Yet again, a command economy is derailed by human greed

 

We've seen innumerable examples, from local, state and national governments all over the world, that human greed and malfeasance can undo any amount of good that might otherwise be achieved.  It looks like a fundamental element of the human condition.

It seems that the latest country to discover (yet again) the truth of that statement is China.

In late May Chinese leaders travelled to the Zhoushan National Oil Reserve and discovered the nation’s strategic oil reserves weren’t there. For over a year, the disruption of oil supplies from Venezuela and Iran had left Chinese oil reserves reduced. Despite that, government documents indicated that China still had 1.2 billion tons of oil reserves. That’s equivalent to 8,756,117,022 barrels.

China’s strategic oil reserve, to the surprise of the government officials who went to verify the reserves in May, was instead composed of water, sludge, various debris and overflow from nearby sewer lines.

. . .

What happened to Chinese oil? It was soon discovered that corrupt government officials and oil reserve personnel had sold the oil and pocketed the proceeds. The local buyers were often operators of small, locally owned refineries that turned the oil into commercial products that were sold throughout China. Most of these oil criminals then fled, often leaving China for sanctuary states that would welcome any affluent Chinese and their new wealth. The only winners were a few conniving Chinese and the Americans, who continued to dominate the global energy system.

. . .

The theft of China’s strategic oil reserves is only the latest of several recent awful discoveries of massive corruption impeding the ambition of its leader, President Xi, to conquer Taiwan. The last one concerned military corruption in building equipment to invade Taiwan, and was discovered in 2023. Missile fuel tanks were found to be filled with water, missile silo lids could not be opened, and the protective concrete missile silos themselves were so defective they might as well have been made of wood. The air force and navy lacked sufficient spare parts for even a week of operations against Taiwan and many aircraft and naval vessels were outright inoperable. This postponed the earliest possible date for the invasion of Taiwan from 2025 to 2027.

The non-existence of China’s strategic oil reserve will probably have the same effect ... There are at least major possibilities that a Chinese invasion of Taiwan has been postponed for another two years, to 2029, and perhaps indefinitely due to further discoveries of calamitous-scale corruption.

There's more at the link.

I've been unable to confirm this article from Strategy Page through independent sources.  Other reports at about the same time don't mention missing oil reserves - only that the reserves exist.  Is the situation as bad as Strategy Page believes?  I'm not sure . . . but the history of corruption in government enterprises that has come out of China over the past few decades would suggest that there's no smoke without fire.

If true, this might help to explain why China has not been extremely vocal in its reaction to developments spearheaded by the USA in Venezuela and Iran.  If it didn't have the reserves to allow it relative independence of action, that would certainly put a crimp in China's style.

Will we ever know the truth?  I suspect it'll be carefully censored and filed away.

Peter

More adventures in the medical world, and some light relief

 

You'll recall my adventures with medical bureaucracy last month.  My pain management specialist very kindly agreed to prescribe another myelogram for me.  The first appointment was canceled on the morning of the procedure by the hospital, because they "had the wrong paperwork" and couldn't proceed without correction.  Turns out the problem was one single word that had not been inserted into the relevant form:  and without that one single word, everything ground to a halt.  At any rate, the missing word was duly provided, and a new appointment was made.  This morning it's off I go to the hospital again for another lumbar puncture, a CT scan, and sundry X-rays.  Hopefully this will be enough to persuade the medical bureaucracy to let me proceed to the next step.

(Why is it that medical bureaucrats and departments can't talk to each other?  I've already electronically checked in to the hospital, and provided my co-payment, and confirmed date and time.  Despite that, I received no less than five e-mails, text messages and phone calls, all reminding me to be at the hospital on time, and do all the pre-procedure processing I've already done.  Do these people have nothing better to do but to waste their patients' time with all this duplication of effort?  And what does it add to our costs as patients to have to pay for it all?)

I'm thoroughly frustrated with the hospital before I even show up there.  To cheer me up, and spare you from listening to my complaints, here's some light relief from Stephan Pastis.  Click the image to be taken to a larger version at the "Pearls Before Swine" Web page.

And, to compare and contrast two of our largest states:

There.  A midweek humor break to relax me before getting poked, prodded and photographed, inside and out.

Peter

Quote of the day

 

From Theodore Dalrymple, writing in City Journal about the abysmal architecture of American embassies:

The new American embassy in Maputo (Mozambique) ... [has] a facade that looks as if a giant Parmesan cheese is expected to fall from the sky at any moment and will need grating as it lands.

The offending building (click the image for a larger view from the US State Department's Web facilities):

One can only cringe in sympathy with Mr. Dalrymple . . .

Peter

A military procurement nightmare: Britain's Typhoon fighter and its successor

 

In a long and very detailed article, Lewis Page argues that "Britain’s next-generation fighter jet is a disaster in the making".  He goes into detail on the background to the present project, and the aircraft that have preceded it in Royal Air Force service.  It's far too long an article to reproduce here, so I've selected as an example just one cost comparison between the current front-line aircraft of the US and UK air forces.

The Eurofighter Typhoon, as flown by the RAF, is the most expensive tactical aircraft ever built by the human race. When the last Tranche 1 planes are gone next year (disposed of with half their lifetime hours unused) the RAF will possess 107 aircraft.

Recent statements reveal that the size of an RAF front-line squadron has fallen from 12 to “up to 10” jets. Officials have recently congratulated themselves that they typically have “65 to 70” Typhoons “available” nowadays for the seven RAF front-line Typhoon squadrons that exist on paper.

Some more Typhoons are in the training and test units but it’s clear that others, probably more than 20, are in a long-term un-flyable condition: in deep maintenance, with parts robbed from them to get others flying, or both.

Each of the 107 Typhoons, according to the National Audit Office, cost well over £215m to obtain in 2011 money, or around $355m (£264m) if we use contemporary exchange rates.

By comparison, the undisputed, most powerful fighter jet in the world is the US Air Force’s F-22 Raptor. Only 183 Raptors were made in the end, as opposed to the 600-plus Eurofighters so far.

But despite this much shorter production run and the fact that it is an entire generation more advanced than a Typhoon, the acquisition cost of one Raptor to the US taxpayer was somewhat lower than the cost of one Typhoon to the UK taxpayer. The Raptor throws into stark relief the almost unbelievably bad value for money offered by the Typhoon.

In short, the Typhoon was a procurement disaster.

There's much more at the link.  Highly recommended reading for aviation and military enthusiasts.

