Waste, fraud, and abuse

Speaking of "abuse," what's abusive is the Trump administration's consistent misuse of language, which varies from highly misleading to downright Orwellian.

A March 7 Washington Post headline was: "DOGE redefines ‘fraud’ to defend cutting federal employees, programs." The article said Trump's recent speech to the nation "illustrated how Trump is trying to rally Americans behind Musk’s project to shrink the government — by attacking vast swaths of federal spending as fraudulent" when in fact they are no such thing. "Fraud" becomes a label attached to whatever you want to get rid of, as does "waste." The authoritarian playbook requires changing the meaning of words.

Or take "efficiency," as in "Department of Government Efficiency." DOGE isn't working to make government operations more efficient; only vastly smaller by pursuing a vicious anti-government ideology. That means cutting large swaths of services, on the one hand, and making many work less well, on the other. Doing the analysis to make a process more efficient is hard work. Hacking it indiscriminately is easy. In any case, a citizen who spends hours on hold with the Social Security Administration because DOGE laid off 7,000 of the agency's workers won't agree that his time is being used efficiently. One might even suspect the objective is to make the 90-year-old social insurance program less efficient in order to turn the public against it—the better to make huge cuts, or even eliminate it. Elon Musk called Social Security's inter-generational compact the "biggest Ponzi scheme ever."

As George Orwell warned long ago, the corruption of language, along with the flagrant misstatement of fact, is a necessary prerequisite to installing and maintaining an authoritarian and certainly totalitarian government. Authoritarians cannot exist without creating their own alternative realities.

Social Security is an excellent example of a pervasive alternative reality. Trump told the American people that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, which he concluded was either "fraudulent or incompetent." The actual number of 100 or older receiving benefits is 67,000, which according to demographers is about two-thirds of the centenarians living in the U.S., and thus a reasonable match for the demographic composition of the country. By sensible estimation one could conclude that the number of 100-year-old beneficiaries, far from fraudulent, looks to be about what one would expect.

Do you think calling Trump's language "Orwellian" is too strong? Consider that he called Ukraine's democratically elected president a "dictator," when in fact Putin, with whom Trump is now aligning, is the actual dictator. Trump said Ukraine started the war, when obviously Russia did, by invading its neighbor. These are 180-degree inversions of reality that Orwell would have recognized as emblematic of his thesis. That Trump's statements are ludicrous does not mean they won't be accepted as true by large numbers of people, which is why they're so dangerous.

Clearly, Trump's followers have a very high tolerance for alternative realities, as evidenced by the realization that even now tens of millions believe the 2020 election was stolen, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. We can also presume that large numbers of people voted for Trump despite rejecting his stolen election claims. I find that particularly inexplicable and indeed odious in light of the profound threat Trump poses to the constitutional order. There's a palpable sickness in the country, both intellectual and moral, that's hard to fathom.

Surely incessant lying is an "abuse" of truth, which is the fundamental ground upon which all else depends. The abuse proceeds nonstop.

Consider Trump's continual and quite remarkable torrent of lies in the aftermath of the historic Los Angeles wildfires. When some hydrants ran dry, Trump claimed there was a water shortage caused by not allowing water to flow to the LA region from northern California. That is egregiously false. The reservoirs that supply LA were full. The problem was that the pumping and storage infrastructure was overwhelmed during the fires and could not keep up due to so many hydrants being open simultaneously, and large high elevation storage tanks being depleted (especially in Palisades). Simply put, the system lost pressure because of abnormally high demand.

"There's no shortage of water in Southern California," said one expert, a civil and environmental engineering professor at UC Davis, "but there was a shortage of water in the areas that had the fires because the storage they had locally in the neighborhoods, in the towns, was not enough for the event." By "storage" he meant the kinds of large elevated tanks that every municipal water system relies upon to maintain pressure. Such systems are designed to supply normal municipal needs, with some additional capacity for fighting a few large fires. But the massive scale of the fires overwhelmed the system, and it couldn't keep up.

The professor added that "the reason why they ran out of water was that the [fire] was much bigger than what the hydraulic systems in the local storage systems were designed for, even though the region, in California, has really quite a lot of water." [my italics -mb]

Bringing in more water from outside would have achieved nothing, but Trump nevertheless kept falsely blaming the state's water policies, in essence confusing the fire situation with a long running and unrelated dispute pitting agriculture against environmental considerations elsewhere in the state. On January 26 Trump ordered the federal government to override the state of California's water-management practices and laws to bolster firefighting efforts, directing the Bureau of Reclamation to deliver more water and hydropower through the Central Valley Project, a network of dams, canals and other infrastructure that supplies agricultural users and has nothing to do with Los Angeles. On January 28 he posted on Truth Social that "The United States Military just entered the Great State of California and, under Emergency Powers, TURNED ON THE WATER flowing abundantly from the Pacific Northwest, and beyond."

There was no exercise of "emergency powers." (And by the way, emergency is another word that's being dreadfully abused, including to justify Trump's spasmodic application of tariffs on our closest friends and trading partners.) Within hours California's Department of Water Resources responded that "The military did not enter California. The federal government restarted federal water pumps after they were offline for maintenance for three days. State water supplies in Southern California remain plentiful." Nothing to see here.

Oh, and there is no water infrastructure connecting California to the "Pacific Northwest," as Trump claimed, much less "beyond." It does not exist, except in Trump's deranged mind.

On January 31 Trump lied that he finally solved the water problem, posting: "Photo of beautiful water flow that I just opened in California. Everybody should be happy about this long fought Victory! I only wish they listened to me six years ago — There would have been no fire!"

What actually happened was that Trump administration officials began releasing significant amounts of water from two federal dams supplying California’s Central Valley which, yet again, has no connection to Los Angeles, and which amounted to a gratuitous waste of water that will be needed later for crop irrigation, which is its primary intended purpose. According to the New York Times, "The releases, as ordered, have sent water toward low-lying land in the Central Valley, and none of it will reach Southern California, water experts said."

