A good editorial from the Star Tribune

It is fair-minded in pointing out that while Minnesota has done a poor job of preventing fraud, it doesn’t justify the racist comments Trump has made. He’ll probably declare it fake news.

Minnesota finds itself in a harsh spotlight as President Donald Trump revs up his attacks on Gov. Tim Walz, an old political foe, while simultaneously expanding his demonization of Somali Minnesotans.

After unleashing torrents of foul language against Walz last weekend, and then this week referring to Somali Americans, including U.S. Rep. Ilhan Omar, as “garbage,” Trump reportedly dispatched additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to Minnesota. Their orders are yet uncertain, but Trump suggests they will patrol a specific class of people, Somali Americans. In other words, strict racial profiling will now extend to our neighbors.

To read some online discourse, including that spewed by Trump in a feverish late-night troll session of more than 160 posts, Minnesota is a den of fraud perpetrated solely by immigrant hordes. This rhetoric is divisive, racist and wrong.

Minnesota is home to the nation’s largest Somali community. These residents are our colleagues, friends, law enforcement officers, public servants, neighbors and taxpayers. That Trump would demonize an entire diaspora — the vast majority of whom live here as legal citizens or permanent residents — is beyond reprehensible. It’s dangerous.

As Trump amped up his verbal and online assault of Somalis last week in the wake of the slaying and critical wounding of two National Guard members by an Afghan immigrant in Washington, according to charges, the president was asked what Somalis had to do with the deadly encounter. Trump’s response was revealing and toxically xenophobic.

“Ah, nothing. But Somalis have caused a lot of trouble,” he said.

Which brings us to the crux of the issue that the president has opportunistically seized on: the amount of fraud that occurred in Minnesota during and after the pandemic. It’s an issue that won’t go away until it’s fully addressed.

Here is the truth, however: Our elected leaders and government officials can prevent and prosecute fraud without villainizing law-abiding Minnesotans or relying upon racist stereotypes.

Yes, Minnesota demonstrated a serious problem with oversight of state dollars during the COVID-19 crisis and the resulting economic calamity. In a well-meaning effort to help people, Walz and his administration fell short.

In the case of Feeding Our Future, the state trusted that nonprofits and other third parties would honor their responsibilities. This enabled the theft of public resources meant to feed the hungry. While most of the perpetrators were Somali, the alleged mastermind was a white woman, Aimee Bock. This crime wasn’t a product of race or ethnicity, but opportunity and criminal greed.

But that’s not the only fraud. In an October commentary in the Minnesota Star Tribune, former Legislative Auditor Jim Nobles detailed the lack of safeguards that enabled fraud in other programs, many of which have led to indictments and prosecution.

Thanks to prosecutors under Democratic and Republican administrations, criminals have faced vigorous prosecution. This is not enough. The public deserves assurances that systemic reform will prevent this from happening again.

Absent this, the state will be unable to credibly launch needed programs to address the growing economic strain on Minnesotans as the cost of living increases and the rate of unemployment is again on the rise.

That said, no specific instances of fraud should ever be used to castigate an entire class of Minnesotans. Minnesotans with German American backgrounds were persecuted as traitors during World War I. Italian Americans were stereotyped as dirty criminals during the 1920s. Hmong immigrants in the 1970s faced distrust and harassment over mistaken assumptions and racial profiling.

Waves of nativist fear have met every immigrant group, and when individuals within those groups committed crimes, they were pinned unfairly on everyone. The answer now is the same as before: Fix the system and police the crime while embracing the individual potential of every Minnesotan to enhance our shared society.

Meantime, any lectures on fraud should come from leaders who want to prevent it, not those who cast slurs and demonize the poor, hapless and innocent. Minnesotans will render their judgment at the polls next year. If our choices are between mushy inaction and spiteful rhetoric, we all lose.

Judging from the responses I’ve seen around this state, people are outraged at Trump’s blatant racism. If he’s planning on running for a third term (unconstitutionally!), he probably shouldn’t count on winning in Minnesota.

This is what stupid rich means

So…Donald Trump got an MRI, but he’s really stupid about it.

Trump added Sunday that he has no idea on what part of his body he got the MRI.

It was just an MRI, he said. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.

