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.
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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.

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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.
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How Musk is benefiting from his government role

Kevin Drum lists all the ways that Trump’s actions so far helps Musk’s businesses. These include getting rid of the head of the Federal Aviation Administration, the body that imposed large fines on his company SpaceX for violations of regulations. Also nearly half of the people at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who are tasked with overseeing the safety of autonomous vehicles and monitoring crashes were fired, thus pretty much disabling oversight of his cars. Trump is also threatening to cut off Ukraine’s access to the Musk’s Starlink satellite network if they don’t agree to hand over their minerals to the US as part of the ‘peace deal’ that Trump wants them to sign with Russia.

One of the mostpetty decisions by Trump is to call for the removal of all the EV chargers at the locations of the General Services Administration.

The General Services Administration (GSA), which manages buildings owned by the federal government, is planning to shut down all of its electric vehicle chargers nationwide, describing them as “not mission critical.” The agency, which manages contracts for the government’s vehicle fleets, is also looking to offload newly purchased EVs.

The GSA currently operates several hundred EV chargers across the country, with approximately 8,000 plugs that are available for government-owned EVs as well as federal employees’ personally owned vehicles.
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“Neither Government Owned Vehicles nor Privately Owned Vehicles will be able to charge at these charging stations once they’re out of service,” it concludes.

At the GSA’s Denver office, employees were told that EV chargers at four federally owned buildings would be taken offline next week.

What is the point of removing chargers that are already installed? Oh yes, now all the GSA vehicles will have to charge at the commercial chargers, many of which are owned by Tesla.

The government and Musk’s businesses are rapidly becoming a single entity.

The government is already grinding to a halt

The Musk-Trump assault on the federal government has already created chaos. Employees have already been fired or are not sure if they will be fired. New hires are frozen as no one knows what the policies are. And people are unlikely to look for jobs in the government sector knowing that they will be treated like dirt. The AssociatedPress estimates that about 300,000 workers have been cut so far.

In normal times, the turnover in the government workforce of 2.4 million employees is about 6% or around 150,000 people. Apparently about 75,000 people accepted the Musk offer to leave, and I suspect that many of these were people who had been on the verge of leaving anyway so had little to lose by accepting the vaguely worded offer. But others may be unplanned and leave their agencies in the lurch.

Federal service rules prevent the firing of employees other than for cause such as misconduct. However, those on probationary status may not be covered by those protections which is why Musk has ordered the firing of all probationary staffers. There are about 220,000 such people.. But the label ‘probationary’ is misleading. It may give the impression that these were new employees who are young and/or inexperienced and so their loss is relatively inconsequential. But that is not the case. Anyone who was shifting from one position to another within the government or getting promoted to a higher level is also classified as probationary for a year. So among the probationers who have been fired are very senior and experienced people who just had the misfortune to shift their jobs at this time.
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The courts are the only thing holding Trump back

Trump and Musk seem to think that they can do whatever they want to whomever they want. As far as Congress is concerned, they are right because the Republican majority seems to be quite willing to roll over for the two of them and be subservient to their whims, abandoning their constitutional role of being an independent branch of government to serve as a check and balance on executive power.

It is the courts that can do something and they have, up to a point.

A federal judge blocked President Donald Trump’s bid to deprive federal funding from programs that incorporate “diversity, equity and inclusion” initiatives.

U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson ruled that Trump’s policy likely violates the First Amendment because it penalizes private organizations based on their viewpoints. And the judge said the policy is written so vaguely that it chills the free speech of federal contractors concerned they will be punished if they don’t eliminate programs meant to encourage a diverse workforce.

Abelson, a Baltimore-based appointee of former President Joe Biden, said longstanding court precedent bars the federal government from “leveraging its funding to restrict federal contractors and grantees from otherwise exercising their First Amendment rights.”
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