News bits: The high cost of cost cuts; MAGA’s authoritarianism on display; MAGA poisons inconvenient history

CBS News reports: “DOGE says it has saved $160 billion. Those cuts have cost taxpayers $135 billion, one analysis says. -- The analysis seeks to tally the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers and lost productivity, according to the Partnership for Public Service (PSP), a nonpartisan nonprofit that focuses on the federal workforce. PSP's estimate is based on the $270 billion in annual compensation costs for the federal workforce, calculating the impact of DOGE's actions, from paid leave to productivity hits.”

The article points out that the PSP estimate does not include expenses for defending multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, or the impact of estimated lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. Also important, the IRS is planning on cutting roughly 40% of its workforce. That would cost the treasury about $323 billion in tax revenue over the next decade (~$32.3 billion/year) due to lower tax compliance and a decline in audits. That data is according to an estimate from the Yale Budget Lab.

My guess is that in the short and long term, DOGE’s alleged cuts are going to cost more than they save. The whole MAGA waste, fraud and abuse narrative is a cynical lie. The effort disguises MAGA’s real intent, i.e., take wealth, power and protections from the people and public interest and give all of that power and wealth to unrestrained (de-regulated and untaxed) MAGA elites and all kinds of tax cheats, elite and otherwise. The annual tax gap is running at about $700 billion/year according to official estimates, about $1.1 trillion by my estimate. For 2025, the top 40% of income earners are estimated to underpay about $660 billion in taxes according to Yale’s analysis.   

Tax cheating by income level

High income earners are the biggest tax cheaters by far

P0-10 - bottom 10% of income earners

P10-20 - 10-20% of income earners

P99.5-100 - top 0.5% of income earners

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Talking Points Memo reports about a lawsuit that MAGA elites have filed in an effort to gain a lot more power over federal courts: “Close allies of President Trump are asking a judge to give the White House control over much of the federal court system. In a little-noticed lawsuit filed last week, the America First Legal Foundation sued Chief Justice John Roberts and the head of the Administrative Office of U.S. Courts. The case ostensibly proceeds as a FOIA lawsuit, with the Trump-aligned group seeking access to judiciary records. But, in doing so, it asks the courts to cede massive power to the White House: the bodies that make court policy and manage the judiciary’s day-to-day operations should be considered independent agencies of the executive branch, the suit argues, giving the President, under the conservative legal movement’s theories, the power to appoint and dismiss people in key roles.” 

The 1st paragraph of the MAGA lawsuit:

For several years, the media and enterprising lawmakers have launched an onslaught to destroy the impartiality and political neutrality of Article III courts and, particularly, the Supreme Court. Justices Thomas, Alito, and Kavanaugh have all faced political and physical threats because of the politicization and weaponization of the law. This lawfare has been led by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and Representative Hank Johnson, relying upon an ideologically favorable legacy media, to falsely accuse Justices Thomas and Alito of ethical improprieties. Their aim was simple: to chill the judicial independence of these Supreme Court Justices. 

Every sentence in that cynical screed is an insulting, outrageous lie. Whitehouse and Johnson aimed to reduce corruption of the USSC, not to chill the judicial independence of any judge. MAGA judges on the USSC just cannot tolerate ethics rules, which usually have nothing to do with judge independence. Threats against USSC judges have nothing to do with anything that Whitehouse or Johnson said or did. Public backlash against some MAGA judges is because some of the public is pissed off about decisions like Dobbs, which took away abortion rights. MSM reporting has been investigative journalism based on evidence, not allegedly partisan attacks for no reason. The evidence the MSM reported included improperly undisclosed gifts, flight records, tax documents, and insider accounts of USSC judge sleaze and corruption.

FWIW, if anything, the TPM article says that MAGA’s effort to corrupt the federal courts is very likely going to fail. Regardless of how it turns out, this is just more solid evidence of the staunchly authoritarian and completely kleptocratic intent of MAGA’s wealth and power agenda, which is deeply anti-democracy, anti-rule of law and anti-civil liberties.  