Doctors typically order an MRI to help with diagnosing symptoms or to monitor an ongoing health problem. So-called “preventive” cardiac and abdominal MRIs are not part of routine screening recommendations. What Trump’s doctor called an “executive physical” generally refers to adding extra, non-routine tests including MRIs to pricey and lengthy exams, not covered by insurance, that are marketed to wealthy people.

I can speak authoritatively from a patient’s perspective on MRIs, because I’ve had two of them in the past year. The first was for a knee problem, and the second was that the doctors wanted to rule out that I was having a stroke after a blood vessel in my eye popped.

First thing I can say is that MRIs are expensive and you don’t get them routinely. The doctors have to get approval from the insurance company, which is maybe not an issue for a stupidly rich person. But they don’t just give them to you on a whim — they have a medical reason for checking you out, and they tell you why they’re doing it. Even if you are so rich you can afford to just do it, it’s going to take a substantial chunk of time, maybe an hour or more, so doctors do try to justify it to you.

The second thing is that you know what’s being scanned. For my knee, they braced it with a couple of padded clamps to hold it in place. For my brain scan, they fitted a plastic helmet around my head to limit movement. Only an idiot would fail to recognize what the instrument was for.

Thirdly, afterwards the doctors tell you what they found. In one case, they found I had a torn meniscus; in the other, no evidence that I’d had a stroke (that must be what getting a “perfect” MRI means). They both discussed it with me in person and sent me an after-examination document that spelled it all out. They also noted some deterioration of the cervical vertebrae, but my knees, other than the meniscus, were flawless.

Is Trump so out of it that the doctors treated him as a dumb piece of meat, sending him off for tests without explanation, stuffing him into a noisy tube without explanation and no preparation, and then not bothering to let him know the results? Did he just sleep through the whole procedure?

Fourthly, you don’t “ace” a cognitive test, and it’s mostly separate from MRIs. I had an MRI but I’ve never taken a cognitive test — the doctors have no suspicion that I’m cognitively impaired, so they don’t bother testing. My mother, on the other hand, didn’t get an MRI because she wasn’t exhibiting those kinds of physical symptoms, but she was exhibiting behavioral symptoms, so they gave her a basic cognitive test, like the ones Trump has previously described (she did fail parts of the test, which was heartbreaking to see). Passing a cognitive test only means that you’ve retained basic mental skills, like having short-term memory and being able to draw a clock face.

You get a cognitive test when there are grounds to suspect a patient is having mental problems. I’ve never had one, but Trump has had a couple of them, with good reason, I think.

You get MRIs when there are physical symptoms that warrant a closer look. Trump seems to be getting trundled off to all kinds of exceptional tests, suggesting that doctors are concerned.

Of course, it’s also possible that he has hired a team of unethical, incompetent doctors, similar to his usual hiring practices, and they see Trump as a healthy mark with more money than sense that they can gouge for all kinds of unnecessary testing.

I was already predisposed to mistrust dollar stores

The town I live in has a spreading plague of dollar stores — we’ve got two (in a town of 5000 people!) and a third one is under construction. I’m not keen on them — they seem to be sloppily managed and underpay their workers — so they’re a sign of a crumbling economy and are just jumbles of cheap plastic junk. But OK, they do serve a growing population of the poor, so I’m not going to lobby to have them shut down.

Except, maybe, they’re lying about providing lower cost goods.

The dollar-store industry, including Family Dollar and its larger rival, Dollar General, promises everyday low prices for household essentials. But an investigation by the Guardian found that the prices listed on the shelves at these two chains often don’t materialize at checkout – in North Carolina and around the country. As the cost of living soars across America, the customers bearing the burden are those who can least afford it – customers who often don’t even notice they’re overpaying.

These overcharges are widespread.

Dollar General stores have failed more than 4,300 government price-accuracy inspections in 23 states since January 2022, a Guardian review found. Family Dollar stores have failed more than 2,100 price inspections in 20 states over the same time span, the review found.

That we have 3 of these bottom-of-the-barrel stores in progress here in Morris, Minnesota suggests that they are extremely profitable, and one way they become profitable is by gouging the customers who can least afford it.

Disgustingly racist president says disgustingly racist things

Our horribly racist president went on an ignorant rant about the Somali community in Minnesota.

