Without Government, Who Would Create A Shortage Of Road Salt?

The Detroit Free Press: Salt shortage has Michigan scrambling to keep roads clear

Yep, there was a clear lack of planning ahead and the governments expecting a mild winter and not ordering enough.  Likely they bought into the idea that  global warming was making winter a thing of the past - which it clearly is not doing.

Slippery-er than normal winter roads are the result with not enough salt being used due to the failure to stock up when demand (and prices) were low.  Now they're ordering salt at highly inflated prices and waiting on deliveries due to production and shipping bottlenecks.

Seriously, if we placed these same government officials in charge of the Sahara Desert, within a couple years they would be announcing a shortage of sand.

Playing With Other People's Money Means Never Having To Say You're Sorry

The Michigan Municipal Employees' Retirement System is on a roll.  

It's a losing roll, but quite a roll nonetheless.

$155 million in losses -- in two transactions. 

The Detroit Free Press:  2 Swiss citizens caused $55M loss, municipal retirement manager says

A nonprofit corporation that manages employee pension funds for more than 1,000 Michigan local governments alleges it was defrauded out of about $55 million after entrusting the money to two Swiss citizens who weren't registered investment advisers.

The losses the Municipal Employees' Retirement System (MERS) suffered on investments in alternative energy projects — disclosed in a Sept. 30 lawsuit filed by MERS in federal court in Grand Rapids — are on top of $100 million MERS lost on a coffee-growing venture in Hawaii

That's $155 million lost in just two gonzo transactions that any responsible fiduciary would have not just walked away from, but ran. 

Why a Michigan entity tried to buy and run  a coffee plantation in Hawaii is  very questionable, but I'm sure the trips to Hawaii to look into it were great.

Don't worry, taxpayers will likely be picking up the pension losses for the government employees who lost money due to the ineptness of other government employees. 

Get Your Democrat Crony Capitalism Right Here

Once again Gov Whitmer is picking winners and losers, but, mostly losers.

After wasting millions on failed battery plant projects, subsidized to the tunes of millions of Michigan taxpayer 's dollars,  she's now moved on to subsidizing data centers. 

The Detroit News: Massive OpenAI data center planned for farmland near Ann Arbor

What could possibly go wrong?

Going Fast And Breaking Things Has Consequences

While Trump is right to be proceeding with reforms, in doing so he and his administration are going a tad too fast. This is causing a lot of own-goals and public embarrassments, not to mention unnecessary disruption and collateral damage, which serves to reduce the enthusiasm and support for the reforms.

For example it has caused some major and completely unnecessary turmoil at the National Institute of Health :  The Transmitter: U.S. health agency purge includes 10 lab heads at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke

This firing included one of the world's top researches on Parkinson's disease.

This firing led a lot of people to calmly ask:  "WTF?".

Well, turns out the firing was apparently a mistake caused by a "coding error" that mislabeled employees -- once people started making noise about it they were rehired.

The Transmitter: Coding error caused layoffs at National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke this week, source says  

Thirty employees—including 11 lab heads—at the institute should “immediately return to work,” according to an email the institute’s Office of Human Resources sent to top administration at the institute Wednesday evening.

Reform is a good thing,  doing it stupidly and making the reformers look incompetent in doing so is not helpful to actual reform of the many, many, real problems in government agencies.

The blanket reductions and stoppages in research funding is having a major effect on good solid research in addition to the wasteful stuff that should be defunded.

"Hasten Slowly" is good advice.

Chesterton's Fence, while usually applied to progressives tearing down institutions, also applies to the Right when they tear down stuff without understanding the direct and indirect effects and implications of what they are doing.

Getting rid of fraud and waste and ridiculous programs that are little more than grants to progressive organizations along with associated graft  is a good thing, burning down the entire research "village" in order to do so is quite another.

Do it smartly, and quickly if need be, but make sure above all that you do it competently and show positive results. 

Surely, They Can't Be That Stupid

Apparently, they can indeed be that stupid, and stop calling me Shirley:

The term, Intelligence Community when applied to the American version of same, is rapidly becoming an oxymoron, if it hasn't already.

 

That level of incompetence is rather staggering.  But, perhaps, they were simply too busy having kinky and highly workplace inappropriate chats on secure government systems to pay attention to avoiding blowing the identities of CIA employees while they were chatting about a whole different kind of blowing:

 

Forbes: More Than 100 Intelligence Staffers Will Be Fired Over Sexually Explicit Texts In NSA Chatrooms, Gabbard Says

One would think members of the "intelligence community", being presumably both more tech-savy and intelligent than average, would know not to do something that the average American worker already knows is highly inappropriate to do in the workplace.  