The water releases came from reservoirs managed by the federal government that feed (along with state reservoirs) a vast agricultural irrigation network. The reservoirs store water from the winter wet season and release it during the agricultural growing season later in the year. Because of the need to maintain supplies for the summer, the only legitimate reason to release water during the winter is to ensure enough excess reservoir storage capacity to handle inflow from large winter storms in order to protect the dams. To state it yet again, the system he's irresponsibly playing with has nothing to do with Los Angeles or its fires. Trump just made it all up.

I belabor this because it demonstrates not just the kind of chattering falsehoods that Trump continually emits into reality's Geiger counter, but rather an elaborately constructed false narrative built on a sequence and assemblage of lies developed and expanded over a period of time inside a deranged mind, all constructing a completely fictitious version of a matter where empirical fact is quite unambiguous and easy to verify.

While California water is a useful case study, Trump's lies overall are too numerous to catalog. Last fall we had Trump and Vance claiming Haitian immigrants were eating people's pets, and that Venezuelan gangs were overrunning Aurora, Colorado. More recently Trump said falsely that China is operating the Panama Canal, as an excuse to justify his warning that "we're taking it back." The canal is sovereign Panamanian territory, and it's operated by Panama. A month ago Trump insinuated that DEI was to blame for the fatal DC plane crash that killed 67. Trump keeps saying the U.S. has given $350 billion in aid to Ukraine when the actual number is less than $200 billion. It goes on and on. You cannot take anything he says at face value. Indeed, a good rule of thumb would be to suppose that the opposite of whatever Trump says is the actual truth.

Such a torrent of lies can overwhelm the epistemological capacity of even a determined truth seeker which, alas, most people aren't. For its part, MAGA utterly lives in alternative realities continually fertilized by credulity and ignorance. As with the words we use to describe things, truth itself can cease to have meaning. When truth no longer holds, society comes apart. Corruption pervades government. (It's happening right now at massive scale.) The constitutional order collapses. All the originally false claims about government—waste, fraud, abuse—become actually real in the corrupt conduct of a government that is not beholden to fact. That is where we're headed. Maybe we've even arrived.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Dead people vote AND collect Social Security benefits

Mike Johnson: "What he's [Musk's] finding with his algorithms going through the data of the Social Security system is enormous amounts of fraud, waste and abuse."

Ted Cruz (who else?): "More than 13 million people on the records receiving benefits who are over 119 years old."

Leave it to Mike Johnson to incessantly insinuate falsehoods. And leave it to Ted Cruz to make the absurdity ("receiving benefits") explicit.

Actually, what "his" (Musk's) "algorithms" are finding is that "he" doesn't understand the data—which is a disturbing, recurring theme. The guy who's hacking up the government has no idea what he's doing.

So let me put all howling, hyperventilating, gullible right-wing minds at ease. A recent AP headline said, comfortingly, "Tens of millions of dead people are not getting Social Security checks, despite Trump and Musk claims."

Sorry, Ted.

Trump, of course, disagrees with the AP, and not just about the name of the Gulf of Mexico. Tuesday, Trump said at a press briefing in Florida that “we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old” receiving Social Security benefits. “They’re obviously fraudulent or incompetent,” Trump added. [my italics -mb]

No, we don't. And they're not.

“If you take all of those millions of people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security with people that are 80 and 70 and 90, but not 200 years old,” Trump said. He also said that there’s one person in the system listed as 360 years old. [my italics -mb]

Leave it to Trump to come up with a 360-year-old "listed" beneficiary. Bet that's a big hit in outraged yokeldom. (In a recent interview, David Brooks said our differences are "fundamentally about culture and respect." Sigh. How does one respect willful ignorance?)

Let's start with a high-level look. According to audits, Social Security's rate of "improper payments" (which would include paying dead people) from 2015 to 2022 was 0.83%. (That's $71.8 billion in improper payments divided by $8.6 trillion in total payments. If you don't do numbers, that's less than 1 percent.)

That rate is actually quite good. In the private sector, accounts payable errors tend to run a bit higher. 80% of companies that remit over 500 payments a month report an error rate of 1% or higher, and 44% of those had an error rate over 3%.

(And interestingly, especially if you think the private sector is the standard by which the government should be measured, life insurance fraud in the U.S. costs the insurance industry $10-20 billion annually. Fraud across all insurance sectors is estimated at $308 billion annually.)

Sure, Social Security's "improper payments" have a large (but not that large) absolute dollar value. How could they not? Social Security is the old-age social insurance program for the entire country with, as I said, $8.6 trillion in payments from 2015 to 2022. The "improper payments" (of every kind) annual average over that period was $7.2 billion—not quite chump change, but not earth shattering either, especially compared to the insurance industry figures I provided above. (If you want to go after real money, instead of gutting the IRS's enforcement arm, as is currently happening, empower it to pursue tax cheats as the previous administration was trying to do.)

According to a July 2024 inspector general's report, the vast majority of "improper payments" were not to deceased persons at all, but to living beneficiaries. But some minority were indeed dead. A November 2021 audit estimated that approximately $298 million (the horror!) in payments were issued to about 24,000 deceased beneficiaries, and about $80 million of that was subsequently recovered.

If I may take editorial license at this point, it matters greatly which reality you live in, which is the fundamental theme in my epistemology. How can we properly govern ourselves if we don't know what's real?

Trump's reality is that "we have millions and millions of people over 100 years old" receiving Social Security benefits, whereas the actual number is 67,000. (Somehow Ted Cruz thinks there are 13 million alleged beneficiaries on the books who are over 119 years old and getting paid. Poor Ted.) 

