… It’s not even past:
Interim US attorney Ed Martin, whose office just fired a bunch of J6 prosecutors, is now telling Elon Musk they will prosecute anyone who "targets" DOGE employees. Presumably this is in response to a Wired article naming some, and a protest at OPM that occurred yesterday.
— amanda moore ?? (@noturtlesoup17.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 12:27 PM
Ed Martin: “D.C. U.S. attorney fires Jan. 6 prosecutors, launches new probes” [gift link]:
Nice summary of the current acting us atty in dc www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202…
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm.bsky.social) February 1, 2025 at 9:38 AM
But Little Elon finally has a chance to make his Nazi-adjacent mommy happy!
What’s his beef against USAID in particu….oh. Wow.
— Carl T. Bergstrom (@carlbergstrom.com) February 3, 2025 at 6:19 AM
And, TBF, Donald Trump has also always been a racist and a grifter — which is why he’s now the GOP figurehead.
Trump says he will cut off funding to South Africa over land ‘confiscations’
— Guardian Australia (@australia.theguardian.com) February 3, 2025 at 9:17 AM
— JoeMyGod (@joemygod.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 4:14 PM
Elon is deleting tweets and suspending accounts that tweeted out the names inside this article.
He's afraid.
They're afraid.— Dan Przygoda (@dprzygoda.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 5:37 PM
Remember — the first lie of fascism is inevitability. And it is a lie. We can fight back.
— Jeff Sharlet (@jeffsharlet.bsky.social) February 3, 2025 at 3:48 PM
Monday Night Open Thread (with bonus Henry)
Gretchen
Thank you, Anne Laurie, for all you do to keep us informed.
Debbie(Aussie)
Why do persons without a degree get to be called engineers?
I am reading BJ every day, as always and I too am gobsmacked by everything that is happening, but not surprised. As Mrs Ohio said this morning. I imagine that my support (horror) means less than nothing. You have it none the less.
edited to add
have the backgrounds of these ‘engineers’ been looked into? Trust fund babies? True believers, I would guess.
Shalimar
I don’t mind dying, but it’s so hard to narrow down which evil asshole I want to take with me to hell.
Viva BrisVegas
So it turns out that the South did end up winning the Civil War.
Just goes to show, if you wait long enough …
BlueGuitarist
Why did Edward R Martin, Jr. put a line thru the typed “Elon” and write “Elon” by hand next to it, on a typed version of a tweet sent via xitter?
Maybe Ed jr. once saw a letter from a VIP to his dad, typed by VIPs secretary, and VIP put a line thru “Edward” and wrote “Ed” next to it and Jr. is trying to copy the look of what he imagines is VIP communication?
rikyrah
Thanks for the info, AL
Baud
For Geminid
MagdaInBlack
Interesting: “r/whitepeopletwitter” has been banned from reddit for 72 hours. Violent posts and doxxing. Elno went after them yesterday for posting his tech-boys info.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
Probably Musk people posting those comments to get the ban.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: Yup, he sent his minions in to do it.
( edited: precoffee)
eta: “r/leopardsatemyface” still going strong, much the same stuff.
Brent Wilson
@Debbie(Aussie): Well to be fair, engineering has never been a licensed profession. Particularly when it comes to software engineering. Indeed quite a few of the world’s most successful software engineers are college dropouts. It’s a whole thing.
The proof is in the pudding when it comes to engineering. The thing you built either works or it doesn’t. No idea of the competence of these asshats.
Baud
@MagdaInBlack:
That’s what I meant by Musk people.
ETA: The subreddit is going to need to install some safeguards.
MagdaInBlack
@Baud: That’s why i edited to “yup.” Installing caffeine now.
“r/oneorangebraincell” is still safe. Orange cats, not trump.
Chetan Murthy
@Brent Wilson: 40 years ago, as I was finishing college (EE, CS), I learned that there was what was called a “professional engineer”, which was licensed, and for which there was an exam. These folks actually incurred some sort of liability for their work if it failed. My memory is, they could get sued, etc. That was (as you rightly say) in sharp contrast to “software engineers” who …. don’t warranty that their product is even as useful as toothpaste. Ah, well.
Llelldorin
@Brent Wilson: Junior coders like this can be fine code hacks, but tend to have certain tendencies that you have to train them out of in industry:
(1) They tend to have a poor sense of scale. College assignments are pre-cooked to be completed in something between a night and a week. This leads to a false sense that _any_ project can be completed in a weekend with enough pizza and coffee.
(2) They tend to disparage basic software engineering concepts like backups, test environments, unit, functional, and integration tests, and the like. This lasts until their (inevitable) first serious screwup.
(3) They tend to dislike code review, in the same way that young authors dislike editing.
A lot of basic safeguards in software engineering exist to help these guys get through their first few major screw-ups without actually damaging anything important. Bozos like Musk don’t understand that, and just assume that if these guys are “good enough” they _won’t_ screw up. That’s a recipe for catastrophe.
Baud
@Llelldorin:
Probably the best outcome we can hope for is an infinite FOR loops that prevents them from doing anything for the next four years.