The article helps us understand why military hardware has become so expensive.  The deadweight of bureaucratic and political control interfered so much with the Typhoon's development, and the lack of vision among military leaders in making it a single-purpose rather than a multi-role aircraft, effectively doomed it to operational irrelevance for much of its service life.  Furthermore, the astronomical costs of not just each aircraft, but spare parts to keep it flying, wasted so much of the Royal Air Force budget that funds were not available for different types of aircraft, or urgently needed upgrades.  (For example, for the past two decades almost every major frontline strike fighter has had AESA radar, offering vastly improved performance over older types:  but the RAF's Typhoons are only now beginning to get one - and, at that, only enough to fit to less than half the fleet.  Without it, if they had had to fight against other modern fighters, they would have been at a huge disadvantage.)

I suppose we could draw parallels between Britain's fighters and the US Navy's ships.  The USN has had so many problems developing new designs that it's had to scrap almost all of them as being too complex and/or too expensive, after its "experts" had spent years gold-plating them and adding every feature they could think of.  It's now been forced to bodge together a "frigate" that is basically a slightly more heavily armed Coast Guard cutter, because the much more sophisticated Constellation class frigates have had to be abandoned due to their design becoming bogged down in excessive complexity.  Will something similar happen to Britain's proposed new fighter aircraft?  I think there's a very good chance that it will.

China is producing new aircraft and ship designs in multiples every year, and building them by the dozens.  One hopes that both Britain and the USA will wake up to reality and start moving faster . . . but if the politicians insist on sticking their oar in, that's not very likely.  Can Secretary of War Hegseth cut through the entrenched bureaucracy and layers of control that have bedeviled US military design?  That remains to be seen.

Peter

Why we're getting poorer, and they're getting richer, all the time

 

That's the essence of a lengthy and very informative essay by Quoth The Raven.  Here are some extended excerpts.  They may look dauntingly long, but they're right on the money (you should pardon the expression) and are well worth reading.  If you're finding it hard to make ends meet, this is why.

The widening wealth inequality gap is the political third rail nobody in power truly ever wants to touch.

Politicians will scream at each other all day over taxes, healthcare, immigration, tariffs, student loans, climate policy, or whatever outrage is currently driving engagement on cable news and social media. But the second the conversation turns toward monetary policy, toward the machinery of money creation itself, the room suddenly gets very quiet.

That’s because monetary policy has quietly become the single most powerful force reshaping wealth distribution in modern America. And unlike the endless partisan theater surrounding fiscal policy, monetary intervention oddly enjoys remarkable bipartisan support.

Republicans and Democrats may pretend to be existential enemies on television, but when it comes to flooding the financial system with dollars, both parties reliably fall into line. And that support is precisely why this topic is politically radioactive: once people understand how the system works, the illusion of two competing economic ideologies starts to collapse. Republicans want less spending, Democrats want higher taxes…but both parties want the Fed to keep printing dollars.

. . .

Now we operate inside a permanently distorted financial system where trillions of dollars can be electronically created and injected into markets whenever instability appears. The market is no longer primarily driven by productivity or efficient allocation of capital. It is driven by liquidity. Price discovery has been replaced by intervention dependency and risk has been socialized while gains remain privatized.

And every time markets threaten to correct naturally, policymakers intervene to ensure asset prices do not fall far enough to inflict meaningful pain on the people who own the overwhelming majority of financial assets. And the consequences of this have been staggering.

While both parties bitch and moan about affordability, protecting the middle and lower class, and “equity”, one of the clearest signs of this Fed-created distortion is the explosive growth of the ultrawealthy class. According to The Wall Street Journal, there are now roughly 430,000 American households worth more than $30 million, including approximately 74,000 households worth over $100 million. The growth of these groups has dramatically outpaced overall population growth over the past several decades.

In other words, Fed policy, blessed by both political parties, is widening the wealth inequality gap both political parties claim to fighting against ... When it comes to purchasing power, we are literally taking from the poor, and giving to the rich.

. . .

Beneath the culture war circus exists a deeper bipartisan consensus: financial markets must remain inflated at all costs.

And the lower and middle class gets absolutely brutalized in this arrangement.

Historically, middle-class wealth accumulation depended on disciplined saving, stable employment, affordable housing, and gradual investment appreciation over time. But inflationary monetary regimes destroy the reliability of all of those pathways. Savings become punishment, cash becomes a melting ice cube, young people are forced into speculative assets (or outright becoming gambling addicts) simply to attempt to preserve purchasing power. Conservative investing gets punished while reckless leverage gets rewarded.

Entire generations now feel compelled to try and make quick money in markets not because they are greedy, but because monetary debasement has made traditional financial prudence nonviable. This creates an economy built less on productivity and innovation and more on asset inflation, debt expansion and outright speculation.

. . .

A market that cannot survive without permanent monetary life support is no longer a healthy market, it is a managed dependency system. A patient on hospice care. And every bailout pushes the reckoning further into the future while making the eventual consequences even worse.

There's more at the link.  It's a long article, but well worth reading in full.

My take-away from this article is that if every American took the time to read and understand it, we'd have a Second American Revolution almost overnight.  It's precisely because most Americans don't understand what is being done in their name by their political leaders (who are enriching themselves in the process, at our expense) that our current miserable monetary situation has been allowed to develop.  I fear that unless and until we kick out those responsible, it'll just go on until it collapses . . . but such a collapse would take us with it, and punish everybody, not just the guilty.

What can we do about it?  Elect a better class of politician, on both sides of the political divide.  Will we do that?  I fear too few of us care enough to make the attempt . . . and that's what our current politicians rely on to keep their place in the sun.

Peter

Adventures with medical bureaucracy

 

Last Friday I mentioned that my blog post that day would be abbreviated due to a medical appointment.  I duly attended it, and it accomplished what I wanted.  I asked about alternative neurosurgical practices, since I'm not happy with the one I've been using, and the doctor referred me to another neurosurgeon in Dallas for further investigation.  (It seems the problem is to decide precisely what surgery I need:  to fuse two or three more vertebrae in addition to the existing pair, or to remove the latter and encase my entire lumbar spine in a sort of metal cage to stabilize the whole area.  There appears to be serious disagreement over which approach would work best, so I've asked for a second opinion from a more professional professional, if you know what I mean.)

So far, so good . . . but then I called the new doctor's office to set up the appointment.  The conversation went something like this.

Me:  I've been referred to Dr. X for further investigation of my spine injury.  You should have been sent my medical history, copies of X-rays and myelograms, and all that stuff.

Doctor's nurse:  Let me check . . . Yes, we have those.  You'll have to get another myelogram, though, because the previous one was done more than six months ago.  Dr. X won't see you until the new results are available.

