Opinion
By Jeff Childers
3/18/25
Good morning, C&C, it’s Tuesday! Your roundup includes: horror movie script writes itself in an isolated Antarctic base; DOGE discovers magic money machines printing dollars for the government out of thin air; the new, new Gold Rush takes hold; a Cold War-era peace thinktank goes to war against DOGE, and DOGE wins; and a left-leaning appellate court un-enjoins President Trump’s DEI orders.
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Things are heating up in the deepest frozen places. Newsweek ran a startling story yesterday headlined, “Scientists trapped in Antarctica plead for help as violence breaks out.” You’ll instantly recognize the story, since it was exactly like the setup of countless horror-survival movies. All it needs is aliens.
A team of climate scientists hunkers down for a 10-month winter in a remote Antarctic base cut off from civilization. They have all been vetted by detailed psychometric evaluations and probed by psychological profiling— but the doctors must have missed something.
The team is completely isolated on its cliffside base, where the typical winter temperature deep freezes to -23C, and wind speeds can reach a punishing 150mph. It is 2,500 miles from South Africa’s closest point, meaning there is zero outside human contact during the ten-month overwintering period.
The assignment is a glacial pressure cooker.
Last week, South Africa got a desperate call for help from its stranded team, the South Africa National Antarctic Expedition (SANAE IV). A frantic email from the base said one of the scientists is growing increasingly mentally unstable. He is physically and sexually assaulting the other scientists.
“His behavior has become increasingly egregious, and I am experiencing significant difficulty in feeling secure in his presence,” the tersely-worded email said. “It is imperative that immediate action is taken to ensure my safety and the safety of all employees.”
South Africa’s environmental minister told the Sunday Times that “people do get cabin fever. It can be very disorientating.” It has happened before. People Magazine’s story reported that six years ago, someone was removed from South Africa’s Marion Island base after “allegedly running amok with an axe.”
In most cases, running amok with an axe can safely be considered a “red flag.” I think there was a famous movie about that particular theme, actually.
Anyway, an “environment of fear and intimidation” now permeates the SANAE IV base. Anxiety is spiraling out of control. “I remain deeply concerned about my own safety, constantly wondering if I might become the next victim,” the unnamed scientist pleaded.
Because of the base’s remote location, it’s not clear whether any immediate action can be taken. It will take months for weather conditions to allow the South Africans to safely mount a relief expedition. But Germany’s Neumayer Station III base lies ‘just’ 186 miles east from SANAE IV. Maybe the German climate scientists can go fight him.
There’s a little good news: South African shrinks are on the job. They have been counseling the team members daily about ‘coping mechanisms’ and strategies for better ‘handling interpersonal conflicts’ with axe-wielding maniacs. But we’ve all seen the movie. Next, the battery cables in the snowmobiles will be mysteriously cut, and then the satellite uplink will be chopped into splinters in the middle of the night.
I’m not saying that you have to be crazy as a rabid penguin to take this kind of job. But it helps. We’ll pray for the terrified climate scientists. Paging John Carpenter.
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Yesterday, the UK Daily Mail ran a story headlined, “Elon Musk reveals DOGE has found 14 ‘magic money computers’ that create cash ‘out of thin air.’” Don’t bother. The gadgets are not available on Amazon; I already checked.
“You may think that government computers all talk to each other,” the space billionaire told Senator Ted Cruz in a podcast interview this weekend. “That they synchronize, that they add up what funds are going somewhere, and it’s, you know, coherent. And that the numbers you’re presented as a Senator are the real numbers. But they’re not.”
Musk continued, “I call them magic money computers— any computer that can just make money out of thin air, that’s magic money. They’re mostly at Treasury, there’s some at HHS, there’s one at State, one at DoD. We’ve found 14 of them.”
“How does it work?” Senator Cruz asked. Musk answered, “It just issues payments!”
Progressive critics pounced, condemning the comment. Musk is trying to undermine confidence in the Treasury! But they didn’t deny it, either. Not exactly. For example:
Of course, every new magic dollar created by the government fractionally dilutes the value of every existing dollar in our bank accounts, shaving a little bit off every time. In other words, magic-money-making is a tax, in the form of inflation. A tax that pays for crowd favorites like Ukrainian tanks, for the Russians to test their drones and missiles on, or worse, to be sold in the box in a Kiev farmer’s market to a South American drug cartel for pennies on the dollar.
But, contrary to progressives’ complaints, managing the money supply is not supposed to work this way. The federal government is supposed to issue debt whenever it increases the money supply, so that we can keep track of things.
The federal government is not supposed to magically issue funny money payments.
I respectfully request one of those computers, strictly for altruistic research and compassionate personal purposes. They should be able to spare one. I promise that, out of pure, selfless patriotism, I will only use it to pay my taxes.
🐶 On hearing the news, several pundits speculated that out-of-control magic money machines help explain why institutional investors recently started snapping up gold like there’s no tomorrow. Headline from this morning’s Financial Times:
Or how about Reuters, also this morning:
Who knows? Call me crazy, but I suspect the timing of the gold rally has more to do with those unsubtle hints Trump and Elon dropped a few weeks back about auditing Fort Knox and the Nation’s gold reserves. Just hypothetically, if a government were keeping a lid on gold prices to conceal real inflation rates—say, to win an election or something like that—that government might covertly sell truckloads of gold to increase the supply, thereby keeping the price down.
Print money out of one terminal, sell gold out of the other. Even Steven! Nobody has to know.
