Vegas Hotel Rooms, MLB Stadium Rentals, & More: DOGE Finds Schools Misused Billions In COVID Funds
Schools misused hundreds of billions in COVID-relief funds on questionable expenses with minimal student impact, according to the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), led by Elon Musk, according to Fox News.
A report by Parents Defending Education, shared by DOGE, highlighted spending such as $86,000 on Las Vegas hotel rooms by Utah’s Granite Public Schools and $393,000 by California’s Santa Ana Unified to rent a Major League Baseball stadium.
DOGE also found schools spent COVID-relief funds on swimming pool passes and even an ice cream truck:
The cost-cutting department also revealed that schools spent $60,000 of COVID-relief funds on swimming pool passes, while a California district used its funds to purchase an ice cream truck.
The Fox News report says that the Trump administration is tightening oversight on the remaining $4 billion in funds, requiring receipts before release.
DOGE wrote in a post on X: “All of this money was drawn with zero documentation.”
Mom’s For Liberty wrote: “Recall those school board meetings when the ruling elites of Covidstan branded mothers as selfish disruptors simply for challenging their interpretation of “The Science” and scrutinizing how they allocated ESSER Funds? Never let them forget that we were right about everything.”
“This is outrageous,” said Will O’Neil, chairman of the Orange County Republican Party, who called the money spent on an MLB stadium “an absolute joke”.
DOGE has cut $370 million in Department of Education (DoEd) spending on DEI programs, axing 70 grants, including one for anti-racism training for teachers.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission scaled an 1,865-foot tall broadcast tower on Monday, which he filmed and posted to X.
“If we are going to continue to expand connectivity we need a lot more tower climbers. It’s a great job. It’s a good-paying job and it’s a career,” said Carr, who strapped on a harness and took at 20-minute ride in a lift called a “pan,” before transferring to the tower.
“It is always a fun experience to get up in the air and hang with a tower crew,” said Carr, who complimented tower technician Hasani Hogan, an Army veteran.
“What a guy. It shows his bravery, his abilities and his commitment to the broadcast industry and our guys that do this. He has done it before and is willing to do it again,” said Carr.
Gun Owners of America just caught the FBI coercing more people into giving up their Second Amendment rights!
Thanks to a FOIA request by GOA’s lawyers, we uncovered even more evidence on the FBI’s unconstitutional and unlawful NICS Indices program.
In 2019, it was discovered that the FBI was using a document titled “NICS Indices Self-Submission Form” that purported to allow American citizens to “voluntarily” waive their Second Amendment rights.
By completing this FBI form, law-abiding Americans allegedly “consent” for the FBI to enter their names into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, marking them as permanently prohibited from purchasing or possessing firearms or ammunition. And as the form warns, once an individual waives their rights, it’s impossible to get them back.
Now, the mere existence of this form was troubling, and it clearly violates the Second Amendment and even the Gun Control Act. But at that point, we weren’t sure how extensively the FBI was using the form, if in fact it was being used at all.
Fast-forward a few years to 2022.
GOA published our initial findings that the FBI had provided these forms to agents for use on American gun owners, who were pressured into signing and therefore “voluntarily” relinquished their rights to purchase, possess, and use firearms.
These FOIA records painted a vivid picture of FBI agents showing up to people’s homes, place of work, etc., presenting to them these forms, and “asking” them to declare themselves to be a “danger” to themselves or others, or lacking the “mental capacity to adequately contract or manage” their lives.
You can imagine how coercive these sorts of FBI visits must have been. The FBI’s use of this secret form has occurred during recent years when the bureau has become increasingly politicized and weaponized against Americans, including gun owners.
Here’s what our attorney, Rob Olson, had to say at the time:
“We’re into a pre-crime, Minority Report type of world where the FBI believes it can take constitutional rights away from anyone it thinks possibly might pose a threat in the future, which certainly is not something you expect in the United States.”
The FBI claimed to have stopped use of this form in 2019 – right after GOA first reported the form’s existence.
After our findings went public in 2022, we called on Congress to investigate the FBI’s use of this unlawful form.
