Trump Redux: The Death of Democracy, or Overblown Hyperbole?

[Lisnaholic]

... and if ignorance was a crime we'd all be locked up at some point.

^    A little piece of forum gold there, Lucem !

[Lisnaholic]

To your point, there would be a serious credibility issue if Elon/DOGE was deeply involved in an audit like this one. More to the point, auditing the gold in Fort Knox isn't really in the purview of DOGE - which has essentially subsumed the Obama-created USDS - it's basically the government geek squad, but you can't audit the gold reserves in Fort Knox with database queries and Excel spreadsheets. In other words, the pimply faced college recruits of DOGE simply aren't qualified to inventory, assay and test the purity of a gold hoard. What's really needed if this audit were to happen is an independent (not government affiliated) entity - after all, you don't ask the fox outside the henhouse to go in and tell you how many chickens are there - again though, this whole process, were a full audit to be conducted, would be very time consuming and very expensive. Right now, it's just bullshitting on Twitter, and it's very possible there's no real life or desire to this. I guess we'll see in due time.

Isn't it a little naive to place any faith in the appropriateness of a Trump-backed audit ? From what I've seen of countless Ninja Turtle audits and DOGE blunders*, the purpose of a Trump-prompted audit isn't about factfinding, it's about flooding the zone, corrupting the data and discrediting the institution being audited.

* DOGE blunders that I have in mind:
(i) firing Office of Nuclear Energy staff before realising their work is essential, and not only that, but firing them in such an abrupt way that the DOGE wizzkids didn't think to get the staffers new contact details.
(ii) Musk's repeated claim that DOGE has uncovered massive fraud because some people registered as being 150 years old are claiming Social Security benefits. He's apparently unaware that the claimant registry system has a default setting of 150 years when the actual age of a claimant is not certain. I suppose that default was set up on the principle that nobody would believe an age of 150 was possible, not imagining that a Musk auditor would so misunderstand the "150" entry as to assume that all "150"s were fraudulent, when all it means is "not known".   

[SGR]

Isn't it a little naive to place any faith in the appropriateness of a Trump-backed audit ? From what I've seen of countless Ninja Turtle audits and DOGE blunders*, the purpose of a Trump-prompted audit isn't about factfinding, it's about flooding the zone, corrupting the data and discrediting the institution being audited.

* DOGE blunders that I have in mind:
(i) firing Office of Nuclear Energy staff before realising their work is essential, and not only that, but firing them in such an abrupt way that the DOGE wizzkids didn't think to get the staffers new contact details.
(ii) Musk's repeated claim that DOGE has uncovered massive fraud because some people registered as being 150 years old are claiming Social Security benefits. He's apparently unaware that the claimant registry system has a default setting of 150 years when the actual age of a claimant is not certain. I suppose that default was set up on the principle that nobody would believe an age of 150 was possible, not imagining that a Musk auditor would so misunderstand the "150" entry as to assume that all "150"s were fraudulent, when all it means is "not known".   

It's a fair point, and as I mentioned, if DOGE were to be responsible and/or deeply involved in a Fort Knox audit, there would be a serious credibility problem. I think there are probably two things going on here which could be considered separately (since you mentioned "Trump-backed"):

1) The appropriateness of an audit of Fort Knox and the biggest US gold depository (i.e. is it worthwhile or justified to do the first full audit in 50 years, or is it good enough that the treasury secretary pokes his head in there once a year just to see if there are still piles of gold around?)

2) How would the motivations of the current administration affect how we view and judge the results of the audit, should they be made public?

Even if an independent auditor (with some level of bipartisan support) completed the task of auditing Fort Knox, if Trump (and/or Elon) immediately used the results of the audit as a political cudgel, the credibility of the audit would be tarnished (e.g. "Looks like Sleepy Joe and Crooked Hillary stole some of our gold! We have 2% less gold than we thought! We used to be a rich nation, but not any more. Such a sad day for our country! Investigations will quickly be under way! Stay tuned!"). It could just be that we're so polarized and surrounded by poor media/information ecosystems that at best, only half of the country would even believe the results of the audit even if it was found that all the gold is there and accounted for, and the audit was done correctly, transparently, and by the books. It would probably go the same way if Biden backed a Fort Knox audit 2 or 3 years ago.

Trump: "The audit is complete, and all the gold in Fort Knox is present and accounted for!"
Democrats: "Uh-huh...suuuuure it is..."

Biden: "The audit is complete, and all the gold in Fort Knox is present and accounted for!"
Republicans: "Uh-huh...suuuuure it is..."

