The Colorado Supreme Court, all of whose members “were appointed by Democratic governors”, has voted for protect our democracy by restricting the group of candidates from which Coloradans can choose in the 2024 Presidential elections.
Although I’m sure that this was well-intentioned, could the result be to threaten our democracy instead? I continue to reject the poll numbers that suggest that Donald Trump is a stronger candidate than Nikki Haley (my favorite Republican for the past few years, though that is arguably like being a dwarf among midgets) or Ron DeSantis (a great governor who needs a softer and more optimistic tone if he’s going to go higher, in my opinion). If Trump is banished from politics by an impartial group of 7 Democrat appointees, mightn’t that actually help democracy-ending Republicans by eliminating a candidate who would lose a general election?
What do people read in Denver? I visited the Tattered Cover, an old-school downtown bookstore, to find out. “For the sisters, misters, and binary resisters”:
Harvard’s Widener Library has been locked down for more than 100 years–longer than lockdowns were deemed necessary by Science. The titanic building was opened in 1915, just three years after the sinking of the RMS Titanic activated Harry Elkins Widener’s will. Most of the library was closed to undergraduates for most of its life. Since they weren’t researchers, why did they need to poke around in the stacks? Male undergraduates were welcome to use Lamont Library and females (Radcliffe students) had their own library.
Respectful tourists have always been strictly barred from the library, as far as I’m aware. Harvard teaches that no human is illegal at the border, but nobody can get anywhere near Widener without a Harvard ID.
Thanks to the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”), we can now see the inside of Widener in the Wall Street Journal (by a U.S. senator from Alaska):
When I walked upstairs to the famous Widener Reading Room, I couldn’t believe my eyes. Nearly every student in the packed room was wearing a kaffiyeh. Fliers attached to their individual laptops, as well as affixed to some of the lamps in the reading room, read: “No Normalcy During Genocide—Justice for Palestine.” A young woman handed the fliers to all who entered. A large banner spread across one end of the room stated in blazing blood-red letters, “Stop the Genocide in Gaza.”
Curious about what was going on, I was soon in a cordial discussion with two of the organizers of this anti-Israel protest inside of one the world’s great libraries—not outside in Harvard Yard, where such protests belong. They told me they were from Saudi Arabia and the West Bank. I told them I was a U.S. senator who had recently returned from a bipartisan Senate trip to Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I mentioned the meetings I had. I expressed my condolences when they told me their relatives had been killed by Israeli military action in Gaza.
One then asked whether I supported a cease-fire in Gaza. I said I didn’t, because I strongly believe Israel had the right both to defend itself and to destroy Hamas given the horrendous attacks it perpetrated against Israeli civilians on Oct. 7.
Their tone immediately changed. “You’re a murderer,” one said. “You support genocide,” said the other.
They repeated their outrageous charges. I tried to debate them, noting the Israel Defense Forces don’t target civilians, and that the only group attempting to carry out genocide is Hamas. But civil debate with these women was pointless. As I was leaving Widener Library, they pulled out their iPhones and continued taunting: “Do you support genocide? Do you support genocide?” The Harvard Palestine Solidarity Committee posted some of this exchange on Instagram.
If students were handing out fliers and hanging large banners in the Widener Library Reading Room denouncing, say, affirmative action or NCAA rules allowing men to compete in women’s swim meets, Harvard leaders would shut them down in a minute. But an anti-Israel protest by an antisemitic group, commandeering the entire Widener Reading Room during finals? No problem.
Here’s the church web site as of September 25, 2023:
Who can decode the symbols on the “Community Pride Worship” banner above?
I can’t find any post-imprisonment media stories about Adolfo Martinez. He has been erased, it seems. He was 30 years old when he was imprisoned and will be 46, almost ready to retire on SSDI, when he gets out.
Tara Tarawneh — a 2020 graduate of King’s Academy in Madaba, Jordan — was arrested Nov. 4 for allegedly stealing an Israeli flag from the front of a Campus Apartments house near the Ivy League campus, The Daily Pennsylvanian reported last week.
Tarawneh gave a hate-filled speech at a Philadelphia rally last month, with video of her addressing the pro-Palestinian crowd going viral, … “I remember feelings so empowered and happy, so confident that victory was near and so tangible,” she tells a crowd of the monstrous Oct. 7 attack. “I want all of you to hold that feeling in your hearts. Never let go of it. Channel it through every action you take. Bring it to the streets.”
