Saturday, January 24, 2026

There's A National Business Model. Who's Behind It?

I've noticed a steady trickle of stories about how Somali fraud businesses in Maine seem to be emulating the same overall pattern of those in Minnesota: ICE seems to be belatedly on the case: As ICE Begins Enforcement Raids in Maine, New Allegations of Somali Fraud Emerge:

Somali-led fraud is a nationwide epidemic. Minnesota is the epicenter due to excellent reporting from Nick Shirley and the shooting of Renee Nicole Good, who was killed after she tried to ram an ICE agent in Minneapolis. But Washington State, Ohio, and Maine also have fraud issues, and now ICE is heading north

The piece quotes a New York Times story behind a paywall:

The Trump administration has started an immigration enforcement operation in Maine, targeting Somali immigrants in the state, according to two U.S. officials with knowledge of the plans.

. . . A number of asylum seekers from African countries who arrived in the United States during the Biden administration have settled in Maine, joining a Somali population that started arriving there in the early 2000s, when refugees from the country began settling in Lewiston. Yet Maine remains an overwhelmingly white state, with one of the oldest populations in the country. Some employers have begun looking to immigrants to fill labor gaps, as native-born employees have either left the work force or retired.

What we began to see piecemeal during the 2024 campaign was a vague picture of a business model -- "faith-based NGOs" identify groups of "refugees" that can be resettled en bloc into small cities in the US interior, with the connivance of slumlords, used car dealers, sweatshop employers, and local politicians. They exploit federal subsidies to maintain these groups as essentially separate economies, while swamping schools and social services, and driving up rents, insurance rates, and crime in the overall communities. This was a picture we began to see in particular with Haitians in places like Springfield, OH and Charleroi, PA in mid-2024.

There's an added factor coming into the picture in the last several months, systematic large-scale fraud. This has been appearing mostly in Somali enclaves, and we've been seeing somewhat far-fetched attempts to explain it by claiming that Somalis are somehow "tribal", which I've been saying is simply meaningless. The ancient Romans were "tribal", too.

I think the actual situation is that fraud is simply one part of the overall mass migration business model, which we're coming to understand only in bits and pieces as individual reporters like Christopher Rufo at City Journal reported on Springfield and Charleroi, and more recently Nick Shirley reported on Somalis in St Cloud, MN and the Twin Cities. Neither had the resources to do comprehensive stories on the overall problem, so that Rufo concentrated on issues like sweatshop employers and slumlords, while Shirley concentrated on fraud.

But the overall patterns of migrant abuse seem to be consistent across the US: a dozen or so "faith-based NGOs" reappear in many cases, no matter where they emerge. There's a consistent pattern of settling particular ethic groups in particular small cities, often in coordination with food industry employers. The overall schemes appear to have been enabled by the Refugee Act of 1980 and the Immigration Act of 1990, and they tend to rely on Temporary Protected Status to place migrant groups in quasi-legal situations.

And so far, at least as it involves Somalis, there's a national pattern of Medicare fraud. Now in Maine,

Federal prosecutors charged three people connected with a Lewiston company in a tax fraud case alleging publicly funded interpreter services were never delivered.

. . . In February, the U.S. attorney’s office charged three people connected to the company for allegedly billing for interpreter services that didn’t happen, court documents show. The case is the first federal prosecution since an investigator authored a 2021 report outlining a suspicious billing pattern for interpreter services, especially among providers working with the state’s Somali community, that indicated widespread fraud within the MaineCare system.

This case has so far gained little attention in part because it is being prosecuted as tax fraud, not health care fraud. But it is similar to fraud schemes alleged in a massive wave of November prosecutions centered on Minnesota’s Somali community. Those cases reignited scrutiny of Gateway among Maine conservatives that dates back to the spring.

Extravagant billing for "interpreter services" is just one of the schemes discovered by Nick Shirley in his Minnesota videos. It's likely that further investigation in Maine and elsewhere will show clones of all the Minnesota fraud schemes operating in other states, and my instinct is that such schemes aren't limited just to Somalis.

