Musk family values

(Doonesbury)

Even cartoonist Garry Trudeau, who is usually up-do-date on his references, cannot keep up. Musk just announced the birth of his 14th child.

But even that might be understating the number. As Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes:

He has sired, at least in a technical sense, thirteenish known children, and has reportedly offered the dispensation of his sperm to friends, employees, and people he met once at a dinner party. (Musk denies this. Skeptics of the strategy, though, might recall that Genghis Khan, according to legend, had more than a thousand offspring.)

Welcome to America!

A German woman has experienced what so many poor immigrants experience at the hands of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers.

A German tourist is fighting to be released from an immigration detention center after she was denied entry at the San Diego border and taken into custody by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) last month.

Jessica Brösche, a 26-year-old German tattoo artist, is being indefinitely detained by US Customs and Border Protection after she tried to enter San Diego on 25 January from Tijuana, Mexico, with her American best friend, Amelia Lofving. The two were traveling with tattoo equipment.
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Brösche had her German passport, confirmation of her visa waiver to enter the country, and a copy of her return ticket back to Berlin, Lofving said. But she was still pulled aside for a secondary inspection by a US Customs and Border Protection agent.

Brösche said she then spent days detained in a cell at the San Diego border before being taken into custody by Ice. The agency brought her to the Otay Mesa detention center, where she’s now been for more than a month.

According to KPBS, US Customs and Border Protection accused Brösche of planning to violate the terms of the visa waiver program by intending to work as a tattoo artist during her time in Los Angeles.

According to ABC’s 10News, she was forced to spend eight days in solitary confinement in the facility.

“She says it was like a horror movie. They were screaming in all different rooms. After nine days, she said she went so insane that she started punching the walls and then she’s got blood on her knuckles,” Lofving said of her friend’s experience.

Surely suspicion that she might commit such a minor infraction does not deserve high-handed treatment like this? The republic will not collapse if someone works illegally for a short time as a tattoo artist.

But this is Trump’s America, where border officials have been empowered to treat everyone as potential terrorists. She should consider herself lucky that she has not been sent to Guantanamo and disappeared forever. At least, not yet.

War criminal Benjamin Netanyahu commits yet another war crime

Netanyahu has announced the complete halt to all humanitarian aid to Gaza. He, with the support of the US, has unilaterally changed the terms of the ceasefire deal and is using starvation to coerce Hamas into accepting it.

Israel has cut off humanitarian supplies to Gaza in an effort to pressure Hamas into accepting a change in the ceasefire agreement to allow for the release of hostages without an Israeli troop withdrawal.

The office of the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, said on Sunday it was imposing a blockade on Gaza because Hamas would not accept a plan which it claimed had been put forward by the US special envoy, Steve Witkoff, to extend phase one of the ceasefire and continue to release hostages, and postpone phase two, which envisaged an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.

“With the end of phase one of the hostage deal, and in light of Hamas’s refusal to accept the Witkoff outline for continuing talks – to which Israel agreed – Prime Minister Netanyahu has decided that, as of this morning, all entry of goods and supplies into the Gaza Strip will cease. Israel will not allow a ceasefire without the release of our hostages,” it said in a statement. “If Hamas continues its refusal, there will be further consequences.”

The 6% lie

Elon Musk claimed that only 6% of federal workers work full time in their offices. This would be dismissed as manifestly false by anyone with any sense. And yet, this lie took wings. Stephen Engelberg, editor of ProPublica, writes that although this was just one of the many falsehoods put out by Trump-Musk (another manifestly false and ridiculous one was that $50 million was sent to Gaza for condoms), it was worthwhile to see how it came about, as a case study of how assertions made by fringe people can, in the current climate, become repeated by more influential ones and thus quickly accquire the status of fact for the cult followers.

As the administration of President Donald Trump throws one government agency after another into the “wood chipper,” a startling statistic about federal workers keeps coming up: Only 6% of federal employees are working full time in their offices.