According to demographers, there are approximately 101,000 centenarians living in the U.S. (Google says 90,000 as of 2021, but the number is growing rapidly.) So just two-thirds of persons age 100 or over are receiving Social Security benefits. I wonder: Why so few?

Trump said "if you take all of those millions of [dead] people off Social Security, all of a sudden we have a very powerful Social Security." Translation: Because the fraud is so enormous, all you need to do to ensure Social Security's solvency is to quit paying dead people. It's as easy as that! Who knew? (To reiterate, the 2021 audit found 24,000 deceased beneficiaries at a cost of a couple of hundred million dollars in improper payments. Not quite enough dollars there to save Social Security, I'm afraid.)

Wouldn't it be nice if the president didn't spew ignorant nonsense? Alas, that's too much to ask.

As for Musk not understanding the data, he is multiply confused. Part of Musk's problem is that Social Security's ancient software is written in the COBOL programming language (which was on its way out when I took a course in it in 1984), which led to certain puzzling (to Musk) conventions in how the data is coded. Part of the problem is that Social Security doesn't have death records for a goodly number of people (which we shouldn't find surprising), but that doesn't mean they're receiving benefits, as Trump's acting commissioner recently noted. The system is coded in such a way that, when complete data is not available, it looks as if there are impossibly old (eg., 150-year-old) persons on the records, but in actuality nobody is sending "them" money. (Sorry, Ted.) Persons who know and work with the data understand what's going on. Musk doesn't. And by the way, the Social Security payment system is programmed to automatically stop sending payments to people when they reach 115 years old. (Sorry again, Ted.)

All this has been widely reported in recent weeks, with numerous debunkings of all the false claims. That didn't stop Trump from talking nonsense in his Tuesday night speech, or Mike Johnson disseminating disinformation as only he can.

Here's the thing. You have a choice of whether you live in a made-up reality, or the actual one. The persons running and ransacking our government live in a made-up reality. Which one do you live in?

 Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Why must the war end now?

Seemingly everybody from clear-eyed commentators to heads of state to Trump himself have insisted it's time for the Ukraine-Russia war to come to an end. But why?

Because the war has gone on for three years, and that's long enough? Because the cost in lives, devastation, and resources has been enormous?

Those aren't good reasons, not least because they're arbitrary, as if the timetable should account for our stock (or deficit) of patience. Or as if the suffering must end because we are decent, caring people who can't bear to observe it. Which, frankly, rings a bit phony to me anyway.

Indeed, the brutal destruction wrought by a vicious aggressor should steel our resolve, although putting it that way runs the risk of cheapening the real resolve before which we should stand in awe: namely, Ukraine's. By comparison, "our" resolve comes at such trifling cost and with almost no sacrifice.

That $200 billion of U.S. aid and arms is chump change compared to the geostrategic value it buys us. And again, saying that runs the risk of losing sight of the most important value, which is Ukraine's freedom, and our insistence on a world order that does not tolerate wars of conquest. 

The question of when the war should end is actually easy to answer: It should end when Ukraine says it should end, and on terms of Ukraine's choosing. If Ukraine wants to keep fighting, our job is to provide it the resources it needs. If Ukraine wants to negotiate a settlement, our job is to assist it to get the best deal that it can.

Honestly, that's not a very big ask of us.

Ukraine, and only Ukraine, can determine when and if its sacrifice has become too great, relative to what it thinks it can achieve. That's not for us to say, because it isn't our country being invaded, and our people being brutalized.

To arbitrarily stop now would be to reward the aggressor, which sends all the wrong messages and creates all the wrong incentives, and would be morally bankrupt.

Expectations are crucial. Russia needs to understand beyond all doubt that there will be no arbitrary end; that it will need to extract itself from the mess it has made, or keep on bleeding. Ukraine is said to be barely hanging on, but that observation applies to Russia too.

It's under-appreciated how much Russia's military has been decimated, and its economy ravished, by its war of conquest. Inflation is 10 percent. Interest rates are 21 percent. The economy is not in recession, but current low GDP growth is driven by war spending, which is considered to be unsustainable.

It's not an exaggeration to say that Russia's military has been devastated. Ukraine says it has destroyed 10,000 Russian tanks, which should be taken with a grain of salt. But western analysts put the number in the thousands. Common estimates are around 4,000 main battle tanks destroyed or captured, and 8,000 armored vehicles. The U.K. estimates Russia is able to produce around 100 new tanks per year. According to the Institute for the Study of War, "Russian forces have sustained vehicle and artillery system losses on the battlefield that are unsustainable in the medium- to long-term given the limitations of Russia's defense industrial capacity and Soviet-era weapons and equipment stocks."

(When considering U.S. aid so far to Ukraine, it's worth pointing out that, before the war, any analyst would have considered it a stunningly good bargain to deplete Russia's military capacity so severely at the cost of a mere $200 billion. Russia is an aggressive adversary, a threat to its neighbors, and to the international order. Its diminishment at that scale would have been viewed as a good thing.)

Russia has also suffered enormous battlefield casualties. Ukraine claims 850,000 Russian troops killed, captured, missing, or wounded. The U.K. puts the estimate at 790,000, and the U.S. over 700,000. Russia has suffered more dead, by some multiples, than all Americans killed in Vietnam.

In the recent Oval Office mugging of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, President Trump stressed Ukraine's recruitment difficulties—difficulties that are unsurprising after three years of all-out war. (The U.S. relied on a massive draft to fight WW II, and also the wars in Korea and Vietnam.) But Russia too is facing significant recruitment challenges. Recruitment is down to around 40 per day, from perhaps 250 per day in mid-2024. Russia has been losing an estimated 1,500 troops per day for the past three months. It's exhausted its prison population recruitment pool that supplied what can only be described as battlefield cannon fodder in the early going. Russia is increasingly turning to foreign nationals, criminals, and debtors to bolster troop numbers, and of course a sizable contingent of North Koreans. But its fighting strength is far below what it would like.

