Republicans do it.
These Texas Democrats are trying to turn gerrymandering into a political Rorschach test. Where we see routine policy, they see an attempt to disenfranchise voters. That could not be further from the truth. Even if most of the new districts we drew do admittedly look a lot like actual Rorschach tests.
We cannot let Democrats grab power by denying us the opportunity to grab power. The partisan gerrymandering we’re engaging in is perfectly legal. And just because many of those new districts happen to be drawn, with almost surgical precision, along racial lines, does not mean we are depriving Black and Brown people of political representation. It’s not our fault if certain ethnic groups don’t vote for Republicans because they hate our policies. There are plenty of Black Republicans, for example, who understand that we’re the right party for Black America. Just ask Candace Owens or former North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson.
Our noble effort to skew the congressional map in our favor has implications far beyond Texas politics. If Democrats take back the House in 2026, they will have the power to certify the 2028 election. We must avoid a repeat of 2020. We cannot let the left subvert democracy by thwarting our attempts to overturn any election where they get more votes.
For that reason, I am prepared to forcibly remove these rogue lawmakers, if necessary. Sometimes the only way to preserve representative democracy is to remove democratically elected representatives.
We must do whatever it takes to support partisan gerrymandering efforts at least until California starts doing it. Then we’ll scream bloody murder.
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