Stanford University is one of the most elite universities in the country, with many distinguished alumni and — far more important — the highest applicants-to-admissions ratio, at least the last time I checked, but was a while back, admittedly.

So I imagine the medical school is at least as good, which leads me to my question:

What the hell, Stanford Medical?

The school has three notable alumni in the news at the moment: Peter Attia, Casey Means and Andrew Huberman. Peter Attia, the “longevity doctor” was tight with Jeffrey Epstein. Casey Means, the “functional medicine doctor” is Brainworm Bobby’s friend and surgeon general nominee. (Her confirmation hearing was postponed when Means went into labor, and hasn’t been rescheduled.) And Huberman, another bro-podcaster with women problems. Several women, several problems.

All three have also gotten heavily into the biohacking / supplements / functional medicine thing. Lots of people I know are into this to at least some degree; I’ve seen supplement arrays that cover half a kitchen countertop. I think what lured these docs into this space, however, is their proximity to Silicon Valley. They see all these geeks buying yachts and figure: Where’s my yacht? Or even my boat? Why suffer through residency, on-call nights, the various miseries of a fully realized medical education, which includes (ick) patients, many of them challenging, when you can just follow the medical-celebrity career arc? Write a book with your heavily retouched face on the cover. Offer a healthy life to people who are already pre-selected to have one. (In that they are young, educated, mostly white, already in pretty good health, i.e. the sort of people for whom simple, common-sense lifestyle changes are likely to have a big impact.) Start a podcast. Make your medical practice “concierge;” Attia charges $100K/year. Cozy up to the new administration. Cash checks, many of them.

I asked the smartest doctor I know what he thought of functional medicine and he said, “Some common sense. Some flam-flam,” which is about what I’d say. Yes, it’s wise to eat a balanced diet, get sufficient rest, exercise and all that. No, you probably don’t need a thousand labs to tell you you need a supplement, and isn’t it a coincidence it’s available in my online store. No, you can’t outrun your genetics, nor time itself. Enjoy your life; we’re all here for a visit.

My doctor friend forwarded this Substack essay about Attia, which I think is about right, too:

To be fair, Attia does some things exceptionally well. His discussions of healthspan, marginal decade, frailty, strength training, and metabolic disease have helped raise awareness among people who often overlook those topics. But outside his sweet spots, a different pattern emerges. Much of his output is average, derivative, or produced by a research team, and in the areas where I have deep expertise – lipoproteins, atherosclerosis, and cardiovascular disease – I hear him make basic errors, overextend mechanisms, or convert weak correlations into causal claims with confident prescriptions. If I notice these issues in the fields I know well, I have to ask what I am missing in areas I do not. Can he seriously be the authoritative voice on skin care and mental health too?

And then there is the 25 percent of his output that is genuinely extreme and, in my view, harmful: high-dose testosterone therapy with bodybuilders as expert guests and little discussion of known risks; supratherapeutic protein targets; experimentation with rapamycin; constant biometric monitoring; and quasi-clinical protocols unsupported by longitudinal human data. This is not harmless enthusiasm for fitness and can’t be written off as “bro-culture.” It is the medicalization of normal aging, which imposes physiological, psychological, and financial burdens on listeners who believe these protocols are prerequisites for a healthy life. I discuss these dynamics in detail in my JAMA Cardiology commentary.

If a practicing clinician inside a health system pushed such a regimen, oversight bodies would get involved. In traditional medicine, the doctor-patient relationship tempers certainty, forces contextualization, and ties recommendations to real consequences.

Enough about these sawbones. I watched Bad Bunny in the Bowl last night, and really liked the show. I was amazed by the logistics of it, how they were able to erect and strike such an elaborate set in the time allowed, all without tearing up the field. Then I went to bed. I gather the game improved in the second half.

What did you think?

There’s a woman, I won’t name her but at least some of you have heard of her, because she pops up in the news every so often as an expert on human trafficking. Sex trafficking specifically, because that’s pretty much the only human trafficking anyone wants to read about. Guys brought in to do slave labor in a restaurant or cucumber field? Booorrr-ing. Teens forced to have sex with greasy old men? Titillating!