Given all that, Putin would be delighted to be extricated from his dismal predicament on favorable terms that allow him to keep a big chunk of Ukrainian territory. Which, to my great consternation, is exactly what President Trump seems to be angling towards. What a monumental travesty that would be. Trump is also moving towards re-normalization of relations between Russia and the U.S., which is simply bewildering. Trump has suggested that Russia be re-admitted to the G-7, for example. And he's moving to weaken or remove sanctions enforcement. These are all shockingly inappropriate moves that send exactly the wrong message to a thuggish aggressor.

Having the war drag on indefinitely would be very bad for Russia. That's why the West and the U.S. need to make it absolutely clear that their support for Ukraine will be robust, ongoing, and open-ended, with no arbitrary limits or timelines. Trump's style of Putin-coddling negotiation is highly inappropriate. Putin needs to know that not only will he not be bailed out, but his cost will be staggering if he chooses to keep fighting. That understanding will help shape whatever peace agreement finally emerges. (At the same time China will get the message that it needs to keep its hands off Taiwan.)

It's certainly true that some kind of negotiation will need to happen at some point. But it's for Ukraine, not us, to say when that needs to happen, and whether there should be a ceasefire or other concessions. Since the true cost of the war is being paid by Ukraine, and since its own freedom is at stake, only Ukraine can determine when the war should end. It really is that simple.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Apparently I live on a different planet than a lot of people

A Washington Post article said yesterday that "Some of the emerging [Trump administration] policies have been driven by backlash to the covid-19 response, after Trump made clear his disdain for the nation’s public health infrastructure. He and allies have said the U.S. approach to the virus, including mask and vaccine mandates and school shutdowns, was heavy-handed, a position that some Democrats now share too."

Although that sentiment is nothing new, I continue be dumbfounded by the notion that the country's response to Covid, a once-in-a-century (we hope) pandemic, was "heavy-handed." There were almost 900,000 daily reported cases in January of 2022. There were 1.35 million cases reported on January 10 of that year. Daily hospitalizations peaked at around 163,000 that same month. Daily deaths were around 2,600. In January 2021, daily deaths were well over 3,000. A 9/11's worth of deaths. Every. Single. Day. The highest daily death count that month was 4,197.

In the U.S., more than 1.1 million people have died of Covid. During its rampage it became the third leading cause of death, behind heart disease and cancer. Life expectancy in the U.S. declined by 2.7 years between 2019 and 2021.

So I remain flabbergasted by claims of over-reaction. By my lights, protecting the public from such catastrophic events is a vital role of the public health infrastructure, and of government. Many who disparage that role are apparently too stupid to realize they are likely alive today as a consequence of the government's "heavy-handedness."

But set that aside. The article also said "the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention was told Friday to lay off an estimated 10 percent of its staff, including nearly an entire class of “disease detectives” — the infectious-disease experts charged with helping spot the next epidemic." [Update: More recent reporting by the New York Times says the "disease detectives" are apparently being spared, but vast numbers of other public heath researchers and scientists are being summarily fired.]

Current serious public health concerns include the rising incidence of avian influenza, which some fear could become the world's next deadly pandemic. The disease has ravished egg laying flocks (it's why egg prices are so high), has been working its way through dairy cattle herds, and is increasingly infecting humans (one has died) that come into contact with those herds. Should the virus acquire the mutations needed to spread easily from person to person, it's off to the pandemic races.

There's more. "Global health leaders have warned about a new outbreak of Ebola virus in Uganda and other emerging outbreaks overseas," said the Post article.

And Trump's move to pull the U.S. out of the World Health Organization will hamper our ability to coordinate with other countries as diseases spread.

As an aside, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now confirmed as HHS secretary, has said the U.S. should pause infectious disease research for 10 years. Kennedy wants to concentrate instead of chronic diseases. Because of course we can't do both.

Also worth noting is that USAID, the world's largest foreign aid organization, has a large and crucial role in strengthening disease surveillance systems globally, particularly in developing countries. USAID, which Trump is in the process of shutting down, is vitally involved in detecting the emergence of the next pandemic.

Trump has also gratuitously announced he'll withhold federal aid from schools that have Covid mandates, which the Post notes is largely moot, since most such mandates were removed almost two years ago.

This is what passes for leadership now. But what right do I have to complain? We knew this was what we were getting, and chose it anyway.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

 

And don't drink bleach, either

In a press conference the day after the the DC plane crash that killed 67, Donald Trump riffed about its cause. His conclusion: DEI. "Diversity, Equity and Inclusion" was the probable culprit.

Trump offered that opinion on no evidence at all. He just made it up, inflaming ongoing DEI discourse, falsely blaming his predecessors, lying about his own record, and generally doing all the despicable things we expect him to do. One reporter challenged him: "Mr. President, you have today blamed the diversity elements, but then told us that you weren’t sure that the controllers made any mistake…. I’m trying to figure out how you can come to the conclusion right now that diversity had something to do with this crash."

"Because I have common sense,” Trump said, "and, unfortunately, a lot of people don’t."

The very first thing that occurred to me, as Trump uttered those words, was: Is that the same "common sense" that caused him to wonder, before a live national television audience in 2020, whether ingesting strong sanitizers (like bleach, or perhaps Lysol), or somehow getting ultraviolet light inside the body, might be useful in combating Covid? Was Trump now displaying the same keen insight and shrewd intuition that he did back then, while treating us all to the amazing workings of his perspicacious mind?

And what a mind. Just ask him. Back then he acknowledged that although he's "not a doctor," he's "like a person who has a good you-know-what." He said this while twirling his finger in the vicinity of his head. His White House coronavirus adviser, Deborah Birx, who is a doctor, sat there stone faced on the stage, in seeming disbelief, as Trump suggested she look into his brilliant ideas.