Me:  Er . . . this is a problem.  A myelogram is a very expensive and complex procedure.  I can't just ask for it as a private patient:  I have to be referred for it by a doctor.  However, if Dr. X won't see me, he can't issue the referral;  and my local general practitioner certainly can't do so, because it's a specialist procedure.  I can't ask for a referral from my previous neurosurgeons, because I'm moving on from them.  What now?

Doctor's nurse:  I'm afraid that's Dr. X's protocol.  He won't see you without an updated myelogram.

Me:  Well, his protocol has just run headlong into medical bureaucrats, and I'm pretty sure they're going to win.  You're asking me to do the impossible.

Doctor's nurse:  I'm sorry, but my hands are tied.  You're going to have to find some other way to get that myelogram.

Me:  Hangs up, bites tongue, bangs head against brick wall, etc.

I checked with my general practitioner, and sure enough, they can't refer me for a myelogram because it's a specialist procedure, outside their area of competence.  The neurosurgery practice that ordered the previous myelogram has no good reason to order another one.  After all, I'm going to see one of their competitors for a second opinion,  so they'll expect the new doctor to prescribe whatever tests he thinks are necessary.  They're not going to do it for him.

"Laugh!", they said.  "Things could be worse!"  So I did.  And they were.

Oh, well.  This, too, shall pass . . . I just need the administrative equivalent of an enema for the bureaucrats, to make sure it does!

Peter

The state and "Cheddarisation"

 

The word "Cheddarisation" threw me when I saw it in the title of an article at Off-Guardian, but having read it, it makes sense.

Once, Britain was a landscape of cheese. There were hundreds of distinct regional varieties, each rooted in a particular place and shaped by local conditions and practices.

These cheeses were not interchangeable. They reflected differences in soil, pasture, climate and animal breeds. Their characteristics shifted with the seasons. They were products of specific environments and the knowledge of those who worked within them. But that diversity has largely disappeared.

Today, most cheese available through mainstream supply chains is standardised. It is consistent in taste, texture and appearance, regardless of where it is produced. Variation has been minimised with predictability the defining feature.

The turning point came during the Second World War. Faced with the challenge of feeding a population under rationing, the British government intervened in food production through the Ministry of Food. One of its key decisions was to consolidate cheese-making into a single, standardised form: Cheddar.

The rationale was practical. Cheddar was durable, transportable and relatively straightforward to produce at scale. In wartime conditions, these qualities made it suitable for centralised distribution. Efficiency took precedence over diversity.

. . .

What occurred in the British dairy sector can be understood as an early example of a wider process: the replacement of complex, localised systems with simplified, standardised ones. For the purposes of clarity, this process might be described as cheddarisation.

Cheddarisation is not confined to cheese. It refers to a more general pattern in which diversity is reduced in favour of uniformity, and local variation is treated as an obstacle to efficiency. Systems are reorganised so that outputs can be standardised, scaled and controlled ... Once a system is simplified enough to be managed from a central desk, the people within that system lose their ability to act outside of it.

There's more at the link.

Off-Guardian offers a number of articles about what it calls "the anti-human agenda", of which the above article is one example.  Categories include:

War on Food

War on Money

Climate Change

Health Tyranny

There are many interesting discussions under each heading.  Recommended reading.

Peter

How many infractions? Let me count the ways...

 

From Bill Melugin on X:

DHS announces the ICE arrest of a Liberian illegal alien who they say was working as a Minnesota corrections officer while also being AWOL from the PA National Guard, all while masquerading as a U.S. citizen despite having no legal status in the U.S.

There's more at the link.

I'm tempted to call it American enterprise at its finest, except that there's nothing American about him.  I'd love to follow his paper trails in those various organizations, to see precisely how they all came to let him slip through the cracks.

Peter

Corruption at the top of the health care industry

 

Yesterday we looked at how vaccine manufacturers may be vulnerable to lawsuits, even perhaps criminal charges, following the publication of the Medicare billing database last weekend.  That's not the only example of potential high-level corruption coming out of the COVID debacle.

Eaton Rapids Joe reminds us:

Slowly, ever so slowly, it is starting to leak out that scientists and researchers knew back in 2020 before the vaccines were released that aspirin was the Covid super-drug. Yes, plain, old, garden-variety, low-dose aspirin.

If fact, they knew back in 2007 that aspirin was THE GO TO drug for SARS. SARS is also a corona virus and is a kissing-cousin to Covid-19. 

. . .

The "problem" is that aspirin is a commodity with very, very low profit margins. 

The other "problem" was that emergency certification of vaccines are not allowed if there are other approved therapies. Powerful people had patents for modified-RNA based vaccines. It was in their economic best-interest to squash alternative therapies. It is also likely that they enjoyed basking in the glory of being called "Savior".

This is one of the reasons why I have a very low level of trust in the Deep State. 

There's more at the link.  Recommended reading.

There's more to it than just aspirin.  The health authorities also cracked down heavily on the prescribing and dispensing of ivermectin (IVM) and hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) to treat COVID.  In fact, they tried to prevent them being distributed at all, withdrawing stocks and sequestering them - despite both drugs being proven, effective remedies for COVID-like diseases for many years.

As Eaton Rapids Joe points out, the problem was that emergency certification of COVID vaccines was only permissible if there were no other approved, effective treatments.  Given the money to be made from the vaccines, the solution was simple:  remove other effective treatments from the market.  That way, emergency certification could be (and was) given - and the vaccine manufacturers, health authorities, and other beneficiaries earned literally billions of dollars.  The fact that thousands died or suffered ongoing health problems from the vaccines bothered them not at all.

I knew about this at first hand, because I was born and raised in Africa, where IVM and HCQ have been in daily use by millions of people for decades.  The developers of IVM were awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine in 2015, and both it and HCQ are on the World Health Organization's Model List of Essential Medicines.  IVM is a remedy for many parasites and fungal infections, while HCQ was developed as an anti-malarial drug;  but both have proven effective against congestive diseases such as SARS or COVID.  In addition, HCQ has proven effective against certain forms of arthritis (I use it to treat spinal arthritis).