Anyway, she published a book about her own history as a trafficked teenager. I read it, twice. I have rarely concluded a purportedly nonfiction book believing that virtually every word of it was some sort of fantastical lie, but for this one, I did. Never mind that, though. I come not to accuse, but to go over the Gannett tips box in every story about sex trafficking, the “how to spot it” part. Look for a couple far apart in age, where the younger party keeps their eyes downcast and doesn’t seem to want to be there, who doesn’t speak for themself, etc. etc. This is advice I’ve read over and over, from the aforementioned woman and many others. And every time I do, I think: Great. You’ve just described every reluctant teenager traveling with a parent. And this is straight out of the “Taken” fantasy, that women are literally snatched off the street and forced into prostitution by swarthy men who are no match for Liam Neeson. What else do you have?

And then I see photos of the Epstein girls. Granted, their faces are mostly black squares, but the body language doesn’t suggest sullen resignation. Probably the most famous photo is this one, of Epstein’s Victim Zero Virginia Giuffre and the former Prince Andrew:

Does she look like she’s looking for the nearest exit and wondering if she can reach the gate before they release the hounds? And the many Epstein girls in the latest document dump, leaning in to some older man’s shoulder for a photo, look the same:

Please, mark my words here: I am not saying these girls aren’t victims. I’m saying that we have a lot to learn about how this case began, developed and sustained itself for so many years. And this latest tranche of emails, photos and videos offer a few clues.

Some of it is pretty widely understood by anyone old enough to have watched some nature documentaries: Epstein had a predator’s eye for a certain kind of girl, pretty but on the poorer side of middle class, badly or indifferently parented, far more likely to be wowed by a couple of C-notes slipped into her hand with a sshhh gesture from the man involved. They’d love the helicopter rides, the private plane, the multiple mansions, the Caribbean island. Perhaps some of them had been primed for this duty by a pervy uncle, stepdad or mom’s boyfriend. I recall a quote from some rock star, asked why groupies would willingly present themselves for no-strings sex with some sweaty bassist who wouldn’t even stay in their lives for 24 hours, and he replied that it probably was more interesting than sex with some hometown loser. Giuffre described sex with Randy Andy as short and not particularly satisfying. As a price to be paid for the life that she had? Probably worth it. At least, worth it at the time.

A few people have noted the super-weird emails to Epstein from Soon-Yi Previn, aka Mrs. Woody Allen, who got together when she was a teen and Woody already approaching senior-citizen status. She describes the 2016 sexting scandal between then-Rep. Anthony Weiner and a 15-year-old as…the girl’s fault. She also thanks Epstein for helping their kid get into Bard College. (NYT story, not a gift link.)

This, I’m convinced, is one reason so many scumbags — Peter Attia, Donald Trump, et al — were willing to look the other way. The girls didn’t seem like victims. Yeah, they were disconcertingly…young, but their eyes weren’t downcast! They weren’t sullen and cowed-looking! So just keep your mouth shut and everything will be fine.

We also have to consider the incontrovertible fact that women have traded sex for advancement throughout human history. Bobbie Gentry wrote a song about it. It doesn’t always work out for them, but our First Lady made it to the White House via that route, even though I’m sure she’d rather be back at Mar-a-lago. (What am I saying? She is at Mar-a-lago. She’s clocked less time in the White House than a minor senator from a blue state.)

And what do we make of photos like this?

I’m assuming that foot is under 18 years old. Who wrote that line from “Lolita” on it? The owner, another girl, Alan Dershowitz?

I guess what all this woolgathering is leading to is: Sex trafficking isn’t as simple as looking for the mismatched couple. It requires old men to stop consorting with obvious teenagers, even if they’re brokered by charming Jeffrey, and even if the girls act like they want to be there. (No 17-year-old wants to have sex with Bill Gates, or Ehud Barak, or sweaty Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, or Noam Chomsky. Or even hot-for-his-age Peter Attia.) The thing about teenagers is, they grow up, and they wise up. And they know what happened to them. Of course it was a woman, Melinda Gates, who seemed to be the only person in that whole crew who took one look at this guy and asked, what are all these teenagers doing at this dinner table?

This is too long. But I’m working on a difficult letter on another tab, and I am a world-class procrastinator. Have a good weekend, all.

Man, am I growing weary of idiots.