So what we're seeing is an overall business model that manifests in multiple states, coordinated by multiple "faith-based NGOs", that appears to exploit similar types of Medicare and Medicaid fraud, almost certainly extending to fraud in other social services, and likely involving similar schemes of money laundering in multiple jurisdictions. This says to me that there's an overall plan in place, and politicians at the state governor level are likely involved, not just in Minnesota, although the Minnesota scheme is likely to be the first one uncovered:

I think we're seeing just the tip of the iceberg so far, and the pattern won't be just Somalis. If cerain masterminds set things up with Gov Walz in Minnesota, what are the chances that the same people talked with Gov DeWine in Ohio? He's been a staunch supporter of the Springfield Haitians, for instance, and there are Somalis in Ohio as well. But how much do the "faith-based NGOs" know about the fraud? Are they getting kickbacks? The US Catholic Bishops really need to get ahead of this.

posted by test @ January 24, 2026   0 Comments

Friday, January 23, 2026

Broken Brains, Exploding Heads?

So, did Trump have a good week or a bad one? Scott Pinsker at PJ Media:

By overwhelming numbers, the American public doesn’t like Trump’s Greenland policy or approach. His polling is in the toilet.

. . . With U.S. opinion polls so dismal, Trump is in a difficult spot. Perhaps there’s a way out — and perhaps a deal can happen. Perhaps we’re just one handshake away from Denmark giving us Greenland.

But despite yesterday’s blockbuster announcement, I doubt it. The Danes won’t just give Greenland away; they’ll almost certainly demand trillions of dollars and an irrevocable war guarantee.

Why is anyone talking about "the polls" at this stage? Back in November, I pointed out that the Real Clear Politics averages for the New Jersey and Virginia governors' races were well outside the margin of error for the individual polls in the average. As best we can tell, "the polls" have a major problem, and unless wwe can get a handle on what's wrong with them, or with the RCP averages, I don't think we can cite them as a reliable indicator. Pinsker goes on,

Prediction: There won’t be a deal. (I suspect the White House knows this and used yesterday’s announcement as an offramp.)

Domestically, Trump’s focus on Greenland is politically costly. It leaves Trump vulnerable to Democratic accusations of caring more about empire-building than the cost of groceries, healthcare, and housing.

His solution is an incoherent mix of demanding NATO countries spend 3% (or whatever) of GDP on defense in return for not invading Greenland, or maybe invading Greenland for the good of the world anyhow, or something like that. The bottom line is that it shorts Trump, which I think is always a bad idea. The Wall Street Journal takes a similar line, mostly behind a paywall, but we get the gist:

A funny thing happened this week that you wouldn’t think possible from reading the common narrative of President Trump as a Frankenstein’s monster unchained to do whatever he wants: He backed down from his demands to own Greenland. And he did so after financial markets, European allies and the U.S. Congress raised objections. The “authoritarian” Trump narrative was wrong again.

This isn’t to dismiss Mr. Trump’s often wild demands and threats. They have consequences in lost trust among allies and doubts about American reliability. These costs are hard to quantify, but they are real and may show up in a future crisis.

On one hand, we know nothing about the specifics of any "framework" Trump announced, so any conclusion that he chickened out in some way is premature. What he wanted was a particular level of access to Greenland, equivalent to territoriality, and he says he's happy with what's being offered. But on the other hand, his overall statements surrounding the World Economic Forum have caused key NATO members to threaten military action against the US, which is simply an acknowledgement that the alliance is shakier than anyone thought, and Trump has been making his views known:

"What we have gotten out of NATO is nothing," Trump said at the World Economic Forum. "We paid for, in my opinion, 100% of NATO because they weren't paying their bills. And all we're asking for is Greenland."

. . . "What I'm asking for is a [oiece] of ice. . . that can play a vital role in world peace and protection," Trump insisted. "The problem with NATO is we'll be there for them 100% but I'm not sure they'll be there for us."

The inevitable consequence, as I 've also discussed earlier this week, has been for NATO members to consider their relative positions vis-a-vis US sttrength:

Canadian military chiefs have wargamed a US invasion and concluded that they would be overpowered in only two days.