Well, thanks to our reporting, Congress did start to look into the matter.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, along with 15 other members of Congress, sent a letter to the FBI demanding that it remove any records from any database relating to those who have signed these forms, remove the records from NICS, and finally confirm that the FBI has halted its use of this unlawful form.
We have continued to press the FBI on this issue, and our continued work has uncovered more documents showing just how deep this FBI rabbit hole goes.
Today, we’ve uncovered even more evidence that not only was the use of the FBI’s secret form more widespread than it initially appeared but also that the FBI was training its field offices on how exactly to implement and effectively use the form in a Minority Report-style of dystopian justice.
In fact, the bureau has now turned over a PowerPoint presentation used in a training on how to effectively use this self-submission form.
But it gets worse.
The PowerPoint originates from an email that was sent to nearly every FBI field office nationwide. Here’s what the email says:
“Good afternoon everyone,
I … wanted to pass along something that we started doing to keep guns out of the hands of individuals with mental health and/or substance abuse problems. In addition to conducting joint interviews … we are also using the NICS Forms when appropriate.”
Attached … are the NICS self-submission forms, and this PowerPoint detailing training from the FBI’s Boston field office.
The training looks to encourage FBI agents to leverage … local mental health crisis intervention teams to find individuals with “acute mental health disorders.”
The PowerPoint then specifically addresses the form by instructing FBI agents to:
“Leverage these partnerships to assist with the NICS self-submission and prohibited user forms. These forms reduce the ability of those with a history of substance-abuse, or those that have not been adjudicated as a mental defective- from purchasing firearms.”
Who gave the FBI the unilateral authority to decide which Americans should keep their Second Amendment rights?
GOA has also uncovered emails showing FBI agents congratulating each other on successfully coercing a “subject” sign the form.
Incredibly, the FBI’s secret form asks the bureau’s victims to certify that they “lack mental capacity adequately to contract or manage the details of [their] life,” while simultaneously requiring “verification” by a “physician or mental-health professional” that the individual nevertheless “has adequate mental capacity voluntarily to execute this document.”
In other words, the form claims that individuals can have enough mental capacity to sign their rights away, but not enough capacity to have those rights in the first place.
Apparently, irony was not part of the FBI’s training on how to violate Second Amendment rights.
So, what can be done about this?
Well, a whole lot, actually.
With Republicans in control of Congress, and a Constitutionalist like Kash Patel soon to be in charge of the FBI, we’re hopeful that GOA’s new discoveries can help bring this story back to the attention of those in power.
Congress, and those in the executive branch, can act upon this information to:
ensure and guarantee that the NICS Indices Self-Submission Form is no longer being used by FBI agents to unconstitutionally disarm Americans;
disclose all records of this nefarious program to the public;
identify and track down each person who has been coerced into signing one of these forms, and notify the person that they are not prohibited from purchasing, possessing, or using firearms or ammunition;
identify all entries that have been made in the NICS Indices on this basis, and take immediate steps to permanently eradicate such entries;
and, finally,
hold accountable those within the FBI responsible for creating and promulgating this unlawful and unconstitutional form.
With Kash Patel heading up the FBI, we’re hopeful that tyrannical actions like the NICS self-submission form are a thing of the past from the FBI.
My most productive periods are when I lose track of time and become completely absorbed in my task. This delightful state of strain-free hyperfocus is commonly called being in “the zone” or “a state of flow.”
As I’m writing this article, I’m trying to achieve that somewhat elusive state. When I get into flow, I’ll know it because I’ll stop thinking about the idea of working. I’ll feel energized and excited about the work, and all distractions will fade away.
My state of flow varies across a variety of activities. It can happen while engaging in physical labor or exercise, hanging out with friends, completing chores around the house, solving a mental problem at work, writing an article, reading a book, or doing anything that takes effort and involvement.
Given my extreme aversion to boredom, what I like most about locking in a state of flow is that everything seems more interesting. Any tendency toward overthinking or procrastination just vanishes, and I become totally focused on keeping going.
If there were a safe way to induce the flow mindset every time I worked, my life would be radically different. However, not finding one hasn’t stopped me from trying to make it happen more frequently with some reasonable degree of success.