Which ones? Let’s start with the pretty people behind “Ballerina Farm,” i.e. the stage set for Hannah and Daniel Neeleman, who have made a career out of, first, being trust funders (him) and later, online influencers, a combination that should make everyone with three working brain cells reel in terror. Why are they idiots? Well…

According to a new report from KPCW, shortly after the Neelemans opened their farm stand, the farm’s raw milk failed two safety tests. KPCW reviewed records from the Utah Department of Agriculture and Food and found that samples tested in May and June had high levels of coliform, the family of bacteria that includes E. coli.

Yes, the Neelemans, Bobby Brainworm and the co-editor of The Detroit News editorial page are all on the raw-milk bandwagon. And now the Neelemans have discovered what everyone who deals with dairy cows in any capacity learns within 24 hours of putting one in your pasture or barn: They are literal shit machines, and it gets on everything.

We’re all shit machines, of course. But I think it was Jim Harrison who quipped that cattle are a machine that turns grass into shit, and a lot of it. Raw-milk aficionados like to talk about how clean and well-cared-for the cows that produce their raw milk are, but I’ve never seen one that doesn’t produce pounds and pounds of poop, around the clock. What’s more, it’s wet and splattery. About the only good thing you can say about cow shit is that it doesn’t smell bad. But I’ve spent time in lots of barns, and the only one I’ve seen that was surprisingly clean was Select Sires, an outfit in Plain City, Ohio, where bovine sires live out their days being jacked off by people for the purpose of selling their semen. Honestly, the place was immaculate. I imagine they have staff who do nothing but wait for a tail to lift, then dash over with a shovel to catch it as it comes out.

Simply washing an udder before milking is not enough to combat a typical dairy barn’s germ array.

Get this quote, from Mr. Ballerina:

“Producing raw milk takes careful planning from a facility and infrastructure standpoint,” Daniel Neeleman said in a statement to The Cut. “Unfortunately, we learned this after the fact.”

You’d think someone intending to go into selling dairy products would learn it before the fact, but when you’ve got 10 million followers, and they hang on your every post, why bother?

So that’s idiot batch #1. Here’s #2:

From her roughly $50,000 annual salary as a data processor in San Diego, (Kiely) Reedy, 34, spends at least $200 to $300 a week on food delivery. Ordering in has eaten away at her savings, she said, and led her to socialize less. She tips generously, but worries that the delivery drivers are poorly paid.

“I feel reliant upon it,” she said, “but guilt for using it.”

Food delivery, which skyrocketed during the pandemic as a practical necessity, has become even more entrenched in the years since as a convenience, an everyday alternative to cooking or eating out. DoorDash is now a verb. And the new delivery economy is transforming the way Americans live — reshaping budgets, mealtimes and social habits.

Fifty thousand dollars isn’t a very big salary, especially in San Diego, but Reedy estimates she spends close to a grand a month on takeout? And not fancy takeout, either, but stuff like spaghetti with marinara sauce, a meal she could easily make at home with two pots, running water and the initiative to go to a grocery and buy a pound of pasta and a jar of Prego.

I shared this with some friends on a text chain earlier this week. Said one: “I hate everyone in this story.”

We don’t eat out much, but among my rituals on a self-care Saturday is to take myself out to breakfast at a Detroit Coney Island, all alone, and spend the 40 minutes or so letting someone else cook my eggs and pour my coffee while I read the news. I’m often astonished by the pile of styrofoam go-boxes on the counter, awaiting some delivery person’s pickup. Diner food has a shelf life maybe 40 seconds longer than fast food; imagine ordering McDonald’s or an omelet and then waiting 20 or 30 minutes past plating to actually eat it. We visited Toronto a few years ago, and starting around noon the bike lanes would be full of brown men pedaling away with giant cooler-boxes worn backpack-style. I thought then, and I think now: Thank you, mom, for teaching me how to make a sandwich.

I know, I know — that’s the privilege talking, and I don’t understand how hard people have to work now, and how cooking is a luxury now, and I get it. But if you’re impacting your own savings to afford mediocre delivery chow, I recommend you consider another line of work.

Maybe open a dairy farm, and sell raw milk.

Happy Wednesday, and a reminder that one member of the entrepreneurial class who gave us all of the above, influencing and social media and the gig economy, among other terrors, is today in the process of driving the Washington Post into a ditch. Move fast, break things, etc.

Even in the slough of despond, it’s possible to find a little cheer. The weather has been unrelentingly cold. My nose always feels frostbitten. At the moment it’s sunny and clear outside, but you know what that means in the dead of winter — it’ll be in the single digits tonight, although the full moon will be pretty for the minute or two you can tolerate being outside looking at it.

