Category: Government

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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Why don’t people on the other sides of frauds get fired?

by philg

We’ve read about a variety of frauds lately, some in the business world and some at the government trough. We hear about the fraudsters being sanctioned, but never the people who were responsible for ladling out the cash. Our first example happened at JPMorgan (source: Association of Certified Fraud Examiners):

In late 2021, JPMorgan announced they were acquiring Frank, a fintech startup founded by [precious female entrepreneur] Charlie Javice that promised to simplify the college financial aid application process. The company reportedly had more than four million users who used the app to help them navigate the complex and difficult process of applying for financial aid. However, by December 2022, JPMorgan filed a civil lawsuit against Javice, alleging fraudulent claims over the amount of customers Frank had. Instead of the around four million customers Javice reported, Frank had fewer than 300,000 actual users. Federal prosecutors then brought criminal charges in early 2023, and in March 2025, Javice was found guilty on multiple counts, including securities fraud, wire fraud, bank fraud and conspiracy charges.

The discrepancy was significant, as Frank had only about 7% of the users it claimed to have during negotiations with JPMorgan Chase. Evidence showed that Javice had actually hired a data scientist for around $18,000 to create synthetic user data, which was then presented to JPMorgan during the acquisition process as a selling point.

Wims Morris, a JPMorgan executive, relied heavily on Javice’s claims about user data.

How’s Wims Morris doing now? Her LinkedIn profile says that she’s now in charge of $88 billion in auto loans:

Next we go to the geniuses at BlackRock, in charge of $12.5 trillion in assets (mostly index funds?). “BlackRock Stung by Loans to Business Accused of ‘Breathtaking’ Fraud” (WSJ):

The lenders have accused [enricher] Bankim Brahmbhatt, the owner of little-known telecom-services companies Broadband Telecom and Bridgevoice, of fabricating accounts receivable that were supposed to be used as loan collateral. The lenders filed suit in August. They said Brahmbhatt’s companies owe them more than $500 million.

The lenders allege in their complaint that their investigation determined that every customer email Brahmbhatt-owned companies had provided to verify invoices over the past two years was fake. They also said they discovered fraudulent contracts from customers dating back to 2018.

In other words, it seems that anyone able to type “Please generate some invoices and customer emails for my hypothetical telecom company” into an LLM could collect $500 million from the smartest folks on Wall Street. A Google search for “BlackRock firings after Brahmbhatt fraud” yields zero relevant results.

The same lack of accountability can be observed in government. Somalis living in Minnesota managed to defraud taxpayers of more than $1 billion via various welfare program schemes (on top of the taxpayer-funded housing, health care, food, and smartphone to which two-thirds of Somali households in Minnesota are entitled by virtue of having over-the-table income lower than 200 percent of the poverty line (MNCompass)). It got to the point that even the New York Times was willing to implicitly criticize war veteran Tim Walz: “How Fraud Swamped Minnesota’s Social Services System on Tim Walz’s Watch”:

The fraud scandal that rattled Minnesota was staggering in its scale and brazenness. … fraud took root in pockets of Minnesota’s Somali diaspora as scores of individuals made small fortunes by setting up companies that billed state agencies for millions of dollars’ worth of social services that were never provided. Federal prosecutors say that 59 people have been convicted in those schemes so far, and that more than $1 billion in taxpayers’ money has been stolen in three plots they are investigating. That is more than Minnesota spends annually to run its Department of Corrections. … Ms. Hassan is of Somali ancestry, as are all but eight of the 86 people charged in the meals, housing and autism therapy fraud cases, according to prosecutors. A vast majority are American citizens, by birth or naturalization.

“The message here in Minnesota,” [Tampon Tim] Walz said, “is if you commit a crime, if you commit fraud against public dollars, you are going to go to prison.”

The worst part is not the $1 billion extracted from taxpayers who had to work extra hours to send money to Somalis and Somalia, but that people might mistakenly believe that Somalis, two-thirds of whom are entitled to every form of welfare (see above), aren’t “hardworking”:

“The actions of a small group have made it easier for people already inclined to reject us to double down,” said Abdi Mohamed, a filmmaker in Minneapolis. “The broader Somali community — hardworking, family-oriented, deeply committed to Minnesota — is left carrying that burden.”

Missing from the article: “Joe Bureaucrat was fired for not noticing this obvious fraud and ladling out more than one $billion in tax dollars.” Also missing… reader comments. The NYT disabled comments on the article from the beginning so that none of their readers could commit Wrongthink and erroneously suggest that Minnesota would be better off without enrichment by Somalis.