What has worked for me in this arena, based on the trial and error of my own life experience, is the following:
1. Tune Out the Voices in Your Head
Step one is a clear mind. You can’t have any other thoughts or voices in your head besides those about the work you’re doing. That definitely means not listening to a podcast while you work or wondering about anything else going on in your life. Laser-like focus at the expense of everything else is what you need.
2. Work Faster
I’ve found that the cadence at which I work is an important variable in inducing a state of flow. You should not only try to work just a bit faster than your natural pace, but you should also eliminate as many pauses and stops as you can. This works by forcing you to not overthink and to rely more on your instincts.
3. Avoid Perfectionism
Related to the point above, you absolutely can’t have any worries about doing great work. The more pressure you add to get things right or perfect, the more self-conscious you’ll be. This applies whether you’re doing intellectual work or just hanging out with friends. Just bring your best self forward and don’t worry about whether it’s good enough—that’s a silly worry because, of course, you’re enough.
4. Play Rhythmic, Ambient Music
When I really want to get in the zone, I turn on some rhythmic music that doesn’t focus on words. Electronic dance music seems to do the trick for me. What you want is a steady driving beat that gets into your bones and keeps things moving forward. I find this works for both physical and mental labor and, surprisingly, even for keeping energy high when hanging out with friends.
[ZH: Or some ‘less than Ambient’ music?]
5. Do 1 Thing at a Time
Anytime you switch your brain away from your work, you lose all the momentum you have built up and will have to start again. You have to keep your head down and locked in. Even though a state of flow makes this 10 times easier, there might still be the occasional temptation to pick up your phone or lean back in your chair and stretch—don’t do it. Once you’re in flow, don’t do anything that might disturb it.
6. Make Decisions Intuitively
Systematic, rational thought is basically the opposite of flow, which is about doing. Some types of work and conversations aren’t natural fits for flow and require a more rational thought process, which is fine. Be sure to recognize and separate these two types to bring the best version of yourself into each one. Most importantly, when you’re in the zone, don’t stop and start overthinking a problem. Just keep moving, even if that means imperfection or leaving something to come back to later. The flow itself is too valuable to waste.
I hope that you see that being in a state of flow is about more than productivity. Focused work will make you more productive, but for me, it’s about so much more. Once you consistently start achieving this relaxed, stress-free work mindset, you’ll want it more and more. It feels good and brings out a creative side of yourself that you’ll want to enjoy more often.
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EU Lifts Syria Sanctions After They Starved, Strangled The Population For Years
Monday was a huge day for the Syrian population, given the European Union has suspended with immediate effect many of the sanctions the bloc long ago imposed on Syria, particularly related to the areas of banking, energy, transport, and reconstruction.
“This decision is part of the EU’s efforts to support an inclusive political transition in Syria, and its swift economic recovery, reconstruction, and stabilization,” a statement issued by the Council of European Union said. As for how ‘inclusive’ the new HTS regime under Jolani is, we’ll let the photos speak for themselves…
But the fact remains that millions of Syrians felt the devastating impact of sanctions most heavily. The West used the sanctions to try and squeeze the Bashar al-Assad government out of power. He fled Syria on December 8 as Turkish-backed jihadists made their way south from Idlib.
For years, and currently, Syrians spend most of their week without electricity, or adequate fuel for heat or cars. The currency collapsed but is barely starting to recover. The common populace has been suffering severely for well over a decade.
The EU has lifted asset freezes for five banks as well as eased restrictions on the central bank, which may allow the Syrian Lira (pound) to improve further.
Reuters has underscored that some EU sanctions including on arms trading, dual-use goods with both military and civilian uses, software for surveillance, and the international trade of Syrian cultural heritage goods, will remain in place.
Yet during the height of the proxy war for regime change, the EU only allowed the transfers of arms and ammo to the anti-Assad ‘rebels’ of Syria. Many of these weapons ended up in ISIS and al-Qaeda hands, and this never seemed to bother Western leaders very much (as it was perhaps intended).
Last week, the UN Development Program (UNDP) issued a report saying it expects it could take over 50 years for Syria to make a full recovery to what it was pre-war.