Or they did know that, but figured the rules didn't apply to them.

I Did Not Know That Michigan's Libraries Are

Heavily, and in some case majorly, funded by traffic tickets and penal fines. 

I had figured that library mileages on property taxes were responsible for the bulk of the funding. Apparently not.

Nor did I know, but I should have guessed, that Wayne County would manage to screw up the accounting and distribution for that funding. Badly.

The Detroit Free Press: Accounting errors have cost Wayne County libraries millions

Over the last decade, 18 libraries in Wayne County have been shorted as much as $1.9 million, while 11 saw an influx in cash, all because of staff turnover at the county level and subsequent accounting errors.

The money at issue flows through the state and comes from penal fines, which are paid to courts in criminal and some civil violations, including most traffic fines. County treasurers collect and distribute the fines to libraries. This funding is baked into state law and it can account for anywhere between 3% to 70% of public libraries' annual budgets, according to the Library of Michigan.

 Wayne County lost the employee who calculated penal fines and the county did not replace that position, according to a report the Library of Michigan prepared for public library directors and boards.

So interesting to know that a goodly amount of the fines from court goes to the state's libraries, hopefully helping the True Crime shelves be well stocked, and that Wayne County can impressively mess up the distribution of those funds.

Another Insane FAFSA Change

Effective January 1 this year, having multiple students in college does not effect you expected financial contribution.

 It used to be if you had two and your EFC was $25,000 then that was split between the two students, increasing your eligibility for financial aid, work-study etc.

No more.   Now with the same income you're EFC is $25,000 per student so you need to come up with twice as much as the calculation used to require.

Yet another effort on the part of the Biden administration to grind down the Middle Class.

FAFSAing Around

The Freep is a master of understatement for the actual cause  of the woe expressed in the article: Significantly fewer students have completed the FAFSA while colleges try to manage fallout

About a quarter of Michigan's high school seniors have completed the federal FAFSA form, the ticket to receiving federal aid for higher education, compared with nearly 40% at this time in 2023, according to federal data.

The lagging completion numbers are partly due to a nearly three-month delay to roll out the new version of the form for students bound for higher education, according to Diann Cosme, director of MI Student Aid within the newly created Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement, and Potential (MiLEAP).

The real reason is the new FAFSA fargin' website doesn't frickin' work.  The rollout, delayed as it has been simply is a website that DOES NOT WORK.

Shades of the Obamacare website rollout. This makes the Freep sad as it's the Democrats dropping the ball yet again so they clearly cant come out and state the obvious.

Quite simply the website makes it impossible to complete the form.

I get an email that I need to sign the app as a parent.

So I login.  The only actions are to either delete the form or edit it.

I do edit and it says you must review the entire page and go to the bottom to continue to sign it.

I go to bottom of the page.

 However at the bottom of the page there is only a button marked return, which returns you to the main screen.  It does not let you sign the FAFSA.

In short there is no way to sign the form.  The website does not work.

I swear, the Department of Education under Biden could mess up a wet dream.

Michigan Liquor Control Commission Under The Democrats : A Million $ In Booze Disappears

This is fine: $961K in liquor went missing from Michigan commission's inventory, audit finds

Quality Democrat competence here, and yes the MLCC is Democrat controlled, almost entirely composed of Democrats, and indeed most of them are Governor Whitmer appointees. 

Michigan’s Liquor Control Commission lacked the proper controls to accurately track its spirit inventory or its licensing program, resulting in hundreds of thousands of dollars in missing liquor, significant excesses and negative balances in its inventory and the issuances of a handful of liquor licenses in dry communities.

One of the largest findings of the audit released Tuesday indicated the commission was missing 20%, or roughly $961,000, of the $4.9 million recorded in inventory between January and February 2022 — a count not confirmed through a state-led physical inventory of Michigan warehouses, but through distributors at the behest of the state.

The missing liquor inventory was one of three material conditions and two reportable conditions found at the liquor commission, whose overall performance was rated as “not sufficient” in an audit released Tuesday. The audit by Auditor General Doug Ringler’s office reviewed records between 2019 and 2022.

Yep, the Auditor General caught the malfeasance.  You know, the very same  Auditor General's Office that Governor Whitmer is trying to gut because it keeps finding Democrat malfeasance in government.

Interesting  how almost a million dollars in liquor goes missing and the Democrat response is to defund the watchdog that caught it.  Funny that. Be interesting to see if this report  is followed up and they track into whose pockets the funds for the missing liquor went - but don't count on any real follow-up anytime soon.