Mx. Tarawneh could reasonably have expected an award for his/her/zir/their actions (the current gender ID of a college student today can never be assumed). A 2019 tale from NYU:
As soon as the [Israel Independence Day celebration] started, an anti-Zionist student rushed to the front of the protest line, held up the Israeli flag, lit it on fire, and threw it to the ground where it continued to burn. Adela [the Jewess] told her friends to ignore him, sing “Hatikvah” and move on.
Suddenly, a student protestor grabbed a microphone from a Jewish student, yelled “Free Palestine!” and waved his hands in the air. More protestors took the 10-foot Israeli flag, shredded it, and hung it from lamp posts and trees. Two protestors were arrested by NYPD and charged with assault, reckless endangerment, and property theft and damage.
Soon after, Adela, who was also a senator for the NYU student government, met with the administration to tell them that a line had been crossed and it was time to act.
What did NYU instead? They gave the anti-Israel hate group the President’s Service Award – the highest honor a student group can receive.
Related:
“Man gets 10 years for fatally stabbing Sioux City roommate” (Des Moines Register, also in the fall of 2019): 39-year-old Elmi Said was sentenced Friday. He’d been charged with second-degree murder for the Oct. 28, 2018, slaying of 40-year-old Guled Nur. … Said is also known as Abdiqadar Sharif.
“Iowa man in face-mask fight sentenced to 10 years in prison” (2021): Police and court records indicate Shane Michael, 42, went to the Vision 4 Less eyewear store on Merle Hay Road in Des Moines on Nov. 11 of last year. While there, Michael was wearing his face mask pulled down slightly, leaving his nose exposed.
“Driver sentenced to 2 years probation in April crash that killed East High School student” (2022): The driver involved in a crash that killed a 14-year-old East High School student has been sentenced to two years probation. Des Moines police said Terra Flipping struck 14-year-old Ema Cardenas with her car on April 28, 2022. She drove away following the crash before and was arrested that same day.
Unaffordable rents are changing low-income life, blighting the prospects of not only the poor but also growing shares of the lower middle class after decades in which rent increases have outpaced income growth.
Nearly two-thirds of households in the bottom 20 percent of incomes face “severe cost burdens,” meaning they pay more than half of their income for rent and utilities, according to the Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies.
Among working-class renters — the 20 percent of people in the next level up the income scale — the share with severe burdens has nearly tripled in two decades to 17 percent.
In October 2023, the CPS shows that 15 percent of the U.S. population is now foreign-born — higher than any U.S. government survey or census has ever recorded.
The 49.5 million foreign-born residents (legal and illegal) in October 2023 is also a new record high.
I question the calculation above because it uses what is likely a flawed methodology for counting undocumented immigrants (hatefully referred to as “illegal”). I think that the 49.5 million immigrants depicted above include an estimated 12.3 million undocumented immigrants. This Yale study says that 10 years ago were were hosting approximately 22 million of the undocumented, but the error bars were substantial. Via the Yale methodology, the correct number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. would be roughly 30 million and the total number of immigrants would be close to 70 million, not 49.5 million.
We have to scroll through about 20 screens to read the entire NYT article. The reporter is described as having “written extensively about poverty, class, and immigration”. Yet neither immigration or population growth is considered in the article, even long enough to be dismissed, as a potential factor in the high rent.
An annual head count, conducted in January, found the homeless population had increased by more than 70,000 people, or 12 percent. That is the single largest one-year jump since the Department of Housing and Urban Development began collecting data in 2007, and the increase affected many different segments of the population.
By the government’s count, 653,104 people in the United States were homeless in January.
“The most significant causes are the shortage of affordable homes and the high cost of housing,” said Jeff Olivet, head of the United States Interagency Council on Homelessness.
But some researchers argued that much of the rise stemmed from the surging numbers of migrants entering the United States, noting a sharp growth in homelessness in the most affected cities, including New York, Denver, and Chicago.
“To me, the story is the migrant crisis,” said Dennis Culhane, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania who has long served as an adviser to the federal government’s annual count. “Even without the migrant crisis we would have seen some increase, but certainly not to this extent.”
Homelessness grew among every group the federal government tracks. It rose among individuals and families with children. It rose among the young and the old. It rose among the chronically homeless and those entering the system for the first time.