And on Sunday, UNDP director Abdallah al-Dardari stated that 90 percent of the Syrian population lived in poverty. This was never close to being the case before the proxy war.
“That is three times the level of poverty in 2010, and the proportion of people living in extreme poverty today is 66 percent – six times the level in 2010, which was 11 percent,” Dardari said.
The US-NATO-Gulf led proxy war to overthrow Assad smashed the country for years and decades to come. And what has emerged is an Al-Qaeda linked government in Damascus, and gangs of unaccountable foreign jihadists roaming the countryside.
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When Europe and the US talk “democracy promotion”… never forget:
A ransomware group called “Ghost” is exploiting the network vulnerabilities of various organizations to gain access to their systems, according to a joint advisory issued by multiple U.S. federal agencies.
“Beginning early 2021, Ghost actors began attacking victims whose internet-facing services ran outdated versions of software and firmware,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) said in the Feb. 19 joint advisory. “Ghost actors, located in China, conduct these widespread attacks for financial gain.”
The attacks have targeted schools and universities, government networks, critical infrastructure, technology and manufacturing companies, health care, and several small and mid-sized businesses.
“This indiscriminate targeting of networks containing vulnerabilities has led to the compromise of organizations across more than 70 countries, including organizations in China,” CISA, the FBI, and the Multi-State Information Sharing and Analysis Center said in the advisory.
Ghost actors are also associated with other names such as Cring, Crypt3r, HsHarada, Hello, Wickrme, Phantom, Rapture, and Strike.
The criminals use publicly available code to exploit “common vulnerabilities and exposures” of their targets to secure access to servers. They leverage vulnerabilities in servers running Adobe ColdFusion, Microsoft Exchange, and Microsoft SharePoint.
Threat actors use tools to “collect passwords and/or password hashes to aid them with unauthorized logins and privilege escalation or to pivot to other victim devices,” the warning read. Attackers typically only spend a few days on their target’s networks.
The advisory recommended organizations patch known network vulnerabilities by applying “timely security updates” to firmware, software, and operating systems.
Organizations must train users to recognize phishing attempts, it said. Entities should identify, investigate, and issue alerts regarding any “abnormal network activity.”
“Maintain regular system backups that are known-good and stored offline or are segmented from source systems,” the advisory added.
“Ghost ransomware victims whose backups were unaffected by the ransomware attack were often able to restore operations without needing to contact Ghost actors or pay a ransom.”
Pre-Positioning by China
The advisory was issued as part of an ongoing effort to counter ransomware threats.
CISA has previously warned about Chinese cyber threats facing the United States. Chinese state-sponsored cyber actors are looking to pre-position themselves on IT networks to carry out “disruptive or destructive cyberattacks” against critical American infrastructure in case Beijing engages in a conflict with Washington, the agency says.
Volt Typhoon, a Beijing-sponsored cyber actor, has compromised the IT environments of several critical infrastructure organizations in sectors such as energy, transportation, communications, and water systems.
In November, CISA and the FBI detailed a “broad and significant cyber espionage” campaign conducted by Chinese hackers that compromised the networks of U.S. telecommunication providers.
Hackers stole customer call records and private communications from “a limited number of individuals who are primarily involved in government or political activity.”
Rep. Mark Green (R-Tenn.), chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, said “the Chinese Communist Party’s exploitation of vulnerabilities in major internet service providers is just the newest alarm to sound as Beijing, Tehran, and Moscow work to gain strategic advantages through cyber espionage, manipulation, and destruction.”
French Government Proves JD Vance Right After Silencing Conservative Broadcaster
In a recent speech at the Security Conference in Munich, Vice President JD Vance warned European leaders that the real threat to the sanctity of the west is not foreign enemies but the enemies within. EU governments have been destroying the very values of “democracy” that they claim to defend and cherish, all in a bid to keep power in the hands of an extremist leftist oligarchy.
European officials attending the Munich conference did so with the expectation that the focus of the event would be on the Ukraine war. Specifically, the event was supposed to be another rally party in the name of continuing the war in the name of “protecting democracy”. Vance flipped the conference upside-down, pointing out that Europe doesn’t actually believe in democracy, not even in the way they define it.
