the chocolate helmet of government accountability

mistaking scam for safety and rolling up networks

what’s worse than playing football with no helmet?

playing football with a fake helmet that you have mistaken for real.

with no helmet, you’d know to be careful. with a fake helmet, you just get your head split when it turns out that “cadbury” is not much help against a linebacker.

“put me in, coach.”

i have used this analogy a number of times around regulators like FDA approving as “safe and effective” products that clearly are neither of those things (and doing so on the basis of meaningless biomarkers.)

the CDC refused to even monitor vaccine safety under covid. they just flat out didn’t do it. they went out of their way to break the AE reporting. it was like sitting in a house consumed by raging fire while the smoke alarm sat mum.

and people said things like “well, if the house were really on fire, the alarm would go off, so obviously, this is fine…”

and we all saw how that worked out…

but this is not unique to health.

increasingly, we see agency after agency in which it’s clear that someone took the batteries out.

it’s legitimately amazing how fake these government systems have become.

they have passed “unsuited to purpose” and reached “directly and intentionally antithetical” to it.

they seem to even lack systems to hold agencies and agents accountable.

and you don’t diverge this far from sane and sensible practice by accident.

here’s some video from a minnesota house hearing where walz appointee erin campbell of the management and budget office admitted under questioning by chair kristin robbins that her agency, wait for it, lacks enforcement tools to hold state agencies accountable for fraud. read that again. despite statutory duties to oversee fiscal controls, the OMB do not even really have a structure to do so.

it’s surreal.

and this is not incompetence, it’s agenda.

well, we let them police themselves. we “create a framework for agencies to use and (provide) support and resources and tools for them to use in order to identify and implement their own internal controls.”

put simply, we let the foxes manage their own henhouse activities.

“and when they fail at that, what do you do?”

the look of dumbfounded “what?” on campbell’s face here in response to this most obvious of questions is as telling as it is astonishing. she’s legitimately speechless. you can basically see “do? we do nothing. what the hell is she talking about?” rattling through her screensaver-mode visage. she passes the question off.

her associate says “what we do is step in with support.”

it’s all of a piece.

“i know you’re asking the question ‘what do we need to hold agencies accountable'?’ but i would view that differently and that would be to say ‘what do we need for agencies to be successful?’”

this is a master class in semantic smokescreen, embedding the idea that for these agencies somehow “being accountable” diverges from “being successful” and that we can set some standard for “success” which sidesteps pesky ideas like “being held to account.”

you seriously cannot make this up.

nor can you make up things like this:

$430 million in fraud just in MN in a few days of looking at fake SBA loans. you basically cannot turn over a rock in the walz fiefdom without “learing” about some quality new fraud. it’s absolutely endemic, a fully metastatic cancer that has seemingly spread to every institution, statehouse, doghouse, and outhouse. the MN government is starting to look like one of these hulls where if you scrape off the rust, there won’t be any boat left underneath.

and this is not an accident.

and this is not just minnesota.

you’re going to see this play out all over america because this is going on all over america.

the fourth, unelected branch of government has become crime.

and, as they emerge, the percentages are going to shock people who blissfully thought that “sure, there’s a little, but it’s not too bad, there are people who keep an eye on stuff like this!”

something like a third of all payments in the US federal payments system don’t even have identifiers on them. you could march an entire army through that opacity. honestly, i’m concerned that perhaps someone has.

one of the really important shifts in perspective is this simple realization:

these government programs are not complete travesties because the people involved are stupid.

they are like this because someone wants them this way.

it’s easy to assume that this is just lazy, unconscientious, room temperature IQ people doing lazy, room temperature IQ people things because there are so many people who fit that description populating these systems and agencies, but to do so misses the game.

those people were selected for and placed into these roles by people who were not stupid. they were put in place by people with plans. the useful idiots are just cannon fodder, filling roles and playing the patsy while flouncing around with fancy titles and sinecures rooted in implausible levels of unaccountable job security.

maybe they really do believe, in their own concussed-bunny fashion, that they are “making a difference” and “promoting justice and opportunity and helping the disadvantaged or oppressed” but it really makes little difference.

stupid is as stupid does and you can get it to do damn near anything if you wind it up the right way. and it will feel wonderful about itself while it does these things.

haters will say this is AI

you cannot fix the system by rooting out stupid.

you cannot simply explain “you need to do this better” because they 1. probably do not know how and 2. would not want to if they did.

and worst of all, the string pullers would not allow them to even if they could and somehow decided that they wanted to.

the system is set up to prevent that, layer upon layer of peter-principle incompetence, ideology, and emotive slop justification.

but these are symptoms, not cause.

the cause is the machine behind it.

finding this business fraud is great. it needs to be done. but then we need to keep following the money and, in this day and age, money leaves a trail like a blacklight bedspread in a rent by the hour motel.

to whom did these businesses make payments and political donations? who was bribed, who was on the take, and which politicians were funding war chests and lifestyles through this?

these questions will need to be asked at a federal and at a global level.

how much of this money went offshore as cash?

where did it go then?

and how much of it boomeranged back laundered through networks of NGO’s and PAC’s and who knows what else?

that’s the real prize here and the reason the ground troops are panicking into open conflict and cries for insurrection DBA “sanctuary city.”

these are the threads that strangle when pulled.

you start at both ends, with the theft and with the likely thieves, and you work toward the middle until you can map the whole flow. you connect the point of robbery to the people with conspicuously inexplicable wallet sizes. then you roll up the entire ecosystem and all its tentacles. RICO is the tip of the iceberg.

that must be the game and the goal.

it’s the only thing that matters and the only solution to the problem. anything less is taking the cancer out of the lungs but leaving it in the lymph system. it’ll be back faster than you can say “yikes.”

it’s all here, the crime, the culprits, and the vast, winding trail.

and it is a key undertaking of our time to see it through wherever it leads.

these systems of unaccountable plunder are the antithesis of the republic, of rights, of reason, and of liberty. they are anti-flourishing, capture by stranglevines.

the situation is binary:

you either cut this all out, or you’ll live like this forever.

LFG.

“HIKE!”