Per the SSA, yes, Musk is looking at those results with complete confirmation bias. He believes there is massive fraud in social security, and so one of the junior devs probably compiled that spreadsheet with the age buckets after doing a few queries on the database, and they're not considering outlier data or anomalous data. I work in tech, and I can tell you that large databases will almost always have anomalous data like this. It's not evidence of fraud. They're going to need to dig much deeper and look at some of these records on a case by case basis if they want to see what's truly going on. Many computer systems have what's known as an 'epoch time'. It's essentially a fixed date which the computer uses as a reference (plus the # of elapsed seconds since this date) to measure the current system time. So often times, when you're accessing specific native date types, and the underlying data of said type is null or corrupted, you will often run into this fixed date. You also need to consider the tool or software that you're using to display this data - what defaults exist there, whether or not there's automatic typecasting, etc.

The SSA is most certainly a legacy application. When working on something like that, it's not just outdated code that is the problem, but it's all the business rules embedded in that program - you can, if you understand the language, technically understand what is happening, but unless you have a firm grasp on the business rules (or in the case of the SSA, the laws and applicable standard operating procedures), you probably won't understand why it's happening. To get a sense of this, and how the SSA's wide set of policies might affect the data, just take a look at the publicly available POMS (Program Operations Manual System) on the SSA's website. And this is just the one about how 'proof of age' is handled, to give a sense of all the different exceptions and various circumstances that need to be accounted for - now we can imagine how this might necessitate not only a very messy and chaotic codebase, but also anomalous data. There are probably many exceptional circumstances that might skew the data one way or another. For example, one person might be dead, but their surviving spouse might still be collecting their social security as a survivor's benefit (so in some instances, it might look like there are still social security payouts to a dead person, but it's actually to their surviving spouse). I'm reminded of a recent story...the last surviving Civil War widow actually died in 2020. Hard to believe, right? Well she was 17 when she married a 90+ year old Civil War veteran - she was his caretaker and he married her so that she could collect his pension after he passed away. After receiving threats from his daughters though, she never applied for the pension. But imagine if she had. If you didn't know the story and saw that a Civil War veteran's pension was still being paid out in 2019, you'd probably have assumed it was erroneous (or fraudulent) too...but in this case, it would not have been.

Some have said online that the age of '150' comes from a COBOL (an old programming language that is still widely in use by govt and banks) epoch date of May 20, 1875 - but I have not found, and am not aware of any COBOL epoch date like this. I'm guessing this is just something that picked up steam in various social media comments from people lightly familiar with stuff like this and it serves as an easy way to make non-tech people understand some of the problems we might be looking at - but I don't think it's accurate. At least, I'm aware of no epoch date/standard like that - it's certainly possible that the system the govt is using is homegrown enough that it has its own sentinel values regarding dates that result in some of the data we are seeing, but that's not currently known. We'd probably need to know exactly which system/OS is truly being utilized here to get closer. My guess, based on how long the program has been in place, is that the government is using some kind of IBM mainframe or midrange system. But even COBOL's handling of dates is different depending on exactly which OS we're talking about in subset, e.g.:

COBOL for IBM AIX:

The beginning of the Lilian date range is Friday 15 October 1582, the date of adoption of the Gregorian calendar. Lilian dates before this date are undefined. Therefore:
Day zero is 00:00:00 14 October 1582.
Day one is 00:00:00 15 October 1582.

COBOL for IBM z/OS:

DATE-OF-INTEGER ... A positive integer that represents a number of days succeeding December 31, 1600, in the Gregorian calendar. The valid range is 1 to 3,067,671, which corresponds to dates ranging from January 1, 1601 thru December 31, 9999.

All this to say that when it comes to dates and computing systems, all may not be as it appears on the surface, and if Elon/DOGE really want to audit these systems, they probably need less junior devs and more greybeards. 

[Lucem Ferre]

US government 'asking Romania to lift restrictions on Andrew Tate'

The party of rapists, for rapists just can't stop telling us all exactly what they are.

I do have a list of Republican sex offenders and it is loooooooong.

And for the record, my "revolutionary compassion" does not extend to politicians.

[Weekender]

Can you really blame Americans for being so distrustful of institutions when nearly every aspect of American society is a sham? An entire economy based around a race to the bottom where the last honest man is separated by his dollar by the scam, every sector predatory from financial, to education, to pharmaceutical.

The answer is probably, yes. Still, maybe it's fitting that a nation born out of the original scamming of the native Americans should have for its last president the Supreme Huckster.

[Trollheart]

Fucking hell, @SGR ! I hope there's not going to be a test after that!! 

[Lisnaholic]

Yes, SGR, I'm afraid I also found your post to be daunting, dense and detailed.
________________________________

For anyone struggling to keep up with the deluge of BS eminating from the American President, here's a useful summary of the disinformation so far:-

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/20/politics/analysis-trumps-13-biggest-lies-first-month-2025/index.html

[SGR]

I probably went a little overboard with the SSA stuff, my apologies. It's not often I get to talk about databases, epoch time, and programming conventions in conjunction with politics headlines. 