Watching at home, I groaned in dismay.

Trump is so full of himself that he has neither the self-awareness nor the discipline to not say stupid things out loud before the American people and the world. (Stupid things are best kept to oneself, and perhaps examined in private with trusted, expert confidants, until one achieves a basic measure of mental clarity. For a variety of excellent reasons and the good of everybody, a president, when speaking publicly, should avoid utterances that would subject him to mockery.)

Anyway, some things never change. At a press conference with Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump proposed that the approximately two million Palestinian inhabits of Gaza not be allowed to rebuild in their own sovereign territory but, rather, should be re-settled in various other countries (Egypt and Jordan, for example). As for Gaza, which Israel has bombed to rubble over the past 15 months, the United States would take possession and indeed ownership of it, and develop it into what Reuters called "an international beach resort" that Trump said could be "the Riviera of the Middle East." (All the particulars—the what and why and how and for whom and indeed WTF remained unspecified.)

There is much to be said about this hare-brained idea. Such as that Trump is, quite incredibly, advocating ethnic cleansing. Removing Palestinians from their land and dispersing them around the region would destroy them as a unified people and be a criminal monstrosity, recorded for all time as such by history.

Also extraordinary was that, like ingesting bleach, this outlandish proposal was clearly vetted only in the screwball mind of Trump himself, before being barfed out onto the world. This is not how serious countries and serious presidents conduct their affairs, especially when such grave humanitarian and geopolitical considerations are involved. A state press conference is not a whiteboard on which previously unconsidered brainstorming takes place.

Obviously, for right-wing Israelis depopulating Gaza would be a dream come true. For everybody else, the idea was crackpot lunacy. Jordan and Egypt want nothing to do with a flood of Palestinian refugees who would have to be permanently assimilated. King Abdullah II of Jordan rejected any attempt to displace Palestinians and annex their land. Egypt's President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi said he would back Gaza's reconstruction but not mass displacement. Saudi Arabia expressed its “unequivocal rejection” of attempts to displace Palestinians and reiterated that it would not establish diplomatic ties with Israel in the absence of an independent Palestinian state.

France reiterated its opposition to any forced displacement of Palestinians from Gaza, calling it a violation of international law, as did Germany. The UK emphasized that Palestinian civilians must be able to return to their homes and rebuild their lives. Spain and Ireland echoed calls for a two-state solution. And so forth.

Experts noted the obvious: Such a plan would be a severe violation of international law. "Forced deportation or transfer of a civilian population is a violation of international humanitarian law, a war crime and a crime against humanity," wrote The New York Times. "The prohibition against forced deportations of civilians has been a part of the law of war since the Lieber Code, a set of rules on the conduct of hostilities, was promulgated by Union forces during the U.S. Civil War. It is prohibited by multiple provisions of the Geneva Conventions, and the Nuremberg Tribunal after World War II defined it as a war crime."

"The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court lists forcible population transfers as both a war crime and a crime against humanity," the Times continued. "And if the displacement is focused on a particular group based on their ethnic, religious or national identity, then it is also persecution — an additional crime."

Unsurprisingly, the administration is now walking it all back. [Update 2025-02-10: Or maybe not. Trump is now returning to the idea, and suggesting he could cut aid to Jordan and Egypt if they don't take displaced Gazans. Trump told Fox's Bret Baier that Gazans would never be allowed to return, and that the U.S. would develop Gaza. "It would be a beautiful piece of land," Trump said.] It was just a lot of talk, said some Republican politicians. (But why must we endure such ignorant "talk" from our president?) Secretary of State Marco Rubio twice suggested that Trump was only proposing to clear out and rebuild Gaza, not claim indefinite possession of the territory. (False. I listened to Trump's press conference. He stressed that the U.S. would own and develop Gaza.)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said "the president has not committed to putting boots on the ground in Gaza," but she did not say how the United States could take control of the territory without using military force, not least because Hamas has not been destroyed, and indeed has substantially reconstituted itself with fresh recruits.

Of course, the problem of what to do about a decimated Gaza is starkly real. "Trump’s proposal for Gaza is met with disbelief, opposition and sarcasm, but as he often does, in his brutal and clumsy way, he raises a real question: What to do when two million civilians find themselves in a field of ruins, full of explosives and corpses?" said former French ambassador to Washington, Gérard Araud.

But it isn't as if the "question" wasn't already obvious, needing but for Trump to raise it even if in a "brutal and clumsy" way. A serious and urgent international discussion of what's next is clearly required. But what nobody needs is a U.S. president throwing half-baked cockamamie at the wall in public.

And just to be clear, don't drink bleach.

Copyright (C)  2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

"Records are immutable" and "Recorded for posterity"

In an executive order on Monday pardoning or commuting the sentences of all 1,500 January 6 defendants, Donald Trump said he was ending "a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years" to begin a "process of national reconciliation."

Trump also ordered the Justice Department to drop in-progress prosecutions against accused January 6 perpetrators, resulting in orders written by several U.S. district court judges. Here is what they wrote in reaction to the dismissal of charges, and the pardons.

 

Judge Beryl A. Howell

No “national injustice” occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election. No “process of national reconciliation” can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity. That merely raises the dangerous specter of future lawless conduct by other poor losers and undermines the rule of law. Yet, this presidential pronouncement of a “national injustice” is the sole justification provided in the government’s motion to dismiss the pending indictment.

