DOGE Ball
Warning: Do not open if offended by f-speak Give Us Our Money Back.
Check f-bombs at the door as we discuss the fury unleashed by this Canadian journalist as she howls at the moon over an alleged theft so large as to be unparalleled in world history. She is joined by others. Soon there is a chorus and, if you listen closely, you can make out the sound of that collective mournful wail, D . . o . . O . . G . . E.
So who is Elizabeth Nickson and why should we listen to her? This one-time journalist (Time; Harpers; The Guardian; the Sunday Times) and author (Monkey Puzzle Tree) abandoned the conventional publishing world for the freedom of the blogosphere with her Welcome to Absurdistan at Substack. Do not sniff at independent publishing – it represents a burgeoning power. Why so?
It’s no secret that legacy media is fast losing both credibility and circulation. Once upon a time, the viability of publishing rested on subscribers. Real, paid subscribers, that is. Ms. Nickson took on the role as a kind of informal investigator to answer the question of how it is that a paper she used to write for, The Globe and Mail (Canada’s “national newspaper”), was able to survive with a dwindling subscriber base of actual people. The answer, it appears, was heavy government “subscriptions.”
Perhaps the same with The Guardian. It was always a bit of a mystery how that newspaper could offer free online access (“for the many, others pay what they can”). Or Politico. Or maybe the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Times, AP, and the BBC. Sometimes the subsidy was direct – Thomson Reuters was granted millions to effect a large-scale social engineering experiment.
Support begets obedience: who’s my bitch. News becomes little more than colored propaganda. The whole story of the 2024 election could be that “the people” woke up to the fact they were being played.
So here is where we find ourselves. There is plenty we could rant about, from the way that sprawling National Security State operates behind the scenes to foment rent-a-riot color revolutions, to the reality of our two parallel economies, to the way “unfiltered alternative media” has been actively undermined.
Yes, we could rant but, ahem, MM is all about the dispassionate assessment of universal truths. The simple question comes down to what, precisely, would you do differently to address our looming national debt with the follow-on whether this would even be enough. After all, no one has yet come forward to claim the free dessert offered to the first person to come up with any credible plan (MM 9/24/24 Debt Jubilee), something beyond a timeline featuring a point labeled “then a miracle happens.”
DOGE highlights a kind of clash of civilizations. The public sector apologist will stare in blank incomprehension and assert “What do you even mean by the term government ‘efficiency’ – how can you even frame it in terms of efficiency when it comes to such absolutes as national defense, clean water, and global warming.” The underlying tone is that some things are priceless and for all else there’s always Mastercard.
Maybe so but we’ve ended up with a proliferation of NGOs that collectively represent a kind of invisible and largely unaccountable shadow government. The hallmark of DOGE is transparency. “We the people” would seem to have the right, certainly the interest, to understand exactly how, say, some bureaucrat’s net worth could jump from $6.7 million to $30 million in four years from a salary of $180 thousand. After all, it’s all on our credit card. Inquiring minds want to know.
Let us thus avoid f-speak as we ponder Benjamin Franklin’s challenge upon the nation’s founding, that here’s “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
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