. . . Under the plans, which officials stressed were precautionary and hypothetical, forces would use asymmetric tactics whereby a weaker army attempts to counter a dominant force. Canada would rely on drone warfare and would also request assistance from European allies, namely the former imperial powers Britain and France.

. . . Canadian military positions on land and at sea would be overcome in as little as two days, leaving an insurgency‑style campaign including ambushes and “hit‑and‑run tactics” as the only option, the report said.

Canada’s military is dwarfed by the US armed forces, having only 63,500 active duty personnel as of 2024 while the US has 1.3 million.

As far as I can see, Trump at the World Economic Forum was able to portray himself as a dominant figure, the center of discussion, and the center of attention, which for Trump is never a bad thing. He was able to make an entirely new point about NATO, suggesting on one hand that the US is willing to walk away from it as a deal, which is a standard Trump negotiating posture. On the other hand, he was able to raise the issue that the other NATO countries are neither individually nor collectively able to form a force that would be any factor in a global balance of power -- if the US walks away from NATO, it has very little to lose, while NATO loses everything.

This is another standard Trump negotiating posture -- he negotiates with opponents who have no alternatives. And he did this at the WEF, not at a NATO meeting, when those behind the WEF presumably had an entirely different agenda. I have a hard time understanding the position that Trump comes out of the week in any diminished state.

posted by test @ January 23, 2026   0 Comments

Thursday, January 22, 2026

Bad Advice From Archbishop Broglio

Via The Pillar:

The archbishop of the U.S. military services said Sunday that he does not believe military action to take control of Greenland could be justified – and that U.S. troops in good conscience could refuse orders to do so.

Speaking to the BBC on Jan. 18. Archbishop Timothy Broglio of the Archdiocese for the Military Services said he “cannot see any circumstances” in which an American military operation to take control of Greenland or another ally’s territory could fulfill the criteria for a just war.

Asked whether he is concerned about Catholics serving in the military who might be asked to participate in a military operation to take control of Greenland, Broglio responded, “I am obviously worried, because they could be put in a situation where they’re being ordered to do something which is morally questionable.”

In this case, I think Abp Broglio is obscuring the difference between a clearly illegal order and one that a particular individual may feel violates his moral or philosophical principles. I asked Chrome AI mode, which is generally reliable on less controversial issues, "What happens if you refuse to obey a military order you think is illegal?" It answered in part,

In the U.S. military, you have both a legal right and an affirmative duty to disobey orders that are "manifestly illegal". However, doing so is legally perilous because you bear the burden of proof if the order is later determined to be lawful.

If you refuse an order you believe is illegal, you . . . will likely be detained and may face immediate charges of insubordination under Article 90 (willful disobedience of a superior officer) or Article 92 (failure to obey a lawful order) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).

A military judge, not a jury, will ultimately determine the lawfulness of the order. If the order is found to be lawful, you face severe penalties including dishonorable discharge, forfeiture of pay, and up to two years of confinement (more in wartime).

. . . To be legally refused, an order must be manifestly unlawful, meaning its illegality is obvious to a person of ordinary sense.

A good example of the uncertainty surrounding what orders might be illegal is the case of the 1968 My Lai massacre. Although no soldiers involved refused alleged orders to kill civilian villagers, two officers, Captain Ernest Medina and Lieutenant William Calley, were court martialed for allegedly giving illegal orders. The evidence indicated that none of the orders, given verbally and recalled differently in different accounts, was explicitly illegal.

Medina was acquitted, while Calley, although convicted, appealed his case and eventually had his sentence considerably reduced. This suggests that in even that case, a soldier who refused orders that weren't clearly, unambiguously illegal would be on shaky ground if the matter reached court martial.

But this is a completely different matter from the situation Abp Broglio is outlining, where a Catholic soldier feels that a military seizure of Greenland violates just war doctrine and, for instance, refuses deployment. In this case, his order of deployment would be completely legal; he just finds it morally objectionable. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Could a military member legally refuse an order if he felt it violated just war doctrine?" It replied, in part,

In the U.S. military, a member can legally refuse an order only if it is unlawful. While just war doctrine informs international laws that the U.S. follows, a service member cannot legally refuse an order simply because they believe it violates the philosophical or moral principles of that doctrine.

