Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 101 of 479
Quote:WTF? Every lab I ever worked, whether research, pharma, govt regulatory, or private consulting, required us to attach our expenses to the equivalent of a program code. Or, if work not attributable to a specific program -example, repairing an instrument used for multiple programs - charge to indirect, or apportion the time.
While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget—and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce—DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.
Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.
On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”
The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.
It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting. Musk reported that he was having difficulty tracing $4.7 trillion in federal spending because the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—a code that links payments to budget items—was allowed to be optional for years and often left blank.
Quote:I imagine this will discourage future waste and fraud
In response, Musk tweeted, the Treasury Department now requires “all outgoing government payments have a payment categorization code, which is necessary in order to pass financial audits. ... All payments must also include a rationale for the payment in the comment field, which is currently left blank. Importantly, we are not yet applying ANY judgment to this rationale, but simply requiring that SOME attempt be made to explain the payment more than NOTHING!”
Quote:Well, they'll definitely survive a nuclear attack.
At the Treasury’s usaspending.gov, which experts use regularly and consider valid despite the big topline errors, nearly $150 billion is slotted every year into an “unreported data” box.
While Musk’s team is reportedly using advanced artificial intelligence systems to comb federal records, it will face a different challenge when tackling the federal employee retirement system. DOGE will confront the “sinkhole of bureaucracy”: records still kept on paper and processed almost entirely by hand by some 700 workers who toil 230 feet below ground in an abandoned limestone mine in northwestern Pennsylvania.
I wonder if this is where that X-files scene was filmed? Miles and miles of file cabinets in an old mine....
Quote:
The government’s use of antiquated systems helps explain some of Musk’s team’s biggest mistakes so far. This month, they claimed that millions of deceased people—some listed as more than 300 years old—are receiving social security benefits. It turns out DOGE probably misread the data sets, which includes millions of dead people not receiving benefits, in the antiquated, 1960s-era computer system Social Security still used to disperse more than $1.3 trillion to some 68 million people last year.
Musk conceded errors will be made, but experts told RCI some are impossible to avoid when trying to get a visible net around the surging ocean of federal government spending.
...
“Federal government spending is nebulous and almost designed to be that way because no one person benefits from it being straightforward,” said Lydia Mashburn Newman, a managing director at the American Institute for Economic Research.
“No one is trying to get a holistic picture of what this or that agency is doing and the way money gets appropriated is very fragmented.”
Newman has seen the beast from two sides, as a congressional aide and federal worker, and she says the cNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:
Originally posted by SIGNYM:Quote:WTF? Every lab I ever worked, whether research, pharma, govt regulatory, or private consulting, required us to attach our expenses to the equivalent of a program code. Or, if work not attributable to a specific program -example, repairing an instrument used for multiple programs - charge to indirect, or apportion the time.
While Musk initially promised to cut some $2 trillion from the federal budget—and news accounts have focused on his efforts to reduce the federal workforce—DOGE’s real accomplishment so far has been to bring attention to the federal government’s broken accounting systems.
Despite the hue and cry raised over DOGE, previous alarms have been rung by some other agencies only to be ignored.
On Jan. 16, four days before Biden vacated the White House, the Government Accounting Office said it was “unable to provide an opinion on the reliability of the federal government’s consolidated financial statements for fiscal year 2024 and 2023.”
The Office of Management and Budget has also flunked six of the 24 departments and agencies it looked at, including Labor and Education. The Defense Department has failed seven consecutive audits, while the Department of Education hasn’t gotten a “clean” opinion for three years.
It is hard to pass an audit when you don’t follow the basic rules of accounting. Musk reported that he was having difficulty tracing $4.7 trillion in federal spending because the Treasury Access Symbol (TAS)—a code that links payments to budget items—was allowed to be optional for years and often left blank.
Trust me... This is VERY standard practice within the government, and when these politicians and bureaucrats go into the private sector after decades of training in government, the old habits die hard. They still have all of their former colleagues in the rolodex, they talk to them on the phone all of the time, and quite a few of them just pop in out of the blue to chat on your average Tuesday afternoon.
My first good job was working for a former politician. I was initially brought in as a temp to help them convert from some rinky-dink ass accounting system to QuckbooksPro. More or less a glorified data-entry position that I easily got with typing over 60wpm. After a week, I already had an offer for full time work at 19 years old for more money than I have ever made since if you factor in inflation.
I devised a job number system and over the course of around three months I poured through old documents and came up with $24,000 worth of bills that had never been collected, and I was able to recoup $16,000 of that easily, without any problems.
The owner and 2nd in command loved the system, and we implemented it on all jobs going forward... Except for when we didn't. Several others in the building basically considered me their enemy after I this, and at my boss's request, I hounded them on filling in ALL of the information. This wasn't laziness. This was about hiding things.
