The Artemis rocket was supposed to be launched right now (3rd attempt), but was once again subjected to abortion care. What’s the principal reason given for the abortion care? “to protect our employees”:
Thanks to our partners at @NOAA, @SpaceForceDoD, & @NHC_Atlantic and their high-quality forecasting, we're standing down from our Sept 27 #Artemis launch attempt. To protect our employees and the integrated stack, we will begin configuring the vehicle to roll back. (1/2) pic.twitter.com/gcrNRpoyts
The decision allows time for employees to address the needs of their families
I.e., employees who live and work on Florida’s east coast have to address the needs of their families who live on Florida’s east coast… because a(n admittedly potentially severe) hurricane is forecast to hit Florida’s west coast, more than 100 miles away, roughly 48 hours after the previously scheduled launch.
In case Minitrue deletes the above, a screen shot:
The government has been shoveling out cash to people who don’t do anything to earn it while at the same time trying to stanch the inflation bleeding with high interest rates charged to those who might have a productive purchase for money. Our best and brightest can’t figure out why inflation persists.
Aside from immigration, the big political question in the U.S. is what percentage of GDP should be consumed and directed by government. In the old days, the Federal government was limited to some extent by the Constitution, but today the only limit on the great things that the Federal government can do is our imagination.
The Federal Child Nutrition Program, administered by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA), is a federally-funded program designed to provide free meals to children in need. The USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service administers the program throughout the nation by distributing federal funds to state governments. In Minnesota, the Minnesota Department of Education (MDE) administers and oversees the Federal Child Nutrition Program. Meals funded by the Federal Child Nutrition Program are served by “sites.” Each site participating in the program must be sponsored by an authorized sponsoring organization. Sponsors must submit an application to MDE for each site. Sponsors are also responsible for monitoring each of their sites and preparing reimbursement claims for their sites. The USDA then provides MDE federal reimbursement funds on a per-meal basis. MDE provides those funds to the sponsoring agency who, in turn, pays the reimbursements to the sites under its sponsorship. The sponsoring agency retains 10 to 15 percent of the funds as an administrative fee.
As part of the charged scheme, Feeding Our Future employees recruited individuals and entities to open Federal Child Nutrition Program sites throughout the state of Minnesota. These sites, created and operated by the defendants and others, fraudulently claimed to be serving meals to thousands of children a day within just days or weeks of being formed. The defendants created dozens of shell companies to enroll in the program as Federal Child Nutrition Program sites. The defendants also created shell companies to receive and launder the proceeds of their fraudulent scheme.
To carry out the scheme, the defendants also created and submitted false documentation. They submitted fraudulent meal count sheets purporting to document the number of children and meals served at each site. The defendants submitted false invoices purporting to document the purchase of food to be served to children at the sites. The defendants also submitted fake attendance rosters purporting to list the names and ages of the children receiving meals at the sites each day. These rosters were fabricated and created using fake names. For example, one roster was created using names from a website called “www.listofrandomnames.com.” Because the program only reimbursed for meals served to children, other defendants used an Excel formula to insert a random age between seven and 17 into the age column of the rosters.
In total, Feeding Our Future opened more than 250 sites throughout the state of Minnesota and fraudulently obtained and disbursed more than $240 million in Federal Child Nutrition Program funds.
In other words, the Minnesota and Federal governments spent $250 million that Americans had paid in taxes without ever simply driving to any of the fictitious cafeteria/restaurant sites to see if there anyone was being fed.
Who is indicted?