. . . "Just war" doctrine is divided into two parts, and the law treats them differently:

Jus in bello (Conduct in War): If an order violates the legal rules of conduct (e.g., a war crime), a member must refuse it.

Jus ad bellum (Justice of War): Military members generally do not have the legal right to refuse to participate in a war they believe is unjust or lacks a legitimate cause. Personal, political, or philosophical disagreement with the war itself is not a legal defense for disobeying a lawful order to deploy or fight.

A good historical example is the case of the 1846-48 Mexican War, in which the US gained Texas, California, and the territory in between. This was as controversial at the time as the Viet Nam War was more than a century later. Ulysses S Grant in his autobiography explains how, as a young Army officer, he was personally opposed to the war, but he served and followed orders throughout. This would be the normal ethos in the US military, and any service member who refused orders on philosophical grounds would be justifiably court martialed. CCC 2309 tacitly acknowledges this after outlining the principles of just war doctrine:

The evaluation of these conditions for moral legitimacy belongs to the prudential judgment of those who have responsibility for the common good.

According to Catholic Answers,

But unlike principles of doctrine and morality, the Church has not definitively taught which specific answers the faithful should embrace when it comes to implementing moral principles—like justice or care for the poor—in the public sphere.

In other words, the Church acknowledges that "those who have responsibility for the common good" have a degree of latitude in determining military policy, and it isn't up to individual Catholics to decide whether to refuse lawful orders -- and in this case, an order to deploy to Greenland would be lawful, just as much as then-Lieutenant Grant acknowledged that an order to deploy to Mexico was lawful.

It's unfortunate that Abp Broglio appears to be giving imperfect and unreliable advice to his flock in the military services.

posted by test @ January 22, 2026   0 Comments

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

"This Seems Like The Beginning Of A Joke"

From Don Surber Monday:

The frenemy countries want NATO to stand up to the United States. This is laughable because the USA created NATO after the Eurocide of World War II. NATO was an excuse for America to place troops along the Iron Curtain. The curtain fell but the troops are still there.

Hey, we are not immune to idiocy.

However, Denmark, France and Germany act like they invented idiocy. This weekend’s warrior cosplay by the mousey mites on the ice in Greenland was farcical.

Italian Defense Minister Guido Crosetto said, “Imagine 15 Italians, 15 French, 15 Germans in Greenland. This seems like the beginning of a joke.”

Just this morning:

European opposition ⁠to President Donald Trump's bid to acquire Greenland and his proposed "Board of Peace" initiative has disrupted plans for an economic support package for postwar Ukraine, the Financial Times reported ‍on Wednesday.

A planned announcement of an $800 billion prosperity ‍plan to be agreed between Ukraine, Europe, and the U.S. at the World Economic Forum ⁠in Davos this week has been delayed, the report said, citing six officials.

From The Guardian this past Sunday:

Trump’s weekend announcement that eight countries that have supported Greenland would face tariffs unless there was a deal to sell the territory to the US was another hammer to the transatlantic alliance, mocking the notion that the US is Europe’s ally. The eight countries include six EU member states, as well as Norway and the UK, the latter unprotected by the much vaunted “special relationship”. It suggests that Europe’s strategy of flattering and appeasing the US president has failed.

From Barron's on Monday:

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said Tuesday he was worried US President Donald Trump's push to take Greenland could be diverting focus away from Russia's invasion, now approaching its four-year mark.

Trump last week threatened European nations with tariffs of up to 25 percent for opposing his plans to acquire Greenland, drawing anger from Brussels and putting the NATO military alliance under unprecedented strain.

. . . "I'm worried about any loss of focus during a full-scale war," Zelensky told reporters.