And, if that said government stopped secretly selling its gold reserves – say, because of a threatened audit — then gold prices would start shooting up again.
Well, all I’m saying is it’s a funny coincidence how the price of gold started rocketing right after Trump and Musk started chattering about auditing Fort Knox.
I’m a lawyer, not an investment advisor, so I would never suggest that you buy gold. I’m just saying. I’m sure everything is just fine inside Fort Knox, and it’s not just empty rows of shelves decorated with a scattered handful of Nixon-era souvenir coins. Why buy gold anyway? Gold fever is probably just one of those market manias that comes and goes, not evidence of pent-up inflationary demand.
Nah. You should hold on to your rapidly depreciating magic money instead.
Thank heavens for DOGE.
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Maniacs at the South Pole aside, it surely is a strange era. The New York Times ran a maniacal story yesterday under the cleverly-worded headline, “At the U.S. Institute of Peace, It’s War When Musk’s Team Arrives.” The sub-headline explained, “A bubbling dispute broke into a dramatic standoff that ended with police involvement and the Department of Government Efficiency taking up residence at the independent agency.”
Last night, USIP’s ‘president’ George ‘the’ Moose, pictured above, was escorted out of the building by sheriff’s deputies, ending a weeklong standoff where he’d refused to voluntarily decamp from his bureaucratic throne. Lawyers for the agency that you never heard of — the latest Cold War relic — argued that DOGE had no authority, since it was quasi-independent from the Executive Branch, partly private, and partly owned by the Legislative Branch, which cannot own or operate any agencies.
USIP was initially formed by the Reagan Administration in 1984, at the height of Cold War tensions. It’s ostensibly a ‘think tank,’ with a stated mission of “promoting peace and conflict resolution,’ but its critics claim the secretive agency is just another ‘soft power’ tool the State Department uses to conduct dirty tricks and destabilize democratic governments around the globe. You decide.
Last week, after President Trump issued his executive order canceling a dozen agencies, including itself, USIP immediately abandoned peaceful conflict resolution and went to war with the Trump Administration. Although the rogue agency is 100% funded by the federal government, and although the President appoints its board members, and although its offices sit in a federal building on federal land right on the National Mall, USIP’s lawyers claim it exists separately as an NGO nonprofit corporation.
After his inglorious exit, Mister Moose complained to reporters that “what has happened here today is an illegal takeover by elements of the executive branch of a private nonprofit corporation.” Uh-huh. Yesterday, President Trump fired Moose and most of the rest of the USIP board, but the large mammal tenaciously clung on, like a tree activist camping out in the canopy, refusing to leave his office and having pizzas delivered to keep his energy up.
Frankly, it was probably more of a media stunt than any actual rebellion. It looks designed to give eager corporate media reporters yet another chance to take dramatic pictures and accuse dastardly Elon Musk of personally cutting critical federal programs. But they really don’t get it. Nobody but insiders has ever heard of USIP. We certainly haven’t heard about it creating any peace anywhere.
Nobody cares except the New York Times.
It turns out that, when you isolate groups of people for too long with no real-world accountability, strange things start happening. Whether it’s an Antarctic climate-research base or a Cold War-era ‘think tank’ on the National Mall, cabin fever is real. You might even call it an epidemic. One type ends in emailed assault accusations, and the other with a 78-year-old bureaucratic termite ordering Domino’s while barricading himself in his office.
It’s over, George. He needs to surrender the Cold War, and learn to code. I hear podcasting is a good gig, too.
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Late last week, an encouraging story cropped up in the Associated Press under the headline, “Appeals court lifts blocks on Trump’s orders restricting diversity, equity and inclusion programs.”
In the final week of February, Baltimore’s brand-new U.S. District Judge Adam Abelson (a Biden 2024 appointee) issued a nationwide injunction against Trump’s executive orders that terminated federal support for Diversity, Equity, and Insanity. Judge Ableson cited First Amendment grounds and ‘vagueness,’ since Trump’s orders didn’t specifically define DEI.
It was especially ironic, since if you ask ten progressives what DEI is, you’ll get ten different answers. I can’t say what it is, but I know it when I see it.
But yesterday, a three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit canceled Judge Abelson’s injunction. (The panel included two Obama judges and one Trump 1.0 judge.) The lawsuit may proceed, but Trump’s executive orders can also continue in the meantime.
The three judges wrote separate opinions. Judge Allison Rushing, the lone Trump appointee, was most critical of Judge Ableson’s injunction and said, “Ripeness and standing doctrines prevent the judicial process from being used to usurp the powers of the political branches.” Indeed.
So today the big universities find themselves trapped in an Antarctic base with a crazed, axe-wielding, DOGE cost-cutter. Yesterday, with the injunction out of the way, the House Committee on Education counseled colleges to comply:
As I’ve told you, Trump’s EOs were very carefully planned. While progressive judges find it easy (apparently) to throw out nationwide injunctions like Fat Tuesday carnival beads, it is much harder to defend them on appeal. Nor has the Supreme Court yet weighed in on the unprecedented epidemic of nationwide TROs and injunctions, but I expect we’ll hear from the Justices soon.
The Supreme Court cannot ignore the TRO catastrophe, because it threatens to finally manifest the long-fretted-over but never-arriving Constitutional crisis. Something is bound to change.
Have a terrific Tuesday! Enjoy the cooler weather and your Spring Break, and come back tomorrow morning for more essential news and commentary.
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The views expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official position of Citizens Journal Florida.