Apparently, It Does Take Someone (Or Even Two People) Getting Killed To Be Fired From A Detroit Union Job

The Detroit News:  Detroit bus driver who killed pedestrian downtown fired

A bus driver with a record of a crash per year (unclear if it is all buses or also personal smash-ups) for the last eight years has now finally been fired from Detroit's Department of Transportation after she ran over a pedestrian a few days ago. That latest fatal crash involved running over the pedestrian in a crosswalk right in front of her bus.

One of those eight prior crashes included a fatality in 2015.

That action wasn't taken after a driving record of 8 crashes until she ran over a person with her bus on camera tells you all you need to know.

Biden's FAA Nominee Don't Know Much About Aviation

The questions asked of him were pretty much what a private pilot candidate should expect to know for their written or oral exam. Not particularly hard stuff.

Townhall: Biden's FAA Nominee Can't Answer a Single Question About Aviation

To be fair, this guy is going to be a bureaucratic administrator, not an aviator, and is likely no more than a diversity hire by the administration.  

Most likely, this is a sinecure for some services rendered in the past, or to fulfill demands from interest groups or another equity/diversity hire.  This guy will  have a staff that actually knows stuff.  He'll simply be an empty-suit signing off and collecting a sweet salary, and perhaps mouthing a few platitudes while driving the Biden Administration's woke mission of an FAA that prizes equity and diversity over competence and effectiveness.

However, it would be nice for once to have a regulator to actually know stuff about what he is regulating, just as I'd like lawmakers to actually have a clue about what they are legislating.

No chance of that happening in this case.

Surprise: Not Only Do Michigan Roads Suck, But The Quality Control Does Too!

Well, surprising no one really, there's a very cozy relationship between the state road agency and the contractors that "fix" the damn roads.

That cozy relationship extends to a lack of competent quality testing, resulting in you guessed it - roads that don't even meet the already low quality standards in this state.

The Detroit Free Press: MDOT fails to ensure quality of gravel used in Michigan road projects, audit shows

I mean, our current road construction and quality standards are great - if this state was Georgia.  

For Michigan, however, with our winters even our current standards are not enough, and the state can't or will not even enforce those basic standards. 

So much for Gov. "Fix the damn roads" Whitmer - it's now over four years and she can't even ensure her own agency is holding the (union) road construction companies to the bare minimums, or her own state agencies to do their own damn jobs.

This is but one of the reasons why Michigan has some of the highest gas taxes and spending on roads, and yet continues to have some of the worst roads in the nation.

No One Could Have Seen That Coming, Oh Wait . . .

The Mercury News: Uvalde killer earned ominous nickname: ‘school shooter’ 

That's what most people would call a "clue".

This is especially so as he was being called that for months before he attacked the school.

ABC News: Texas school shooter left trail of ominous warning signs

The Uvalde, Texas, gunman gave off so many warning signs that he was obsessed with violence and notoriety in the months leading up to the attack that teens who knew him began calling him “school shooter.”

. . .

A state investigative report that highlighted law enforcement's bungled response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School has also provided the most in-depth account to date about missed red flags and possible motivations surrounding 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. Despite many warning signs, he still managed to legally amass more than $5,000 in guns, ammunition and gear in the weeks leading up to the killings.

Read the entire ABC news article and be amazed at how many clear signs the killer was giving off and yet nothing was done.

Yet again, another "known wolf" giving off clear signs of violent intent and mental illness with a propensity for violence towards others and again nothing was done.

Heck, for 77 minutes as the shooting went on, nothing effective was done either. 

The insanely bungled and inept, if not beyond grossly negligent, police response cost lives.  But so too did the abject failure to act after so damn many clear indications were made by the killer before he acted.

Fun With The Federal Government

I'm trying to renew my NEXUS membership.

NEXUS is about the best traveler program you can get - all the benefits of TSA PRE, Global Entry, SENTRI, and using the NEXUS line at the US-Canada border - and it's cheaper than all the others, too.

Only downside is renewal is required, and part of the renewal requires an in-person interview, they also apparently now offer Zoom interviews, but there's a problem with that too.  

The major problem is there are no interview slots available, at all.  

As in none.

Per the system there won't even be a Zoom interview available for at least a year if not more.  

Personally, I can't plan my schedule out a year in advance as I don't know when a court might schedule something, family issues may arise, etc. 

The one in-person location in all the USA that offers an in-person interview is in Minnesota on the border with Canada, even as multiple application centers in Michigan are supposed to be available but none even have a single opening.