Abdi Nur Salah
Abdiaziz Shafii Farah
Abdihakim Ali Ahmed
Abdikadir Ainanshe Mohamud
Abdikerm Abdelahi Eidleh
Abdimajid Mohamed Nur
Abdinasir Mahamed Abshir
Abdirahman Mohamud Ahmed
Abdiwahab Ahmed Mohamud
Abdiwahab Maalim Aftin
Abdul Abubakar Ali
Abdulkadir Nur Salah
Abdullahe Nur Jesow
Ahmed Abdullahi Ghedi
Ahmed Mohamed Artan
Ahmed Sharif Omar-Hashim
Ahmed Yasin Ali
Aimee Marie Bock
Anab Artan Awad
Asad Mohamed Abshir
Asha Jama
Ayan Jama
Bekam Addissu Merdassa
Fahad Nur
Farhiya Mohamud
Fartun Jama
Filsan Mumin Hassan
Guhaad Hashi Said
Hadith Yusuf Ahmed
Haji Osman Salad
Hamdi Hussein Omar
Hanna Marekegn
Hayat Mohamed Nur
Khadar Jigre Adan
Liban Yasin Alishire
Mahad Ibrahim
Mohamed Jama Ismail
Mukhtar Mohamed Shariff
Mustafa Jama
Qamar Ahmed Hassan
Sahra Mohamed Nur
Said Shafii Farah
Salim Ahmed Said
Sharmarke Issa
Sharmake Jama
Yusuf Bashir Ali
Zamzam Jama
The Federales note “An indictment is merely an allegation. All defendants are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law,” but we know that this isn’t true with respect to Donald Trump, whose guilt may be established even prior to any indictment.
Why couldn’t Federal or state officials, at some point during the three years in which payments were made, have made an in-person visit to see what was being served for $250 million in tax money? Weren’t they curious to check out the menu and food?
On May 1, 2022 I ordered my “free” (i.e., taxpayer-funded) COVID-19 tests. They arrived in today’s mail. They expire 22 days from now, on September 9, 2022.
For these to be useful, in other words, I need to copy the Pfizer CEO and add COVID-19 to my vaccinated-and-boosted body… within the next three weeks.
The coronavirus pandemic decimated Sri Lanka’s tourism earnings, …
The news is not all bad. Thanks to a robust program of lockdowns and quarantine, “In April 2020, Sri Lanka’s response to the pandemic was ranked as the 9th best in the world” (Wikipedia). (On the COVID-19 death rate leaderboard, Sri Lanka ended up with roughly double the death rate of continental neighbor India.)
What other nation shares Sri Lanka’s form of government-by-emergency?
America’s public health emergency plan for COVID-19 will continue for at least another 90 days, the Biden administration announced Wednesday.
The emergency plan has been in effect for over two years, during which time it has made it possible for people who may otherwise have lost health coverage to stay enrolled in Medicaid without the usual paperwork checks that would be required, even if their incomes had risen higher than that allowed, The New York Times reported. The program experienced record levels of enrollment during the pandemic.
A virus that attacks obese people continues to be an emergency. Aside from vaccinating 6-month-old babies against a disease that has killed 80-year-olds, how do our best minds of public health respond? Some snapshots taken at the local CVS on July 6 (“must buy 2”):
Related:
After 2.5 years of the best lockdowns, mask orders, and forced vaccinations that covidcrats can dream up… “The pandemic remains a global health emergency, the W.H.O. says.” (New York Times, July 12): With known coronavirus cases rising significantly across the globe, continued Omicron evolution and increased pressure on public health systems, the World Health Organization on Tuesday said that the pandemic remains a public health emergency. “The virus is running freely and countries are not effectively managing the disease burden based on their capacity, in terms of both hospitalization for acute cases and the expanding number of people with post-Covid-19 condition — often referred to as long Covid,” he said at a news conference in Geneva. … countries like the United States have been throwing out vaccine doses, while not even two-thirds of the world population is fully vaccinated
An obsessive focus on the vaccines that don’t prevent infection has resulted in a failure to apply the vaccines that do prevent infection… “A sharp global drop in childhood vaccinations during the pandemic threatens the lives of millions of children.” (NYT, July 14): Millions of children around the world, most of them in the poorest countries, missed some or all of their childhood vaccinations over the past two years because of a combination of conflicts, climate emergencies, misinformation campaigns, pandemic lockdowns and Covid vaccination efforts that diverted resources, according to a new analysis from Unicef, the United Nations agency that vaccinates half the world’s children, and the World Health Organization. It is the largest backslide in routine immunization in 30 years, the report said. Combined with rapidly rising rates of malnutrition, it has created conditions that could threaten the lives of millions of young children. “This is an emergency for children’s health — we have to think about the immediate stakes, the number of children that are going to die because of this,” said Lily Caprani, head of advocacy for Unicef. “It’s not in a few years’ time; it’s quite soon.”
