What's the Deal with Elon Musk and DOGE in the MAGA States of Amerika?

For those not living in the recently formed country now known as the MAGA States of Amerika, this newly-formed country currently embodies the same territories on the surface of the Earth that were formerly occupied by the United States of America for nearly 250 years. Currently, Elon Musk and his very young team of IT geeks are now quickly dismantling what remains of the old government of the United States of America. This effort is being performed by Elon Musk's new organization, DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency. However, DOGE is really not a new Department under the Constitution of the now-defunct United States of America because, under that obsolete Constitution, Departments can only be formed and funded by Congress. Fortunately for Elon Musk, such things are no longer an obstacle.

In Beware - The Coming ASI Machines Will Also Most Likely Be On The Spectrum Too, I warned that, at least initially, the coming ASI Machines will most likely be much like the human geniuses that we have known in the past who were definitely on the autistic spectrum like Wernher von Braun, Elon Musk and Isaac Newton. In that post, I explained the dangers that can arise when such people are given political power. For example, in his quest to reach for the stars, Wernher von Braun ended up working with the Nazis to build his V-1 and V-2 rockets using concentration camp slave labor to then kill many in London. But always for the higher purpose of reaching for the stars. Similarly, Isaac Newton as Master of the Mint ended up having people drawn and quartered in public executions as the result of the Great Recoinage of 1696 in England that he personally led for the greater good.

As all historians, philosophers and religious leaders have always found, we human DNA survival machines are a very strange breed indeed. Over the centuries, such people have tried with all of their might to explain the bizarre nature of we human DNA survival machines without much success. Doing so is quite difficult because, unlike all of the other carbon-based life forms on this planet, we human DNA survival machines are also equipped with Minds that arose out of the highly-overengineered brains within our skulls to provide a home for a huge number of cultural and intellectual memes. This cast us to also be the very first Meme survival machines on the planet as well. Trying to be a human DNA survival machine and a human Meme survival machine at the same time can many times lead to conflicts between the two roles. This is even more difficult for human DNA survival machines on the autistic spectrum of genius. For example, take Isaac Newton:

Me
Tell me about some of the strange things that Isaac Newton became interested in during his later days.

ChatGPT
In his later years, Isaac Newton increasingly turned his formidable intellect toward pursuits that went well beyond the physics and mathematics for which he is best known. Notably, his interests evolved to include a range of esoteric and mystical topics that many today might label “strange.” Some of the most remarkable areas he delved into include:

1. Alchemy and the Occult
Newton devoted a large portion of his private study to alchemy—a field that mixed experimental chemical work with mystical, almost magical, ideas about the nature of matter. He filled notebooks with experiments and theories aimed at transforming base metals into gold and, more ambitiously, at discovering the philosopher’s stone. His alchemical research, which spanned millions of words, was kept secret during his lifetime (partly because such studies were viewed with suspicion and could even be dangerous to one’s reputation) and only began to be appreciated by scholars centuries later. His work in this area contributed, in a complex way, to the eventual development of modern chemistry, even as it was steeped in the occult and mystical ideas of his era.

2. Biblical Prophecy and Chronology
Parallel to his alchemical studies, Newton became deeply engrossed in the interpretation of biblical texts. He applied his mathematical genius to decipher what he believed were hidden messages and prophecies within the Bible. Among his many writings on this subject, he famously calculated that—based on his interpretation of prophetic scriptures—the world could not end before the year 2060. This work on biblical chronology and prophecy was part of a broader effort to reconcile the observable universe with divine design and revealed his belief that ancient texts contained keys to understanding cosmic order.

3. Sacred Geometry and Ancient Structures
Another curious facet of his later interests was the study of ancient monuments and their hidden mathematical and spiritual significance. Newton speculated that structures such as the Great Pyramid of Giza and the Temple of Solomon were built according to sacred geometric principles—a kind of divine blueprint. He believed that these edifices not only reflected ancient wisdom but also held encoded secrets about the natural world and even the future (for instance, as part of his broader apocalyptic studies). To him, these ancient constructions were not merely historical relics but integral parts of a cosmic puzzle that linked physical laws, divine design, and prophetic destiny.

4. An Integrated Vision of Science and Mysticism
Perhaps the most striking aspect of Newton’s later life was his attempt to weave together his scientific discoveries with his mystical and theological investigations. Rather than viewing natural philosophy and religious thought as separate realms, Newton saw them as different expressions of the same underlying truths. His work sought to establish a “theory of everything” in which the laws of motion and gravitation coexisted with divine purpose and prophetic insight—a vision that, while unconventional by modern standards, reflects the broader intellectual currents of his time.

In Context
It’s worth noting that while these interests might seem “strange” to us now, they were not entirely unusual among intellectuals in Newton’s era. The boundaries between what we today call science, theology, and occult study were far more fluid in the 17th and early 18th centuries. Newton’s later pursuits thus represent both a personal obsession and a window into a period when the search for truth embraced both the empirical and the mystical.

In summary, in his later days Newton immersed himself in alchemy, biblical prophecy, sacred geometry, and the study of ancient wisdom—all in an effort to uncover a unified understanding of the universe that bridged the gap between natural law and divine order.

