Author Archives: eehines

Golden Dome

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William Forstchen, historian, author, and reputed EMP expert, wants us to build President Donald Trump’s (R) golden dome, an evolution of former President Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative which was designed to destroy incoming ICBMs before they could reach their detonation locations in an attack on the United States. He’s right, but his emphasis is too narrow. His concern:

We have to defend the United States against an EMP attack, which could destroy us in a matter of minutes.

He cited studies, as summarized by Fox News, some statistics:

Congressional reports from 2002 and 2008, said that 80%-90% of Americans would be dead a year later if an EMP strike happened.

That would result from energy and water distribution network failure, power failure, financial system failure, transportation failure, and the resulting lack of food in the cities and the lack of water in urban areas from small to large.

The problem that’s not being addressed, though, is that an EMP does not need a nuclear detonation to generate it. Small EMP devices can be built relatively easily, and our destruction can be achieved with a collection of these small devices being used to destroy our financial and communications data centers, nodes in our energy distribution networks, nodes in our water distribution networks, nodes in our mass transportation and shipping centers.

All of these would aggregate to a nuclear EMP in their end result, and these smaller devices are much harder to detect. The several Departments in our Federal government and the several private companies in our tech industry need to get seriously involved, both in partnership with each other and separately, in figuring out how to detect and neutralize these devices, also.

Forced Out?

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The Wall Street Journal is claiming that Dr. Peter Marks, [t]he Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine official, has been pushed out or forced out, depending on whether you’re reading the headline of the lede. The news writer, though, gave the fact of Marks’ departure in the second paragraph:

He submitted his resignation after a Health and Human Services official earlier in the day gave him the choice to resign or be fired, people familiar with the matter said.

Even stipulating the description to be accurate—it is carefully sourced to anonymity—Marks’ decision plainly was a wholly voluntary choice.

He could have held out for being fired, but he chose otherwise. He voluntarily resigned. Pressure might have been applied, but he easily could have resisted the pressure.

This distortion isn’t unique to the WSJ; it’s a broad and hoarily held misrepresentation by the press at large.

Apart from that, there were valid reasons for wanting Marks to go, and he made crystalline one of them in his resignation letter.

It has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies[.]

Those aren’t the words of someone who’d be gainfully employed any further; firing him would have been a legitimate response. He was given a choice, though, and he voluntarily chose.

Nobody forced him to make that choice. Nobody pushed him in one direction or another.

A Cost of the Left’s Obstructionism

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This one is our national debt and the interest due on it.

• the average interest rate on debt will exceed the economic growth rate by 2045, sparking the beginning of a debt spiral
• Federal debt held by the public will rise from 100% of GDP in FY2025 to 156% of GDP by 2055
• annual deficits will grow from 6.2% of GDP in 2025 to 7.3% of GDP by 2055

The obstructionism of the Left and their Progressive-Democratic Party isn’t even centered on principle, only on anti-Trumpism and anti-Republicanism and anti-Conservatism.

Potentiating the economic disaster that our debt and associated interest payments portend, those things would accumulate into the loss of the US dollar as the world’s reserve currency. That, in turn, would feed back negatively into our economy, forcing it onto the vagaries of foreign currencies and currency exchange rates.

This is why the DOGE-led spending cuts must be enacted into law by Congress. This is what the Left’s and their Progressive-Democratic Party’s obstructionism will cost us.

An Activist Judge’s Pseudo-Concurrence

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The 4th Circuit overruled a District Court judge’s injunction barring the Trump administration from shutting down USAID and allowed the closure to go forward (and the SecState Marco Rubio promptly announced the closure and elimination of USAID effective 1 July).

What interests me, though, is what Circuit Judge Roger Gregory wrote in his “concurrence.” He opened insisting that President Donald Trump (R) had

We may never know how many lives will be lost or cut short by the Defendants’ decision to abruptly cancel billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated foreign aid. We may never know the lasting effect of Defendants’ actions on our national aspirations and goals.
But those are not the questions before the Court today. The question before us is whether Defendants have satisfied their burden for a stay of the district courts injunction pending their appeal to this Court[.]
…
I do, therefore, think that the Executive branch has unconstitutionally invaded the role of the Legislature, upsetting the separation of powers.

Those aren’t the questions before this court, so we have no business addressing them here. But I’m gonna go ahead and do that, anyway, because I gotta have my hype and manufactured hysteria on the record.

Then he closed with this, to give effect to his hype [citations omitted]:

…the Executive has taken many likely unconstitutional actions that, collectively, dismantled an agency, rather than just a single action, does not mean the court cannot render those actions invalid. The sheer number of illegal actions taken necessitates relief that consists of “vast and detailed actions,” to adequately redress the harms caused by the illegal shutdown of a government agency. Rather than “micromanag[ing]” the Executive, the [District] Court was simply attempting to remedy each of the likely illegal actions.
The judiciary is limited to the cases and controversies before it. These Plaintiffs, suing these Defendants, cannot obtain the relief that they seek.

This is the activist judge instructing the plaintiffs in the course of action through which to pursue their own obstruction. This is an activist judge prejudging a future case, and thereby violating his oath of office. This is a judge who insults our judicial system by his presence in it.

The 4th Circuit’s ruling can be read here.

A Gordian Knot Solution

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I have called, often, for the dissolution of the Department of Veterans Affairs on the basis of that agency’s, and now department’s, poor-to-nonexistent quality-level care for our nation’s veterans.

Now we get this. It’s from the end of the Biden administration, but this sort of thing is not unique to that one.

The inspector general report published Thursday confirms that a $2.9 billion supplemental request went unused because the agency failed to account for “prior-year recoveries” in its budget planning. Had the agency taken into account those recovered funds, the inspector general found, its projections “would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by year-end.”

And this, more generally:

The OIG review team found that Veteran’s Benefits Administration wasn’t consistently overspending in FY 2024 for either compensation and pension or readjustment benefits accounts, which were the subject of the budget request. “Realized prior-year recoveries,” which are “unspent deobligated funds,” weren’t included in the agency’s calculations, which contributed to the erroneous predictions.
“Had the realized prior-year recoveries been included in the calculations throughout the year, the monthly funding status reports would have shown a reduced risk of a shortfall by the end of the fiscal year,” the watchdog concluded.

Current VA Secretary Doug Collins has inherited this situation and the permeating VA internal culture; he has this:

It’s just a very, a department that is so bureaucratically bogged down that it has trouble doing its main mission, and that is taking care of veterans, and that’s why we’re actually working very hard to streamline processes, to get better help in place, and to have budgets and numbers that we can be accurate

To an extent, I disagree with Collins. It’s not worth the time, effort, money, or other resources to try to untangle this financial mess. It’s time for the Gordian Knot solution. Just get rid of the VA altogether, and convert the department’s current and putative future budgets to vouchers which our veterans can use to visit the doctors, clinics, and hospitals they choose and from which they’ll be able routinely to get timely care. Transfer the VA’s veteran housing mortgage facilities to HUD for execution.

Veteranos Administratio delende est.