Don't be fooled by claims that neither has been proved to be effective against COVID.  That propaganda was hurriedly poured out in torrents by the medical industry during the COVID scare, because they didn't want to upset the money rolling in from their new vaccines.  I'll give you the clearest possible evidence that both worked.  Where are the reports of massive COVID infections and mortalities in Africa?  Even at the height of the scare, there were no such reports, because COVID never spread wildly in Africa.  Why not?  My opinion is that it's because so many Africans - millions of them - were already taking IVM and/or HCQ on a regular basis to treat common infections and diseases on that continent.  They had already built up a "pre-resistance" to COVID because of that, and so did not succumb to it.  Effectively, COVID was stopped before it could get a foothold.  That's my opinion, of course, but I know at first hand how effective those drugs were (and still are) in Africa.  I took them myself for many years.  If there's another explanation, let's hear it.  I'm waiting.

I still keep supplies of IVM and HCQ on hand, because they still work against a wide variety of congestive diseases, viruses, etc.  My wife and I have both felt the beginnings of the current flu bug, or whatever it is, during the past few weeks.  We have a simple solution:  the moment we feel the crud coming on, we take one tablet of IVM and one of HCQ right away, and then alternate them daily until the problem is past.  Neither of us developed full-blown crud, and neither of us felt (light) symptoms for more than 24-48 hours.  We've been doing that for a long time.  I know that "correlation is not causation", but after years of using both drugs in Africa, I'm in no doubt about how useful they are.

There you have it, friends.  If you can't get your hands on IVM or HCQ locally (and the US medical establishment is still pretty firmly against them, for obvious reasons) then I suggest you consider other means of doing so.  Some go to Mexico and patronize local pharmacies, who have no such reservations and don't even require prescriptions.  Some buy online from pharmacies in other countries, which is illegal under US law, so I'm not going to recommend you do that.  Of course not.  IVM can be had in veterinary form in this country (derided by the authorities as "horse dewormer" - but what horse dewormer has won a Nobel Prize?).  The horse dewormer version still works on humans.

Thanks to Eaton Rapids Joe for mentioning aspirin and COVID.  It's a worthwhile reminder.

Peter

Not just an open-source treasure hunt, but a COVID vaccine problem supersource

 

By now I'm sure readers are aware that last weekend, the Department of Health and Human Services released an open-source 11GB file containing every single Medicare claim from 2018 to 2024 - not individual patient diagnoses and private information, but every charge claimed against Medicare for every procedure by every provider.  It's a gold mine of information that may lead to literal gold mines for those who find evidence of fraud and abuse in the data.  As Jeff Childers pointed out:

This is clearly not just a DOGE project. It is a coordinated effort across the Trump Administration. For example, timed with the release of the data, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent announced a related new program. Not only have they open-sourced the research, but they have gamified it. Bessent said Treasury was setting up a website for people to report Medicare fraud— and they’ll get up to 30% of whatever’s fined and recovered.

If the $1 trillion fraud estimate is even half right, the government just turned fraud detection into the world’s largest treasure hunt. Some kid in a bedroom with a laptop, a chatbot, and a case of energy drinks might make more money this year than most hedge fund managers. Dog the Bounty Hunter: Fraud Edition is coming soon, to a laptop near you.

Social media quickly began lighting up across the board. Within hours of the data release, citizen analysts had started flagging facilities billing for physically impossible numbers of procedures, clinics with addresses at residential apartments diagnosing hundreds of children with autism per month, and at least one provider that seems to have performed more Medicaid services than there are actual humans in its zip code.

However, the biggest aspect of this data treasure trove might be the unveiling, at long last, of the problems caused by COVID vaccines.

While most folks were off and running hunting for fraud bounties, the covid warriors instantly saw the other, riper fruit hanging higher up in the HHS data’s branches ... And now they have AI to help crunch the numbers, build spreadsheets, put up websites, and suggest, “Would you like me to draft the lawsuit?”

Since the agency was birthed by progressive geniuses in the Carter Administration, HHS has diligently protected the privacy of Big Pharma by keeping a death-grip on Americans’ health data. Even though, during the exact same period, we got fatter by the minute, our health got worse and worse, and we spent more and more trillions on healthcare. It’s none of your business because privacy. Science! Trust the experts! Shut up!

Now, taking the corporate media, pharma, and the political establishment completely by surprise, the data is suddenly out there. The VAERS data looked awful, but they wriggled out of that trap by sneering that the adverse event-reporting system —the system they created— was unreliable. But now we have a second data set— and it includes vaccination records.

What happens when the HHS data confirms the VAERS data? What will they say then?

I don’t say this lightly: this historic HHS data release could be even bigger than the Epstein files.

There's more at the link.

I think he's spot on.  Anyone and everyone who's been affected by problems after receiving the COVID vaccine, or who's lost a relative or friend to vaccine-related issues, can now find out for certain whether there's any correlation between that vaccination and subsequent medical issues, as revealed by what care was billed, when, and for how long.  With that information on hand, lawsuits for medical negligence and/or malfeasance of any kind by the vaccine manufacturers become more than just a theoretical possibility.  They become almost a certainty.

Cue the vaccine manufacturers suddenly lobbying Congress to pass a law granting them retroactive immunity from lawsuits over negligence and malfeasance - immunity they do not have under the existing vaccine legislation.

I wonder how many ambulance chasers lawyers are suddenly rubbing their hands together with glee as they cue up their legal AI systems and turn them loose on the new data?

Peter

Taxes in California

 

Yesterday reader Paul M. made this comment on Larry Lambert's blog.  He's referring to California taxes.

‘Tax us to death’…saw this:

Payroll taxes, Building Permit Tax
, CDL license Tax
, Cigarette Tax
, Corporate Income Tax
, Dog License Tax, 
Federal Income Tax
, Federal Unemployment Tax, Fishing License Tax
, Food License Tax
, Gasoline Tax (currently 44.75 cents per gallon)
, Gross Receipts Tax
, Hunting License Tax, 
Inheritance Tax
, Liquor Tax
, Luxury Tax, Marriage License Tax
, Medicare Tax
, Personal Property Tax
, Property Tax, 
Real Estate Tax
, Road Usage Tax
, Recreational Vehicle Tax
, Sales Tax
, School Tax, Social Security Tax
, State Income Tax
, State Unemployment Tax, Telephone Federal Excise Tax
, Telephone Federal Universal Service Fee Tax
, Telephone Federal, State and Local Surcharge Taxes, 
Telephone Minimum Usage Surcharge Tax, 
Telephone Recurring and Nonrecurring Charges Tax
, Telephone State and Local Tax
, Telephone Usage Charge Tax
, Utility Taxes
, Vehicle License Registration Tax
, Vehicle Sales Tax
, Watercraft Registration Tax
, Well Permit Tax
, Workers Compensation Tax.

Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world. We had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world, and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

When you lay it all out like that, it's a breathtaking tax burden, isn't it?  That list isn't even comprehensive:  it doesn't include firearms taxes, ammunition taxes, and regulatory fees for this, that and everything else.  Now they want to add a wealth tax on top of it all!  They say it'll be a one-time tax, but if you believe that . . .

I wondered for a brief moment why any sane California taxpayer would vote for a government that robs them blind like that, but then I realized that most sane California taxpayers probably don't vote for those measures.  Taxpayers who've drunk the liberal/progressive Kool-Aid do;  but they're not the biggest margin of support.  The people who don't have to pay those taxes, but who benefit from the money they bring in, are mostly the ones who vote for them (and the politicians who impose them).

Peter

That's a very good point

 

In an interview a few days ago, the Commissioner of the Department of Corrections in Minnesota raised what I think is a very worthwhile question.

On Friday’s broadcast of NPR’s “All Things Considered,” Minnesota Department of Corrections Commissioner Paul Schnell discussed cooperation between local sheriffs and immigration officials and said that “having judicial orders or detainers or holds that are signed by a judge would address this issue. But, to date, we have not seen a willingness on the part of DHS to pursue those.”

. . .

"... sheriffs are in a very difficult position, because they face legal liability if they hold people beyond their appointed time. And having judicial orders or detainers or holds that are signed by a judge would address this issue."

There's more at the link.

That may be a smokescreen, of course, glossing over the real issue that Minnesota's policy is not to cooperate with Federal authorities over immigration issues, including arrests.  However, the question of administrative versus judicial orders or detainers is, I submit, more important than it may seem at first glance.

In criminal law, a warrant is typically required to arrest someone or search their property. These types of warrants must be issued by a judge; thus, they are also known as “judicial warrants.”

A judicial warrant is a document issued by a judge (or magistrate judge) that authorizes law enforcement officers to perform certain actions (like conducting a search, making an arrest, or seizing property). Judicial warrants are typically issued based on probable cause, which means there must be reasonable grounds to believe that a crime has been committed and that the action authorized by the warrant will yield evidence related to that crime. These warrants serve as a safeguard against unreasonable searches and seizures, ensuring that law enforcement actions are conducted within the bounds of the law and respect individuals' constitutional rights.

. . .

An administrative warrant doesn’t need to involve a judge or court at all (though an administrative law judge may review some). Instead, it’s issued by an administrative agency or official, as the name implies.

. . .

Administrative warrants are used for regulatory or administrative purposes, not criminal prosecution. Another difference is that administrative warrants generally have a lower standard than "probable cause,” which is required for judicial warrants. Finally, administrative warrants are based on statutory authority rather than Fourth Amendment requirements (like judicial warrants).

Judicial warrants typically deal with criminal law, whereas administrative warrants typically deal with civil law. That’s part of why the standard for a judicial warrant is higher: life and liberty are on the line. That’s also why judicial warrants will be in the form of either arrest warrants (to apprehend a suspect), search warrants (to search a specific location for evidence of a crime), or seizure warrants (to seize specific property or evidence related to a crime). Judicial warrants are considered more protective of individual rights, as they require a neutral judge's independent review of the evidence and a finding of probable cause.

Again, more at the link.

I can see both sides of this issue.  ICE and other federal agencies often try to arrest hundreds, even thousands of people in a given area (a city, a suburb, at an employer's premises, etc.).  To get individual judicial warrants against every potential suspect in that area might be so great a burden on their administration that it's effectively impossible.  However, that also runs a greater risk that some, at least, of those they arrest might have their civil rights ignored in the process.  We've already seen reports of that;  for example, US citizens arrested and detained for extended periods (sometimes days or even weeks) until they could prove they were legally resident in this country.  ICE and its defenders will protest that they could have produced such proof at any time, but if they were denied access to telephones and other means of communication (a routine occurrence, or so I understand), how were they to ask a family member or other person to deliver such proof?  If they lived alone, how could they get such proof from their place(s) of residence when they were detained, preventing them from traveling to their homes?

A judicial warrant demands a higher standard of proof from law enforcement authorities before they can make an arrest.  If a suspect's rights are to be restricted or infringed by arresting him/her, a judge or magistrate must confirm that there is enough evidence to justify that interference.  The warrant can also be challenged in court, as can the process leading to its being issued.  If an officer mistakenly asks for a judicial arrest warrant because he/she had unreliable or insufficient information, that can be held against the officer if it comes out in court.  An administrative warrant lacks all such protection - it was (normally) never reviewed by a judge or magistrate before being issued.  In so many words, it's nothing more than a bureaucratic rubber stamp.

I'm firmly of the opinion that illegal aliens should be deported, except for genuine, repeat, genuine, verifiable cases where refugee status might be awarded.  However, regardless of one's perspective on immigration, I think the use of only administrative warrants for mass arrests is legally questionable, and might become a tool of actual oppression if the "wrong people" issue such warrants without judicial scrutiny.  I think ICE may have to reconsider this issue.  Certainly, I'll be more comfortable from legal, moral and ethical perspectives if they do.

At the same time, those opposed to enforcing immigration laws will have to accept that it's a federal government issue, not a state or local issue.  If they want to protest it, there are legal avenues for them to do so.  To physically assault federal officers in the performance of their duties is not one of them;  nor is using state and local laws and regulations to obstruct and interfere with their operations.  Administrative warrants are too often used as an excuse to disrupt such legitimate law enforcement activities, without examining the rights and wrongs involved.

Peter

Where did the water go?

 

I was interested (and somewhat amused) to read that the biggest reforestation project in the world has had some - wait for it - unintended consequences.  Say it ain't so!

China’s massive tree-planting push has long been hailed as a climate win. But new research shows the country’s ambitious effort to slow land degradation, and fight climate change, has also reshaped its water supply in surprising, and sometimes uneven, ways.

When China dramatically expanded forests and restored grasslands under its "Great Green Wall" initiative, it didn’t just change what the land looked like, it changed how water moves between the ground and the atmosphere.

. . .

“They’ve actually increased forest cover by 15% over the last five decades,” [meteorologist Jennifer] Gray explained. “If you think about the amount of moisture that those forests are releasing into the atmosphere, it is just an incredible amount.”

. . .

What surprised researchers most wasn’t that water moved, it was where it ended up. “What’s so remarkable about this study is the scale of it and the unintended consequences,” Gray said. “The rain was distributed in completely different ways and in completely different places.”

The reason lies in the atmosphere itself.

“The atmosphere and the winds can actually transport moisture more than 4,000 miles,” Gray explained. “So if you plant trees in one area that doesn’t mean that that’s exactly where it’s going to rain.”