And boy... you should have seen political mailing season. We'd get so many contracts that I'd work 120 hour weeks for 3 weeks straight at the end, and everybody in production was put up in a hotel right down the street for that entire time.
But I knew we didn't actually deserve ANY of those contracts. How did I know? Because I knew what we charged private businesses, and if anything because of the sheer size of these mailers it should have been much cheaper per-piece to produce and distribute. But they'd sometimes come in as high as 10 times the going rate. Sometimes I had to pull some teeth and I even had one guy call me a little prick in front of my boss, but they always paid these stupid prices in the end. I was the guy who got all the checks and entered them into Quickbooks. More often than not, even in the good old days before the dotcom bubble burst, I only got those checks after harassing people until they made it their priority to pay off their debt.
There is supposed to be bidding o
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Trump calls his opponents ‘scum’ and lawbreakers in bellicose speech at Justice Department
For more than an hour, he delivered an insult-laden speech that shattered the traditional notion of DOJ independence.
By Irie Sentner and Josh Gerstein | 03/14/2025 06:42 PM EDT
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/03/14/trump-doj-speech-prison-oppon
ents-00231438
President Donald Trump on Friday walked into the Department of Justice and labeled his courtroom opponents “scum,” judges “corrupt” and the prosecutors who investigated him “deranged.”
With the DOJ logo directly behind him, Trump called his political opponents lawbreakers and said others should be sent to prison.
“These are people that are bad people, really bad people,” the president said in a rambling speech that lasted more than an hour.
While condemning officials who directed the military’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and repeating his false claims about the 2020 election being stolen, Trump said: “The people who did this to us should go to jail.”
In remarks that were by turns dark, exultant and pugnacious, Trump vowed to remake the Justice Department and retaliate against his enemies, some of whom he called “thugs.”
It was, even by Trump’s standards, a stunning show of disregard for decades of tradition observed by his predecessors, who worried about politicizing or appearing to exert too much control over the nation’s most powerful law enforcement agency. Trump, instead, called himself the “chief law enforcement officer in our country” and accused the DOJ’s prior leadership of doing “everything within their power to prevent” him from becoming the president.
Trump charged the DOJ with spying on his campaign, raiding his home, persecuting his “family, staff and supporters,” launching “one hoax and disinformation campaign after the other” and breaking the law “on a colossal scale,” making clear the glee he has taken in undermining the department’s typical independence and wielding it to achieve the White House’s objectives.
“First, we must be honest about the lies and the abuses that have occurred within these walls,” Trump said. “Unfortunately in recent years, a corrupt group of hacks and radicals within the ranks of the American government obliterated the trust and goodwill built up over generations. They weaponized the vast powers of our intelligence and law enforcement agencies to try and thwart the will of the American people.”
Those days, Trump said, “are over, and they are never going to come back. He added that he would demand “full and complete accountability for the wrongs and abuses that have occurred.”
While any presidential visit to the Justice Department is a rarity, Trump repeatedly breached other norms in his remarks as he slammed former officials, unleashed attacks on private attorneys, and touted his vote tallies in last year’s election.
“It’s a campaign by the same scum you’ve been dealing with for years,” Trump said of the lawyers and officials who have targeted him. “We will expel the rogue actors and corrupt forces from our government. ... We will restore the scales of justice in our country.”
The president sought to recast his fraught history with the department — most notably the two federal criminal cases he faced last year, one on charges of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and the other for refusing to return a hoard of classified documents after he left office in 2021. Trump also bragged about revoking the security clearance of “deranged Jack Smith,” the special counsel who indicted him in those cases. (Smith and the Justice Department abandoned both cases after Trump won reelection last year.).
Trump boasted about pardoning hundreds of “political prisoners who have been grossly mistreated,” referring to the people convicted in connection with the pro-Trump mob that stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And he said “there was no better day” than when he fired James Comey, the president’s first-term FBI director who investigated the 2016 Trump campaign’s ties to
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Attempts to boost US exports risk undermining the foundations of American exceptionalism
By Jeremy Warner | 15 March 2025 11:00am GMT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/15/trumps-game-plan-for-d
evaluing-the-mighty-dollar/
Stephen Miran, who was confirmed last week as chairman of the US council of economic advisers, suggests that surplus countries should be forced to peg their currencies against the dollar at a beneficial rate to the US by threatening them with even higher trade tariffs should they refuse.
Yet even if this form of competitive devaluation via blackmail were initially successful, it wouldn’t necessarily stop the flow of foreign capital into US markets, and would therefore be hard to maintain.
Miran has got an answer for that, which is to tax the coupon on US treasury securities for overseas buyers so as to discourage foreign demand for them.
The same effect could be achieved, Miran argued in a paper last November, by forcing countries to swap their holdings of US Treasuries for 100-year bonds. In return they would receive security guarantees.
It scarcely needs saying that both these lines of attack would be regarded as a default, and would therefore play havoc with US debt markets and the federal government’s ability to fund its burgeoning budget deficit.