Maskachusetts has been prevented by its constitution from imposing California-style progressive tax rates to fund its Progressive government goals. That could change in November if voters approve an amendment that would enable forcing the rich to pay their fair share.
Currently, Massachusetts is ranked among the top 15 states in percentage of residents’ income taken to fund state and local government (Tax Foundation). TX runs state/local gov. on 8.6% of what its residents earn. FL takes 9.1%. MA takes 11.5%. The champions include NY at 15.9% and CA at 13.5%. Government by Science (philosopher kings) is not cheap, apparently.
The amendment to the Massachusetts Constitution would have a particularly significant impact on retirees and small businesses. It would affect a long list of “income” categories, including salary, capital gains (on the sale of investments, homes, businesses and other assets), dividends, IRA and 401K distributions, interest, royalties, and commissions. In any one year, should the totality of these income streams exceed $1 million, the state would increase existing income taxes by 4 percent on the excess.
“Pass-through” companies such as partnerships, limited liability corporations, subchapter S corporations and sole proprietorships are taxed via individual returns. These mostly small businesses, nearly two thirds of which are subchapter S corporations, employed almost half of all private, for-profit employees in Massachusetts in 2019.
Passage of the constitutional amendment would force many pass-through businesses to pay the new 4 percent tax on top of the existing 5 percent income tax. Subchapter S corporations, which currently pay Massachusetts’ unique “stinger tax” of up to 3.9 percent, would face a total state tax burden of up to 12.9 percent, a rate higher than large corporations pay.
In addition, adopting the tax hike amendment would give Massachusetts the nation’s highest short-term capital gains tax (16 percent) and the highest long-term capital gains tax in New England.
… the tax hike amendment falls primarily on households selling a family home or business to finance retirement. Nearly half of all parties affected by the tax earn $1 million or more only once in a decade; over 60 percent do so only twice.
The tax would apply to more residents every year. To adjust for inflation, the tax amendment uses the Chained Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers, which has lagged well behind household income and wages in Massachusetts. State legislative salaries, on the other hand, are tied to median household income, which has risen much faster.
I’m not sure that the tax increase would be a bad idea. Due to the state’s 5% income tax and 16% estate tax, a successful person could already save $millions for his/her/zir/their children by moving to the vacation playground of Florida (see analysis below; kids will enjoy roughly 42 percent higher spending power if the parent moves 30 years prior to dying). We can therefore infer that most people who have chosen to stay in Maskachusetts don’t mind paying higher tax rates.
“Police Militarization Gave Us Uvalde” (Atlantic) is an interesting article asking related questions. The author has experience both in the military and in the police.
… with the sanction of the courts, departments have reworked their tactics to define American communities as battle spaces, and citizens in them as potential enemies. We have for years told American police officers to regard every civilian encounter as potentially deadly, and that they must always be prepared to win that death match. This is not an exaggeration; there is extensive academic literature on the “danger imperative” as a cornerstone of police training. An entire industry of grifting ex-cops have made themselves rich training police departments in fear and loathing of civilians, quite literally telling officers that they must always have a plan to kill everyone they encounter.
Less than one-quarter of officers ever discharge their weapons a single time in their careers. Ambush killings of police have fallen by 90 percent over the past several decades. Labor statistics suggest that fatality rates for police (for all causes, not just in the line of duty) are far less than those in logging, commercial fishing, and trash collecting. This is not to say that police don’t face real dangers—they do, but the large majority of policing is routine, and the large majority of encounters with civilians are completely innocuous.
The goal of the military is to overwhelm enemies, regardless of whether any particular individual on the other side “deserves” to be overwhelmed. It seems clear that police should not approach fellow citizens, rights-bearers, with the same attitude. Yet a profession’s tools and tactics will not-so-subtly define its attitude and culture. When you repeatedly drill officers that everyone is out to kill them, some will shoot first and ask questions later—and not just the weaker or undertrained officers at the margin, either.