Yesterday, The Guardian weighed in again:

The strain is already intense for Europe. Trump’s pressure is designed to expose EU fault lines and sow internal division by forcing member states to prioritize different existential threats and divergent interests. Denmark has a near-existential interest in preventing this annexation. France and Germany have an interest in demonstrating EU cohesion, yet risk seeing their vital access to US export markets severed.

. . . In the face of this trauma, the traditional European habit will be to try to weather the storm. There is a deep-seated institutional hope in Brussels and Berlin that this is a temporary aberration – that if Europe simply absorbs the tariffs and waits until 2028, transatlantic relations will return to “normal”.

This reflex must be actively resisted. The wait and see approach is no longer a strategy. It is a recipe for perpetual vassalage. The Greenland crisis is not just bad weather. It is a structural shift. European leaders must use this crisis as the necessary political catalyst to further the continent’s own sovereign defenses.

Well, European leaders have already risen to the threat: they've put 15 Italians, 15 French, and 15 Germans in Greenland, except the Germans have already pulled out. But The Guardian nevertheless realizes how serious things have become:

Producing the financial resources for an independent defense will take years; every month spent debating is a month lost. The choice is no longer between the status quo and integration. It is between a painful European rebirth or a slow descent into a world where the EU collapses internally, its security is in tatters and it becomes a target for expansion in Moscow.

Trump seems to be one of the few people who's come to the recognition that Moscow hasn't been able to make headway in Ukraine in four years. The stalemate between Russia and Ukraine is increasingly pointless; men of military age have fled Ukraine to avoid conscription and the meat grinder; the country is recognized as hopelessly corrupt, yet Zelensky continues in power. But NATO and the EU want to continue that increasingly irrelevant situation, and The Guardian has decided the solution is for Europe to rearm to maintain the status quo.

There's a sudden consensus that Trump's focus on Greenland is breaking NATO and possibly the EU, and it's become the main topic at Davos. This is simply remarkable. Trump seems to be upending the post-1945 consensus, just like that, with Greenland as the fulcrum of the lever.

posted by test @ January 21, 2026   0 Comments

Tuesday, January 20, 2026

Don Lemon's Protracted Career Sunset

It's intriguing that two high-profile leaders of the Minnesota ICE riots are has-beens, Tim Walz, who ended his reelection campaign after revelations of Somali fraud, and Don Lemon, who was fired by CNN in 2023:

Don Lemon landed in hot water earlier this year after comments he made about Republican presidential hopeful Nikki Haley, a former UN ambassador and governor of South Carolina.

Ms Haley was not "in her prime", Lemon said in February, a remark widely decried as sexist.

. . . "I'm just saying what the facts are - Google it," he added, in response to objections from his female co-hosts, Poppy Harlow and Kaitlan Collins.

Lemon issued a statement on the same day saying he regretted his "inartful and irrelevant" comments. He also apologised to the newsroom and agreed to partake in "mandatory training" to address the incident.

Unmentioned by legacy media as of 2023 but almost certainly much closer to the real reason for his firing was a 2018 episode in a Hamptons bar:

Dustin Hice says in his Suffolk County Supreme Court suit that he was slinging drinks in July 2018 for The Old Stove Pub in Sagaponack when he and his coworkers decided to go out for drinks after work one night.

The group headed to Murf’s Backstreet Tavern in Sag Harbor, where Hice told The Post, “I see out of the corner of my eye, it’s Don Lemon’’ there, too.

“I had had two beers, maybe three at the most,’’ Hice recalled. “I said, ‘Hey, Don, let me buy you a drink.’ I turned to Nick the bartender and said, ‘Hey, Nick, let me get two [vodka] Lemon Drops’ and put two fingers in the air.

. . . As alleged in his complaint, Hice, 38, told The Post, “About 5 or 10 minutes later, Don gets up, walks around the bar, comes up right up to me and puts his hands down his board shorts. He rubs himself aggressively, his penis and whatever else down there.”

Lemon then “shoved his index and middle fingers in Plaintiff’s mustache and under Plaintiff’s nose,’’ according to Hice’s suit, which was filed over the weekend.