European officials were indignant after Vance called them out on their own stage, claiming his accusations of authoritarianism had no basis in reality. France’s Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot defended European policies following the criticism by Vance stating:
“Freedom of expression is guaranteed in Europe…Nobody is obliged to adopt our model, but nobody can impose theirs on us…”
This, of course, is a lie. The French government went on to prove JD Vance right this week after they finalized a move to shut down conservative French TV station C8. The outlet will cease broadcasting on February 28th after the Council of State, France’s top court, rejected their appeal against the removal of their frequency.
Arcom, France’s audiovisual regulator, excluded the channel in July from the shortlist of selected candidates for the reallocation of digital terrestrial television frequencies which expire at the end of the month. Arcom confirmed its decision on December 12th.
Arcom pulled up C8 for a lack of editorial control over its programming following a series of incidents on the conservative “Touche pas à mon poste” show hosted by Cyril Hanouna, who regularly criticized the progressive establishment. The show racked up fines of over 7.5 million euros.
The closure of C8 has caused uproar among conservatives in France. The station is owned by Vincent Bolloré, a media tycoon whose conservatism and Catholicism has long made him a hate figure among the progressive left. French officials claim that Bolloré was trying to “take over the media”, conveniently overlooking the fact that France’s state-run broadcaster (like the BBC) is staffed overwhelmingly by people who lean leftist. C8 was one of the few broadcasters in France presenting a conservative viewpoint.
French journalists are often fined and even fired for stepping outside the boundaries of acceptable political opinion. There is no freedom of speech in France, just as there is no freedom of speech in most of Europe and the UK. JD Vance was absolutely correct in his assessment in Munich.
Notably, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz (soon to be replaced) was less interested in pretending as if German authorities care about free speech. Unlike the French, he openly admitted that the German government’s intent was to suppress or remove conservative participation in government. The conservative AFD doubled their seats and took second place in the recent election. German leftists are worried that the party will have coalition influence over future policy, or even worse, that the AFD may one day become the #1 party in Germany.
Scholz argued:
“A commitment to ‘never again’ cannot be reconciled with support for the AfD…”
“That is why we will not accept outsiders intervening in our democracy, in our elections, in the democratic formation of opinion in favour of this party.
“That is not appropriate — especially not among friends and allies. We decide for ourselves how our democracy will continue…”
“We are absolutely clear that the extreme right should stay outside the political decision-making process and that there would be no cooperation with them…”
The reality is that much of the progressive establishment believes in democracy only so far as they can exploit the idea as a moral shield for their authoritarian activities. Just as woke activists use “racism, sexism and homophobia” as empty justifications for silencing their critics, so too do leftist governments use “threats to democracy” as an empty justification for silencing their political opponents.
Though there has been considerable movements in recent years to oppose Europe’s fall into far-left tyranny, it may be too little to late. As in the UK, the EU establishment is criminalizing speech and silencing dissent at an exponential rate. The end result of this trend is never good.
Calls have grown for the British government to introduce the equivalent of the United States’ Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), after the extent of so-called “woke waste” spending on projects abroad which fall under the umbrella of diversity, equality, and inclusion (DEI) was revealed.
Successive Conservative and Labour governments have signed off on projects such as £9,550,000 awarded in December 2024 to Cowater International to support “Accountability and Inclusion” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The bulk of the funding under scrutiny has come through the foreign aid budget administered by the Foreign and Commonwealth Development Office (FCDO), although spending at home for academic and arts projects that appear to push the DEI agenda have also come under fire.
‘Gender Mainstreaming Strategy’
More than half a million pounds (£575,000) was granted to the Ark Group to deliver advice to the Jordanian Armed Forces’ “Gender Mainstreaming Strategy,” also by the FCDO but under the previous Conservative government in March 2024.
Projects around the world aiming to address the “climate crisis” are also major recipients of vast sums of UK money, with more than £101 million given to “Climate and Ocean Adaptation and Sustainable Transition” in Indonesia, the Philippines, Vietnam, and Mozambique, with this contract awarded to DAI Global in November 2024.