It also rose among veterans, the group that in recent years had experienced the sharpest declines, after a significant expansion of federal aid.
I am stunned that migrants got a cameo in the NYT!
As the safety net has expanded over the past generation, the food stamp rolls have doubled, Medicaid enrollment has tripled and payments from the earned-income tax credit have nearly quadrupled.
But one major form of aid has grown more scarce.
After decades of rising rents, housing assistance for the poorest tenants has fallen to the lowest level in nearly a quarter-century. The three main federal programs for the neediest renters — public housing, Section 8, and Housing Choice Vouchers — serve 287,000 fewer households than they did at their peak in 2004, a new analysis shows. That is a 6 percent drop, while the number of eligible households without aid grew by about a quarter, to 15 million.
The first paragraph is interesting. From the NYT’s perspective, it is great news that 2-3X as many Americans are welfare-dependent. There is, certainly, no possibility that we could run out of other people’s money.
In the past 40 years, entitlements have grown 15 times as fast as discretionary programs outside of defense, Robert Greenstein of the Brookings Institution has found. “The fact that housing aid is discretionary has really hindered its growth,” he said.
More than 19 million households qualify for rental aid by having “very low incomes”— half the local median or less — but only 4.3 million get help. (In Charleston, a very low income for a family of four is less than about $49,000.)
Loyal readers will be familiar with my inability to understand how we can support this kind of inequality. We take 19 million households, all more or less similar in terms of how poor they are and how much effort they put into working. We select 4 million of them to get free housing and tell 15 million to go pound sound (or crash at a relative’s apartment). If housing is a human right, why wouldn’t we give free houses to all 19 million? If housing is not a human right, why do we give free houses to 4 million households?
At NYC prices, the 2.5-mile tunnel network would have cost nearly $9 billion to construct and we can be pretty sure that the Islamic Resistance Movement (“Hamas”) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ) did not spend anywhere near that much. This part of the video (made by Hamas) may show construction techniques:
Another idea for saving money and improving performance: hire Egyptians to guard the U.S. border. There are plenty of people who’d like to leave Gaza right now, I’m sure, yet the Egyptians have managed to keep them from entering Egypt via a combination of fence/wall and personnel. The U.S. has a track record of demonstrated failure in border control (hassling international airline passengers whose passports were already checked twice on departure doesn’t count, in my view). Why not replace our border patrol with Egyptian contractors and let an Egyptian company build the non-wall wall that the Biden administration is building?
In a recent phone call regarding correct Christmas Card mailing addresses, a nurse friend in Boston told me that she’s moonlighting providing anesthesia at an abortion care clinic. Anesthesia is required starting at about 10 weeks of gestation and the clinic provides abortion care to pregnant people who are up to 24 weeks pregnant. She said that they are especially passionate about providing abortion care to pregnant people who’ve come from states where abortion care is illegal or unavailable in practice at the 24-week mark.
Who decides how long the pregnant person has been a pregnant person? “That’s done with a combination of ultrasound looking at bone sizes and also asking the patient about the date of the last period.” In other words, depending on what the ultrasound shows, the clinic might refuse to provide abortion care to a pregnant person who has been pregnant for only 23 weeks or, if the customer gives a later-than-reality last-period date, to a pregnant person who has been pregnant for more than 24 weeks, which is still perfectly legal in Maskachusetts:
(Note the “mental health” judgment item.)
What’s the revenue picture for the clinic? “Prices start at $600,” she replied. What about for abortion care at 23.99 weeks? “I think it is about $3,500.”
What’s her daughter up to? I learned about various biomedical internships for the college undergrad. “She wants to go to medical school and become an ob-gyn.” I told my nurse friend about our neighbor who does IVF and who tells people if their insurance won’t cover the astronomical cost to get a job at Starbucks where they’ll be immediate covered. “Oh, my daughter wants to work on the other side of O.B. She wants to work in an abortion clinic where women [hateful term quoted; her language, not mine] come from out of state if they can’t get abortions in their own state.”
The ‘Sons of Liberty’ were essentially the henchmen of the rich smuggler-barons who were faced with ruin
At 6:30 p.m. on Thursday December 16, 1773, a group of between 100 and 150 Americans raided three East India Company merchantmen moored in Boston and threw 92,000 lb of tea (worth $1.7 million in today’s terms) into the harbor. A central part of the American founding story, the 250th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party is being commemorated this month as a key moment when patriotic Americans fought back against the greedy British and their oppressive taxation policies that forced up prices on commodities such as tea, which in turn led to the American Revolution.
