Butch at home

It turns out that one of those "rescued" astronauts who returned from the ISS via SpaceX is a man of Christian faith. 

He's still getting used to earth's gravity but he's glad to be home. He says, "God is always good."

DOGE and Social Security

Antonio Gracias has been working on the DOGE team, recently looking into Social Security. He comes onstage with Elon to explain to an audience something surprising:

 

"New non-citizen social security numbers" dramatically grew during the last four years under the previous administration, from 270,000 in 2021 to over two million in 2024. That's an explosion, not just growth. About 1.3 million of them are already on Medicaid. Some actually voted in our recent election.

Antonio takes the time to honor the "very good people" working in Social Security who showed him what was going on, at their own risk. 

He says he's "pro legal immigration," and this chart is "not political. This is about the future of America."

Wiki on DOGE

If you wanted to find out what DOGE is, would you go to Wikipedia? Many would, because they think it is neutral and honest in reporting factual information in a non-partisan way. I wish that were the case. 

It has nothing good to say about this heroic effort to trim the federal budget. On the contrary, the reader only learns that DOGE is controversial, it inspires lawsuits, its claims to the discovery of fraud are false, its leader is ambiguous, it cuts good programs, it's a partisan political tool, etc., etc.

In short, Wikipedia's article is a hit job on DOGE and on Elon Musk. It reads like a partisan political tool itself. 

Wikipedia is the product of Katherine Maher's priorities. "Consensus" and "getting things done" come before truth on her priority list. Vital information is missing from the article. There's no effort to acknowledge the legitimate views of the people who support it.

Transparent DOGE

New tasks are accomplished every day at the Department of Government Efficiency, and they're published every day. You can go to the website and check on their progress--every day.

We who respect the responsible management of money are happy about this. We've known in a general way that the federal government was handling that management irresponsibly to some degree, but we discovered that it's much worse than we feared.

Take Social Security for example. Continuing work at DOGE reveals that the 3.7 million checks going out every month to people over the age of 120 (reported in this post) was just the beginning. 

Yesterday the website said that so far a total of 9.9 million people listed as over the age of 120 were receiving checks. Correction has been made, so those people are now listed as deceased, and the checks will stop. Whether that should be called "waste" or "fraud" doesn't matter. All of us should be happy it stopped.

It was unjust. The only people who are unhappy about the stopping of those checks are the cheaters who were cashing them.