Category: Government

The Army helicopter crash in DC revisited

by philg

As noted in Reagan National Airport Black Hawk-CRJ crash, the easiest way to have prevented the January 2025 crash would have been to implemented congestion pricing on the highways around DC so that officials didn’t need helicopter taxi service to avoid the traffic jams that have been caused by dramatic population growth induced by spectacular growth in government spending (plus open borders?).

“The Last Flight of PAT 25 Two Army helicopter pilots went on an ill-conceived training mission. Within two hours, 67 people were dead.” (New York Magazine):

Black Hawks are typically flown by two pilots. The pilot in command, or PIC, sits in the right-hand seat. Tonight, that role was filled by 39-year-old chief warrant officer Andrew Eaves. Warrant officers rank between enlisted personnel and commissioned officers; it’s the warrant officers who carry out the lion’s share of a unit’s operational flying. When not flying VIPs, Eaves served as a flight instructor and a check pilot, providing periodic evaluation of the skills of other pilots. A native of Mississippi, he had 968 hours of flight experience and was considered a solid pilot by others in the unit.

In terms of flying hours, Mr. Eaves was at the same stage as a civilian helicopter pilot beginning a second year working as an instruction in little Robinsons, mostly going in circles around a training airport.

His mission was to give a check ride to Captain Rebecca Lobach, the pilot sitting in the left-hand seat. Lobach was a staff officer, meaning that her main role in the battalion was managerial. Nevertheless, she was expected to maintain her pilot qualifications and, to do so, had to undergo a number of annual proficiency checks. Tonight’s three-hour flight was intended to get Lobach her annual sign-off for basic flying skills and for the use of night-vision goggles, or NVGs. To accommodate that, the flight was taking off an hour and 20 minutes after sunset. …

Night-vision goggles have a narrow field of view, just 40 degrees compared to the 200-degree range of normal vision, which makes it harder for pilots to maintain full situational awareness. They have to pay attention to obstacles and other aircraft outside the window, and they also have to keep track of what the gauges on the panel in front them are saying: how fast they’re going, for instance, and how high. There’s a lot to process, and time is of the essence when you’re zooming along at 120 mph while lower than the tops of nearby buildings. To help with situational awareness, Eaves and Lobach were accompanied by a crew chief, Staff Sergeant Ryan O’Hara, sitting in a seat just behind the cockpit, where he would be able to help keep an eye out for trouble.

Lobach, 28, had been a pilot for four years. She’d been an ROTC cadet at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which she graduated from in 2019. Both her parents were doctors; she’d dreamed of a medical career but eventually realized that she couldn’t pursue one in the Army. According to her roommate, “She did not have a huge, massive passion” for aviation but chose it because it was the closest she could get to practicing medicine, under the circumstances. “She badly wanted to be a Black Hawk pilot because she wanted to be a medevac unit,” he told NTSB investigators. After she completed flight training at Fort Rucker, she was stationed at Fort Belvoir, where she joined the 12th Aviation Battalion and was put in charge of the oil-and-lubricants unit.

In addition to her official duties, Lobach served as a volunteer social liaison at the White House, where she regularly represented the Army at Medal of Honor ceremonies and state dinners. … She was planning to leave the service in 2027 and had already applied for medical school at Mount Sinai. Helicopter flying was not something she intended to pursue.

Though talented as a manager, she wasn’t much of a pilot. … One instructor described her skills as “well below average,” noting that she had “lots of difficulties in the aircraft.” Three years before, she’d failed the night-vision evaluation she was taking tonight. … It’s not uncommon for pilots to struggle during the early phase of their career. But Lobach’s development had been particularly slow. In her five years in the service, she had accumulated just 454 hours of flight time, and she wasn’t clocking more very quickly.