Then you’re reminded that you have a ticket for this past Saturday’s “Symphonic PFunk: Celebrating the Music of Parliament Funkadelic” at the Detroit Opera, with the full opera orchestra backing up the current iteration of players. It was a birthday present from my friend Dustin, who was my escort. And a few hours later, you’re sipping a Negroni at the London Chop House bar, having ended Dry January six hours early, and while it’s still cold outside, there is the warmth of George Clinton and Co. just a few People Mover stops away, and friends, it was a barnburner of a show. For the “Atomic Dog” finale, a whole bunch of Omega Psi Phi brothers came dancing down the aisles and up onto the stage. (It’s their anthem and they have a particular dance they do, the Atomic Dog Stomp.)

I love this town so much. It just tickles my fancy in so many ways.

The rest of the weekend I spent working and taking breaks to scan the latest Epstein-file news. Sigh. Some of the conclusions one can draw from them are undoubtedly true, others – like the ones from the FBI tip line – give Rolling-Stone-rape-on-campus/Satanic panic vibes. No one with a functioning brain can deny the close, close ties between Epstein and his bestie over at Mar-a-lago.

I’m still waiting for the RogerEbert.com review of “Melania.” You know, our First Lady? The “hot piece of ass?”

There was other good news this weekend. A Democrat won a state senate seat in Texas by a 14-percent margin, which would be interesting, but the fact it was considered safely Republican, and Trump won it by 17 points? Slam dunk. Let’s hope the momentum can be sustained through November.

One bit of bloggage today: Greg Bovino, Mr. Sensitivity.

Stay warm, comrades.

Because January has 1,297 days, and it’s been quite cold for 1,295 of them, I’ve been watching a fair amount of TV. Like “Industry,” a series about high-risk finance-world hijinx set in London, because I’m an HBO snob. I have to read the recaps and Reddit groups to understand exactly what happened in the episodes I just watched. It makes me feel smarter and dirtier (there’s a lot of sex), which is sort of the signature feeling of being an HBO subscriber.

I similarly enjoy feeling dumb and kind of baffled, so I’m also watching “Heated Rivalry,” which is gay romance porn. Seriously. It’s about two hockey players who land as top-ranked rookies in the not-NHL (because the real one would never allow its intellectual property to be depicted in such a scandalous way), almost immediately hook up, and continue being rivals and secret lovers for the course of a decade.

When I say it’s porn I am not exaggerating. Not hard-core — we never see a unit except for a very brief glance on a phone screen — but there’s no doubt what is happening, which is to say we see bobbing heads, pelvic thrusts into other pelvises with heads thrown back so there’s no doubt someone is hitting the target, and lots of dirty talk.

I started watching it not because I’m into gay porn, but because it was an immediate, surprise hit for HBO, who picked it up from some Canadian network I’ve never heard of. And the people making it a hit aren’t gay men (although I’m sure they’re watching), but women. Who knew?

The first episode did little for me, but I gave it a second chance, and now I have to see it to the end. One player is Canadian and the other Russian, and they kinda leave me cold, because half their dialogue is them calling one another assholes and boring, right before they smash their bodies together and get with the fellatio. I’m more interested in the B-plot couple, another hockey stud and the smoothie barista he falls for, whose arc and dialogue is right out of the Hallmark Channel, but at least seem to actually like one another. I watched the penultimate episode last night and will tee up the finale tonight. Alan’s not into it, but he’s not objecting, either.

I do enjoy seeing the parallel world of the not-NHL, which is called MLH in the show. There’s the Boston Raiders and the Montreal Metros, which the two leads play for, and the New York Admirals, the B-plot guy’s team. The championship they play for is just “the Cup,” no Stanley involved. (As a prop, it’s kind of underwhelming, and looks like a bowling trophy, but the hoisting it overhead and kissing it part is dead-on.) The smoothie barista’s store is called Straw & Berry, and the sign is so obviously composited into the shots it’s kind of funny. At least the Olympics are called the Olympics, and the 2014 games happen in Sochi. I guess they don’t worry about the Olympic committee, or the Russians suing.