Far from increasing the price for American consumers, the taxed East India tea was going to be sold for about half the $1 that they were then paying for a pound of tea. The only people who were going to lose out were the smuggler-barons of Boston, New York and Pennsylvania who employed the “Patriots” who attacked the vessels. As the historian Charles Arnold-Baker has pointed out, “The Boston Tea Party was essentially a private operation for the benefit of racketeers,” rather than the action of selfless citizens.
When the first of the three ships carrying tea arrived at Boston harbor on November 28, 1773, the merchant-smugglers had no trouble in whipping up a mob, largely made up of their own employees, to prevent the tea being offloaded, which by law had to happen within twenty days of docking. The duty had to be paid on offloading, otherwise customs had the right to seize it. If that happened it would have to be sold on the quayside for knockdown prices, and the Boston merchant-smugglers would have lost the lucrative tea part of their business. So the next day they called a mass meeting of the so-called Sons of Liberty, demanding that the tea be sent back to England without the tax being paid.
Where do Elizabeth Warren and Justin Trudeau come into the story?
In the highly coordinated assault on December 16, three well-organized teams, dressed as Mohawk Native Americans and using soot for “blackface” in order to increase deniability in court, raided the ships, hatcheted open the 342 chests of tea and threw it overboard, all in under two hours. The efficiency of the operation points to it having been organized in advance by the Boston merchant-smugglers, rather than being a popular uprising of the outraged citizenry, as the American founding myth claims.
The articles asks a big question:
The Boston Tea Party was the spark that ignited the American Revolution. But far from being a spontaneous uprising of ordinary Americans angry at high taxes and prices, as it has been portrayed for a quarter of a millennium, it was, in fact, a well-organized assault by smuggler-barons and their henchmen against a government attempt to halve the price of one of New England’s major commodities. One wonders what would have happened if only Governor Hutchinson had put an adequate armed guard on the ships.
Given the enormous potential for financial gain of getting around the Royal Proclamation of 1763, which limited how much land the evil white European settlers could steal from the noble indigenous tribes, I don’t think a failure to have a Tea Party would have changed the course of history, as the article suggests.
Illustration of the inflation-free economy that we’ve been able to build under self-governance:
…. because he has experience with running a government at a structural deficit, something that states are theoretically not allowed to do.
California has been in the news lately for its forecast $68 billion budget deficit, about 30 percent of total spending by the state government and about $7,000 per significant taxpayer (in just one year) if we assume that only about 10 million Californians are earning enough to live an unsubsidized life. The report that is the basis for these media stories has a more interesting figure, though:
Like the federal government, the California state government is set up to spend more than it collects in tax revenue. California can’t print money the way that the Feds do. I’m wondering what their theory is for how they can run deficits indefinitely. Do they believe that the U.S. is in a huge slump right now and better economic times are around the corner once another 10 or 20 million undocumented cross the border? And that migrant-fueled economic boom will increase tax revenue to move the state back into surplus? In the previous version of this report, the analysts said that the budget had to be balanced every year (but reserves can still be spent to allow a deficit?):
What’s the near-term solution that the legislature’s analysts propose? Cutting spending on education! I can’t see a proposed long-term solution in these documents, though.
Oh yes, let’s also look at how good the best and brightest humans are at economic prophecy. The previous year’s report forecast a deficit for 2024-5… of about $17 billion.
An Atlanta woman pleaded guilty to stealing more than $4 million from Facebook while she was an executive at the company.
Barbara Furlow-Smiles who worked as a lead strategist, global head of employee resource groups and diversity engagement at Facebook, Inc., now known as Meta, from about January 2017 to September 2021 according to U.S. Attorney Northern District of Georgia Ryan K. Buchanan’s Office.
“This defendant abused a position of trust as a global diversity executive for Facebook to defraud the company of millions of dollars, ignoring the insidious consequences of undermining the importance of her DEI mission,” said Buchanan in a statement.
That last paragraph is my favorite. The U.S. government employee implies that the mission of DEI, despite its having been found unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, is sacred.
The other interesting aspect is that she stole $4 million via expense account fraud. Where can the rest of us get an expense account big enough that $1 million per year in fraud isn’t detected for more than 4 years?