Having presided over scores of criminal cases charging defendants for their criminal conduct both outside and inside the U.S. Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, which charges were fully supported by evidence in the form of extensive videotapes and photographs, admissions by defendants in the course of plea hearings and in testimony at trials, and the testimony of law enforcement officers and congressional staff present at the Capitol on that day, this Court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement. The prosecutions in this case and others charging defendants for their criminal conduct at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, present no injustice, but instead reflect the diligent work of conscientious public servants, including prosecutors and law enforcement officials, and dedicated defense attorneys, to defend our democracy and rights and preserve our long tradition of peaceful transfers of power—which, until January 6, 2021, served as a model to the world—all while affording those charged every protection guaranteed by our Constitution and the criminal justice system. As to these two defendants specifically, both admitted their criminal conduct under oath, after consultation with their attorneys, and pursuant to plea agreements to which they agreed. Bluntly put, the assertion offered in the presidential pronouncement for the pending motion to dismiss is flatly wrong.

 

Judge Tanya S. Chutkan

More broadly, no pardon can change the tragic truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. On that day,“a mob professing support for then-President Trump violently attacked the United States Capitol” to stop the electoral college certification. The dismissal of this case cannot undo the “rampage [that] left multiple people dead, injured more than 140 people, and inflicted millions of dollars in damage.” It cannot diminish the heroism of law enforcement officers who “struggled, facing serious injury and even death, to control the mob that overwhelmed them.” It cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake.  And it cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power. 

In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.

Dismissal of charges, pardons after convictions, and commutations of sentences will not change the truth of what happened on January 6, 2021. What occurred that day is preserved for the future through thousands of contemporaneous videos, transcripts of trials, jury verdicts, and judicial opinions analyzing and recounting the evidence through a neutral lens. Those records are immutable and represent the truth, no matter how the events of January 6 are described by those charged or their allies.

Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly

What role law enforcement played that day and the heroism of each officer who responded also cannot be altered or ignored. Present that day were police officers from the U.S. Capitol Police and those who came to their aid when called: the D.C. Metropolitan Police Department, Montgomery County Police Department, Prince George's County Police Department, Arlington County Police Department, and Fairfax County Police Department. Grossly outnumbered, those law enforcement officers acted valiantly to protect the Members of Congress, their staff, the Vice President and his family, the integrity of the Capitol grounds, and the Capitol Building-our symbol of liberty and a symbol of democratic rule around the world. For hours, those officers were aggressively confronted and violently assaulted. More than 140 officers were injured. Others tragically passed away as a result of the events of that day. But law enforcement did not falter. Standing with bear spray streaming down their faces, those officers carried out their duty to protect.

All of what I have described has been recorded for posterity, ensuring that what transpired  on January 6, 2021 can be judged accurately in the future.

 

 Judge Amy Berman Jackson

Moreover, a dismissal with prejudice would dishonor the hundreds of law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line against impossible odds to protect not only the U.S. Capitol building and the people who worked there – who were huddled inside in terror as windows and doors were shattered – but to protect the very essence of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power. It would dishonor those valiant officers who fulfilled their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” They are the patriots. Patriotism is loyalty to country and loyalty to the Constitution – not loyalty to a single head of state.

No stroke of a pen and no proclamation can alter the facts of what took place on January 6, 2021. When others in the public eye are not willing to risk their own power or popularity by calling out lies when they hear them, the record of the proceedings in this courthouse will be available to those who seek the truth.

 

Judge Paul L. Friedman

In this case, the government has not provided a factual basis for dismissal. The only justification is a citation to the presidential proclamation. The Proclamation itself ... attempts to justify dismissal by asserting that it is needed to "end[] a grave national injustice that has been perpetrated upon the American people over the last four years and begin[] a process of national reconciliation."

The Proclamation's assertion is factually incorrect. There has been no "grave national injustice." And just because the Proclamation was signed by the president does not transform up into down or down into up as if peering through the looking glass of Alice in Wonderland. Mr. Warnagiris was charged with serious crimes and the abandonment of his case by the government does not justify or erase his criminal actions on January 6, 2021. 

...

The undersigned has presided over a great many of the January 6 cases, and other judges of this Court have done the same. In each of the cases, law enforcement diligently investigated the facts. The prosecutors from the Department o Justice and the United States Attorney's Office conscientiously presented the evidence to support the convictions — including powerful testimony from law enforcement officers and witnesses, as well as hundreds of hours of shocking videos of assaults on the Capitol and those trying to protect it. In each case, either a judge or a jury evaluated the evidence presented through the crucible of direct and cross-examination. Judges methodically applied the law to the facts or instructed juries to do so. The voluminous records created in these cases and the thoughtfully considered sentences imposed by judges of this Court will forever reflect that in the tumultuous time following the events of January 6, 2021, this Court was at all times a place of law and fact.

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

There are always reasons

On Planet Earth, the Panama Canal is part of Panama, and managed by the Panamanian government under strict neutrality treaties that ensure equal treatment for all nations' vessels.

On Planet Trump, "American ships are being severely overcharged," and "China is operating the Panama Canal."

"We didn't give it to China, we gave it to Panama," Trump proclaimed in his inaugural address, "and we're taking it back."

No, China isn't operating the canal, and there's no legal way to take it back. At least Trump admits that we did indeed give it to Panama, which underscores the illegality of his concomitant threat.

Autocrats always find made-up reasons to exercise brute power, which is why the truth always matters, and why Trump's endless lying is endlessly dangerous.

For example, Vladimir Putin had his own made-up reasons for his illegal invasion of Ukraine. Historically, Ukraine was never an independent entity with its own identity, he said, but always a part of Russia. False. And Ukraine's leaders are "Nazis," he insisted. Ludicrous. In launching his war of conquest, Putin reneged on the 1994 Budapest Memorandum signed by Russia, under which Ukraine gave up its Soviet era nuclear weapons in return for respect for Ukraine's independence, sovereignty, and existing borders, and for refraining from the threat or use of force against Ukraine's territorial integrity or political independence. So much for all that.

Now Putin says we're taking it back.