“And he goes, ‘Do you like p—y or d–k?’ And he kept saying, ‘P or D? P or D?’ He said it three or four times. I’m like, ‘Whoa man, what the hell?’ ” Hice claimed.

Hice eventually dropped the lawsuit in 2022, but accounts suggest that CNN's legal department had had to get involved, and the story likely contributed to a consensus on mahogany row that Lemon was a loose cannon. Since his firing, he's become "independent", with a Don Lemon Show on YouTube, Substack, Facebook, and Instagram.

Despite the growing audience and praise, Lemon acknowledged that it wasn’t always easy to become CEO of his own media company, overseeing operational demands and serving as talent. “It’s been a learning experience. It has been frightening, thrilling, and terrifying all at the same time,” he said. “Every day, even when people doubt you. . . just keep going. Because it doesn’t matter. What people think about you doesn’t really matter.”

The problem at this point is that he doesn't have a major corporation's law department to back him up, and this comes at a time when he already needs to be talking to expensive attorneys: Dhillon, a Sikh, gave an extensive explanation of the federal case against Lemon and others for disrupting a Christian service to Benny Johnson:

United States Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division Harmeet Dhillon, in an interview on "The Benny Show" with Benny Johnson, said the DOJ will pursue charges for the people who stormed a Minneapolis church during service to carry out an anti-ICE protest, including former CNN host Don Lemon.

"Don Lemon himself has come out and said he knew exactly what was going to happen inside that facility," Dhillon said. "He went into the facility, and then he began — quote, unquote — 'committing journalism,' as if that's sort of a shield from being a part, an embedded part, of a criminal conspiracy. It isn’t."

"I don't know what he is now, but journalism is not a badge or a shield that protects you from criminal consequences when you are part of a crime," Dhillon said. "And I think the videos show how close he was to these folks. I think further evidence will show more information about that."

. . . And so, as you know, and as people have said, the prior administration prosecuted people under the FACE Act for peacefully praying outside abortion clinics where unborn children were being killed inside. Now, that's protected by federal law. That's up to Congress.

However, that same law gives us the right at the Department of Justice to prosecute the same kind of conduct vis-a-vis any house of worship. And there's been a lot of talk of the First Amendment thrown around. The First Amendment includes the right to pray without interference.

. . . I'm not going to flag, but the FACE Act has been mentioned as one of the predicates there. In other cases, the Biden DOJ used the Klan Act conspiracy charges tacked on to the FACE Act in the case of protests outside abortion clinics to bring much longer sentences. So, there are a number of tools available to us.

Who funded this? What other crimes may have occurred? Was there a use of the wires or the mails in preparing for this event?

Did anyone cross state lines to do this? All of those are potential predicates for additional federal charges.

Whether or not Lemon is eventually convicted on charges like those Dhillon outlines, his problem right now is that he already needs expensive attorneys to start working on his defense -- and the days when someone like Alan Dershowitz would take his case pro bono are long gone.

The suits at CNN saw this coming years ago. Even CNN didn't have that kind of money. Rush Limbaugh used to call Lemon "the gift that keeps on giving", and it looks like his ability to get into repeated scrapes hasn't stopped. Like Walz, Lemon's career is effectively over.

posted by test @ January 20, 2026   0 Comments

Sunday, January 18, 2026

Now We Hear It: Becca And Renee Weren't "Married"

Julie Kelly reports:

An attorney representing Renee Good’s estate acknowledged in an interview with the Washington Post that Becca Good was not her wife. Antonio Romanucci, the Chicago-based attorney who also represented the family of George Floyd and succeeded in winning a $27 million settlement for the Floyd family, said Renee’s “partner, parents and four siblings want ‘to honor her life with progress toward a kinder and more civil America.” Romanucci further confirmed the pair “were not married.”

On Friday, just a few days after publishing the story about Thompson, the Times had to admit in a separate story that Becca and Renee “were not legally married.” But a review of Times articles published since the shooting does not show that the paper has corrected any previous articles describing Becca Good as the “wife” or “widow” of Renee Good.