Captain Lobach had the same number of hours as a Big Tech engineer who flies recreationally for about three years and, based on the above, far less interest in becoming proficient. The small number of hours seems to be common within the Army:

Similar problems exist throughout Army aviation; the service has been having a hard time retaining its most experienced pilots and providing adequate flight time for those currently coming up through the ranks. Since 2011, the average number of hours flown per year by crewed Army aircraft has fallen from 302 to 198.

Here’s a confusing part. Maybe the issue was with the tail rotor rather than “a tail fin”?

As they passed over the Civil War battlefield of Thoroughfare Gap, an alarm called a master caution went off, indicating that a control system for a tail fin was malfunctioning. If the situation worsened and the surface became stuck, the helicopter could crash.

(This was unrelated to the crash as it happened an hour earlier and the system was “reset”.)

The conclusion of the article is bizarre. After writing about a person who wasn’t interested in aviation, the author concludes with a quote from the pilot-brother of one of the regional airline pilots who was killed by the Army crew’s incompetence:

He thinks that Lobach could have become a good pilot if they gave her another thousand hours of flying time. Instead, the Army withheld from her the training and flight time that she needed to fly safely and then required her to go fly anyway on a mission that was as ill-conceived as it was poorly executed.

The article is heartbreaking because there are thousands of superb civilian helicopter pilots who would have sacrificed almost anything to take Captain Lobach’s place behind the controls of a Blackhawk even without receiving her Army pay and benefits ($150,000/year if we include housing allowance and the actuarial value of the pension?). It’s understandable that the military is a bureaucracy, but after all of the selection hurdles how does it end up with pilots who don’t love to fly and live to fly?

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Why won’t San Francisco Democrats provide their teachers with fair compensation?

by philg

Californians love to brag about how productive and rich they are. San Francisco should be the richest city in the world right now given that most of the AI companies have set up shop within the city limits and the founders/executives of these companies also live within city limits, e.g., Sam Altman (worth nearly $2 billion) That’s a tax base that municipal governments all around the world can only envy. We are informed that Democrats protect American workers’ interests and there are no Republicans who could potentially prevent San Francisco from taxing and spending.

Separately, we are informed that public employee unions would never use their power to exploit taxpayers by demanding above-market compensation. Our newspapers report as an established fact that unionized schoolteachers are “underpaid”.

This week, however, we learn that the elite Democrats who run San Francisco refuse to provide their public schoolteachers with the fair compensation that the union has requested, thus necessitating a strike. NYT:

On Monday morning, Cassondra Curiel, the president of the union, the United Educators of San Francisco, led a rally on the steps of Mission High School, where dozens of teachers, dressed in red, rattled tambourines and hoisted signs calling for higher wages. Some brought their children, who were out of school for the day.

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Add EBT card readers to televisions?

by philg

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, a day when tens of millions Americans with jobs will sit on their sofas instead of working and paying taxes associated with working, e.g., payroll and personal income tax.

We have been gifted by far-sighted and generous politicians whose dreams of an improved cradle-to-grave welfare state for roughly 50 percent of Americans have been spoiled by the laziness of Americans who have jobs but don’t work enough hours to fully fund progressive dreams.

Imagine the boost to tax revenue if working Americans worked all weekend instead of watching games on TV. What if we augmented televisions and streaming services with EBT card readers and only those with active SNAP/EBT/food stamps would be able to watch NFL, NBA, MLB, etc.? (It’s easier to get someone who works 50 hours per week to instead work 60 hours per week than it is to get someone who works 0 hours per week to toil for 10 tedious hours per week.)

I pointed this out yesterday, but it is worth pointing out again today: Santa Clara County just recently issued a mask order to reduce the spread of COVID-19 (below) and today they’re going to host a COVID-19 superspreader event. #Science!

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Our tax dollars at work: 500 lawyers and the Epstein files (also, Gulfstream and Bell helicopter maintenance costs)

by philg

“Department of Justice Publishes 3.5 Million Responsive Pages in Compliance with the Epstein Files Transparency Act” (justice.gov)

The Department of Justice today published over 3 million additional pages responsive to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law by President Trump on November 19, 2025.