The UK has also allocated a further £12 million for a “Taskforce on Access to Climate Finance“ in Mauritius, with the contract still out for tender until December this year, the database shows.
While many drivers in the UK have been hit by congestion, ULEZ, and parking charges, almost half a million pounds (£499,649.60) was awarded by the FCDO in 2023 for 15 electric vehicles to be “donated to Albanian prisons” by the British Embassy in Tirana.
Since winning the general election last July, Labour has repeatedly claimed there is a “£22 billion black hole” in the public spending purse, which Chancellor Rachel Reeves has said necessitates sweeping cuts, such as the loss of winter fuel allowance for the majority of pensioners.
‘A Question of Priorities’
A group operating under the handle The Procurement Files since December 2024 has trawled the publicly available government accounts database to expose some of the more contentious spending, working with journalist Charlotte Gill, who runs a blog and uses the handle @wokewaste.
Also under scrutiny has been the hundreds of millions awarded to diplomatic spending, such as the refurbishment of embassies and high commissioners’ offices.
A spokesperson for The Procurement Files told The Epoch Times: “The UK spends over £100 billion a year on interest. Our aim is to help to find ways to reduce wasteful spend and to save the UK taxpayer money.
“For us, it is a question of priorities. Why would the UK taxpayer fund a project for ‘Green Urban Growth in Somalia’ or a ‘Maldives Shark Diving Code of Conduct’ when people here are struggling to pay sky-high energy bills?
“Politicans from the Conservatives and Reform, including Nigel Farage, have been in touch and follow our work.”
They added, “We will follow the blueprint laid out by Elon Musk and the U.S. DOGE team, and are cheering them on from the sidelines!”
Reform MP Richard Tice told The Epoch Times: “I believe I speak for the majority of logical, common-sense Britons when I say we need an equivalent of DOGE in the UK.
“As has been proven in America, the only people who oppose such an agency are the incompetent or corrupt bureaucrats.
“Let’s expose the levels of government waste, sleaze, and neglect of taxpayers’ money.
“Full transparency is what the people want—let’s give it to them.”
Sam Bidwell, director of The Next Generation, part of the Adam Smith Institute, said on social media platform X: “The benefits of a British DOGE would be in long-term growth rather than short-term savings.
“We have several hundred regulators, quangos, and [Arms Length Bodies], which churn out reams of absurd anti-growth regulation.
“Defunding and reforming these bodies would be an enormous net positive.”
Some Conservatives have backed the calls for a UK DOGE, including Scottish Tory leader Russell Findlay, who pledged in a speech on Tuesday to set up a Scottish Agency of Value and Efficiency in the event of him becoming first minister.
Findlay said such a department would be tasked with “cutting waste, identifying savings, and delivering better value for taxpayers.”
But there has been no talk from the British government of slashing such projects as the £22,490,382 awarded by the FCDO to PwC for “Green Growth” in Nepal shortly after Labour took office in July 2024.
Under the previous government, £220 million was granted to Palladium for “UK Partnering for Accelerated Climate Transitions” in developing countries, with an option to more than double this amount. The same company was separately awarded £15.5 million to deliver a “climate smart jobs programme” in Uganda.
The FCDO is not the only department to come under scrutiny, with the Home Office also coming in for criticism on social media for awarding Alcis Holdings £133,000 to monitor the “Afghanistan Taliban’s Narcotics Ban.”
Generous spending for high-level diplomacy is a recurring theme of the contracts under scrutiny, with £179,931 granted to “replace air-conditioning condensers” at the British High Commission in Barbados, and a £14.4 million contract for a whole-building refurbishment of the High Commission in Kenya.
Smaller amounts of funding have also come under fire over the usefulness of the project, with an academic study of “Shrimp Health in Bangladesh” awarded £50,000 in May 2023 through the Department for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs.
Arts Council funding which promotes DEI themes has also been criticised by commentators and social media users, such as the £185,627 awarded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (ACHR) for a trans-identified academic to research “Trans Performance Now: Glitching Transgenderism” at Northumbria University.
Gill has highlighted a number of AHRC-sponsored studies in her work, writing that “the taxpayer is funding their own demise” by unwittingly stumping up for projects such as “The Europe that Gay Porn Built,” awarded £841,627 over four years at Birmingham City University.