. . .

That’s why Gray says climate solutions can’t stop at planting trees. “It puts an exclamation mark on the importance of having city planners get involved, water management folks get involved as well,” she said, “so this can be carefully thought out as to where the water is going to be distributed once you do something like this.”

There's more at the link.

This is fascinating to me.  I've never figured out how bureaucrats and political functionaries can dictate to Nature - "We are going to do this, to force you to do that" - without any real understanding of how Nature works, the interplay of forces and influences that mold and shape the world we live in.  It seems ridiculous on the face of it;  what my father would call "farting against thunder".  The power of natural forces is so enormously greater than anything of which we can conceive that it makes fools of the bureaucrats who think that way.  Perhaps this is yet another example of the folly that led to Mao's megalomaniac "Great Leap Forward", which led directly to the "Great Chinese Famine" and caused tens of millions of deaths.

I think it's a laudable ambition to halt desertification by reforestation . . . but just reforesting thousands of square miles doesn't mean they'll be transformed into the microclimate you want them to have.  I'll be watching the progress of similar projects with great interest.  Ethiopia is planting 50 billion trees;  there's the Great Green Wall for the Sahara and the Sahel;  and India has The Great Green Wall of Aravalli.  I wonder if they'll all run into the same problem?

(There's also the colonial-era Great Hedge of India, designed to prevent unwanted border crossing in either direction.  Perhaps the Border Patrol might like to investigate that project?)

Peter

So... what sex am I, again???

 

I went to a local hospital this week to pick up some CD's containing recent diagnostic imagery.  I duly reported in, and was directed to a small office, where someone would meet me with the CD's.  After a few minutes, a very pleasant young lady came in, handed me a brown envelope, and assured me that everything I needed was inside.

Being a trusting sort (NOT!), I opened the envelope. pulled out the printed records, and glanced at the first line.  One word jumped out at me.  It read, "HYSTERECTOMY".

I blinked, and looked again.  Sure enough, it hadn't changed.  I looked up at the nice lady, patted my (over-ample) belly, and said, "I may look pregnant, but I assure you, I'm not - and I've never had this surgery!"

She blinked in her turn, glanced at the paper, and turned beetroot-red.  "Oh!  OH!  I'm sorry!  I must have picked up the wrong envelope!  Wait just a moment!"

I waited, grinning.  The envelope had not had any name on it, so I presume they'd simply filed them in roughly alphabetical order based on the printed records inside.  In due course, she returned, still slightly pink, and handed me another envelope.  This time, the right records were inside.

I asked, "Do we need to look at the CD, to make sure it doesn't have happy snaps of a hysterectomy instead of my spinal scans?"

Her blush deepened.  "Er... I - I don't think so?"

I left it at that and departed, still grinning.  When I got home and told my wife, she almost collapsed, she was laughing so hard.  We're both looking forward to finding out what images another doctor might see on the CD when he reads it!

Ah, the joys of (mis)filing systems . . .

Peter

A criminal investigation I'd like to see to start 2026 on the right note

 

This headline yesterday boggled my mind.

DOJ's Inventory Of Unreleased Epstein Files Soars To 5.2 Million Pages

Remember February 2025?

Today, Attorney General Pamela Bondi, in conjunction with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), declassified and publicly released files related to convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual exploitation of over 250 underage girls at his homes in New York and Florida, among other locations ... Attorney General Bondi requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response, the Department received approximately 200 pages of documents...

I don't know what bureaucratic battles Attorney General Bondi has had to fight with an entrenched anti-Trump Justice Department and a Deep State dedicated to fighting him and his minions at every turn.  Her public statements have all been along the lines that she's going to (and wants to) release all the relevant documents.  She may be the victim of bureaucratic sabotage, more sinned against than sinning . . . but her public image has become one of ineptitude, incompetence and waffling.

Who hid the existence of so many documents from her, and why?  Where were they kept, and why were they not catalogued in the FBI's systems so that they could be readily made available?  Why have we found out about them only in dribs and drabs, never all at once so that we knew the scale of the problem?  In particular, why has it taken almost a year to uncover the existence of this latest, massive "document drop"?

I understand that most, if not all, of these documents are coming out of the Justice Department's Southern District of New York.  If that's the case:

• Who was/is responsible for reporting their existence when the Attorney General of the USA demanded that information?
• Who has signally failed in their duty to obey the orders of their ultimate superior and deliver the documents in a timely and usable fashion?
• Why has he/she/they not been at least administratively disciplined, if not criminally charged, for their dereliction of duty?  And why has the Southern District not been cleaned out wholesale, top to bottom, and more reliable personnel appointed to it?  If a major division of a large private corporation had behaved in this fashion, you may be sure heads would have rolled a long time ago!

Attorney General Bondi's credibility has been severely affected by failures to charge various individuals and address known issues over the past year.  The latest development over the Epstein documents threatens to completely derail her government career.  She may become poisonous to the political touch for her supporters.

WHY IS NOTHING BEING VISIBLY, IMMEDIATELY DONE, OPENLY AND WITHOUT EQUIVOCATION, TO RESOLVE THIS ISSUE ONCE AND FOR ALL?

One hopes the President will act swiftly to address the matter.  These problems are doing him no favors at all, and are tarnishing his administration as a whole.  What's more, many of us who supported him want - demand - answers now.  We're tired of waiting, and see no good reason why we should wait.  If there's nothing to hide, why is it being so carefully - and so successfully - hidden?

Peter

Electoral fraud that preceded the election: hijacking the 2020 census

 

It seems that the 2020 census deliberately mis-apportioned state populations, which in turn led to mis-allocation of electoral seats per state.  Nice when you can fix the results before the election even begins!

Redistricting is a sum of blocks. Distort the blocks, and you distort the districts, the legislatures, and the House. This practice is not merely bad policy; it is plainly unconstitutional. The Supreme Court’s opinion in Department of Commerce v. House of Representatives (1999) made clear that statistical sampling for apportionment is illegal on statutory grounds. Abowd’s algorithmic manipulation is statistical sampling by another name, an unlawful substitution of estimated data for an actual enumeration required by the Constitution.