In recent Fort Knox developments:

https://x.com/TheChiefNerd/status/1892421435508851149

It's not clear who "we" is in this context.

USA Today makes it sound like Musk is simply urging 'US officials' to conduct an audit.

Elon Musk urges US to audit gold at Fort Knox base for first time in over 50 years

While the AP makes it sound like Trump said Musk would be 'looking at Fort Knox' to verify gold is there (I think they are basing it on that clip of him talking in the plane, but he used the more nebulous 'we'):

Trump wants to know if there's gold in Fort Knox. (There is)

Forbes had the following article, and they point out a detail that's easy to overlook:

Trump Joins Elon Musk In Targeting Fort Knox Gold—What We Know About Its $400 Billion Supply

With gold trading at more than $2,940 per troy ounce on the open market Tuesday, that means the Fort Knox gold has a market value of $434 billion, more than the market value of Europe's most valuable public company, Tiffany and Louis Vuitton parent LVMH.

However, the government denotes the value of this gold at Fort Knox as just $6 billion based on the government-set book value for gold of $42.22 per troy ounce.

BullionStar has a pretty good explanation of this archaic per/troy oz value of gold.

To understand what is at stake, let's start with a few stylized facts about U.S. monetary gold:

• Central banks that keep gold on their balance sheet tend to hold physical gold. But the U.S. Federal Reserve doesn't actually hold physical metal. Instead, it owns gold certificates.
• The Fed registers the value of these gold certificates on its books at $11 billion. It has used this same number for decades.
• These certificates have been issued to the Fed by the U.S. Treasury, a different branch of the Federal government.
• To "back" these certificates, the Treasury in turn holds physical gold. According to the September 30, 2018 Status Report of U.S. Government Gold Reserve, the U.S. Treasury currently records 261,498,926 fine troy ounces of gold in reserves.
• The Fed's Treasury gold certificates are quite odd. They do not provide the Fed with a claim on a fixed weight of gold held at the Treasury. Rather, they provide the Fed with a claim on $11 billion dollars worth of gold. It would be as if your coat check tag constituted a claim on $40 worth of coat, rather than the coat itself.

How many ounces of gold does the $11 billion claim entitle the Fed to? That depends on the price of gold that is used in the calculation.

At the official price of $42.22, the Fed's $11 billion in gold certificates lay claim to 261 million ounces of gold held at the U.S. Treasury ($11,000,000,000/$42.22). So pretty much every bit of the 261,498,927 ounces held at the Treasury is the property of the Fed.

We can now start to see some of the complications involved in marking the official gold price to market. Setting the official price at today's level of $1225 per ounce, the Fed's $11 billion worth of gold certificates would constitute a claim on just 9 million ounces of the yellow metal ($11,000,000,000/$1225). That is, of the 261,498,927 ounces held at the Treasury, just 3.4% would now be earmarked to satisfy the Fed's gold certificates. This would deprive the Fed of 96.6% of the ounces that had previously been stored on its behalf. The remaining 252 million or so ounces of gold would henceforth constitute the property of the U.S. Treasury.

And the calculation above is from a few years back using old numbers. If you used the current spot price of gold ($2945/oz) the calculation would be as follows ($11,000,000,000/$2945) => 3,735,144 oz => (3,735,144/261,498,927) = 1.4% of the gold now earmarked to satisfy the Fed's gold certs, leaving 98.6% of the gold as property of the U.S. treasury.

One of Trump's recent executive orders was to develop a plan for a sovereign wealth fund. NPR recently had a decent primer article on sovereign wealth funds - it's certainly not a new idea. Since we were talking about what the true motivations for a Fort Knox audit might be, perhaps it's not simply to verify and ensure that we have all the gold we say we do, but rather to drive a revaluation of our gold to buttress a sovereign wealth fund.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent was quick to downplay this idea (but you know how that goes):

https://x.com/BloombergTV/status/1892561717193785641

The Gold Observer recently had an excellent writeup on how this process would play out (in a legal sense, and in an accounting sense) were it to come to fruition though - Congress would first need to approve an increase in the statuatory price of gold, and the treasury would need to issue new gold certificates to the Federal Reserve. This whole process would likely be bullish for gold, but weaken the dollar.

[Trollheart]

Right. I want David Copperfield (the magician, not Dickens character) to make the entire Fort Knox building disappear, and see what Trusk have to say about that! He can do it, you know. 

[Lexi Darling]

The American Nazi Party strikes again.