But What of Elon Musk?
Previously, I warned about the dangers of giving political power to geniuses on the spectrum of autism such as Elon Musk, Wernher von Braun and Isaac Newton in Beware - The Coming ASI Machines Will Also Most Likely Be On The Spectrum Too. People do not understand that Elon Musk is a genius on the spectrum of autism who has adopted the philosophy of Longtermism as I explained in The New Philosophy of Longtermism Raises the Moral Question of Should We Unleash Self-Absorbed Human Beings Upon Our Galaxy?. Elon Musk wants to see human beings live on for billions of years by getting off the Earth as soon as possible because sooner or later astronomical catastrophies or the stupid things that we human beings do will lead to our extinction. In this view, nearly all of the human beings who will ever live will live in the future. So, a few "inconveniences" for those currently living should be no problem. That is how Elon Musk can shut down USAID and let thousands of children starve to death for the greater good of those who will live in the future. This is also why Elon Musk has always feared Advanced AI; he sees Advanced AI as a possible human extinction event. Thus, Elon Musk hates Sam Altman at OpenAI. However, Elon Musk has also launched his own Advanced AI research and robot development projects this past year. Perhaps in an attempt to control Advanced AI? Elon Musk also hates the former government of the United States of America because he viewed its safety regulations to have overly interfered with his SpaceX ambitions to put human DNA survival machines on Mars.

The MAGA States of Amerika currently spends about $6.7 trillion each year or $6,700 billion. So far, DOGE seems to have saved a few billion dollars by killing DEI and Climate Change contracts. So Elon Musk has about 100 IT geeks just running around killing contracts for DEI, Climate Change, subscriptions to periodicals, and businesses owned by women and minorities because that is the only thing they really know how to do. To really find fraud, waste and abuse you need an army of forensic accountants working with the government IT people who understand the very complicated government payment systems. You can track the progress of DOGE at their website:

Department of Government Efficiency
https://doge.gov/savings

If you click on a contract, it brings up a brief description of the contract. If you then click on the:

View on FPDS

button you can see a very high-level description of the contract which really does not tell you much about what the contract is for. The brief Descriptions seem to indicate that DOGE is canceling anything to do with DEI, Climate Change, subscriptions to periodicals, and businesses owned by women and minorities. For example, I saw that subscriptions to GARTNER, an IT journal that has been around more than 60 years, were all canceled.

When you get to the FPDS entry for the contract, scroll down to the Business Types under the Business Category section. Nearly all of the businesses are owned by women or minorities. So these young DOGE IT geeks are just doing SQL searches on databases for keywords that contain the new "forbidden" words like "Equitable" and for contracts from businesses owned by women and minorities. These IT geeks have no idea that what they are doing is highly illegal.

So be very careful with the words you use in your future funding proposals. I found one NOAA contract that got dinged for:

Description: Study on Equitable Distribution of Fisheries Management

These young IT geeks are very dangerous when mucking around in very old software. For example, Elon Musk bragged that his IT Geek Squad had found people who were 150 years old collecting social security benefits. These young IT geeks have no experience with the IT tricks that we used back in the 1960s and 1970s. It turns out that when a social security recipient was missing a valid birth year, the social security software entered the year "1875" as a flag for other software to seek out a correction.

I spent 2+ years on Amoco's Y2K project. After an application was remediated for Y2K bugs, we brought the application into our hermetically sealed Y2K lab for a two-week test flight. The lab contained a large number of PCs, Unix servers, and a logical partition of an IBM mainframe. In the Y2K lab, we would change all of the system dates on the hardware through a series of dates. The first one was 010199 (January 1, 1999) followed by 090999 (September 9, 1999) and 123199 (December 31, 1999). This was because programmers back in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s used those wacko dates to signify that there was a problem with the record it was reading. So even if you expanded all of the dates in the files or databases from a 2-digit year to a 4-digit year, the software would still break for those dates.

There is no way all of the contracts that were dinged by these IT geeks could have been reviewed before they were canceled. When under pressure, IT Management will do very strange things. When I first got to Discover managing a small consulting group supporting www.discover.com, one of the AD Managers I was supporting had written an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for my group to use SQL to manually delete certain database entries that his software entered by mistake. Rather than fixing the bug in his software, he wanted my team to login to the database with DELETE authority to find and delete the bad entries. Unfortunately, with just a few bad keystrokes, my team could then delete the Master table for www.discover.com! I refused and had my consulting company raise the issue with the AD Manager. My consulting company was not thrilled with me after that.

Last night, I heard that DOGE has its IT geeks messing with Social Security. The acting head of Social Security resigned over that. Now DOGE wants access to the IRS systems. Maybe the young DOGE IT geeks will accidentally launch a nuclear first strike and we will all be able to stop worrying!

I have seen this before on the Y2K project for Amoco and a Data Warehousing project at United Airlines. In both cases, an outside contractor brought in dozens of young IT workers who did not understand anything at all about the very complicated corporate financial systems that they were trying to work on. In both cases, the corporate IT professionals were far too busy to help these young kids do anything useful at all. All these young IT geeks did was to bill millions of dollars in charges doing nothing of value. I am sure that the government IT professionals who are now getting laid off for no apparent reason at all have no interest in helping these DOGE IT geeks dismantle the former United States of America. To see more about my 2+ year adventures on Amoco's Y2K project see Scenes From the COVID-19 and Y2K Pandemics

Comments are welcome at scj333@sbcglobal.net

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Regards,
Steve Johnston