Why are straight women so into gay romance? Beats me. I read a little here and there. Someone mentions there’s a lot of consent, and it never feels tacked on, but rather hot and human: Can I do this? Would you like that? Etc. Some enjoy a show where no women suffer at all. The power dynamic is never mismatched; Shane and Ilya are both having great careers, and win and lose roughly in proportion to one another. You do kinda wonder how the New York B-plot hunk is drawn to this smoothie guy, but smoothie guy is in grad school and extremely cute. Everybody has a sensational ass. It’s not a mystery.

Also, watching guys get it on means I don’t have to think about the president or any of his gang of thugs for the running time. Is that so wrong? I don’t think so.

What are you watching?

The Freep ran a weird story on Sunday, noting that the many protests against the Trump regime in Detroit last year were overwhelmingly white. No argument here; I was at most of them, and they were indeed on the pale side. But I noticed the writer using a particular usage that’s become common in recent years:

I first noticed this in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “Between the World and Me,” bodies used as a synonym for people. It struck me then, and it still does. Coates is a skilled writer, and his usage suggested a world where black people aren’t seen as fully human, just bodies, flesh in human form but a color others won’t acknowledge as their equals, which was exactly the point of his book. But the widespread imitation of it just seems trendy, like describing everything as iconic.

And this is the sort of woolgathering that goes on during a winter storm. Gazing out the window at the all-day snowfall, trying not to return, yet again, to the news from Minneapolis, about which I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said already.

And it’s still snowing. Not the fatfluffyflakes of some storms, but a fine, dry powder that just keeps coming and coming. It takes a long time to pile up, but at the end we’re probably looking at five inches. Nothing compared to what Ohio is getting, but enough to cancel a lot of events and make an all-day stay-home the wisest course of action.

At one point, bored, I checked to see how far out you could pull a Google map and still see highway conditions. Pretty far:

You can almost see the path of the storm reflected there. Then I pulled out farther to check to see if Google was still a bunch of lickspittles, and yeah, they are:

More bloggage:

An occasional commenter here, Nancy Friedman, works in business naming, mostly — maybe entirely — in the San Francisco area. She has a Substack, and a very amusing take on an overused word many tech bros are hot to include in their startup’s handle: Praxis. One even wants to found a new city — in Greenland, natch — and call it that. Writes Nancy:

Dryden Brown, who is 29, would appear to be very interesting himself, but he doesn’t have his own Wikipedia page. Here’s how the Wiki entry for “Praxis (proposed city)” introduces him:

Dryden Brown was raised in Santa Barbara, California and was homeschooled in order to pursue competitive surfing. He stated that as a high schooler, he studied Ayn Rand and Austrian economists, and when he applied for college, he limited his applications to Harvard University, Stanford University, the University of Oxford, and the University of Cambridge. He was rejected by them all and he attended New York University before dropping out.

A 2023 story in Mother Jones provided a few more biographical details: Brown’s father “worked in private equity and owned a seven-bedroom, 6,200-square-foot home that recently sold for more than $6.5 million.”

Yes, I felt that familiar full-body twitching at the mention of Ayn Rand, the “Objectivist” author of the bad novels Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead. They’re frequently the only novels that “libertarian utopians” boast of having read.

And, as surely as “utopia” follows “libertarian,” PRAXIS is the name they default to for their endeavors.

I’ll remind you that this “charter cities” scam is what’s behind the revival of the stupid Belle Isle scheme that I wrote about recently.

Finally, a gift link to a NYT magazine story about year one in Kash Patel’s FBI. It’s enraging.

Still snowing. Let’s get through the next week, shall we?

The severe cold front headed this way has been heralded and warned about for days now, but it still hasn’t arrived. Overnight, we’re told. Definitely Friday. I got out my flannel-lined pants and longjanes, put them on, and feel right toasty, but it’s still a mere 21 degrees, and I’m indoors. Wore the Parka of Tribulation out for errands today, and it’s stiffly occupying a dining-room chair, so I guess, all in all, I’m Ready.

This is normal, despite what the weather terrorists are telling us. But that’t the thing about weather in general — three mild winters erases all memory of bad ones forever. The AM radio idiots report wind chills, which are pretty sketchy to begin with, as though they are the actual temperatures. It’ll be 20 below tomorrow, the dumbest one reported when I was out and about. Well, yeah. If you’re walking around naked.

Alan will set the faucets to drip overnight. Unless the power or furnace goes out, we’ll be fine.