Really looking forward to the whimpering cowards in the mainstream media  tell us all about how this is just fine and dandy. Gonna be just so fun.

[Buck_Mulligan]

69 million married women at risk of being stuck off the voter rolls, at least temporarily.

Many of you have seen stories about the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, technically called H.R. 22. You're asking us if it's real. It is. In January, the GOP pledged to fast-track the bill, naming it one of their priorities this Congressional session. Lawmakers will vote on it soon.

Here's what it would do. First, and most importantly, it would make Americans provide some kind of formal document to prove their citizenship every time they register to vote (or re-register, as some places require after, say, a change in address). A driver's license, REAL ID, military ID, or tribal ID wouldn't be sufficient. Approved documents include a passport or birth certificate.

What's the problem? Well, it adds hurdles to voting, which are shown to depress the vote. And it would instantly disenfranchise 69 million married women who changed their last name. Their married names don't match their birth certificate, so they would be unregistered until they took actions to prove their citizenship. Some challenges: tens of millions of American citizens don't have access to the needed documents.

What if, for example, you're one of the 140 million Americans without a passport? Or if you lost your documents in an accident, and the government becomes very slow about providing you with your birth certificate or passport? The SAVE Act would either prevent you from voting or make it extremely difficult.

That's not all. The bill would also force states to conduct regular voter purges, which almost always result in legitimate citizens losing their right to vote. It would punish election workers with up to five years imprisonment for registering someone to vote without the right documents — even if they're actually a citizen. Because you'd have to prove your citizenship in person with original documents, there would be no registration by mail or online.

Switched party? Moved houses? Got married? Better get all your documentation in order and wait in line at a voter registration office, no matter how far that is, or no voting rights for you!

[Weekender]

It should be on the state to prove you're ineligible to vote. Voting is not a privilege that the state grants, it is a right of the people that the state must accommodate. Even requiring ID I think is a violation of the constitution per the 14th 15th, and 19th amendment.

Requiring a birth certificate would be absolutely insane.

[Buck_Mulligan]

Not unexpectedly, Trump has fired Gen. Charles Brown the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs because he is too keen on DEI,  and replaced him with a 3 star who in the past has apparently claimed that the US could wipe out IS and Al Q in a week.

[Buck_Mulligan]

Signs of change...

Tide Change: A series of new polls shows Trump's approval rating is falling. A majority of Americans disapprove of his performance and think he's gone too far with his executive power. Consumer sentiment is also down; people are worried about inflation and tariffs specifically. Growing pushback to Trump and Musk's assault on our institutions could be filtering through to Republican lawmakers, who are reportedly growing uneasy about the impact cuts will have on their constituents, with some facing increasingly angry calls from voters. Rep. Rich McCormick (R-GA) was shouted down and booed when he tried to defend Musk and DOGE at a town hall in his reliably red district. Rep. Cliff Bentz (R-OR) faced similar issues at his own town hall on the other side of the country. The pressure has some Republicans speaking out: Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) told her constituents that the situation "requires us as a Congress" to start "speaking out and standing up" to Trump and Musk; Rep. Troy Balderson said Thursday that Trump's executive orders were "getting out of control." Trump reportedly freaked out about the falling numbers. At least some of the American public is telling their leaders they want the DOGE destruction machine to stop. And it's not just Democrats.

A CNN poll published Thursday found that just 47 percent of Americans approve of Trump's performance, while 52 percent disapprove. Moreover, 55 percent of respondents don't think he's focused enough on the most pressing issues in the U.S., and 62 percent don't think he's done enough to bring the costs of common goods down.

The Washington Post and Gallup released similarly negative results this week. The Post-Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of Americans thought that Trump was "exceeding his authority" and that 48 percent opposed his actions outright. Gallup's poll showed that 51 percent of Americans disapproved of Trump.

[Lexi Darling]

They're trying to play this shit off as a "joke" now apparently.

If it salutes like a nazi, removes women and minorities from job positions like a nazi, polices reproduction like a nazi, attacks trans and gender non-conforming people like a nazi, quotes antisemitic dogwhistles like a nazi (in Bannon's case saying very openly antisemitic things), consolidates power and authority like a nazi, denies science in favor of personal beliefs like a nazi, worships chest-beating 'masculinity' like a nazi, is unsupportive of disabled people like a nazi, and builds concentration camps for minorities like a nazi, it's a nazi.

Actions speak louder than words, and I'm instantly suspicious of anyone who is trying to play this off as a "joke" or buy into the flimsy attempts at plausible deniability this nazi administration is trying to pull. Being ignorant or stupid isn't an excuse anymore, bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to people who have telegraphed exactly what they are will instantly earn you my distrust and frankly, speaking as a Jewish trans woman, my disgust.