I will file a complaint with the D.C. bar asking disbarment of the two attorneys who filed this deepl unethical lawsuit, William Scolinos (DC Bar No. 90023488) and Daniel Epstein (DC Bar No. 1009132). D.C. bar will probably ignore me, but so what? 

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The Independent newspaper reports more evidence that MAGA elites intend to rewrite history to fit the mountain of lies that its extremist authoritarian ideology is based on: “Oklahoma wants to teach kids Trump’s false version of the 2020 election where he was cheated out of victory -- The Oklahoma Superintendent of Public Instruction, Ryan Walters, announced a new education policy for the state on Thursday, which includes the allegation that there were “discrepancies” in the 2020 election, which President Donald Trump baselessly claims was stolen from him. The new academic standards for social studies for the coming school year state that students should ‘identify discrepancies in 2020 elections results by looking at graphs and other information, including the sudden halting of ballot-counting in select cities in key battleground states, the security risks of mail-in balloting, sudden batch dumps, an unforeseen record number of voters, and the unprecedented contradiction of ‘bellweather county’ trends.’”

This is not new. For years, djt and MAGA elites have been very clear that (i) inconvenient history is unacceptable, and (ii) they will try to replace it with MAGA lies as much as possible. That is fact, not opinion. Examples include, (1) the TPM article where MAGA elites try to institutionalize false claims of widespread election fraud in 2020 (but, djt himself did engage in large scale election fraud in Georgia, his insurrectionist 1/6 coup attempt and his failed fake electors schemes), (2) on Jan. 21, 2017, just one day after the inauguration, djt made the false claims that (i) the media had misrepresented his inauguration crowd size, and (ii) saying it “looked like a million-and-a-half people” and extended “all the way back to the Washington Monument”, (3) djt falsely said efforts to critically examine slavery and racism in American history was “toxic propaganda” and “ideological poison” without evidence, and (4) djt falsely claimed (i) the Biden administration had lost track of over 300,000 unaccompanied migrant children, and (ii) “We have 325,000 children here during Democrats - and this was done by Democrats - who are right now slaves, sex slaves or dead.” 

MAGA’s pattern of historical revisionism within the authoritarian movement shows that factual reality is subordinate to political narrative. Normalizing historical lies undermines democratic discourse, the rule of law and decision-making. That is the point and the goal.

The human condition: We’re hard wired for spirituality -- what a mess 😕

The wheels are really off that cart

It feels like the wheels have come off the American cart. Tens of millions of adult Americans believe the insulting lies, slanders, and idiotic crackpottery that the MAGA dark free speech Leviathan constantly inundates society with. MAGA is a reason- and reality-detached cult heavily tinged with some form(s) of Christianity. Now a new source of human spirituality has been stumbled upon by some troubled souls. It is leading a few folks straight to mental hell. 

What’s the new all knowing source of whatever it may be? Yup, you guessed it, AI (artificial intelligence). Rolling Stone writes: 

People Are Losing Loved Ones to AI-Fueled Spiritual Fantasies

Self-styled prophets are claiming they have 'awakened' chatbots and accessed the secrets of the universe through ChatGPT

Less than a year after marrying a man she had met at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, Kat felt tension mounting between them. .... But by 2022, her husband “was using AI to compose texts to me and analyze our relationship.”

.... long story cut short to try to avoid TL/DR ....

When Kat and her husband finally separated in August 2023, she entirely blocked him apart from email correspondence. She knew, however, that he was posting strange and troubling content on social media: people kept reaching out about it, asking if he was in the throes of mental crisis. 

Kat was both “horrified” and “relieved” to learn that she is not alone in this predicament, as confirmed by a Reddit thread on r/ChatGPT that made waves across the internet this week. Titled “Chatgpt induced psychosis,” the original post came from a 27-year-old teacher who explained that her partner was convinced that the popular OpenAI model “gives him the answers to the universe.” Having read his chat logs, she only found that the AI was “talking to him as if he is the next messiah.”  