The other thing the AM radio idiots were talking about today was the 4D chess their brilliant leader played to get a deal on Greenland, when it seems to me he got what we could have had all along if we’d just acted like a normal country and not a speeding truck driven by a drunk. But that’s why they’re idiots.

Now we await the next insane twist in the news. My decluttering project continues. Found this in a case of cassette tapes, which I no longer have the means to play:

Yes, it’s one of Jeff Borden’s hand-crafted mixtapes from the legendary series of Halloween parties he and two other guys hosted in the ’80s. It’s labeled “Hostbusters #2.” I don’t know if that means it’s the second tape of the evening, or the second party in the series. I just punched “Earl Klugh” in the search engine here and got no hits, so I will tell this story that I suspect I’ve shared before, but oh well:

Borden paid a near-scientific level of attention to his mixtapes. (Note the two colors of ink in the track listing.) Like Rob in “High Fidelity,” he gave great thought to how each one should kick off, rise in excitement, offer occasional breaks, etc. Given that these parties went for hours, it required multiple tapes, and each one needed to be considered as part of the arc. One year, a guy who came as someone’s plus-one approached him with a tape of his own, an album by the jazz guitarist Earl Klugh.

“Can you play this?” the guy asked.

Borden put him off, explaining the energy of the party was driven by the music, etc., and he didn’t think it would really work with the vibe. The guy persisted, and Borden finally said, “Let me think of a spot to fit it in,” and they both wandered off. Midnight came and went, and suddenly it was 3 a.m. and the place was still rockin’. Shit, thought Borden. I’m going to be here past sunrise if I can’t get this wrapped soon. He wasn’t the type to turn the lights on and start kicking people out — too rude. But then he spotted the guy with the Earl Klugh tape. “Let’s put on Earl,” he suggested.

The party emptied out in 15 minutes.

I should make a Spotify playlist of these tracks. Something to do when I’m confined to quarters this weekend. Stay warm, everybody.

I saw this video at least four times yesterday, on social media. Maybe you did, too. It’s very cute: A fox plays in the snow. It bounds in a snowbank, slides amusingly across a frozen creek, buries its head in another snowbank, pops out, bounds down to another snowbank.

I watched it with a cold eye. It is almost certainly AI.

What do I base this on? First of all, foxes are pretty wary, and likely wouldn’t cavort so close to a person holding a phone. OK, so maybe the animal is domesticated somehow, accustomed to humans. Then why, when it pops out of the snow, does it have not a flake of snow on its head? Why is the camera so steady? Why is it too good to be true? Why is the creator’s page full of supercute-but-unlikely animal videos, scenes of kittens cuddling with tigers, cats nursing baby rabbits or a horse dropping to its belly so that a little girl can pet its nose?

Why aren’t people more skeptical? A local politician has been posting videos of “ICE agents” being kicked out of restaurants by a scolding woman with a Spanish accent. Fakes, every one. He doesn’t seem to care. It’s like when Facebook was new, and you’d point out that the “totally true” story someone just put up is an old urban legend, never happened, and they’d say, essentially, who cares? It’s a good story, don’t take things so seriously.

Come back to me when the video is so good you can’t really tell if this is THE pee tape, or not. When there are riots between ethnic groups sparked by videos of things that never happened. We are sleepwalking off a cliff with this technology and no one seems to care.

The other day I had a conversation with a media professional who seemed amazed that I don’t use ChatGPT or any other AI tool. I’ve mentioned before that Google now reports results in AI summaries, but I don’t go out and ask Gemini or Grok or any other tool to summarize my email. I don’t tell the chirpy assistants to help me polish a paragraph. Talk about putting yourself out of business. I guess we just have to learn how to write the correct prompts.

And I was going to go on about this, but whenever I hear Alan mutter “Jesus Christ” I know it’s bad, and whaddaya know, it is:

The Trump administration has acknowledged for the first time in a court filing that members of the U.S. DOGE Service accessed and shared sensitive Social Security data without the awareness of agency officials.

The admission comes months after a whistleblower raised concerns that members of DOGE — the government cost-cutting operation founded by Elon Musk — had obtained one of the government’s most protected databases, risking the security of hundreds of millions of Americans’ private Social Security information. The agency had previously denied the whistleblower’s allegations.

But the Justice Department submitted a court filing Friday in an ongoing case saying that the Social Security Administration had discovered a secret agreement between a DOGE employee and an unidentified political advocacy group. The agreement called for sharing Social Security data with the aim of overturning election results in certain states, according to the filing.