This brings back a number of questions I had in the immediate wake of the shooting. Reports at the time characterized Becca as Renee's "wife", apparently without fact checking, for instance, Becca Good, Wife of Renee, Releases Statement: "We Had Whistles. They Had Guns". According to Wikipedia,

A nearby resident said that, after he heard Good's SUV smash, he went outside and saw Rebecca Good "covered in blood" and sitting in front of the building, crying, "You guys just killed my wife".

Clearly the disingenuousness began at the scene. But there are other questions that cascade from the fakery. As I noted on January 9, the SUV Becca and Renee were in was a Honda Pilot, a $50,000 car. That immediately set warning lights flashing for me: who owned that car, and how did they pay for it?

But I put those questions aside if she and Becca were "married" -- it must be community property, although reports were that Renee was a stay-at-home mom:

Good previously worked as a dental assistant and at a credit union, but was primarily a stay-at-home mom in recent years, the ex-husband said.

So how does a stay-at-home mom drive a $50,000 SUV that isn't community property? The Missouri Department of Motor Vehicles confirmed that the vehicle was co-owned by the two women and had been registered to a Kansas City address. So this leads to an entirely reasonable question how Becca was able to afford a $50,000 car. But this is the question that must not be asked:

A push by the Department of Justice to open an investigation into the widow [sic] of Renee Nicole Good after her tragic killing at the hands of a federal immigration officer has sparked a mass resignation of federal prosecutors in Minnesota, reports say.

According to reports, at least a dozen federal prosecutors across Washington and Minnesota have indicated their plans to resign. This includes six federal prosecutors in the state who left their jobs on Tuesday, and another six top prosecutors in the criminal section of the Justice Department in D.C..

. . . The resignations came as a result of a push by top Justice Department officials to investigate Good’s widow, a move that has sparked outrage over the seeming mission to punish a family already grieving the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent’s brutal and public killing of Good.

This comes amid flagging efforts to draw equivalence with the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020. Even PBS is acknowledging it's not going well:

Five years ago, video images from a Minneapolis street showing a police officer kneeling on the neck of George Floyd as his life slipped away ignited a social movement.

Now, videos from another Minneapolis street showing the last moments of Renee Good's life are central to another debate about law enforcement in America. . . . Yet compared to 2020, the story these pictures tell is murkier, subject to manipulation both within the image itself and the way it is interpreted.

. . . "The people who are writing the cultural narrative of the Good shooting took notes from the Floyd killing and are managing this narrative differently," said Kelly McBride, an expert on media ethics for the Poynter Institute.

. . . When one online commentator wrote that Good did not deserve to be shot in the face, conservative media figure Megyn Kelly responded, "Yes, she did. She hit and almost ran over a cop."

Poynter's McBride said the media has generally done a good and careful job outlining the evidence that is circulating around in the public. But the administration has also been effective in spreading its interpretation, she said.

Unmentioned in respectable media is also the problem that lesbians are a tough sell. Yesterday's Babylon Bee carried the headline Minnesota Changes Official State Bird To Screaming Lesbian

Following recent developments stemming from political protests and clashes with the federal government across the state, Minnesota announced that it had changed the official state bird to a screaming lesbian.

After the recent spate of screaming lesbians, state officials agreed that a change was needed to modernize the official state bird and make it more fitting and identifiable as embodying what everyone thinks of when they think of Minnesota.

Even before general recognition that Renee and Becca were never formally "married", although they had the legal option of doing this, the constant use of words like "family", "stay-at-home mom", "wife", and "widow" were falling flat. It didn't fit the competing narrative of two former heterosexual marriages and three kids, two from one, one from another, with the six-year-old dropped off at day care before the shooting. Devoted mom indeed.

It's hard not to conclude that legacy media is losing its grip over public opinion.

posted by test @ January 18, 2026   0 Comments

Saturday, January 17, 2026

On Reflection, This Is A Troll

The one thing that's kept bothering me about Scott Adams's "conversion" is that it's a little too much like a three-panel Dilbert strip. In panel 1, a "Christian" tells Dilbert the way to get to heaven is to say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior". In panel 2, Dilbert, on his deathbed, says this and dies. In panel 3, there's a punch line -- I'm not sure what that would be, I'm not Scott Adams, but it would undercut the whole thing the "Christian" told him in panel 1.

