Submit Your WAR!
Musk Demands Weekly Activity Reports from Federal Workers
Roughly four decades ago, as a young officer in the Air Force working on various projects, I had to submit what we jokingly called the WAR, or weekly activity report. I thought of that as I saw Elon Musk’s demand that federal workers submit personal reports of weekly accomplishments starting today; apparently, failure to do so will be seen as tantamount to resignation.
As usual, Musk is a heavy-handed jerk (which is putting it lightly, I know). Still, the idea of WARs isn’t a bad one. It helped me in my job as a project engineer in the Air Force. It served as a record of what I’d done, or tried to do, each week and it came in handy during performance reviews. Typically in the Air Force (and perhaps most other jobs as well), your boss who’s writing your performance review will ask you for input before she or he writes your equivalent to my OPR, or Officer Performance Report. To me, that was a simple exercise of gathering the old WARs and summarizing them in a page or two.
I hope Musk is also submitting his WAR. So far, he seems best at posing with chain saws or with one of his many kids in the Oval Office. If Musk doesn’t submit his WAR to me today, I’ll take it as his resignation from the DOGE.
LOVE your caption under the Elno-and-chainsaw pic, Bill!
Today’s TomDispatch’s Tom Engelhardt’s D IS FOR DONALD (AND DECLINE): The Big 3Ds (or Is It Four?) concludes as follows:
“And yes, he’s certainly going to be President Decline, Baby, Decline. Don’t, for a second, be fooled by his very open urge, in a strikingly McKinleyesque fashion, ‘to expand our territory’ — to grab, that is, or at least dream about grabbing yet more territory for imperial America, ranging from Greenland and the Panama Canal to that 51st state Canada, and, of course, Gaza. The urge to return to a nineteenth-century version of imperialism, even as he does his best (or worst?) to take this country and this planet down, is striking, to say the least. Especially as, in the wake of the McKinley moment, the American version of imperialism normally involved a far more subtle kind of control over significant parts of this planet, rather than the Trumpian urge to simply grab what you can, bit by bit, island by island, country by country.
“Of course, on a planet that itself is beginning to come apart at the seams, such a president, a man focused on himself above all else, is no small disaster. Four more years of Donald Trump should worry anyone, whether your fears have to do with the dismantling of this country or the taking down of our world. In fact, THINK OF DONALD TRUMP’S AMERICA AS THE PLANETARY EQUIVALENT OF A MEMECOIN. WHILE HE AND HIS FAMILY MAY WIN SOMETHING SIGNIFICANT, DON’T COUNT ON THAT FOR THE REST OF US, INCLUDING THE 49.7% OF AMERICAN VOTERS IN THE LAST ELECTION WHO BOUGHT INTO HIS SCHEME.
“The Big D — whether you want to think of it as Decline, Dysdopia, Denial, or simply Donald — is now ours for four long, long years. And that couldn’t be sadder.”
The full article is well worth the read and is at https://tomdispatch.com/d-is-for-donald-and-decline/ ; EMPHASIS added.
Note: Another "D" to add to the list ~ as John pointed out earlier ~ is DEBT; now standing at $36.52 TRILLION, and counting, to be exact.