Even the most lawless thugs assert justifications for their lawlessness. Trump's false reasons include: "Panama's promise to us has been broken."

But no, American ships aren't being "overcharged," at least not in the sense that they pay higher fees than other nations' ships. All shipping is subject to the same fee structure, which varies based on vessel size. These rates are determined in public meetings by the Panama Canal Authority, ostensibly reflecting market conditions and operational costs. (There can admittedly be disagreements about whether the fees, which apply to everybody, are set at appropriate levels.) Recent increases have been attributed to severe drought conditions since 2023, which have led to historically low water levels in Gatun Lake, the canal's primary water source.

Ricaurte Vásquez Morales, the Panama Canal Authority chief, has emphasized that there are no exceptions to the rules, and giving preferential treatment to one country's ships would violate international law and "lead to chaos."A Trump spokesperson pointed out that the U.S. is the largest user of the canal and thus disproportionately affected by fee hikes. But in what sense is the largest user paying the most fees unfair?

Crucially, Trump's claim that China is "operating" the Panama Canal is categorically false, so false as to properly be called a lie—particularly in the context of his threat that "we're taking it back." It is certainly true that there has been significant Chinese investment and commercial activity adjacent to the canal. Chinese companies operate ports on both the Atlantic and Pacific sides. But there are also ports operated by Taiwanese and Singaporean companies, and by an American-Panamanian joint venture. And ships transiting the canal need not use the ports at all.

Lest there be any misunderstanding here, my point doesn't involve any opinion about whether or not the current transit fees are set at appropriate levels. What I condemn is the thuggish threat of taking the canal back (even by force, as Trump has suggested), which would mean the seizing of sovereign Panamanian territory, and predicating that action on an outright lie, told to the American people and to the world. The lie thus becomes the "reason" for a lawless act. We should expect better of the United States (or maybe not), but obviously not of Trump.

Asserting lies to construct false realities is what autocrats necessarily do. Lying continually about almost everything is what Trump does. It's a noxious combination that's toxic to all our highest intellectual and ethical values. As a country, it seems we increasingly have neither.

Copyright (C) 2025 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Landslide? Mandate?

            Electoral

                votes   Popular vote margin

                -----   -------------------

2024  Trump       312    2.5 million   1.6%

2020  Biden       306    7.1 million   4.5%

2016  Trump       304   -2.9 million  -2.1%

2012  Obama       332    5.0 million   3.9%

2008  Obama       365    9.6 million   7.2%

2004  G.W.Bush    286    3.0 million   2.4%

2000  G.W.Bush    261   -0.5 million  -0.5%

1996* Clinton     379    8.2 million   8.5%

1992+ Clinton     370    5.8 million   5.6%

1988  G.H.W.Bush  426    7.1 million   7.8%

1984  Reagan      525   16.9 million  18.2%

*Ross Perot got 8.1 million votes (8.4%)

+Ross Perot got 19.7 million votes (18.9%)

Margins could change slightly as count proceeds. The latest is here.

 

Trump did not win a majority of the popular vote in 2024, despite there being no significant third party candidates. As of this writing, he won 49.86% of all votes cast. Although Trump won 6 more electoral votes (the number for Kansas or Utah, for example) in 2024 than Biden did in 2020, Biden won 51.3% of all votes cast.

 

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

The inherent fragility of democracy

In the first chapter of one of the most difficult books I've ever read, Martin Hägglund (2008) describes the philosopher Jacques Derrida's insight that democracy has the inherent property of autoimmunity. Analogously to how with autoimmune disease a living body can attack itself, democracy can likewise attack itself, and contains, paradoxically, the means of its own destruction. "Democracy is autoimmune because it is threatened not only by external enemies, but also by internal forces that can corrupt its principles," Hägglund writes.

One way this autoimmunity manifests is that "it is always possible that a democratic election will give power to a nondemocratic regime." Hägglund highlights Derrida's reminder that "fascist and Nazi totalitarianisms came into power or ascended to power through formally normal and formally democratic electoral processes."

There are more recent examples. Harvard professors of government Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt wrote today that "leaders like Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, Viktor Orban in Hungary, Kais Saied in Tunisia and Nayib Bukele in El Salvador have won decisive electoral majorities — and then used their elected offices to undermine fair competition, making it nearly impossible to remove them from office democratically."

Derrida's book Rogues describes how in 1992 the Algerian state suspended elections because "the elections were projected to give power to a majority that wanted to change the constitution and undercut the process of democratization." Thus democracy itself was thwarted in an attempt to protect it, demonstrating an autoimmune response where the system attacks itself.

Hägglund: "The immune-system of democracy—the strategies it employs to defend itself—may thus be forced to attack itself in order to survive. The effects of such autoimmunity may be positive or negative, but in either case they reinforce that democracy is necessarily divided within itself. The principles of democracy may protect those who attack the principles of democracy. Inversely, the attack on the principles of democracy may be a way of protecting the principles of democracy. There is no way to finally decide whether it is legitimate for democracy to attack or to refrain from attacking itself, since either one of these strategies may turn against it at any moment." [my italics -mb]

Hägglund says "Derrida emphasizes that there can be no democratic ideal that is exempt from autoimmunity, since the very concept of democracy is autoimmune. In order to be democratic, democracy must be open to critique and to the outcome of unpredictable elections. But for the same reason, democracy is essentially open to what may alter or destroy it. There is thus a double bind at the core of democracy. It must both protect itself against its own threat and be threatened by its own protection."

Which is sobering to contemplate as a democratic presidential election nears, in which one candidate has promised to govern in ways that are antithetical to the Constitution, and his former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff has called him "fascist to the core."

That might be the cause of the churn in your gut. Our only recourse now is to vote in defense of both democracy and the Constitution.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Inexplicable. Seriously?