Donald Trump on Tuesday called Somali immigrants garbage and said they should be sent back home in a rant that came as the administration is reportedly increasing immigration enforcement against undocumented Somalis in Minnesota.

In a xenophobic rant during a cabinet meeting, Trump went off on Somalis and Ilhan Omar, the congressional representative who is from Somalia and is a US citizen. He said Somalia stinks and is no good for a reason.

They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country, I’ll be honest with you, he said. He called Omar garbage and said we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country.

These are people who do nothing but complain, he said. They complain, and from where they came from, they got nothing … When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it.

I’ve taught Somali students. I’ve visited Somali neighborhoods in Minneapolis, I’ve eaten in Somali-owned restaurants with food by Somali chefs. Fly into the Minneapolis airport and call for a cab, you’ll probably get a Somali driver. I have a lot of respect for Ilhan Omar, she’s fighting on the side of righteousness. I agree with her response to this racist abuse.

Omar, a naturalized U.S. citizen who fled Somalia’s civil war as a child and has represented Minnesota’s 5th District since 2019, responded on X: “This president’s bigotry won’t silence our contributions to this nation. Somalis built Minnesota stronger. Your hate only exposes your weakness.”

If there is any corrupt, lazy garbage to be removed, it’s the person of Donald Trump. I stand with our Somali citizens over any Republican sleazebag.

It’s tough to argue with someone who lacks evidence

I’m sure you’ve noticed how creationists only want to talk about their perceived flaws in evolutionary theory, but never about their preferred creationist explanations (they can’t, because they don’t have a reasonable creationist model to discuss.) Here’s a cartoon illustrating that fact.

It’s also the case that they think there is nothing to discuss: you either accept that god did it, or you’re wrong. It all makes conversations with them pointless and boring.

You mean Legally Blonde was not a documentary?

I wish I could say that I hope Trump is learning something, but I doubt that he is. It seems that appointing attractive young women to high positions in his legal team has drawbacks — not that he should discriminate against young women, but that being blonde is not sufficient qualification before the law.

So the Trump administration’s cases against Letitia James and James Comey have been thrown out, on the basis that the lead prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan was not qualified, and that she was illegally appointed. She was sternly rebuked by the judge, which must have been embarrassing for her.

Then a panel of judges disqualified Alina Habba straight out of her job as the US Attorney for the District of New Jersey. Trump hadn’t bothered to get congressional approval for her appointment, as part of his ongoing campaign to become the authoritarian emperor who doesn’t need laws, legislatures, or courts.

Their qualifications seem to have been being attractive enough to catch the king’s eye, and then being slavishly sycophantic. Please, can Pam Bondi be next in line for public disgrace?

Again, this isn’t about their looks, although Trump definitely has a type — it’s about letting their appearance override their lack of competence.

xkcd doesn’t cover all the possibilities

This came out with poor timing.

You see, yesterday afternoon was spent trying to use a company’s website. I was sent a bunch of stuff from a company, complaining about my mother’s failure to respond to their entreaties — she died in 2024. I’m still dealing with random bureaucratic nonsense, because apparently they didn’t get the public announcement my lawyer published. So I called them.

What followed was steps similar to what you see above.

Except that I managed to get through to a human representative. Unfortunately, it was someone with a thick Indian accent, so we struggled for a while, but eventually we distilled everything down to a request for documentation, etc., and she was sort of helpful, and told me what to do to maybe clear all this up.

By faxing all these documents to a number. Faxing. Who uses a fax anymore?

I found a site that lets me email them stuff that then gets faxed, for a price.

I am now waiting to see if all that worked.

I also contacted Boeing, which went much more smoothly. I think I’ll miss the monthly copy of The Aerospace Mechanic that they’ve been sending me.

Sorry, I’m going to be pessimistic again

Let’s see…we’re living in a country run by openly corrupt oligarchs. The educational system is being undermined by fundamentalist Christian fanatics. We’re almost certainly headed for an economic crash, as billionaires pour billions of our dollars into the AI fantasy. MAHA is similarly chasing illusions, that removing food dyes will correct systematic patterns of abuse by Big Food, and that autism is caused by whatever unlikely correlation Robert Felching Kennedy Jr names. The anti-war president is searching for a casus belli to blow up boats in the Pacific, the Atlantic, and the Caribbean. What else could possibly go wrong?