Rather frustrating.  But they've given a message that by renewing you get an automatic extension for 2 years after the expiry date on the card, so I expect it will take 2 years for them to sort this out and open up some appointments,

In addition, I'm having fun dealing with USCIS's computer system on an immigration matter that I'm doing pro bono (more on that later). 

When you log in, it wants a two factor authentication, so it send you a one-time code to your phone.  You enter the code and voila:

Isn't that great?   There is nothing else on the screen but that message.

Kinda the Schrödinger's cat school of authentication - you're both valid and invalid at the same time.

Figured out after awhile the trick how to proceed from that screen, which was not intuitive at all. But I was able to do what needed to be done.  In short I truly was both valid and invalid until I figured out how to proceed from that quantum state.

There Is Nothing Government Operates That Cannot Lose Money

From marijuana, to whorehouses to now legalized gambling.  Government somehow always manages to lose money on a sure thing.

Reason: D.C. Managed To Lose $4 Million on Its Own Sports Betting App

After the D.C. Council approved sports gambling in the district in 2018, it further authorized a single company to develop the GambetDC app, at a cost of $215 million over five years. In return, the District hoped to see annual tax revenues of $20 million from bets placed. Instead, the lottery admitted this week that the D.C. government only took in about $1.5 million from the app in 2021, its first full year of operation. In fact, after adjusting for the cost of advertising the app, the government actually lost more than $4 million last year. 

One has to wonder at the relationship, if any, of the company to any of the City Council members or officials for this kind of deal to get authorized, or is it just standard government inefficiency and lack of any business acumen and oversight at work?

If the rosiest projection is it costs $215 million and you're expecting a revenue of only $20 million per year, then that's over a 10 year period before you even see any positive cash flow from the venture (DC council, I'm sure, hates the word profit).  

That's bad enough, but to then show a loss of $4 million a year due to it not working destroys these projections entirely and makes you wonder if anyone did any due dilligence on this at all.  DC losing money from legalized gambling is simply nuts.

Of course, it's not their money at stake, and it's unlikely that any of the decision makers will suffer any consequences from this which partially explains why these inexplicable losses keep occurring - the ones making the decision have no skin in the game and no downside to their bad bets, and in fact win either way while the taxpayers take the loss.

Justin You Schmuck: 1984 is Not Supposed To Be A How-To Manual

So it looks like Canada under Trudeau is going all Total Surveillance / Total Control State so fast the banks are having issues.

The Emergencies Act, formerly the War Powers Act has only been invoked twice in Canadian history:  Once under Pierre E. Trudeau in the FLQ crisis in 1970 when Quebec Marxist Separatists committed about 200 bombings,  kidnapped British trade commissioner James Cross and kidnapped and murdered of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte.  

 Now twenty-two years it is being invoked by his son against peaceful protestors who blow truck horns, blockade traffic, have dances and parties with bouncy-houses and then clean up the area where they've been leaving it cleaner than how they found it.

In short, Trudeau fils is miffed that he wasn't the one shutting down business and movement of Canadians this time.

Using the EA against peaceful protestors is kinda like using a nuclear bomb to swat a fly, and not what it was designed for, but this is what happens when you elect a substitute teacher based on his having some looks that women find attractive and his father's last name.

It's gonna be one heckuva precedent for the next time left-wing demonstrators want to march or protest against a conservative government in Canada, just saying. 

It also appears Justin and friends are messing with the Canadian banking system, trying to seize money or freeze the funds of the trucker protestors. 

There's absolutely no way that's going to go sideways.

No chance of it harming the Canadian banking system,  as people realize what was once a solid, safe, sable and well maintained financial system can have their funds seized or frozen upon government whim, which was just demonstrated when the Big 5 major Canadian banks went offline last night and this morning.

No chance of this leading to actual bloodshed as Ottawa police threaten to take truckers' kids and kill their dogs.

So, anyone still in the mood for an all-digital currency?  or giving governments this kind of power?

Paper Doesn't Reset

Currently having the joy of doing the Free Application for Federal Student Aid FAFSA application for Abby for next year.

Back when I did it, it was paper.  Now it's online, for efficiency, of course, and as one expects, since it is created and managed by the bureaucracy, it's screwed up. 

It has already crashed twice now this morning.

From the beginning its rather slow, with having to hit continue multiple times to change and advance pages and often the continue button spins and when its done you're stuck sitting on the same page again and have to hit Continue yet again and by the third or fourth try it works.

First crash had a funny message that "Based on the information you provided we can't process your form" - this with less than a pittance of the form filled out and we hadn't even gotten to any good parts yet.