But in our ill-conceived attempt to refashion police into a cadet branch of the military, we have somehow managed to get the worst of both worlds. We have trained a generation of officers that being casually brutal in everyday encounters is acceptable, but these same officers show a disturbing tendency to fall back on jargon about “battlespace management” and “encounter tempo” to explain a slow reaction in the rare circumstance that really does require a rapid, all-out response.
Food for thought and in the spirit of the engraved words below, “Good government demands the intelligent interest of every citizen.”
This post is not about the obviously false claim that someone whose name appears on a foundational paper regarding mRNA vaccines had something to do with the invention of mRNA vaccines. (See also Nature‘s history of mRNA vaccines, which devotes the first three paragraphs to the now-unpersoned Malone and mentions his name 27 times.) It is rather about the possibility that our family could get free Internet rather than handing over $780 per year to AT&T for gigabit fiber! Of course, I clicked on the ad (landing page):
If it’s “free” then I assume it is paid for by taxpayers. What does Comcast say about this taxpayer-funded program?
“a longer-term replacement for the Emergency Broadband Benefit.” So the temporary emergency government program (#BecauseCOVID) has morphed into a permanent entitlement. The FCC explains this:
It’s not the government taking $14 billion every year from one set of residents of the U.S. and using it to pay whatever Comcast and the, ahem, competitors are charging another set of residents. It is instead an “investment in broadband affordability,” implying that broadband prices for Americans who haven’t been organized enough to get into the welfare system might start coming down to European rates.
I will have to revise my standard description of what a low-skill or elderly/infirm immigrant to the U.S. can expect to receive from existing taxpayers. Before it was free housing, free health care (Medicaid), free food (SNAP/EBT), and free smartphone (Obamaphone). The FCC explains eligibility for this new permanent entitlement:
If you’re on SNAP or Medicaid, in other words, you’re seamlessly eligible for free home broadband connection. So now it is free housing, health care, food, smartphone, and broadband.
We’ve had runaway government borrowing and spending, plus money-printing by the Fed, for the past two years. Now we have runaway inflation, which has led to some eye-popping asset prices and a government eager to collect a share of these assets even before they’re sold (“unrealized gains”). See “Biden to Include Minimum Tax on Billionaires in Budget Proposal” (NYT, 3/26/2022):
The tax would require that American households worth more than $100 million pay a rate of at least 20 percent on their income as well as unrealized gains in the value of their liquid assets, such as stocks and bonds, which can accumulate value for years but are taxed only when they are sold.
Legal questions about such a tax also abound, particularly whether a tax on wealth — rather than income — is constitutional. If Congress approves a wealth tax, there has been speculation that wealthy Americans could mount a legal challenge to the effort.
Due to the threshold of $100 million in assets, I’m a huge supporter of this bill! (though I’m concerned that it won’t be long before either the threshold is reduced or $100 million is the price of a Diet Coke). But it makes me wonder about whether the whole framework of capital gains is Constitutional.
Let’s ignore the mechanics of taxing someone on gains that exist only on paper and just focus on traditional capital gains taxes on realized gains (i.e., money received after an asset sale). The government is mostly in charge of what happens to the value of money because the government can decide interest rates, money printing rates, and how much the government will borrow and spend. The Sixteenth Amendment gives the government the power to tax incomes:
The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.
But it isn’t income when an asset goes up hugely in nominal dollars because dollars have been devalued by the government’s actions. This has been mostly ignored in U.S. history because mostly inflation hasn’t been too extreme (though, of course, for long-held assets, the cumulative effect could still be dramatic). Consider a person who hits 70 and sells some stocks purchased in 1972 to fund retirement. Let’s suppose that these shares were purchased for $10,000 in 1972 and sold for $65,000 today. According to the government’s own CPI calculator, the investor suffered a loss, not a gain, on these shares (no income). Yet, if he/she/ze/they lives in California, more than $20,000 in tax could be owed (20 percent federal long-term capital gains, 3.8 percent Obamacare federal tax, 13.3 percent state tax).
How has the current system persisted for so long without a serious Constitutional challenge?
“Getting “Real” by Indexing Capital Gains for Inflation” (Tax Foundation, 3/6/2018): Inflation is low today, but that may not always be the case. Indexing provides important protection for all citizens, even those who have no capital gains, by reducing government’s ability and incentive to raise effective tax rates by inflating the currency.