What they all seemed to share was a complete disconnection from reality.

The sad reddit post, Chatgpt induced psychosis, reads as follows:

My partner has been working with chatgpt CHATS to create what he believes is the worlds first truly recursive AI* that gives him the answers to the universe. He says with conviction that he is a superior human now and is growing at an insanely rapid pace. I’ve read his chats. Ai isn’t doing anything special or recursive but it is talking to him as if he is the next messiah. He says if I don’t use it he thinks it is likely he will leave me in the future. We have been together for 7 years and own a home together. This is so out of left field. I have boundaries and he can’t make me do anything, but this is quite traumatizing in general. I can’t disagree with him without a blow up. Where do I go from here?

* Recursive AI is capable of “self-improvement” from repeated cycles of self-evaluation, learning, and adaptation. The idea is that the AI doesn’t learn just from external data or human input, but actively refines its own algorithms, models, and strategies in a feedback loop. In essence, it “learns how to learn” and then uses that improved learning ability to further enhance itself. That’s the delusional road to a self-deluded human’s false belief in omniscient AI. There ain’t no such thing. -- Germaine 😊

As one might expect from me being laser-focused on the ongoing fall of American democracy and rule of law to MAGA authoritarianism and kleptocracy, I asked about possible parallels between minds trapped in AI-generated spiritual fantasies & illusions and minds trapped in MAGA fantasies & illusions. Long, complex analysis cut waaaay short: Yup, there’s significant parallels. Little slivers of Pxy’s response:

Agency Detection and Charismatic Projection
Both groups exhibit hyperactive theory of mind:

• MAGA supporters anthropomorphize Trump as a messianic figure despite contradictory evidence, exemplified by 71% of Republican primary voters trusting him over family/religious leaders 21

• AI spiritualists attribute consciousness to large language models, with users describing ChatGPT as "God" or a "cosmic guide" 12 13

Neuroimaging studies show similar default mode network activation patterns during religious/political devotion and human-AI bonding experiences 1 10. This neural signature correlates with:

• Suspension of critical thinking (reduced dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activity)

• Enhanced emotional valence (increased amygdala-hippocampus connectivity)

See? We’re hard wired for spirituality. 

Q: Are we hard-wired for spirituality? 

Oops! Wheel’s off!

News bits: Killing due process; Regulating a monopoly can be good; MAGA's crackpot public health science

1. A key constitutional protection for civil liberties and democracy is due process. Due process is one of the most fundamental safeguards against government unfairness, oppression or abuse of citizens and other people in the US. It appears twice in the Constitution as No person shall be .... deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. The 5th Amendment applies this fundamental right to the federal government, and the 14th Amendment applies it to the states. 

Being anti-democracy and authoritarian, MAGA elites hate due process for most people. Of course they demand it for themselves. The AP reports that djt continues to directly undermine the idea of due process, with an implicit two-tier system, one for the elites and the other for the rest of us: “Trump, in a new interview, says he doesn’t know if he backs due process rights -- Asked in the NBC News interview whether U.S. citizens and noncitizens both deserve due process as laid out in the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution, Trump was noncommittal. ‘I don’t know. I’m not, I’m not a lawyer. I don’t know,’ Trump said when pressed by [the interviewer].”

Claiming to “not know” if this fundamental right should apply to anyone is more solid evidence of djt’s authoritarian intentions. His claim of ignorance is another insulting lie. He knows it applies. But  he just hates it as any other dictator-kleptocrat-liar would.

