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Blurb: "You’ve never seen Elon Musk like THIS! An AI-generated video has the tech billionaire transformed into a Ming Dynasty official, delivering an epic speech about "Governmental Efficiency" with Kung Fu flair!"

The many comments from Chinese people are especially interesting providing historical perspective on current events in the USA.

For example, from one comment: "In the Ming Dynasty of China (over 600 years ago), there was a special department called the Jinyiwei, which was only responsible to the emperor and had great privileges. Once DOGE was established, the vast majority of Chinese people knew what it was, including its responsibilities, powers, drawbacks, and future development，and the problems it generates."

And: "A nation with 5000 years of history and most of them are recorded, they know pretty much every political system ever existed."

And in reply: "Yes, the United States today is very much like the end of the Ming Dynasty during the Donglin Party period. There are strong enemies outside, and internal party struggles continue. Everyone thinks that they are saints and gentlemen, and only they can save the country."

From Wikipedia for context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_dynasty "By the 16th century, the expansion of European trade—though restricted to islands near Guangzhou such as Macau—spread the Columbian exchange of crops, plants, and animals into China, introducing chili peppers to Sichuan cuisine and highly productive maize and potatoes, which diminished famines and spurred population growth. The growth of Portuguese, Spanish, and Dutch trade created new demand for Chinese products and produced a massive influx of South American silver. This abundance of specie re-monetized the Ming economy, whose paper money had suffered repeated hyperinflation and was no longer trusted. While traditional Confucians opposed such a prominent role for commerce and the newly rich it created, the heterodoxy introduced by Wang Yangming permitted a more accommodating attitude. Zhang Juzheng's initially successful reforms proved devastating when a slowdown in agriculture was produced by the Little Ice Age. The value of silver rapidly increased because of a disruption in the supply of imported silver from Spanish and Portuguese sources, making it impossible for Chinese farmers to pay their taxes. Combined with crop failure, floods, and an epidemic, the dynasty collapsed in 1644 as Li Zicheng's rebel forces entered Beijing. Li then established the Shun dynasty, but it was defeated shortly afterwards by the Manchu-led Eight Banner armies of the Qing dynasty, with the help of the defecting Ming general Wu Sangui."

One other comment suggests that the rebel Li Zicheng was fired as a postal worker ten years earlier when the Ming Dynasty struggled financially and laid off thousands of government workers.

This Washington Monthly article explains why DOGE's cuts will ironically fail to achieve DOGE's ostensible objective though: https://washingtonmonthly.com/2025/01/05/fire-the-contractor... "That’s because Trump and his DOGE sidekicks both misunderstand the nature of the problem and risk undermining the government services that their base depends on. The primary source of government waste and inefficiency isn’t what they say it is: a bloated civil service insufficiently “loyal” to the president. Rather, as writers for this magazine ... have tried to explain, the problem is the opposite. Federal agencies have too few civil servants with the right expertise to manage the contractors who increasingly deliver the federal government’s services. The key to reducing waste and increasing efficiency is for the government to hire more high-quality government employees and shrink the number of contractors. And there’s even a huge opportunity here of bringing in the technology and people skills to remake government so it’s ready for the challenges of the future."