By any post-pandemic standard, it’s an astoundingly low number, particularly as major American corporations move to force workers back to the office five days a week.

It’s also completely untrue.
[Read more…]

Another crypto heist and the NFT bust

I know hardly anything about cryptocurrencies or the underlying blockchain structure but was under the impression that it was supposed to be very secure because the ‘ledger’ was widely distributed over many computers and thus hard to hack. But now we hear of yet another heist of cryptocurrency, this time for a whopping $1.5 billion.

North Korea was behind the theft of approximately $1.5bn in virtual assets from a cryptocurrency exchange, the FBI has said, in what is being described as the biggest heist in history.
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Describing this particular form of North Korean malicious cyber activity as “TraderTraitor”, the FBI on Wednesday warned that the virtual assets, stolen from ByBit, a Dubai-based crypto trading platform, would eventually be turned into currency.

“TraderTraitor actors are proceeding rapidly and have converted some of the stolen assets to bitcoin and other virtual assets dispersed across thousands of addresses on multiple blockchains,” said an FBI statement.

The bureau added that it expected the assets would be further laundered and eventually converted to fiat currency – a normal, government-backed currency that is not tied to commodities such as gold.
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Hackers linked to North Korea stole more than US$1.3bn in cryptocurrency in 2024 – then a record amount – according to a report published in late December. The thefts were spread out over 47 incidents, the blockchain analysis firm Chainalysis said, adding that the total was a dramatic jump from the $660m seized in 2023.

[Read more…]

You should really check this out

A new commenter acsglster had a wonderful idea. In response to my earlier post about ‘stupid Muck tricks’, they submitted to grok 3 (Musk’s chatbot) the following prompt:

Elon Musk sent an email to around 3 million federal government employees asking them to respond with 5 bullet points of things they did last week. He proposed to feed the responses to a LLM (probably you) with a view to some kind of activity-based analysis of who to retain and who to fire. What is the feasibility of such an idea?

The response grok 3 came back with is something to behold. Check it out.

Stupid Musk tricks

One of the enduring right wing myths is that if only the government was run like a business, then everything would be fine. Not just any kind of business but a sole proprietorship where one person has the ability to make all the decisions. They think that if this were the case, here would be no waste, no fraud, and all employees would work at peak efficiency all the time. This idyllic state would be obtained by because of the ability to fire people at will, so that employees are in a state of perpetual fear and uncertainty and thus will not do anything other than work. Right wingers believe that employee protections from arbitrary management actions and firings, workplace safety rules, and limits on what employees can be expected to do and how long and when they work, are all things that reward inefficiency.

Musk’s actions since being given so much power by Trump shows that he definitely thinks along those lines. All the summary decisions that seem to have been taken without much thought, such as firing people, eliminating agencies, and cutting budgets all show that mindset.

But perhaps the most emblematic of that mindset, and the stupidest thing he has done was to issue a demand to all federal workers that within 48 hours (and that was also over a weekend) they had to provide five bullet points listing all that they had done in the past week. If they did not do so, they would be considered to have resigned.
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What is Trump’s beef with medical research?

Trump seems determined to shut down research, especially medical research. First he ordered a halt to all scientific research grants awarded by the NIH and NSF and the suspension of all grant review panels, a vital step in the whole process of awarding them. Then after a judge blocked that ban, Trump seems to have searched for a loophole to continue the ban. And he thinks he has found an obscure one, by forbidding notices of meetings to appear in the Federal Register, usually a formality.

The National Institutes of Health has stopped considering new grant applications, delaying decisions about how to spend millions of dollars on research into diseases ranging from heart disease and cancer to Alzheimer’s and allergies.

The freeze occurred because the Trump administration has blocked the NIH from posting any new notices in the Federal Register, which is required before many federal meetings can be held.

While that may seem arcane, the stoppage forced the agency to cancel meetings to review thousands of grant applications, according to two people familiar with the situation, one of whom was not authorized to speak publicly and the other who feared retribution.
[Read more…]