[Daniela Jampel, who served as an assistant corporation counsel for the City] had publicly challenged the mayor at an unrelated event on LGBTQ issues — as [Mayor Eric] Adams stood in front of a podium banner that read, “Come to the city where you can say whatever you want.’’
“Three weeks ago, you told parents to trust you that you would unmask our toddlers,” Jampel told the mayor.
“You stood right here, and you said that the masks would come off April 4. That has not happened.”
In other words, she said whatever she wanted opposite a banner that said she could say whatever she wanted. Example signs from NBC:
What happened next?
Sources close to the matter said Jampel – a leading local critic of the toddler mask mandate and pandemic school closures – was informed by e-mail shortly after the presser that she was fired.
(Note that Jampel need only move to Florida to live in a society that conforms to her preferences. It is against state law for a public school system to shut down schools, order children to wear masks, etc. She could leave New York City to the folks who like it the way that it is is and come to a place where most people would agree with her regarding the best ways to protect 4-year-olds from a disease that kills 84-year-olds. (see Relocation to Florida for a family with school-age children for how Americans could be a lot happier if people were more mobile))
“The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States” (Human Rights Campaign): In an HRC Foundation analysis of nearly 7,000 full-time LGBTQ+ workers, median earnings were about $900 weekly, about 90% of the $1,001 median weekly wage a typical worker earns in the United States, as reported recently by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Put another way, LGBTQ+ workers earn about 90 cents for every dollar that the typical worker earns. LGBTQ+ people of color, transgender women and men and non-binary individuals earn even less when compared to the typical worker.
Note that if we combine the last two points we find that New York City is spending its taxpayers’ money to recruit additional lower-than-average income residents who will thus be eligible for a full range of means-tested welfare programs after arrival in NYC. And, if a transition is just beginning, for every valuable 2SLBGTQQIA+ community member who is persuaded to move, NY taxpayers will be forking out $100,000 to gender reassignment surgeons and therapists, via Medicaid, that would otherwise have been shouldered by working taxpayers in Florida. Nonetheless, NYC may find itself outbid by Palm Springs, California, which is offering guaranteed cash to members of the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community. See Guaranteed Income Pilot – DAP Health and California city to give universal income to transgender, nonbinary residents regardless of earnings | Fox News:
Transgender residents in Palm Springs, California are eligible to receive a UBI of up to $900 per month solely for identifying as transgender or nonbinary — no strings attached.
The new pilot program will have $200,000 set aside for allocation after a unanimous vote by the Palm Springs City Council last week.
Twenty transgender and nonbinary Palm Springs residents will receive the free money funded by the taxpayers for 18 months, with advocacy-based health center DAP Health and LGBT advocacy group Queer Works managing the program.
Not everyone in the 2SLGBTQQIA+ community is aligned on this one:
Palm Springs Mayor Lisa Middleton, who is transgender, pointed to the transcript from the city council’s March 24 meeting where she “expressed strong reservations in general to guaranteed income programs.”
Former San Diego City Councilman Carl DeMaio, a Republican who served as the first openly gay member of the city council, called the program “outrageous and discriminatory.”
“We’re completely opposed to guaranteed or universal basic income programs, because they ultimately cause inflation and raise the cost of living on everyone — they don’t work,” DeMaio said in a statement.
“But at least some of them have minimum income requirements to qualify, whereas this one is no-strings-attached ‘woke’ virtue signaling to the LGBT community in a way that is not only offensive but discriminatory,” he continued.
I personally disagree with Mx. DeMaio. If there is an income threshold necessary to qualify for free taxpayer cash then you’re pretty much guaranteeing that the recipient will limit his/her/zir/their working efforts so as to stay under this threshold. (See Fast-food economics in Massachusetts: Higher minimum wage leads to a shorter work week, not fewer people on welfare for how low-wage workers are smart enough to avoid working themselves out of means-tested entitlements.) If people are going to be paid for identifying as transgender or non-binary the money shouldn’t be conditional on them also refraining from serious work efforts.