The proof arrived in March and May of 2022 when the Bureau’s own quality checks exposed a lopsided pattern. Fourteen states had statistically significant coverage errors, eight with overcounts and six with undercounts. The tilt was unmistakable. Democratic-leaning states were widely overcounted. Republican-leaning states were widely undercounted. Florida’s undercount was roughly three quarters of a million people. Texas’s undercount was on the order of a half million. Minnesota and Rhode Island kept seats they would have lost under an accurate count. Colorado gained a seat it did not deserve. Florida and Texas each missed multiple seats they should have gained. Analysts estimate the net effect was a shift of nine House seats away from Republican-leaning states and toward Democratic-leaning states. The Electoral College moved with them. More than $86 billion in federal formula funds followed.

. . .

The stakes are immense. The Census Bureau’s operations across a decade cost taxpayers on the order of $25 billion. Citizens paid for accurate data and received a noisy approximation that tilted representation and shifted money. Republican states are projected to lose almost $90 billion in federal funds across the decade as a result of the miscounts. Democratic states are projected to gain $57 billion. This is not a rounding error. It is a reweighting of national political power and public finance by mathematical fiat.

There's much more at the link.  It provides graphic evidence of what I can only presume is Deep State manipulation of our electoral machinery, to give their approved candidates and causes a built-in advantage even before a single vote is cast.  That situation still exists, and will govern national elections for the next half-decade or more until a new census can re-calculate our population and fairly apportion its distribution.  It means President Trump is fighting a built-in, institutionalized disadvantage in every election he and his party fight.

Food for thought.  Remember to get out and vote today!

Peter

Is the US intelligence apparatus deliberately playing us false?

 

From Larry Lambert over at Virtual Mirage:

(h/t Sam Fadis) Steve Witkoff called out CIA for providing him and Jared Kushner with completely faulty intelligence regarding Hamas and the negotiations to end the fighting in Gaza. And he did it on air on 60 Minutes.

The President himself is directly involved. Witkoff and Kushner are the President’s personal envoys. For CIA to get the intel picture completely wrong is a monumental failure and leads immediately to the next, and most important question: Why? Why was CIA so wide of the mark with its analysis? Two possibilities present themselves immediately. Either CIA’s intelligence was just that bad, or people in CIA and likely the broader Intelligence Community (IC) were deliberately feeding the President’s top men bad intel.

Today’s CIA quite frankly has little or no insight into the inner workings of groups like Hamas. That would require risk. That would require moxie. That would require leaving Northern Virginia and talking to foreigners. If you don’t want to risk it, you can take whatever intel the Israelis pass you on the subject and base your analysis on that. If the Israelis are telling the truth and have solid sources, you may be OK temporarily. If the Israelis, the guys who did not see a Hamas offensive building on the other side of a wall a couple of years ago, have bad intel, then we do too. Most alarming of all, of course, if the Israelis decide to lie to us for political reasons, we will not know it. We will be led around by the nose and steered in the wrong direction.

The Intelligence Community (in all its manifestations) has only one job. One. Provide truth to power. Clandestine activity (Covert Action) must stem from that, as does everything else. If you can’t provide the truth to power, you’re part of the problem, not part of the solution.

People within the IC are deliberately feeding the President and his key people bad intelligence. And, just as bad, they are refusing to pass on certain information to the policy makers in this administration. There remain people within the IC who oppose this President and his appointees and are using intelligence as a weapon to frustrate President Trump’s political objectives. They want him to fail. They don’t care about the consequences for American national security. They want to inflict political damage because they are laser-focused on putting a Democrat in the White House in 2028 who will guarantee the continued existence of the Deep State and prevent the American people from regaining control over the vast federal bureaucracy.

Since Trump sat down in the White House for the second time, there has been no real reorganization. No meaningful change of any kind has actually occurred. Director Ratcliffe sits atop an organization that remains structured essentially as John Brennan wanted and run by people who made rank and climbed the ladder under either Brennan or his surrogate, Gina Haspel. All of the people who thought it was appropriate to designate “crying spaces” where employees could retreat to compose themselves when Trump won in 2016 are still there. All the folks who looked the other way when the attack on the CIA base in Benghazi was blamed on a peaceful demonstration that got out of hand are still there. All the individuals who sat and watched while a slow-motion coup against Donald Trump went on year after year are still there, just in much more senior positions now.

I can only hope that President Trump and his leadership team are fully aware of all this (which I assume they are), and are doing something about it (of which I'm not so sure).  One can't bring in complete outsiders to assume all intelligence agency leading positions without discarding literally generations worth of experience and insight.  Outsiders simply can't have that depth of insight.  However, if the existing leadership isn't using or providing that depth of insight, can we afford to keep them in place?

One has questions . . .

Peter

Temporary tags being misused? Say it ain't so...

 

I noted this report with cynical amusement.

The general manager of a DeLand car dealership was arrested Oct. 7 on a warrant after failing to appear in court in September on charges he did not register temporary tags on vehicles he was selling, court documents show.

. . .

Florida troopers started investigating the dealership's temporary tags after an unregistered one was found on a vehicle during a traffic stop March 3.

The report states that the driver of the Ford Escape stopped by a trooper said she bought the vehicle with the unregistered temporary tag from DeLand Reliable Cars and Trucks.

The driver of the Ford Escape was cited for not having a vehicle registration.

Troopers said the temporary tag was not registered and the Department of Motor Vehicles did not have any information on file for the tag attached to the Ford Escape.

Troopers towed the Ford Escape and requested an audit be done on DeLand Reliable Cars and Trucks, according to court documents.

. . .

Investigators discovered that the dealership had issued four different unregistered temporary tags to the driver of the Ford Escape, an arrest report shows.

Investigators said they also found 20 temporary tag numbers issued to DeLand Reliable Cars and Trucks that were never registered to a person or vehicle but were found attached to cars at the dealership.

"(The vehicles) were driven on public roadways throughout the state of Florida," investigators noted in their report.

There's more at the link.

It reminded me of multiple incidents after Hurricane Katrina in 2005.  I reported at the time:

I've ... heard reports from Texas, Alabama and Tennessee of brand-new high-end motor vehicles (e.g. Cadillacs, Lincolns, BMW's, etc.), with New Orleans dealer tags, being driven through various towns on their way North and West. The drivers were described as "gang-bangers" (and sundry less complimentary terms). However, there have been no reports of stolen vehicles from New Orleans, because there are no workers to check out dealer lots, or report thefts, and no working computers to enter VIN's, etc. into the NICS database of stolen vehicles - so officers have had no choice but to let these vehicles proceed. Draw your own conclusions.

Many of those vehicles turned out to have been stolen, but in the absence of any way to check on the validity (or otherwise) of their temporary tags, they couldn't be detained by local cops as they were ferried to whatever their final destination might be.  I understand many ended up being sold on the West Coast or in the Midwest.  Still others, I'm sure, found their way to Mexico and points south.