The Somalis who defrauded the white say-gooders of Minnesota weren’t Hollywood-style supervillains with IQs of 160. JPMorgan could have discovered precious female entrepreneur Charlie Javice’s fraud by making about 10 phone calls. Ditto for BlackRock and Bankim Brahmbhatt (believed to be back in India now after enriching the U.S. for enough years to obtain U.S. citizenship (FCC filings)). If nobody can be fired then what’s the incentive to perform basic due diligence?

Maybe I am out of step with the rest of humanity. For example, I would have imprisoned the Theranos Board, its attorneys, and anyone who invested other people’s money in Theranos rather than prosecuting and imprisoning Elizabeth Holmes. Believing that a Stanford dropout knew stuff that all of Europe’s PhD chemists didn’t know is criminal-level idiocy in my opinion! I would have sent Elizabeth Holmes out on a speaking tour (not a Hillary-style “listening tour”) where she could tell venture capitalists and money managers that sometimes credentials actually do matter.

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Growth on food stamp spending vs. growth in immigration

by philg

I hope that none of the loyal readers of this blog went hungry yesterday.

Today is the 35th anniversary of the EBT system for food stamp benefits (later, “SNAP”). The Mickey Leland Memorial Domestic Hunger Relief Act was signed on November 28, 1990. Let’s have a look at inflation-adjusted spending on taxpayer-funded food:

We’re spending roughly 14X what we spent in 1970. What else has grown dramatically since 1970? The number of foreign-born people living in the U.S. is about 5.5X:

Correlation can’t be causation here, of course, because we’re informed that low-skill migration makes America rich and the SNAP data suggest that the number of poor people in the U.S. has grown dramatically, from 17 million beneficiaries in 2000 to 42 million in 2025 (see Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today).

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Some progress toward Navajo/Chilean prices for our National Parks

by philg

Loyal readers may recall What if our National Parks charged Navajo prices? (2023)

$100 per person per day is the “Navajo rate” for what could reasonably be charged … the Chileans charge foreigners $35 per adult to visit their signature national park for one day. Even at Chilean prices it would seem that the NPS could easily be self-funded.

“Department of the Interior Announces Modernized, More Affordable National Park Access” (yesterday):

Beginning Jan. 1, 2026, the Annual Pass will cost $80 for U.S. residents and $250 for nonresidents, ensuring that American taxpayers who already support the National Park System receive the greatest benefit. Nonresidents without an annual pass will pay a $100 per person fee to enter 11 of the most visited national parks, in addition to the standard entrance fee.

Orwell fans will appreciate the contrast between headline (“more affordable”) and body (“$100 per person extra”). Also, nobody questions that “American taxpayers [SHOULD] already support the National Park System”. Why does a working class American who can’t afford the epic costs of airline tickets, rental car, hotels, etc. have to pay taxes to subsidize rich people from around the world who can afford the $1,200/day cost of a hotel-based family National Parks trip? (I estimated $1,000/day in 2023, but airline ticket, restaurant, and hotel prices have gone up significantly since then.) Separately, if the NPS funds itself via entry fees it won’t have to turn people away during the inevitable government shutdowns.

I can’t understand how the new park entry pricing system will work. Americans aren’t required to carry passports. Tens of millions of residents of the U.S. have no documents at all (22 million as of 2016, according to Yale). How is a gate agent at a National Park supposed to determine if a visitor is a U.S. resident? We’re informed that it is racist to demand ID for voting. Could a National Park demand to see a state-issued driver’s license or other ID before offering the “resident discount” rate? We’re informed by CNN that “Outdoor recreation has historically excluded people of color” and “racist laws and customs kept Black Americans out of these parks”. Surely our government wouldn’t want to intensify the racism inherent in the racist National Parks by demanding ID from visitors of color?

Loosely related, a couple of photos from the Schoodic Peninsula, an often forgotten piece of Acadia National Park. As with the core portion of Acadia, the land was donated to the American People. The Rockefellers donated the island land and Schoodic was donated anonymously in 2015. This reminds me to note the tragedy of Bill Gates giving all of his money to Africa, which doesn’t seem to help average Africans (every year that the Gates Foundation has operated in Africa, the number of needy Africans has increased; maybe some rich people in Africa have gotten richer?). If Gates had to sell the Microsoft stock and pay capital gains before shipping the proceeds to Africa, the tax revenue would easily fund an additional national park. Alternatively, if he spent his money on unspoiled U.S. land he would easily be able to create five new national parks.

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Taxpayers must fund, but cannot enjoy, the Blue Angels

by philg

Today was when hundreds of thousands of taxpayers had expected to enjoy an air show.