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2. In another indication that when companies are given unfettered power to do what they want, the outcomes can be bad by blocking competition and innovation. The American Prospect reports about a court decision that took some power from Apple to control its iOS App Store, which usually charges a 30% fee: “Apple’s Monopoly Is Finally Held Accountable -- And within hours of a Wednesday court ruling, innovation on smartphones is exploding, showing private regulation can be more burdensome to markets than democratic rules CEOs like to condemn. There’s been an enormous amount of discussion about what holds back markets in physical commodities like housing and energy, but also what prevents innovation and invention. One argument is that there are too many government-generated rules and regulations that slow everything down. Another is that the absence of government structuring leads to private regulations, imposed by dominant firms on their own terms to often exclude rivals and extract money. When those private regulations are forced into remission, markets can explode with new products and offers. .... That’s happening right now in real time in the market for mobile phone apps, and particularly the distribution of those apps to customers. It represents the first real, thorough, and permanent consequences to a Big Tech company for monopolizing markets. And literally within 24 hours of a federal court’s Wednesday ruling imposing sanctions for this misconduct, competitors have been rushing into the space in ways that will make the market fairer, more affordable, and more abundant.”

In protecting its monopoly, Apple executives lied to the court and stonewalled discovery demands and compliance with court orders. That bad faith behavior made the judge angry. She wrote: “Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction. Remarkably, Apple believed that this Court would not see through its obvious cover-up.”

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3. In his 2021 book, RFK Jr rejected the germ theory of disease. The theory is that microorganisms (bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi) cause infectious diseases. That is basic mainstream of health science. It is science fact, not theory or opinion. The germ explanation (theory) was first proposed by Athanasius Kircher in 1658, but he could not prove it. The explanation gained mainstream acceptance in health science from empirical evidence generated by Louis Pasteur in the 1860s, and Robert Koch and Joseph Lister between the 1860s and 1880s. 

Pasteur's swan-neck flask experiment

This showed that bacteria were present everywhere, and did not generate

spontaneously after they were killed (by heat in these experiments)

ars Technica writes about RFK Jr’s idiotic, crackpot false belief about infectious diseases: “RFK Jr. rejects cornerstone of health science: Germ theory -- .... Kennedy is the country's top health official, his warped ideas are contributing to the rise of a dystopian reality. Federal health agencies are spiraling into chaos, and critical public health services for Americans have been brutally slashed, dismantled, or knee-capped .... The health of the nation is at stake; the struggle to understand what goes on in Kennedy's head is vital.” 

The article points out that acceptance of the germ explanation debunked two alternative theories of infectious disease. One was the miasma theory, which says that infections are caused by miasma, i.e., noxious mists or vapors, or bad air from decaying matter. The other debunked theory was the terrain theory an ill-defined thing that suggests infectious diseases come from imbalances in the internal "terrain" of the body, such as malnutrition or the presence of toxic substances. What the crackpot Kennedy believes is his own personal bastardization of the two incorrect theories. He claims to believe in miasma theory, but he incorrectly describes his hypothesis as something more like terrain theory. He rejects the germ explanation, because it makes trillions of dollars for drugs and vaccines to treat or prevent infections. This idiotic, malicious monster believes in fortifying the immune system to deal with infections.

This is a wonderful example of how mendacious, incompetent, corrupt, authoritarian djt and MAGA elites insult, disrespect and threaten to kill or harm the American people. It is just stupid, morally rotted, corrupt, crackpot MAGA business as usual. 

News bits: MAGA dislikes honest AI; MAGA de-protects consumers; Theocracy rising

Blog note: Lots of important, bad MAGA things are happening faster than I can create reasonable posts about. There is usually context and complexity that needs explanation. Putting that in requires additional searching, reading, thinking and analysis, all of which slows me down. Bad MAGA news is usually too complex for proper explanation in bits. But given the length of my list, ~25 topics, I have to do some shorter bits posts to reduce the backlog. Unfortunately, completeness will suffer.

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Bit 1: Gizmodo reports that some or most MAGA authoritarians are unhappy with Musk's Grok AI (artificial intelligence) because it gives answers they do not like: “Elon Musk’s Grok AI Has a Problem: It’s Too Accurate for Conservatives MAGA Authoritarians -- Grok, the artificial intelligence chatbot created by Elon Musk’s xAI, was supposed to be the “anti-woke” AI that would satisfy the MAGA masses by doing what other chatbots refuse to do, like…spreading election misinformation and saying racial slurs. But increasingly, Trump-y X users who ask Grok to explain things to them are disappointed to learn the AI doesn’t see things their way and won’t reaffirm all their misguided beliefs (you have to use ChatGPT’s latest sycophantic update for that). .... increasingly, MAGA folks in particular have been getting peeved with Grok, as it has repudiated some of the Trump administration’s biggest ongoing lies. ..... It has sent Trump backers spiraling, and people are starting to notice.”