Lordy, the stupid things that come out of mouths attached to religion-addled brains.

Too hash? Consider. The Trump-supporting Dallas pastor, Robert Jeffress, preached this to his congregation the day after the failed assassination attempt: "What happened yesterday is also a demonstration of the power of almighty God. I mean, what happened was inexplicable apart from God. God spared him for the purpose of calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation."

Seriously, inexplicable? As in, can't be explained?

That's just dumb. The kid missed the shot. It happens. Perhaps he wasn't a good marksman. Or maybe he felt rushed. He'd just chased a police officer off the roof, so he knew he'd been discovered, and had to work fast. Or the steeply pitched roof affected his aim.

Or this. Trump turned his head at an opportune moment. Trump himself acknowledged that he was turning to look at a chart that he was using in his speech.

Did God make him turn? Don't be absurd. Do you think that, but for God, he'd not have turned to look at that chart?

Trump's movement is completely explicable in terms not just of what he was doing in that moment, but, in a broader existential sense, of the stochastic happenings that carom off each other continually as reality plays out at each point of space and time. Existence is a dice roll. A shooter's intention and a speaker's movement line up, or they don't, without apparent reason. Because of how our brains are wired, we typically only notice when some seemingly momentous coincidence occurs. But make no mistake: coincidences occur constantly.

Which presents a golden opportunity for mush-minded thinking. Because coincidences are happening continually, there are always some available to take the believer wherever he wants to go. Constructing meaning from randomness is utterly commonplace in the belief buffet. It's a trademark feature of religious practice by denizens of pews and pulpits to align notable coincidence with divine providence—at least when when events conform to some desired narrative that the believer wants to advance. With religion, the stupidity (sorry, that word again) never ends.

Sometimes it gushes forth. "If you didn't believe in miracles before Saturday, you better be believing right now!" bellowed Republican Senator Tim Scott at the Republican National Convention. "Thank God Almighty that we live in a country that still believes in the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords, the Alpha and the Omega. Our God still saves."

Tim Scott's standard for what qualifies as miraculous is clearly quite low, but it's entirely consistent with what I've observed in a lifetime of watching persons captive to religion. Heck, I used to be one myself. But I must admit I always had a hard time with miracles and other bizarre claims. I made the best of it, but was often secretly embarrassed by the stuff I heard in church. Even as a kid I knew deep down that a lot of it was crazy. What's fascinating to me is that the Tim Scotts and Robert Jeffresses are never embarrassed as they spew nonsense. Nor are many other grownups I observe with dismay.

Genuine miracles don't happen, because the only things that ever do happen are things that can possibly happen. Occurrences that are rare but possible and thus explicable don't count as miracles. Sorry, they don't.

Rare outcomes happen in nature. Rarity means uncommon, not impossible. Everything unfolds on a probability curve. Such rarities include the vast majority of miracles recognized by the Catholic Church, which overwhelmingly tend to be unexplained recoveries from dire disease processes that ought (probabilistically speaking) to be fatal. But we know that in principle such recoveries can occur as a result of entirely natural processes, such as the body's sudden spectacular marshaling of its immune system, for reasons that aren't presently understood.

Just because the doctors you consult don't know why someone got better doesn't make it a miracle that they did. There are monumental examples of this, and utterly banal ones. I got better. Did the antibiotic help or hurt? Don't know. Doctors don't understand the placebo effect, either, but it's undeniably real, and has to be accounted for in medical studies of drugs and procedures. And so on.

For many decades, certain authors and medical practitioners have been exploring the body's own innate capacity for self-healing. Bernie Siegel, for example. Or Andrew Weil.

Interestingly, none of the Catholic miracles involve outcomes that we know in principle can't happen in nature, such as the spontaneous regeneration of an amputated limb. Because humans absolutely can't regrow missing limbs, such regeneration would qualify as a genuine miracle if it ever happened. It never has, and never will. Maybe that should tell you something.

Long ago, some Catholic friends were having a hard time understanding why I claim their "miracles" don't count. What would? they asked. I pointed out the window at the municipal water tower across the field. Having that tower suddenly move several hundred feet would be a miracle, I said. At least once we ruled out David Copperfield-type illusions operating from our perspective in the living room where we were sitting. We could walk over to the tower's new location and kick at its base. Yup, a miracle.

A lot of miracle claims are mush-minded motivated reasoning, as with the Jeffress and Scott quotes above. It's a game religious types seemingly don't realize they're playing, but they do it all the time. The failed assassination attempt lets them tell themselves that Trump has been chosen by God, which is exactly what they wanted to believe anyway. Indeed, there's even been a messianic aspect to this among some Christians, which is bizarre and disturbing.

Thus religious practice often involves exercises in motivated tea leaf reading. Maybe God is trying to tell us this. Or that. Maybe. God never speaks clearly, so the possibilities are endless. The maybes slot effortlessly into worldviews. We get to play out scenarios in our head and choose the ones we like, and then incorporate them into our personal realities. God communicates through "signs," suggested Marjorie Taylor Green, with her really dumb mention of earthquakes and eclipses. Christians thus find themselves in the business of interpreting what earthquakes and eclipses mean. (Apparently they don't mean fault slippage or orbital mechanics.) Robert Jeffress said the failed assassination attempt was God's way of  "calling our nation back to its Judeo-Christian foundation." Sure it was.

But as I wrote elsewhere, there is only one reality, and it's our job to discern it. Not only will religion not help, but it will rot the thinking brains we need to discover and act upon what's real. It will train us how to not think. It will cause us to eschew empirical processes in favor of deeply irrational ones. We can do better than that. And if we're to survive as a civilization, we must.

Copyright (C) 2024 James Michael Brennan, All Rights Reserved

The latest from Does It Hurt To Think? is here.

Way to go Joe

A good pun, huh?