“NAS Pensacola cancels annual Blue Angels air show because of government funding uncertainty” (Stars and Stripes):

Naval Air Station Pensacola canceled this year’s Blue Angels Homecoming Air Show due to uncertainty regarding government funding. Officials said the ongoing government shutdown, limited funding and the time needed to arrange for performers and necessary support contracts are key reasons for canceling the annual two-day event, according to a Facebook post by NAS Pensacola. The show was originally set for Nov. 14- 15 in Pensacola, Fla., and expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors.

Pensacola might be the best place to learn about the relationship between peasants and rulers in the U.S. See Two-year anniversary of National Naval Aviation Museum’s temporary coronapanic closure (2022) and “US government shutdown closes NAS Pensacola to the public, including aviation museum” (October 1, 2025) and “National Naval Aviation Museum to reopen to public” (AOPA, May 4, 2023):

Access to Naval Air Station Pensacola, home of the museum as well as the Pensacola Lighthouse and Maritime Museum, and Fort Barrancas, had been restricted to Department of Defense cardholders since December 6, 2019, when a terrorist opened fire at the military base, killing three and wounding eight.

Wokipedia:

On the morning of December 6, 2019, a terrorist attack occurred at Naval Air Station Pensacola in Pensacola, Florida. The assailant killed three men and injured eight others. The shooter was killed by Escambia County sheriff deputies after they arrived at the scene. He was identified as Mohammed Saeed Alshamrani, an Air Force aviation student from Saudi Arabia. … On January 13, 2020, the Department of Justice said they had officially classified the incident as an act of terrorism, motivated by “jihadist ideology.”

On February 2, 2020, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claimed responsibility for the shooting. In an audio recording, emir of the Yemen-based group Qasim al-Raymi said they directed Alshamrani to carry out the attack. On May 18, 2020, the FBI corroborated the claims.

In response to the domestic jihad, the government excluded taxpayers from the museum for about 3.5 years and then opened the border for any other jihadi who might want to settle permanently in the U.S., e.g., “Nasir Ahmad Tawhedi, an Afghan national who entered the US on September 9, 2021, via humanitarian parole (later applying for a Special Immigrant Visa). In October 2024, he was arrested in Oklahoma City for plotting an ISIS-inspired Election Day mass shooting attack targeting large gatherings. Tawhedi purchased AK-47 rifles and ammunition from undercover FBI agents, communicated with an ISIS facilitator, and planned to die as a martyr. He pleaded guilty in June 2025 to conspiring to provide material support to ISIS and attempting to acquire firearms for a terrorism offense” (Grok).

One of my photos of the Blue Angels from the Reno Air Races 2016 (the races themselves were shut down by “the Reno-Tahoe Airport Authority citing regional growth and safety concerns” (source)):

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The government is required to pay Americans who don’t work (SNAP) and forbidden to pay Americans who do work (air traffic controllers)

by philg

A judge appointed by Barack Obama ordered the federal government to pay Americans who don’t work (state-sponsored PBS), i.e., those who receive SNAP (“food stamps”). At the same time, we’re informed that it is illegal for the federal government to pay Americans who do work (air traffic controllers who drew the short draw and are required to work every day for the same delayed paycheck that government workers who are on vacation will receive).

Could the Founding Fathers have imagined a day when people who don’t work for the federal government and who mostly don’t work at all (see “The Role of Full-Time and Part-Time Work in SNAP” from AEI, 2023) have a superior claim on the fruits of taxpayer toil than do people who actually work for the federal government?

Separately, I’m pleased to see that the answer to Why won’t rich states fund SNAP and other welfare programs during the federal shutdown? is “some will”! Connecticut’s governor says that he will step in with other people’s money (from his taxpayers/subjects) and pay the SNAP royalty with state funds:

It is tough for me to understand why SNAP is a federal program, actually. Don’t state and local governments have a better idea of who might be hungry in their corners of the U.S.? And of what food costs in their corners of the U.S.? Also, the farther away from the average taxpayer these decisions are being made the less personal satisfaction a taxpayer can take in helping his nonworking brothers, sisters, and binary resisters (see Immigration kills pride in paying income tax?). Think of the righteous satisfaction that will now be available to the rich taxpayers of Connecticut (the 10th richest state).