Actually, I don't think it would be too far from the sequence below. The context is Adams's revival of the Dilbert strip in March, 2023 as "Dilbert Reborn" following the cancellation of the original strip in the wake of harsh remarks he made about African-Americans that February. The strip's distributor severed ties with Adams, ending the comic's syndication, while his publisher canceled his upcoming next book and removed the others from its offerings.

The sequence below appears to be the "origin story" of Dilbert's rebirth and marks one of Adams's few actual ventures into eschatology (click on the image for a larger copy):

In the sequence, a garbage man encounters Dogbert atop a recycling bin. The garbage man tells Dogbert he can bring Dilbert back in a matter of hours if Dogbert gives him Dilbert's ashes. And as promised, a reborn Dilbert pops up from the recycling bin, angrier than ever. I think this gives some idea of what the final panel might be in the hypothetical three-panel strip of Dilbert on his deathbed I suggested above -- and there might well be a hell involved, certainly not a saccharine heaven with cherubs strumming lyres in the clouds that some observers appear to believe Adams finally endorsed.

And if we put Scott Adams in the tradition of dark freethinking American humorists like Mark Twain and Nathanael West, this seems like a much more consistent outcome. It was, after all, Adams's reaction to the death of his career, only a few years before he had to contemplate his actual demise. But overall, while I don't think Adams was as smart about religion as he could have been, I do think he was much too smart to believe you'll go to heaven if you just say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior", and of course, no reasonable Christian apologist like C S Lewis or Fulton Sheen would claim this in any case, which is why I'm puzzled that figures like Franklin Graham are OK with it.

The problem is that many radical Evangelicals do in fact say this. I asked Chrome AI mode, "Are there prominent Christian spokesmen who believe you'll go to heaven if you simply say, "I accept Jesus Christ as my lord and savior"? It answered in part,

Yes, many prominent Christian spokesmen and evangelists teach that accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior is the essential requirement for salvation and entry into heaven. This teaching is often centered on the "Sinner's Prayer," a short profession of faith popularized by major evangelical figures throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

It lists Billy Graham, Franklin Graham, Joel Osteen, Rick Warren, and Jack Hyles as proponents of this view, but it includes the caution,

Some critics and spokesmen warn against "easy believism," where a person says the words without genuine heart change. Many teachers, including Billy Graham, emphasize that true belief must involve turning away from sin (repentance) and a change in desires to follow Christ's teachings. Supporters often cite Romans 10:9, which states that if you "confess with your mouth that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved". Some modern pastors, such as David Platt, have criticized the "Sinner's Prayer" as a potentially "superstitious" practice not explicitly found in the Bible, arguing it risks giving people false assurance without a radical life change.

This brings me to a problem I struggled with during my undergraduate years. I noticed, without understanding all the implications, that Evangelicals referred to themselves as "Christians", unlike Catholics or main line protestants who referred to themselves more particularly as members of their denominations. Thus if they referred to a "good Christian lady", they meant an Evangelical, and almost certainly not a Catholic or Episcopalian. So I began to ask myself if in fact I was a "Christian" if those who most audibly called themselves "Christian" were so much at variance with what I thought was reasonable Christian belief.

And looking back, I realize that only half a decade before, I'd been through Presbyterian confirmation class, which gave me absolutely no resources even to start to answer this question. But then, decades later, I commented to a fellow parishioner at coffee hour that my wife and I had come into the Catholic Church through RCIA. He replied, "Then you've been better catechized than 90% of the parish here."

I think this is at the root of Scott Adams's final troll: an awful lot of professed Christians believe some very silly stuff, and almost none of them is willing to call it out. All we got when Adams begsn to talk like some doofus in a Dilbert strip was pious umm-hmms from people like Franklin Graham who should know a lot better. At least so far, Bp Barron and Fr Schmitz have kept quiet, but I hope to see a day when even they will speak up.

posted by test @ January 17, 2026   0 Comments