ACHR funding for academic projects abroad has included £318,510 for a study that claims that water has experienced trauma, and aims to “address current water and mental health issues affecting Indiginous communities” in Peru and the United States.
Since taking control of the White House for the second time, President Donald Trump has begun a wide-ranging and rapid programme to cut what he regards as unnecessary and sometimes corrupt government expenditure, appointing SpaceX CEO Elon Musk as head of DOGE, named after the internet meme.
DOGE’s first radical move was to announce the slashing of USAID’s workforce from 14,000 to 294 after an audit revealed it was funding projects such as $1.5 million to “advance DEI in Serbia’s workplaces,” as well as $2 million for sex changes and “LGBT activism” in Guatemala, and $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru.
USAID was set up in 1961 by President John F. Kennedy to administer humanitarian aid on behalf of the U.S. government, but much of its work is now contracted out to external agencies.
Musk claims to have already saved the U.S government more than $3.4 billion by halting DEI contracts, using his platform X to highlight what he has labelled widespread “fraud” as well as “waste.”
The Trump team has suggested as much as a trillion dollars could be saved by DOGE, although there is pushback from the Democrats and many NGOs and others who work within the foreign aid field.
The billionaire entrepreneur said earlier this month on X: “The corrupt politicians ‘protesting’ outside the USAID building are the ones getting money from USAID.
That’s why they’re there – they want your stolen tax dollars!”
The United States is the world’s largest provider of money for foreign aid, by a considerable margin. The UK is the world’s fourth largest spender, giving approximately £15.4 billion in 2023, compared to around £71.9 billion from the United States.
The US has continued carrying out airstrikes against Syria’s Idlib Governorate’s Harem District, near the Tel al-Karama refugee camp this weekend, targeting and killing Wasim Tahsin Bayraqdar, who they described as a “senior leadership facilitator” for the al-Qaeda-linked Hurras al-Din.
It is the third US drone strike against Idlib since President Trump took office last month, and all three reportedly targeted and killed Hurras al-Din leaders. This is particularly noteworthy since Hurras al-Din announced it was dissolving in late January, before any of these attacks.
This latest attack is perhaps an even bigger deal because Bayraqdar is the brother of Samer Bayraqdar, who is the Syrian government’s current Religious Endowments Minister. The ministry ensures that endowments are used properly for the maintaining of mosques and to help pay for religious education.
The US claimed the Bayraqdar that they killed was an active member of Hurras al-Din, despite the obvious handicap of that group apparently having dissolved weeks ago. Syrian researchers are also reporting that the man actually left Hurras al-Din five years ago after becoming disillusioned with the group.
The statement from researcher Mohammed Munir al-Faqir, who claimed to have met Bayraqdar in 2022, after he had already left Hurras al-Din and became a businessman, declaring that the US had killed “an isolated civilian citizen” and urging they retract their previous targets and reevaluate them.
That’s unlikely to happen, as the US, at least, seems satisfied with the narrative that Bayraqdar was an active “finance and logistics officer” at Hurras al-Din, and indeed has never appeared to even acknowledge the very public dissolution of the organization.
Hurras al-Din was effectively al-Qaeda’s affiliate in Syria. They were distinct from Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), which is broadly the current government. HTS had similar ideology to Hurras al-Din and going back through a series of rebrandings and renamings got its own start as al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), the original al-Qaeda affiliate in neighboring Iraq.
Therefore it is not necessarily implausible that a minister from an al-Qaeda-linked government might well have a brother affiliated with a separate al-Qaeda-linked organization. At the same time there is a paucity of evidence that this was actually the case, just a claim from CENTCOM that they hold that to be true.
There’s also no sign the US is slowing down on striking Syria, as on Sunday another strike was reported in Idlib, which killed another person. Details are still emerging on this newest strike though it seems probable that whoever this was, it will be presented as something to do with Hurras al-Din.