A further approach would be to require the US Federal Reserve to sell dollars for foreign currency without limit, though where that would leave the US’s domestic monetary system is anyone’s guess.
These are by no means fringe views in the Trump camp. Scott Bessent, the US treasury secretary, has separately pushed the idea of some kind of Bretton Woods-style realignment of global currencies that would put US producers at less of a competitive disadvantage.
The US is by far the biggest buyer of goods in the world; it’s about time, Bessent’s aides say, that the rest of the world started treating the US with the same respect that a business would reserve for its largest customer, and stop ripping Americans off.
As last week drew to a close, Trump’s trade war showed every sign of spiralling out of control. Both the European Union and Canada are seemingly up for a fight, with tit-for-tat retaliatory action against anything Trump throws at them.
As I say, there is nothing new in today’s world that hasn’t been seen before. The whole ghastly, divisive mess we see unfolding before us was perfectly foreseen by the British economist John Maynard Keynes, and is in a sense a direct consequence of the dollar’s global reserve currency status.
Without going into the precise mechanisms, this in effect requires the US to run big, compensating fiscal and trade deficits so as to supply the rest of the world with the dollars it demands.
Keynes’s solution was to establish a separate international reserve currency which he called the “bancor”, but it never flew.
And in any case, would Trump really want to give up the dollar’s “exorbitant privilege”? It’s a fair bet that he would not. Nor does he seem minded to run the balanced budgets that would help mitigate the trade deficit.
There’s no telling where this will end. Badly, would be a reasonable guess.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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No one has told me why I was fired. But the notice was delivered hours after I declined to recommend reinstating the gun rights of a famous friend of the president, the actor Mel Gibson, who has a history of violence against women. In 2011, Gibson pleaded guilty to battering his former romantic partner, who reported that he hit her while holding their baby and broke her teeth. Shortly after I informed the deputy attorney general's staff that I could not recommend rearming this particular bully, I received my termination notice.
On her first day in office, Bondi issued a memo putting the entire DOJ workforce on notice that we are all now the president’s lawyers.
We have since been warned, both explicitly and by example, that if we do not “faithfully” and “zealously” do the president’s bidding, we will be “rooted out” and silenced. -- Elizabeth Oyer
MARCH 14, 2025
https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/political-commentary/trump-justi
ce-department-fired-mel-gibson-guns-1235296311/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.
Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, you deserve to be hit in the face with a shotgun blast, you goddamn Nazi who is hypnotized into believing he is not one. Same for RFK Jr:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.
Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.
Falsely Claiming Measles Vax Causes Deaths ‘Every Year’
Robert Kennedy spreading BS in an interview. This article does have a clip to it (MedPage Today on which you can listen to Mr. “irregardless” Robert Kennedy discuss his beliefs)
In this MedPage Today video, Paul Offit, MD, of Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia and a member of FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biological Products Advisory Committee, responds to claims about measles and vaccines made by HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. in recent interviews.
March 14, 2025 3:27 pm
https://angrybearblog.com/2025/03/falsely-claiming-measles-vax-causes-
deaths-every-year
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ix, you deserve to be hit in the face with a shotgun blast, you goddamn Nazi who is hypnotized into believing he is not one.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
More Anti-America cheerleading from our two idiots today, I see.
Take the weekend off boys. You deserve a break.
Added to the list.
You really need to take that break. You're losing your shit now that the Democratic Party is dead and the news doesn't tell you what you want to hear anymore.
Come and get me. Show me what a man you are with that shotgun in your hand, faggot.
And I wonder what Kevin Drum would think about your behavior as he looks up at you from hell.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Quote:6ix, do you remember what happened to the Nazis? Execution. 6ix, add that to your list, Nazi who insists he is not.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Added to the list.
Elon Musk to CNN: "The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy, the empathy exploit," Musk said. "They're exploiting a bug in Western civilization, which is the empathy response."
Empathy, he said, has been "weaponized."
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/05/politics/elon-musk-rogan-interview-empa
thy-doge/index.html
G.M. Gilbert was the chief psychologist who interviewed Nazis on trial at Nuremberg. His words are as valid today: "I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining It: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
https://www.tumblr.com/wilwheaton/710866275687120896/in-my-work-with-t
he-defendants-at-the-nuremberg
Sieg Heil Mein Führer Trump
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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SECOND, this is the definition of sociopathy, and describes you to a "T":
Quote:
I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I've come close to defining It: a lack of empathy. It's the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy."
Not once have I seen you express empathy for anybody.
SIX, you also fail to express empathy for anyone not like you. But at least you have empathy for your family and friends.
Being empathetic doesn't mean turning yourself inside out to help. But at least don't harm. That's why my statement "I believe in solving problems". I don't believe in "helping" people when their problems can, and should, be fixed.
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"It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal."- Henry Kissinger
AMERICANS SUPPORT AMERICA
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