End of Painting and Stupid

Painting is done!  Yay!  For the first time ever, I got no, none, not any paint on me or my clothing.  Yay me.  Here is Jim painting, under the overcast sky, next to the grapefruit tree.  I find it amazing that we have citrus trees that are producing fruit in our yard. 

The orange tree appears to be winding down, but there are many grapefruits left to eat.

Ok, on to the nightmare that is our current administration.

Things are going well in our nation's capital.  Secretary of Defense Hegseth has been interfering with the recruiting process.  From The New Republic we learn the following:

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s decision to withdraw Army recruiters from the nation’s top Black engineering event has ushered blunt criticism from military leadership.

“It’s fucking racist,” one active duty Army general told Military.com on the condition of anonymity. “For the Army now, it’s ‘Blacks need not apply’ and it breaks my heart.”

The Baltimore-based Black Engineer of the Year Awards (BEYA) has historically been a key event for the Pentagon to recruit high-caliber STEM talent. One Army recruiter told the service member news outlet that BEYA is one of the “most talent-dense events we do,” and that the branch “need[s] the talent.” BEYA, in turn, recognizes on its website that the “U.S. military is one of the largest STEM employers in the nation.”

The military is having difficulty making their recruiting targets as it is.  This will not make things better.

This will not improve things, either.  From Task and Purpose we learn: 

Air Force officers who have volunteered their own free time to make life in the service safer for those on active duty and less daunting for families during and after deployments say they are watching years of work be wiped away by the current crackdown on diversity initiatives.

At one of the Air Force’s largest bases, an annual Family Readiness Summit scheduled for Feb. 20 was canceled, according to emails obtained by Task & Purpose, even though it was funded, like the one held in February 2024, by the Air & Space Forces Association, an independent non-profit that receives donations from its members. Discussions about addiction at the 2024 Summit led the Air Force to begin selling Narcan, which can reverse an opioid overdose within minutes, at base exchanges.

This is being done under the guise of doing away with DEI and being woke.  It's hurting families, it's hurting service people, and it's just flat out wrong.  The military has a long history of being a difficult place for the families, these people were going the extra mile to help out, now they're shut down.

But here, is the worst thing I have read today.  This fills me with dread and makes me wonder if the republic really is going to fall.  I don't know if the article is behind a paywall, I subscribe to Wired.  So, I will cut and paste some of it.  Musk is bringing in people from Silicon Valley and making them CIOs of various departments.  The article is here.

The Trump administration is replacing some of the nation’s top tech officials with Silicon Valley talent tied to Elon Musk and companies associated with Peter Thiel. This could make it easier for Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) engineers to gain access to sensitive government systems, sources and experts say.

Over the past few weeks, several Musk-aligned tech leaders have been installed as chief information officers, or CIOs, at the Office of Management and Budget, the Office of Personnel Management, and the Department of Energy. CIOs manage an agency’s information technology and oversee access to sensitive databases and systems, including classified ones.

"Federal agency CIOs have authority over all agency asset management, which includes software used to monitor civil servant laptops and phones,” a former Biden official with firsthand knowledge of a CIO’s capabilities tells WIRED. “CIO shops manage and control IT access to all agency databases and systems, and have oversight over all the IT contracts per FITARA [the Federal Information Technology Acquisition Reform Act]. They have lots of IT budget and head count that Musk might want to take over. In agencies, CIOs are functionally as powerful as OIGs [the Office of Inspectors General].”

So, they're bringing in adults, and giving them this much power.  Palintir is a software platform that does data analysis, and is already tightly integrated with the military.  What could go wrong?

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been closed.  They were put in place after the 2008 financial disaster caused by unregulated credit default swaps.  We were lucky not to lose the country that time.  Anyway, President Musk wants twitter to get involved in payment systems.  This would bring it under CFPB oversight, they over see things having to do with money.  So, just like that, they're toast.

 

There's so much more, I think this is already long enough.

That's it!  That's all I've got.