In 1968, the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted that in 2001, we’d have crewed spacecraft that can venture to Jupiter and supercomputers with artificial general intelligence. These predictions didn’t come true. In 1982, Blade Runner showcased a dystopic 2019 Earth with flying cars, advanced holographic technologies, and AI replicants nearly indistinguishable from humans. Those forecasts missed the mark. Seven years later, Back to the Future Part II envisioned a 2015 America with hoverboards, flying cars, food rehydrators, and cold fusion power generators fueled by trash. Sadly none of these innovations have arrived.
In 2015, the Paris Climate Agreement set a goal of achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 through a combination of renewable energy, efficiency gains, and carbon capture. Though humanity still has a quarter-century to hit that lofty mark, we appear destined to fail.
Countries, cities, businesses, and organizations worldwide followed Paris negotiators’ lead in pledging to reach Net Zero by 2050, and made bold claims that they would do so. But, just as science fiction writers can be overly optimistic with their visions of the future, so, too can diplomats forging a framework to tackle climate change.
Vaclav Smil is one of the leading thinkers on energy and the environment. Last year, the distinguished professor emeritus in the Faculty of Environment at the University of Manitoba penned an extensive report for the The Fraser Institute, a libertarian-conservative Canadian public policy think tank. In it, he outlined numerous reasons why Net Zero by 2050 is highly unlikely.
He began with a glaring fact.
“Despite international agreements, government spending and regulations, and technological advancements, global fossil fuel consumption surged by 55 percent between 1997 and 2023.”
While fossil fuels make up a declining share of civilization’s overall energy mix, falling from 86 percent in 1997 to 82 percent in 2022, their use in absolute terms is still rising as humans demand more and more energy.
But why can’t we just electrify everything and replace fossil fuel energy with renewables and nuclear? We have the technology, after all. And 25 years is a long time…
Smil describes the enormity of this undertaking, and why a quarter-century is a blip on the timescale of energy transitions.
“The first global energy transition, from traditional biomass fuels such as wood and charcoal to fossil fuels, started more than two centuries ago and unfolded gradually. That transition remains incomplete, as billions of people still rely on traditional biomass energies for cooking and heating.”
Alright, but what if humanity aligns towards decarbonization? Well, that naive dream of cooperation is burst by real world actions.
“China is far from done with its massive use of fossil fuel: its coal output reached a new record in 2022 and the country approved the construction of 106 gigawatts of new coal-fired power, the highest capacity since 2015.”
India is almost certain to follow China’s lead as its 1.4 billion inhabitants insist on a higher standard of living.
And there’s another roadblock: incorporating intermittent energy sources such as wind and solar into an aged grid on a grand scale.
“The IEA has estimated that meeting the global decarbonization goals would require adding or refurbishing more than 80 million kilometres of transmission grids by 2040. That is the equivalent of the entire existing global grid in 2023.”
And then there’s the fact that humanity still lacks viable zero-carbon options for commercial processes that produce essential materials such as steel for infrastructure and ammonia for fertilizer.
“These two key material processes … would need an annual production capacity of some 135 million tons of green hydrogen by 2050. However, depending on additional needs for transportation and heating, from industries (from glassmaking to food preservation), and for peak electricity generation, the total demand for green hydrogen could be easily as high as 500 million tons by 2050, [requiring] about 25 PWh of green electricity, the total equal to about 86 percent of the 2022 global electricity use.”
And then we get to the matter of cost…
“[McKinsey’s Global Institute’s] estimate of $275 trillion between 2021 and 2050 prorates to $9.2 trillion a year. Compared to the 2022 global GDP of $101 trillion, this implies an annual expenditure on the order of 10 percent of the total worldwide economic product for three decades.”
Not since World War II has the world seen targeted spending on this scale.
Smil admits that while a complete transition to Net Zero is incredibly unlikely. It is possible.
“No natural laws bar us from making the enormous investments needed to sustain such massive annual shifts.”
But at the same time, we must dwell in reality.
“We should devote our efforts to charting realistic futures that consider our technical capabilities, our material supplies, our economic possibilities, and our social necessities—and then devise practical ways to achieve them. We can always strive to surpass them—a far better goal than setting ourselves up for repeated failures by clinging to unrealistic targets and impractical visions.”
Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times or ZeroHedge.