Do I believe the dealer's manager when he protested his innocence about the misuse of dealer tags?  Like hell I do!  It's a common tactic when a dealer - even an employee at a dealer who has access to the tags - makes a deal with criminals.  If they have 24 to 48 hours to get a head start, they can evade or avoid detection and pursuit until they and their stolen vehicles are safely out of the original jurisdiction.  In the case of Florida, a 48-hour period without questions being asked will allow the thieves to drive the vehicles all the way to Mexico - and once they're across that border, say goodbye to them for good.

Another problem is that if such vehicles are involved in accidents, they frequently have no insurance coverage at all.  If you're in a fender-bender with a car with a temporary tag, make sure to call a cop to the scene, and ask them to verify the tag number and insurance status.  If the other driver does his best to stop you doing that, be very suspicious.  If you fail to do that, your own insurance company might say that you're partly to blame for the costs of repairing your own vehicle, because you didn't check that the other driver's information was valid.

Something useful to file away in the old memory banks . . .

Peter

Following the medical money (or lack thereof)

 

A few weeks ago I wrote an article titled "From 'Medical Care' to 'Medical Couldn't Care Less'."  In it, speaking about conflicting medical bureaucracies with whom I'm having to deal at present, I said:

Neither bureaucracy cares about me (or any other patient) as a person.  They're just ticking off the boxes on their forms, checking their reams of regulations, and putting their organizations' interests ahead of anything and anyone else.

That's being driven home yet again by the latest medical shenanigans.  I'm in pretty severe pain (all the time) from a deteriorating spinal condition, but no doctor or nurse seems interested in speeding things up to get to a point where that could be alleviated.  Instead it's fill out this form, get that test, make follow-up appointments (which they then cancel because I haven't yet completed all the tests they want - but they don't tell me that until less than 24 hours before my appointment), and so on.  What's worse is that medical insurance is an integral part of the problem, in that they won't discuss further treatment until a series of tests are completed, even if those tests have nothing whatsoever to do, medically speaking, with the specific health issue under discussion.  The forms have to be completed, with all the boxes ticked off, even if some of those boxes apply to other conditions.  If I complain and argue about it, I'll be frozen out of the process until I knuckle under.

The problem is, all of this costs money - and with competing bureaucracies arguing over who is or is not responsible for the bills, I have to pay for everything up front, in the hope of getting at least some of the money back from one or the other agency in due course.  The fact that such costs run into thousands of dollars is irrelevant, as far as the bureaucrats are concerned.  I have to get the tests done;  if I can't afford to have them done, I won't be approved to proceed to further treatment options (for which they still won't pay, at least at present) through their bureaucratic processes.  If I can persuade doctors to offer the treatment(s) I need without medical insurance pre-approval, it'll have to be on a cash basis, in the hope that subsequent discussions with my lawyer might persuade the insurers to contribute something towards them.

I'm going to have my right kidney removed towards the end of this month (the culmination of the kidney problems I had last year, with four lesser surgeries having failed to correct the situation).  It'll take me a couple of months to get over that, I'm told, so back surgery will have to be on hold until I've fully recovered my strength.  If I can raise the money for that, it should happen late this year or early next year, if I can get my medical ducks in a row.

I'm going to be launching a fundraiser within the next week or so to ask for help in meeting these expenses.  This is a very costly situation for us. We're in the process of taking out a second mortgage on our home, and we've saved what we can to meet initial expenses, but we're still looking at a looming fiscal cliff in the not too distant future.  I know we're far from alone in facing that sort of problem:  I've mentioned others' fundraisers in these pages on occasion.  Thank you to everyone who's already been generous.  We couldn't have made it this far without you.

Peter

So much for the "Katrina Declaration"

 

I note with disgust that a large number of employees of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) have complained that "the Trump administration’s sweeping overhaul is gutting the disaster relief agency’s authority and capabilities, undoing two decades of progress since the failures of Hurricane Katrina".

Titled “Katrina Declaration,” the letter accuses President Donald Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, whose department oversees FEMA, of eroding the agency’s response capabilities and appointing unqualified leadership. The group calls for FEMA to be shielded from political interference and for its workforce to be protected from politically motivated firings.

The warning comes as the nation marks 20 years since Katrina devastated the Gulf Coast, killing nearly 1,400 people, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA.) The botched FEMA effort exposed fatal flaws in the federal emergency response system – failures that led Congress to pass sweeping reforms, including the Post-Katrina Emergency Management Reform Act, which strengthened FEMA’s independence and set higher standards for its leaders.

Now, the letter argues, those reforms are being unraveled, as the Trump administration moves to either abolish or drastically shrink FEMA’s role.

There's more at the link.

I remember FEMA and Katrina very well indeed, because I was part of the independent efforts to bring relief to New Orleans after that hurricane, and saw the official cock-ups at first hand.  I wrote about them at length at the time and afterwards.  Go read about them for yourself, if you haven't already read that earlier article.  It's eye-opening.  Let's just say that my respect for FEMA, the American Red Cross and a number of other big-name emergency management and disaster relief organizations was severely undermined.

As for "reforms" implemented after Katrina, why don't we ask the citizens of North Carolina how they feel about the agency after Hurricane Helene went through there last year?  The initial relief efforts were a shambles, and didn't improve until the Trump administration took office in January this year.  There were - and still are - persistent allegations that the Biden administration deliberately slow-walked aid to the area because it was largely conservative in its politics, and had not supported the Democratic Party and the Biden administration in the past.  FEMA was pilloried by many of the locals for its initial failure to act, and - when it did act - for ignoring the expertise of local agencies and taking over in a heavy-handed, inefficient, bureaucratic manner.  There were repeated reports of supplies sent in by independent agencies being confiscated by FEMA without so much as a "by your leave", and a number of rescuers reported that they were ordered out of the area on pain of arrest if they returned.

I think FEMA as presently constituted is nothing more than a collection of bureaucrats throwing their weight around in an attempt to justify their existence.  I think we'd be far better served if each State set up its own FEMA equivalent, using people who know the local area and population and are thus better positioned to help without delay in time of need.  The federal FEMA could then be used as a conduit to get supplies and equipment to the state(s) when and where it's needed, and hand it over to the local FEMA to put it to work.  The military could also establish permanent, working relationships with the State-level FEMA's to prearrange things like helicopter support, evacuations, etc.

Meanwhile, based on my own extensive (albeit two-decade-old) experience with FEMA, I consider this "Katrina Declaration" to be not worth the paper it's printed on.

Peter