More than 2,000 videos and 180,000 images are included in today’s additional publication. Combined with prior releases, this makes the total production nearly 3.5 million pages released in compliance with the Act.

More than 500 attorneys and reviewers from the Department contributed to this effort. In addition, the United States Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York (USAO-SDNY) employed an additional review protocol to ensure compliance with a Court order requiring United States Attorney Jay Clayton to certify that no victim identifying information would be produced unredacted as part of the public production.

Through the process, the Department provided clear instructions to reviewers that the redactions were to be limited to the protection of victims and their families. Some pornographic images, whether commercial or not, were redacted, given the Department treated all women in those images as victims. Notable individuals and politicians were not redacted in the release of any files.

How did the Department of Justice have 500 attorneys and reviewers with nothing more pressing to do than read through 3.5 million pages?

The files are at https://www.justice.gov/epstein ; Readers: did you look into them and find anything interesting? (it will be a challenge because our $7+ trillion/year government has given us only the crudest imaginable electronic search capability; only exact string matches are returned)

What did I find after about 45 minutes of poking around? I don’t need 3.5 million pages on the subject of the extent to which young women will be willing to have sex in exchange for housing in Manhattan, private jet travel, Caribbean vacations, straight-up cash, etc. So I searched for “Gulfstream Maintenance” and found an estimate for FANS compliance scheduled maintenance on N120JE, Jeffrey Epstein’s 1988 G-IV, s/n 1085. (FANS is a digital communication system between ATC and aircraft with about 1/100th the power of an iPhone.) This is from 2019, i.e., in pre-Biden dollars:

The $343,000 number will grow after the inspection is in progress and discrepancies are identified, e.g., corrosion from being operated in the Caribbean or from frisky passengers spilling Champagne.

How about the Bell 430 helicopter? The annual on that puppy was estimated at only $92,000 (again, in pre-Biden money):

I also found this property tax bill for Jeffrey Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse, 9 E. 71st. In pre-Biden dollars (2019), it was supposedly worth $56 million and Epstein owed $347,000/year in tax.

Zillow says that its price has gone up in nominal dollars, but taxes owed haven’t kept up with inflation ($347k in pre-Biden dollars is about $447k today). Maybe Ayatollah Mamdani is right about rich people in NYC needing to pay their fair share?

While I appreciate this window into the lifestyles of the rich and famous that our government has provided as part of its $7+ trillion in spending annually, I can’t figure out why the Feds hung onto and catalogued the documents that I stumbled on. Does it matter to anyone other than curious me how much a rich douche had to pay for Gulfstream or twin turbine helicopter maintenance? Would the charges against Emmanuel Goldstein and associates have been different if the Manhattan property tax bill had been $300,000/year rather than $347,000/year?

Related:

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Somali day care background book: Mississippi Swindle

by philg

Mississippi Swindle: Brett Favre and the Welfare Scandal that Shocked America turns out to answer some background questions on how American taxpayers ended up funding fake day cares. The author, Shad White, is the State Auditor of Mississippi. Phil Bryant, the governor at the time, received a insider’s tip that prompted an investigation by White’s team.

The root cause of the Mississippi fraud seems to be the same as the root cause of the Minnesota fraud: state officials allowed to make decisions about how to spend federal money. The author says that Clinton administration technocrats in D.C. were concerned that they’d destroyed the Black American family. Children born to “single mothers” went from roughly the same percentage as in the white population to over 60 percent (current data: 25 percent for whites; 65 percent to Blacks) in response to the Great Society “marry the government” programs introduced under Presidents FDR and Johnson, e.g., Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The Clinton geniuses implemented Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (“TANF”) in which states would get block grants and then could do whatever they wanted to with the money. They could, for example, give cash directly to “families” that didn’t work, but could also give money to nonprofit organizations that purported to assist those who didn’t work, e.g., by helping them write resumes or delivering other nebulous services.