Baud
Via Reddit
The story has the creepy details, if you can stomach it.
Bruce K in ATH-GR
@Baud: And once again, we see that when it comes to one’s children, drag queens are safer by orders of magnitude than church officials/priests/ministers.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The other thing that Trump has going with South Africa is Bricks, the Chines alternative to the G7. Dumb Ass Donny apparently mixed South Africa up with Spain.
Geminid
@Baud: This is Ahmed al-Sharaa’s second foreign visit, after meeting with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh this weekend. From Clash Report:
This will be a working visit, presumably orchestrated by Hakan Fidan, Erdogan’s impressive Foreign Minister. More from Clash Report:
Ibrahim Kalin is head of Turkiye’s intelligence agency M.I.T. Kalin took the post when Hakan Fidan was promoted to Foreign Minister in June of 2023.
Like his predeccessor, Kalin holds a PhD in International Relations. Kalin earned his at George Washington University around the year 2001, and then taught for several years at a Massachusetts college.
Geminid
@Baud: Some very interesting information is coming out about Ahmed al-Sharaa’s family history. Relatives in earlier generations held significant posts in late-Ottoman era and Assad era governments.
Also, the identity of al-Sharaa’s wife was revealed a week ago, and it turns out she also is from a politically connected family. I just found this out from Ragip Soylu’s twitter account. Soylu reposted a thread by another reporter that I’ll try to excerpt from tomorrow morning.
@Geminid:
Llelldorin
@Baud: Given that a lot of this is in COBOL, I’m looking forward to seeing how many flipped subtractions we see in the next few weeks.
SUBTRACT B FROM A GIVING C
is perfectly good English, but it’s not what a coder trained in the last 30 years will be expecting.
Geminid
@Geminid: The Erdogan/al-Sharaa press conference will be 7pm local time, which I think is Noon Eastern Standard Time.
It should be interesting. I expect there will be questions on Russia’s Syrian bases, the Kmeimim airbase near Latakia and the naval base at Tartous. Al-Sharaa’s government is currently negotiating the future status of the bases with Russia.
The rwo leaders will almost certainly get question on Israel’s occupation of an additional portion of the Golan Heights. In the aftermath of Assad regime’s fall last December, Isrseli forces seized around 400 square kilometers of land beyond the line designated by the Separation of Forces agreenent signed by Israel and Syria in 1974.
Erdogan’s public position on this is that the Israelis will have to withdraw sooner or later. He hasn’t made this an urgent priority though, and neither has al-Sharaa. Their answers on this topic today will be interesting.
Gin & Tonic
@Chetan Murthy: Yes, there are PE exams in nearly every engineering discipline you can think of. They are hard. And, yes, being able to sign “PE” after your name carries with it legal responsibility.
Matt McIrvin
Elon Musk loves talking about how you can only change the world if you work 80, 100, 120 hours a week. He’s done this for ages and right now he’s talking about how he’s winning because his kids work 120 hours a week and the people they’re up against work 40.
There is no actually good, constructive job that benefits from this kind of grind culture. What it does do is allow you to get something out the door faster than the competition, though it might be garbage.
Here, what he’s literally bragging about is that by working this fast they can commit more crimes before the legal apparatus catches up with them.
I also know from personal experience that severe sleep deprivation encourages nihilistic, destructive thinking. When you all see me suddenly sounding like, I don’t know, the Unabomber Manifesto, it’s usually because I haven’t gotten a decent night’s sleep in days. (This was, oddly, something the movie “Fight Club” got 100% right–the protagonist hardly ever slept and it drove him out of his mind in this violent bro-ey way.) I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon Musk gets only a few hours of sleep a night.
Quinerly
Glad to see we are all reading up about Ed Martin. He’s an embarrassment to the Missouri Bar, the City of St. Louis, and to my old law school alma mater, Saint Louis University.
Never, ever underestimate him. He is smart.
LeeM
@Brent Wilson: As a licensed and registered Engineer in 7 states, I have to disagree. Most degreed engineers don’t pursue licensing due to the time and difficulty of passing the two 8 hour exams as well as the experience requirements. But dog forbid someone with a PhD calls themselves a doctor.
StringOnAStick
@LeeM: Yeah, gaining the right to put a PE behind your name, and paying for the liability insurance needed in order to safely practice as a Professional Engineer is a whole thing that requires a lot of hard work to even be allowed to sit for the PE exam, and of course the exams depend on which engineering specialty you are educated in and intend to practice in. Software engineering does not have a PE designation available. We should all be very glad that there are PE’s out there designing bridges, buildings, water systems, chemical plants, etc.
dnfree
@Brent Wilson: I started in the computer field way back when it was still called Data Processing. I was a programmer and eventually a systems analyst. I was never an engineer. Software isn’t engineering any more than housewives were “domestic engineers”.
Chris T.
@Llelldorin:
“But then you can’t move fast and break things!”
(Uh. Duh, yeah. Exactly. Some things shouldn’t be broken.)