Today, the president-elect nominated Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy to the non-existent Department Of Government Efficiency (DOGE) in the government into which the president-elect has yet to be inducted. If that is not a double-negative, I don’t know what is.

So, Musk and Ramaswamy are, or are going to be, the DOGE. That intrigued me because The Doge has an interesting history. The Doge was once a head of state, or lord, in Italy. But, it was complicated because they were elected to their positions by electors from the Great Council of Venice. After a while the electors wanted to limit the influence of powerful families, so the number of electors increased. Sound familiar?

From Wikipedia:

After 1172 the election of the Venetian doge was entrusted to a committee of forty, who were chosen by four men selected from the Great Council of Venice, which was itself nominated annually by 12 persons. After a deadlocked tie at the election of 1229, the number of electors was increased from forty to forty-one. New regulations for the elections of the doge introduced in 1268 remained in force until the end of the republic in 1797. Their object was to minimize as far as possible the influence of individual great families, and this was effected by complex elective machinery. Thirty members of the Great Council, chosen by lot, were reduced by lot to nine; the nine chose forty and the forty were reduced by lot to twelve, who chose twenty-five. The twenty-five were reduced by lot to nine and the nine elected forty-five. Then the forty-five were once more reduced by lot to eleven, and the eleven finally chose the forty-one who elected the doge. None could be elected but by at least twenty-five votes out of forty-one, nine votes out of eleven or twelve, or seven votes out of nine electors.. . .

While doges had great temporal power at first, after 1268, the doge was constantly under strict surveillance: he had to wait for other officials to be present before opening dispatches from foreign powers; he was not allowed to possess any property in a foreign land. 

So, back in the day a Doge had to go through a stringent election process and not possess any property in a foreign land. Clearly, we are not talking about that kind of Doge.

Maybe we are talking about Dogecoin; an open-source peer-to-peer digital currency. Yeah, that seems more like it. A decentralized system that stores information in a network of computers; a currency that is ever-expanding in dynamic ways, and is a payment system that was originally designed as a joke.

Oh yes. That’s our DOGE.