How about another pandemic? How about a bird flu pandemic?

After a quiet summer, bird flu is on the move again, and experts say it poses an escalating threat. While the virus doesn’t appear capable of spreading from human to human, it has killed people exposed to sick poultry. This year, the United States saw its first death from bird flu, a Louisiana senior with a flock of backyard chickens.

Viruses are constantly evolving, and if a person catches bird flu while infected with a seasonal flu, the pathogens could mutate into a variant that infects large numbers of people. “The minute it transmits in humans, it’s done,” warned Erin Sorrell, senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security.

In our recent bird flu epidemic, for most of us it was a nuisance: egg shortages in the grocery stores, higher prices. But in the center of the epidemic, factory farms in Ohio and Indiana, it was far worse. Entire flocks of chickens had to be killed to suppress the spread. Farmers going out of business. Would you believe mass graves with millions of birds?

ProPublica has published evidence that the avian virus is spread by airborne contamination.

Our finding: The wind was at least a plausible explanation for how the virus could have spread from farm to farm.

We shared our analysis of the outbreak with eight experts in avian flu who agreed with that assessment. Several of them felt it was more than a mere possibility.

“It just seems so likely to me that this was an airborne thing,” said Brian McCluskey, former chief epidemiologist with USDA’s agency that oversees the response to bird flu. “I mean, how else would it have moved around so quickly?”

The experts stressed the analysis didn’t prove the wind directly carried bird flu from one farm to another, or that it was the only factor at play. The virus typically spreads via multiple routes, which could include contaminated birds, rodents or workers; if farms share the same feed supplier or trash collector, those factors can’t be ruled out.

But several experts said ProPublica’s analysis underscores the shortcomings of the government’s strategy, which fails to take the wind into account at all.

“USDA has been grossly negligent in not establishing risk factors in real time,” said Simon Shane, a poultry veterinarian and consultant.

There has been talk of pre-emptively vaccinating chickens…but the idea is opposed by the chicken meat and egg industries. That might give foreign buyers the impression that American chickens are tainted, and we can’t have that! So instead we’ll dig trenches and bury millions of birds when the virus appears, which is our government approved strategy. You know who is behind this approach.

Adding to the headwinds is U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has said the virus should be allowed to burn through flocks so that farmers can identify birds with natural immunity, an approach public health experts have called “dangerous and unethical.”

That’s the same strategy many of these MAHA morons endorsed for COVID — let it burn through the human population until the virus was “done”. That would have been a disaster, but now they want to do the same thing for the poultry industry. Maybe they’ll get to do the experiment in the near future if the bird flu jumps to the human population.

We are so screwed in so many ways.

Somebody got paid

The US government hates drug dealers so much that they’re willing to blow up fishing boats to kill them extrajudicially — boats that might contain only fishermen, but because some are “narcoboats,” the Secretary of War believes he is authorized to “kill everybody”.

During the 2 September operation, led by the elite counter-terrorist group Seal Team 6, a first missile strike left two survivors clinging on to the wreck, the Post reported. Adm Frank M “Mitch” Bradley, head of Special Operations Command, reportedly ordered a second strike to kill the two survivors to comply with Hegseth’s orders.

Some current and former US officials and experts have said, according to the Post, that the Trump administration’s missile strikes in the Caribbean may be unlawful. To date, more than 80 people have been killed in the series of military strikes, targeting at least 22 more boats.

No wonder our president thinks telling our military to not follow unlawful orders is sedition — he’s eager to commit murder under the excuse that he opposes drug trafficking. Curiously, though, while he’s slaughtering low-level possible narcotics dealers without evidence that they actually are criminals, he’s showing mercy to rich, convicted kingpins of the drug trade who made millions of dollars shipping cocaine into the US.

President Donald Trump said Friday that he will be pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who in 2024 was convicted for drug trafficking and weapons charges and sentenced to 45 years in prison.

What’s the difference between a poor South American guy working on a small boat in the ocean and a rich Central American who probably has many millions of dollars salted away in shady banks? I don’t think it’s geography. I suspect someone got an awful lot of money to whisper in a senile president’s ear. Said president might have also wet his beak in the bribe.

Hey, does anyone else think this whole business of presidents being able to circumvent the law and nullify the decisions of the courts to reek of royal privilege?