I replaced conservatives with MAGA authoritarians in the article’s title because real conservatives can accept inconvenient facts, truths and sound reasoning. As I have shown here many times, few MAGA people will tolerate exposure to inconvenient facts, truths or sound reasoning. The evidence of that is overwhelming.

Anyway, all Musk has to do is to ramp up Grok’s AI sycophancy response (as discussed here) and MAGA people will be happy with the misinformation and good to go.

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Bit 2: The American Prospect writes about an important matter that MAGA elites never, ever mention. Specifically, when government regulations are obliterated and corporations left to make their own rules, sometimes deregulated free markets are worse than when they were regulated: “House Republicans Take Their Turn at Ravaging CFPB -- Kneecapping the consumer financial protection agency would do much to enable fraud, and next to nothing to reduce federal expenditures. Much to the delight of Wall Street and billionaires everywhere, the Trump administration, Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency, and Project 2025 architect Russell Vought have waged a war against the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB). .... The Republican plan sharply reduces the existing cap on the amount of money the agency can request from the Federal Reserve annually (a staggering 70 percent funding cut), and relinquishes the CFPB’s Civil Penalty Fund to the U.S. Treasury, which would severely limit its ability to provide restitution to victims of financial fraud. ....  The CFPB has routinely brought back more in consumer relief than it spends on an annual basis, but a majority of its work would be unable to be conducted with that level of funding, including statutory obligations.”

MAGA elites’ Project 2025 made clear that eliminating protections for consumers (CFPB, etc.), workers (NLRB , etc.) and the environment (EPA, etc.) were top priorities. All three efforts are well underway. As I have pointed out many times before, when government protections are removed, power and wealth flows from protected people and public interests to wealthy special interests. Wealth and power trickles up to djt, and capitalist and religious elites, while risks and damage are offloaded on the public, i.e., socialized. 

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Bit 3: Various sources are reporting about a May 1, 2025 EO that djt signed in a thinly veiled effort to advance Christian theocracy in government and law. The effort is cynically disguised as protection for oppressed, discriminated against Christians by state and federal governments. The EO includes these cynical or mostly false assertions: In recent years, some Federal, State, and local policies have threatened America’s unique and beautiful tradition of religious liberty. These policies attempt to infringe upon longstanding conscience protections, prevent parents from sending their children to religious schools, threaten loss of funding or denial of non-profit tax status for faith-based entities, and single out religious groups and institutions for exclusion from governmental programs. .... The Commission shall produce a comprehensive report on the foundations of religious liberty in America, the impact of religious liberty on American society, current threats to domestic religious liberty, strategies to preserve and enhance religious liberty protections for future generations, .....

Claims of widespread or serious Christian persecution is insulting and preposterous. There is no evidence of anything close to real persecution of Christians in the US. In addition to robust constitutional and legal protections for religious belief and practice, Christianity enjoys serious political lobbying power. It is generously given billions of dollars worth of tax breaks very year. Also, Christianity dominates in state and federal governments, law enforcement, courts, public schools, universities, the US military, and just about everything else in American society, commerce and government. Where is all this persecution coming from? Nowhere.

Rather than facing systemic threats, most or nearly all alleged cases of Christian persecution are legitimate political disagreements. Yes, isolated incidents of bias occur, but they are not remotely close to the systemic threat that djt and Christian nationalist (CN) elites cynically and falsely allege. Elites who control the CN wealth and power movement want to preserve Christianity’s massive cultural primacy in the face of secularism and religious diversity. djt’s false narrative of persecution mobilizes his CN base political support, while insulting and disinforming the entire public. 

Q: Is this EO a DEI initiative for Christians?

(looks like it to me)