Given that the FAA is primarily funded by user fees, i.e., taxes on airline ticket and on fuel purchased from Bill Gates to fuel private jets, why can’t it keep paying air traffic controllers from these fees, in the same way that that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office continues to pay patent examiners? ChatGPT explains:

1. Different legal frameworks for how “fees” are held and spent

🏛️ USPTO — Fees go into a revolving fund that stays available

  • The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office operates under a Permanent Appropriation — the Patent and Trademark Office Revolving Fund (31 U.S.C. § 42).
  • Fees collected from patent and trademark applicants do not go to the Treasury’s general fund. They are kept in the USPTO’s own account and are “available until expended.”
  • That means USPTO has multi-year, no-year spending authority: it can use fee revenue (and any surplus) during a lapse in appropriations.
  • As a result, the USPTO can continue operations — including paying employees — even when Congress hasn’t passed a new budget, as long as its revolving fund has sufficient balances.

🛫 FAA — Ticket and fuel taxes go into a trust fund, but still need appropriations

  • Airline ticket taxes, fuel excise taxes, and other aviation fees are deposited into the Airport and Airway Trust Fund (AATF), established by 26 U.S.C. § 9502.
  • Crucially, those funds are not automatically available for expenditure.
  • Congress must appropriate money out of the trust fund every year to specific FAA accounts (Operations, Facilities & Equipment, etc.).
  • When there’s a lapse in appropriations (a shutdown), FAA legally cannot obligate or spend AATF money — even though the Treasury is still collecting ticket taxes daily.

2. Anti-Deficiency Act — the key legal barrier

  • Under the Anti-Deficiency Act (31 U.S.C. § 1341), federal employees can’t volunteer or be paid without an active appropriation unless they’re performing “excepted” duties (like safety-of-life).
  • Air traffic controllers are “excepted” — so they must report to work — but cannot be paid until Congress authorizes the expenditure.
  • The FAA’s hands are tied: even though tax revenue is flowing into the AATF, no one has authority to draw from it.

Maybe we need a new law that says that the FAA can draw on the Airport and Airway Trust Fund to fund its operations any time that there is a shutdown?

Related:

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Why won’t airlines give interest-free loans to air traffic controllers who are working without pay with pay

by philg

Due to the government shut down, air traffic controllers who are 100 percent guaranteed by law to be paid for 100 percent of hours worked are calling in sick so that they don’t have to “work without pay with (delayed) pay”. Now the FAA is cutting back on total volume so as to maintain safety with a reduced number of controllers who show up (CNBC):

Note the misleading statement about “gone unpaid since the shutdown began”. That would be like saying that a worker who has paid monthly has “gone unpaid since the start of the month”.

Cutting flights will cost the airlines a fortune due to the need to reschedule crews, passengers, aircraft, etc. Maybe a 6:00 am flight is only half full, but if it is cut the crew and plane won’t be where they need to be to operate a 9:00 am flight.

What if the airlines got together and offered interest-free loans to every controller, secured by the massive payday that all government workers, those who showed up and those who didn’t (the lucky “nonessential” ones and also the fake-sick ones), will receive as soon as Congress settles its differences? It could be done through the federal government, even. The airlines give the money to the Feds. The Feds issue paychecks as usual. The Feds then reimburse the airlines when the government reopens. Alternatively, the airlines could make the loans privately and directly to ATC employees.

Related:

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Number of Americans dependent on food stamps has been reduced from 17 million in 2000 to only 42 million today

by philg

Josh Hawley, a senator who calls himself a “Republican”, in the New York Times:

Millions of Americans rely on food assistance just to get by. The program often known as food stamps — officially it’s now called the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP — is a lifeline that permits the needy to purchase basic food items at the grocery store. Last year, SNAP enrollees hit about 42 million. That’s over 12 percent of the American population.

We’re informed that low-skill migrants make America rich. America has never been richer in migrants (CIS):

We’re informed that government spending on poverty relief reduces the number of poor people. The federal government spends more than $100 billion per year of workers’ (chumps’) tax dollars on SNAP. How much larger was the group of helpless government-dependent Americans 25 years ago before the most recent $trillions had been spent on SNAP? According to the USDA, the number of food stamp-dependent Americans in 2000 was… 17 million:

In other words, in the past 25 years the number of Americans who’ve become dependent on food welfare exceeds the population of Taiwan (23 million), where all of the world’s highest-tech integrated circuits and bicycles are made. The Google says that while we managed to grow our food-welfare-dependent population by more than 2X, TSMC grew its market value from $40 billion to over $1 trillion.

(Note that the 42 million Americans who are enrolled in SNAP/EBT shouldn’t be taken as an estimate of the number of Americans receiving what used to be called “welfare”. There are about 78 million Americans currently on Medicaid, for example. Maybe the discrepancy is that a multi-member welfare household shows up just once for SNAP and multiple times for Medicaid? Or some people getting taxpayer-funded food are getting it via programs with other names (see chart below)?)

Inflation-adjusted spending seems to have grown by about 14X since 1970 (USDA):

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