And it sent me back to the start page to reenter all the info.  So far had only put in the very basic biographical information -names, address, dob, SSN and drivers license number but it was a pain to do it all yet again. No way to save it as you go, nor any warnings that it wouldn't work again.

And it crashed yet again. this time at least with a friendly message that "The FAFSA form is currently unavailable. We are working to resolve this problem as quickly as possible."  and yep,, booted me back to the start screen of the FAFSA, which has no notice that it is down and you can have the joys of getting to try and start over hoping it might be working again.

Paper while slower to process at least didn't crash while you were trying to fill it out.

If you're going to require using an online system to do something, at least make it efficient and actually work.

Yes The US Government Did Badly Mess Up The Gas Can

In the Detroit Free Press, a leftist columnist laments that modern American gas cans doth suck.  That it took him this long to realize it makes one wonder how often, if ever that he's used a gas can in recent history.

The Detroit Free Press: I wasted $40 on a couple of nearly unusable gas cans: How to find a good one

The writer, Phelan, notes that these cans were govern mentally mandated  with "improvements" to make them environmentally friendly are not only hard to use, but lead to gas spills and hazards which is hardly good for the environment which is what they were designed to protect, right?

He goes on to note that the changes were due to governmental policy and you  need to get on the "black market" to find decent replacement working spouts.

He does state it was the California and US Governments that combined to mess up something so simple as a gas can, but still thinks the environmental regs that led to him and everyone else using the cans spilling gas are still a good idea - so he can't endorse people retro-fitting them to make them work.

He can see the problem, knows what caused the problem but can't advocate fixing the problem as that would go against his love of governmental regulations no matter how much they make people's lives worse and cause the very problems they purport to solve.

Postal Disservice Yet Again

I placed an order for a few of a very useful AR15 type magazine accessory from Buds Guns.

It's the Thermold AR15 Magazine Loader.  For $6.00 its about the best tool you can buy to quickly load your magazines.  Used by the Canadian Forces, no less.

You can use Canadian or US stripper clips in it, or just pile loose rounds in by hand and push down on the rounds to load them en masse, no stripper clip required.

In short, it works great and is highly recommended if you have an AR15 or firearm that takes AR15 magazines.  Their FAL loader and M1A loader work similarly well.

Now Buds offers excellent service.  The Post Office, not so much.

The order was placed on May 20 and shipped by Buds on May 20.  Like I said, excellent service.

The package arrived in Pontiac two days later on May 22.   It's been sitting somewhere in the Pontiac Post Office ever since, with the last update being dated May 28 stating delivery will arrive later than expected.

Tell me something I don't know.

Since May 28 no further updates, and no package.

Update June 23:  It finally arrived in the mailbox sometime last night.  Mailed out May 20 and it spent a month sitting somewhere in the Pontiac Post Office before being delivered.

What Good Is Reporting Unemployment Fraud if They Don't Act On It?

Back in June 2020 someone placed a false unemployment insurance request under Tash's name.  They got the home address right, but interestingly enough the fraudster changed her middle initial.

On June 6 we received a letter about the unemployment request from UIA asking for verification.  That very same day we reported it as identity theft to UIA on their online system for fraud reporting as she never has made an unemployment claim.

Nothing further came of it, until yesterday when we got another notice from UIA that her benefits are apparently being extended and she will now get even more unemployment money under the .

Again, she never applied for Pandemic Unemployment Assistance, and we've never received any of the money, but it seems someone else sure has gotten it likely for over a year.

So let's see, UIA apparently ignored the need for a response to their verification of claim form, then they ignored the fraud report, and they still apparently seem to have allowed the false claim and are sending the funds off to somewhere.

Given the extensive fraud going on, including over $1 Million in false claims by a UIA state employee, and over 100,000 false claims one would think they would quickly handle a report of fraud, but apparently not.

Oh, and who is going to pay for this fraud - why the businesses that employ people in Michigan of course!

As seen on the UIA's website: 

The Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund balance is below $2.5 billion. As a result, the taxable wage base for the 2021 calendar year is $9,500 for all contributing employers. 

 (That's a nice increase of 5.55% in the base amount from last year).

Yep, a lot of that trust fund is being drained by this fraud and government inefficiency if not outright corruption.  So of course, businesses not responsible for the fraud (not to mention our Governor's lockdown policy that also led to massive unemployment) will now have to pay a higher rate to make up for it.

On top of it all, their fax number for reporting fraud is not working today.  Perfect. Just sent it in via their electronic reporting system, same as in June, but since that didn't get anywhere then, so I doubt this repeated fraud report will either.