The Mississippi DHS folks decided to give roughly 10 percent of the TANF funds to poor people and then 90 percent to friends’ nonprofit orgs whose executives spent the money on new houses, luxury vacations, kickbacks to state bureaucrats, etc. Only about $100 million was stolen from federal taxpayers, but the mechanism seems to be the same as in the much larger Minnesota fraud. The core prerequisites are (1) letting state officials decide how to spend federal money, and (2) the ability of officials to hand over taxpayer funds to nonprofit orgs.

There are some other good insights into the bureaucratic lifestyle. Some families in Mississippi living in $1 million houses and with six-figure incomes were enjoying Medicaid (an angel/VC-investor friend in a $2 million (pre-Biden dollars) house Maskachusetts was doing this about 15 years ago; he answered all of the questions on the Mass Health Connector accurately and the system kicked out that he was entitled to superlative MassHealth (Medicaid) coverage at $3/month). When the auditors pointed this out to the Medicaid bureaucrats their response was to push back rather than admit any bureaucratic errors or shortcomings. Even the people in the welfare bureaucracies who were corrupt or personally benefitting had a powerful desire to obstruct auditing and to preserve business as usual.

I’m almost done with the book and so far there isn’t a single example of a person who lost his or her job as a consequence for incompetence. A handful of people suffered criminal convictions, but nobody lost a day of wages as punishment for taxpayers losing $100 million.

If you don’t want to read the book, Wikipedia offers a summary.

Loosely related, a thoughtful perspective from U.S. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana:

Also, pronouns and goats in Minneapolis:

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Could the Federal Reserve gnomes work in a cruise ship moored in the Potomac?

by philg

The Federal Reserve is in the news lately for spending about $3,000 per square foot to renovate some office space in D.C. that will be used by 3,000 to 3,400 people. (source: the haters at Fox) The cost will be roughly $1 million per employee ($3.1 billion total).

I recently got off the Celebrity Ascent, a two-year-old cruise ship built by the notoriously efficient French. According to a talk that I attended by Instagram-famous Captain Tasos, she cost $1.2 billion, brand new, and can be both a home and work space for more than 5,000 people. ChatGPT estimates the square footage of the Fed’s buildings at 1.1 million and the Ascent at 2 million (cabins plus public spaces). The Ascent is fully covered with WiFi and, thus, could serve as an office building in our modern Zoom-based age (at a dock it could be hooked up to a fiber bundle instead of an apparently rather feeble Starlink subscription (throttled to 3.5 Mbps download per device; 2.5 Mbps upload).

Instead of renovating the Fed buildings, why not have our French brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters build an “office ship” to be moored in SE DC (just east of the Woodrow Wilson Bridge, I guess, due to the 75′ vertical limit)? As a bonus, any time that Fed employees need to visit colleagues in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, or Miami (the latter isn’t home to a regional Fed, but maybe it should be?), the “office ship” can set sail up or down the east coast (not a Jones Act violation because the government can do whatever it wants?).

What’s the flaw with this proposal to save taxpayers at least $2 billion (maybe $3 or $4 billion if the DC project goes over budget) and give each Fed employee twice the square footage (plus an awesome buffet restaurant and a wonderful theater if the Fed is as good at putting together an orchestra as Royal Caribbean/Celebrity are; hire Jessica Gabrielle to do an employee disco night once/month and her Blue Jays band to work lunch two days per week; maybe bring in Stephen Barry a few times per year for gender diversity reeducation (he liked to borrow purses from female-identifying audience members)).

Since every American will be on GLP-1 pills, the Fed could run a “chocolate shawarma” station as Celebrity did. Imagine replacing the two foreigners below with efficient enthusiastic friendly American government workers:

(Why did Celebrity put up a sign labeling these “shawarma” rather than “crêpes”? It’s true that the legacy white Christian French population contributed the underlying pancake, but they also had a chocolate wheel from which shavings were being made.)