Gift link. This country is so broken. See you later this week.

I remember during the financial crisis, reading truly stomach-churning headlines, then glancing out the window and wondering why there weren’t people running down the streets clutching 10-pound bags of rice to their chests. It was such a disconnect between Life as Reported on the News and Life as it Happens Close Up. While I’m certain there were anguished conversations happening in homes over collapsing home values and disappearing jobs and cratered stock portfolios, by and large life looked normal from the outside.

Some people were not surprised by this. My last editor’s parents were both Holocaust survivors. His mother, a teenager at the time, was pressed into factory work for the collapsing Nazi regime. She told him that she and her fellow workers joked and laughed all the time, because what else could they do? In Auschwitz. So I get it, but there’s something about a weekend that we just endured that feels like 10-pound bags of rice clutched to the chest would be a totally normal thing to do.

We are…about to invade Greenland? Sending troops to Minnesota? About to see the Department of Justice investigate the widow of Renee Good, just as soon as they find the toadies willing to do it? And yet, I spent the weekend socializing, exercising, shopping and eating hamburgers. Well, just one hamburger. And I didn’t buy much, but it was nice to get out of the house and walk around a mall, like it was the ’80s again.

Then I come home, read the news and learn that this dork is nominated to be our ambassador to Iceland. I love Iceland. I could live there, easily. It’s so beautiful it almost hurts to look out a window. I’m sure this chucklefuck will have the Icelanders hating us soon enough, like the rest of the world.

However, there was comic relief. In the wake of the shameful gift of Maria Corina Machado’s Nobel medal to Tubby, there appears to be a grassroots effort for people to send their own awards to the White House. Gene Weingarten offered his Pulitzer Prize. If I hadn’t tossed all our journalism awards a few years back, I’d be happy to send the miniature bust of Mark Twain that Alan won for something, I think in an AP contest. For once, the AI creations are really funny:

But still, it’s an unsettling time. How weird that as I got in the car to go get that hamburger, this was on the radio. What a great song. All they have is Lee Greenwood. We have Gil Scott-Heron.

I don’t have much to report. But a new week lies ahead. Let’s white-knuckle through it.

I’m not the first, the tenth, or even the thousandth person to observe that one of the most dispiriting and shocking things about the Trump era is not the fascism, it’s the complicity. Big law, big business, higher ed — all have bent the knee. The most powerful institutions in the country squatted and peed like frightened puppies when Trump raged at them. As Ta-Nehisi Coates said not long ago, of Harvard and Columbia, “Y’all are sitting on $40 billion? And you can’t oppose this man? Either you’re cowards or you’re with him. And if you’re with him, you never believed in the things you were talking about to begin with.”

So when someone doesn’t? It’s pretty great.

Chuck Redd, the jazz drummer/vibes player who refused to play his annual Christmas Eve jam at the Kennedy Center? Hero. Bela Fleck, banjo player? Did the same thing, also a hero. And now comes the union auto worker who heckled Tubby as he toured a Ford plant in Dearborn. He’s been suspended, but my guess is, he’ll be back on the job soon. And he, too, is a hero.

We all know why Trump keeps the ass-lickers around him. Because they let him do whatever he wants, and because they spend every moment in his presence telling him how great he is. There’s a reason the Roman emperors had a slave whispering in their ear during their triumphs, telling them the mob is fickle and they are but men made of flesh and blood like everybody else. Blessed be the truth-tellers, for they will come out of this era with their dignity intact.

Unlike, say, Tim Cook.

Meanwhile, I texted a friend in Minneapolis and asked if things are as bad there as they seem. His reply:

Yes. I have a little Catholic school on the next block. Now a lot of Latino kids. Families line up to pick them up in the afternoon. There haven’t been any cars for days. (His son’s) friend got arrested at a protest. ICE detains you and holds you for 10-12 hours then kicks you out. No paperwork. No charges. (Son) works at a restaurant doing double shifts because ICE is patrolling around the homes of Hispanic coworkers. Can’t drive down the street without them on patrol. A woman yesterday was trying to get to a doctor appt. ICE broke her window, cut her seatbelt and dragged her out of her car. Last night Hannity ran a video of it as an example of anti ICE protesters trying to hit agents.

I’ll leave you with that.