Loosely related, Marella Discovery nursing her calf (St. Kitts):

Sanity check on ChatGPT’s numbers: Ascent is 1071×130′ in size. That’s 139,230 square feet of space if the ship were shaped like a block. She has the equivalent of about 15 full-length decks so that works out to 2.1 million square feet. Then subtract a bit because there is some tapering.

Speaking of sanity, if the Federal Reserve truly wanted to conserve taxpayer funds, it could order a ship built in China (30-40 percent cheaper, supposedly, though apparently still not competitive in the real-world cruise industry) and skip out on the fancy Azipods and bow thrusters (the office ship won’t move too often so perhaps just use tugboats to achieve precise positioning within harbors). Speaking of Azipods, how do those clever Swedes get the slip rings to work? Enormous amounts of power are transferred and the pods can rotate continuously (i.e., a power cord won’t work). ChatGPT:

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Is Minnesota the new Purdue Pharma/Sackler Family?

by philg

During the time when Americans cared about opioids (see Who funded America’s opiate epidemic? You did.), the scapegoats for the mostly taxpayer-funded problem were Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family that owned Purdue Pharma (also scapegoated: members of the Sackler family who had no ownership or management role in Purdue Pharma!). Seldom vilified in the press:

  • Medicaid bureaucrats who enabled the addictions by paying for opioids in spectacular numbers
  • FDA bureaucrats who approved additional uses for opioid pills
  • Johnson & Johnson, which grew and imported the raw materials for opioid pills (and also sold some of its own pills to compete with Purdue Pharma)
  • DEA bureaucrats who approved the importation of opium raw materials in growing and spectacular quantities
  • Pill distributors and pharmacies

Taxpayers who followed the headlines would learn that the U.S. had a near-perfect system, but that there was one bad apple within the perfect system. Once Purdue and the evil Sacklers were shut down we could get back to business as usual at Medicaid, FDA, DEA, J&J, CVS, etc.

I wonder if Tim Walz and his merry band of check-writers in Minnesota are the new Purdue Pharma/Sacklers. The U.S. welfare system is perfectly engineered for fraud, it seems, with state bureaucrats having the authority to spend federal money. Any system without a massive fraud incentive would start with state bureaucrats spending only state taxpayer money and local government employees spending only local taxes. (Imagine a bureaucrat in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He/she/ze/they would reasonably approve 100 percent of residents for SNAP/EBT because the money is coming from the federal treasury and will grow the Cambridge economy. The same bureaucrat would have an incentive to approve 100 percent of residents for state-funded programs since only a small fraction of state taxpayers live in Cambridge.)

What if fraud levels are nearly as high in some other states, but people who benefit from the U.S. running the world’s second largest welfare state (percentage of GDP; maybe we are #1 now after the coronapanic enhancements?) don’t want peasant taxpayers to look into the situation? It would then be ideal to scapegoat the Minnesotans and their Somali brothers, sisters, and binary-resisters. Once a handful of Somalis in Minnesota have been sent off to Club Fed (they’ll live at taxpayer expense for a few years as punishment for previously living at taxpayer expense), everyone can assume that the problem is solved because the bad apples (bad guavas?) have been removed from the welfare state barrel.

Vaguely related…

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Was the person killed in Minneapolis even aware that an ICE operation was in progress?

by philg

From Pink News: “Renee Nicole Good was a 37-year-old and died just a few streets away from her home, according to reporting by the Minnesota Star Tribune … Good had been married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at the age of 36, and had been currently living with her wife in Minneapolis alongside her six-year-old son. Good also reportedly has two other children, who live with extended family members.”

Our government says that the late Ms. Good was interfering with an ICE operation, presumably to kidnap noble Somalis who’ve done so much to enrich the U.S. But if the incident happened “just a few streets away from her home” and the ICE agents weren’t wearing conventional uniforms, is it possible that Good was interacting with ICE only by chance?

I can understand why someone who works in the Welfare-Industrial Complex (or Big Daycare) would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims, but it doesn’t make logical sense that someone with Renée Good’s personal background would try to stop ICE from deporting Muslims. She wanted to maximize the number of Somalis who would, if they were in power, force her to become a 2nd or 3rd wife of a man instead of a lesbian partner of some other woman? And a Muslim-run nation might not let a woman unload her kids in order to enjoy more sexual freedom. (American women typically keep their kids after terminating a sexual relationship in order to harvest child support profits, but perhaps Ms. Good’s first husband didn’t earn enough money for that to make sense? (Mothers abandoning their kids to the father is much more common in Europe where child support revenue might be capped at $2,000 to $8,000 per year, depending on the country.))

Readers: What is the evidence that Ms. Good was aware of or interested in ICE operations?

Of course, I’m aware of the existence of Queers for Palestine, but I don’t think that’s quite the same. Queers for Palestine seek to impose an Islamic theocracy (Hamas rule) over Israelis. They aren’t working to subject themselves to Islamic rule.

(This post is not seeking to assign blame to anyone. With perhaps 30 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. and guns being widely distributed among both migrants and ICE agents, I’m sure that this won’t be the last death related to immigration enforcement. I’m just trying to figure out what happened. If Renée Good interacted with ICE purely by chance then her death is even sadder because of its pointlessness.)

Google AI:

consensual same-sex sexual activity is illegal in Somalia, with penalties ranging from prison sentences (up to three years under civil law) to the death penalty in areas controlled by groups like al-Shabab, all within a highly stigmatized cultural and religious environment where homosexuality is criminalized and heavily persecuted.

Related:

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How do nonprofits that promise to discriminate get federal money?

by philg

A Florida senator whom I wish would retire writes about federal tax dollars being funneled to Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in western Maskachusetts (I was there once, part of being a houseguest of some Democrats who have a $2 million lake house nearby and who subscribe):

My response to our elderly senator:

The organization’s December 2024 web page proudly describes the federal funds recipient policies of discrimination that is contrary to the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of Equal Protection. Here are just some of the ways that they promise to discriminate based on race and gender ID:

  • Prioritization of BIPOC Vendors: Conduct focused research and expand the use of BIPOC-owned vendors
  • 83% of the 2024 episodes in our monthly “PillowVoices: Dance Through Time” podcast featured BIPOC artists, and 100% featured women.
  • All of Jacob’s Pillow Dance Interactive playlists featured BIPOC and women artists.
  • off-campus and on-campus programming for low-income, BIPOC Berkshire residents.

How can government money be used to fund activities that should be illegal and unconstitutional if the government itself did it? (I guess we have had government-run race- and sex-discrimination in contracting, with set-asides for women- and minority-owned businesses, but I have never figured out how that is Constitutional.) I have never been able to get a straight answer from any of my lawyer friends as to how the government can operate and fund race discrimination without first repealing the 14th Amendment.

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Every public school should register as a Somali day care in order to receive federal funds?

by philg

The Somali immigrants who built Boston (“cannot talk about any achievement that the city of Boston has had in safety, jobs, and economic development, in education, without talking about the Somali community,” said Mayor Michelle Wu) have also been featured on X lately (not in the New York Times or CNN, though?) for harvesting federal taxpayer money via registering fictitious day cares. Example with more than 75 million views:

Public schools are always hungry for more money, e.g., to spend in administration, pensions, employee health care, etc. (occasionally on classroom instruction as well) What if every public school in the U.S. registered with Minnesota officials as a Somali day care? Just leave off the state from the address and include the ZIP code so that checks get through the mail. Minnesota politicians and state workers never noticed that the day cares they were paying were nonexistent. Why would they notice that a ZIP code to which they were mailing checks (drawn on the US Treasury) wasn’t part of Minnesota? In the unthinkably rare event that a Welfare-Industrial Complex worker comes to inspect there will almost always be children on site.

Loosely related…

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