Conservation or Big Beautiful Ballrooms?

[Bonasababy]

I hope so. I don't think you read the link he posted and you were responding to the thread title. After reading the link I took your point to be "Fraud happens...so it is ok if the President commits a little fraud".

I also point out that your AP link is from 2023 and contains the sentence below. So it was illegal and was being prosecuted, at least in 2023. Unfortunately we DOGE'd a lot of people in anti-fraud investigative units, so I'm not sure these days.

The U.S. government has charged more than 2,230 defendants with pandemic-related fraud crimes and is conducting thousands of investigations.

In MN...ground zero for pandemic fraud if you believe the MAGA party...they have dropped cases and let people go. Missing deadlines, not complying with orders... So many federal lawyers quit. Judges are ripping Trumps Justice department a new one.

Seems like every month Trump is pardoning fraudsters and those convicted of crimes.

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-grants-pardon-former-us-congressman-convicted-insider-trading-2026-06-06/

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/forget-doj-trump-pardon-call-bobby-other-influencers-2026-06-11/

 

[406dn]

Nope, white elephant are your words. Are you wanting to put a permanent line item in the budget to update it as required?

Actually a one time line item, for its demolition.

 

[Nick87]

Face it. They're all crooked.

 

[Carnage2011]

In MN...ground zero for pandemic fraud if you believe the MAGA party...they have dropped cases and let people go. Missing deadlines, not complying with orders... So many federal lawyers quit. Judges are ripping Trumps Justice department a new one.

Seems like every month Trump is pardoning fraudsters and those convicted of crimes.

https://www.reuters.com/world/trump-grants-pardon-former-us-congressman-convicted-insider-trading-2026-06-06/

https://www.reuters.com/investigations/forget-doj-trump-pardon-call-bobby-other-influencers-2026-06-11/

I’m ready for the Trump era to be done for sure, but for a MN resident to be yapping about pardons is hilarious. Who did Walz just try and pardon? You’re complaining about an insider trading pardon (which I agree is BS) then you better be complaining about Walz sex offender due to his “immigration concerns.”

 

[Bonasababy]

I’m ready for the Trump era to be done for sure, but for a MN resident to be yapping about pardons is hilarious. Who did Walz just try and pardon? You’re complaining about an insider trading pardon (which I agree is BS) then you better be complaining about Walz sex offender due to his “immigration concerns.”

Whataboutism....

FWIW I do not support that pardon but the details...including pleas from the victim for a pardon that are well known here (but you wont hear from far right sources) muddy the waters.

At the least it was politically stupid, and they (it wasnt Walz alone making the decision) did listen to and take into account the victims views.

Ask the Eppstein survivors how they feel about Trumps DOJ not being willing to even meet with or listen to them.

 

[Carnage2011]

Whataboutism....

FWIW I do not support that pardon but the details...including pleas from the victim for a pardon that are well known here (but you wont hear from far right sources) muddy the waters.

At the least it was politically stupid, and they (it wasnt Walz alone making the decision) did listen to and take into account the victims views.

Ask the Eppstein survivors how they feel about Trumps DOJ not being willing to even meet with or listen to them.

Everything with politics is whataboutism. That’s the whole point. You complain about Trump and can’t comprehend how people support him. Trump supporters do the same thing with Walz/Harris/Biden. It’s literally choosing the least “bad” side.

Prime example of whataboutism…your last paragraph. I’m down to throw every pedo in prison (or public hanging). There is no muddying the waters with sexual assault…

 

[Irrelevant]

My point, apparently not so obvious, is people are hyper-focused on a building structure addition to protect politicians from the crazies. No matter who is in the WH, it will be used for decades to come. Yet, the same people ignore literally hundreds of other billions that we got nothing for.

It's not that hard to find the articles if you bother to look. If you are waiting for your media to call it out, it may be a while. Just a couple of samples below ... you might trust at least one of these links ... maybe not.

The Great Grift: How billions in COVID-19 relief aid was stolen or wasted

An Associated Press analysis found that fraudsters potentially stole more than $280 billion in COVID-19 relief funding; another $123 billion was wasted or misspent.

apnews.com

Gavin Newsom’s Empire of Fraud

California has lost at least $180 billion to fraud, according to officials and experts.

www.city-journal.org

Gotcha.

"Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden."

I support the continued prosecution of these thieves.

 

[Nick87]

Gotcha.

"Most of the looted money was swiped from three large pandemic-relief initiatives launched during the Trump administration and inherited by President Joe Biden."

I support the continued prosecution of these thieves.

I dont know if we will ever know how many people ripped off those pandemic funds or the grand amount. Regardless who was president at the time ( i think there was plenty under both). What happens to that money? It's gone all the honest folks like us are stuck paying the price of the inflation. Sometimes i think like woukd be better/easier to just be a criminal.

 

[mtmiller]

Sometimes i think like woukd be better/easier to just be a criminal.

Presidential aspirations, nice.

 

[Forkyfinder]

Presidential aspirations, nice.

Hey now - i think hes qualified to serve on a ukrainian gas companies board - how about you?

He probably has to pee clean for work - so hes already more qualified than others.

 

[Nick87]

Presidential aspirations, nice.

Never said I'd be any good at it.

 

[Irrelevant]

View attachment 412431

He Predicted America's Crisis Sixteen Years Ago, to the Year. His Database Says It Ends Three Ways. America Has Survived One of Them Before.

He predicted 2020 back in 2010. His data gives America three endings. Your parents lived through the only good one.

stbadhon.substack.com

Then, around the turn of the century, he asked the question that changed his life and may yet change how you see yours. If populations of animals rise and fall according to discoverable laws, do human societies? Historians had insisted for generations that the answer was no, that history is too messy, humans too unpredictable. Turchin’s response was to stop arguing and start counting. With colleagues around the world he built a database of hundreds of societies across 10,000 years, from the Roman Republic to imperial China to pre-revolutionary France, recording for each one the conditions that preceded its moments of breakdown. If you study one collapse, you have an anecdote. If you study hundreds, you have a pattern.
...
So what did the equations see in 2010 that the pundits missed? Three gauges, all climbing into the red. And here is where this stops being a story about a clever scientist, because all three gauges are measurements of your life.

The first he calls popular immiseration, which is a cold word for something you have felt in your chest for decades. Starting in the 1970s, American wages quietly detached from American growth. The country kept getting richer and its people, in relative terms, did not. Measure your own life against your father’s at the same age: how many years he worked to buy a house, versus how many your children will. That gap is not your imagination and it is not your family’s failure. It is the first gauge.

The second is the mechanism that creates the gap, which Turchin names the wealth pump: the set of arrangements by which prosperity flows steadily from the majority toward the top. His database shows the same engine in the late Roman Republic and pre-revolutionary France, and the same behavior around it in every era: those benefiting resist taxation and redistribution, and work to reserve advancement for their own children. Nothing personal, nothing conspiratorial, and carried out under governments of every stripe. The Nobel economist Angus Deaton reviewed Turchin’s evidence and called it “well-informed, convincing and terrifying.”

The third gauge is the strange one, the discovery that made Turchin famous, and it is not about the poor at all. He calls it elite overproduction. When the wealth pump runs long enough, society produces far more ambitious, credentialed people than it has powerful positions to give them. America now mints roughly 35,000 new law degrees every year for a shrinking legal market, doctorates far in excess of professorships, and fortunes in excess of the offices money can buy. History’s revolutions, his data shows, are not led by the hungry. They are led by frustrated would-be elites who harness the anger of the hungry. The men in masks on July 4th were not peasants. Neither were the leaders of any uprising in his database.
...
Among the societies in Turchin’s crisis database, the ones that reached the condition America is in now, the outcomes read like a coroner’s ledger. Forty percent saw their rulers assassinated. Twenty percent endured civil wars that lasted a century. Three quarters ended in revolution or civil war or both. And sixty percent of them ceased to exist entirely, dissolved from within or conquered from without. Turchin’s current description of the United States, in his clinical vocabulary, is a society in a “revolutionary situation.”
...
The first ending is the fire. This is the road three quarters of his historical cases took: the spiral where political violence becomes ordinary, where each faction’s fear justifies the other’s escalation, until the argument moves permanently out of the courtroom and into the street. No one chooses this ending on purpose. It arrives through a thousand small permissions, and its early scenes look unsettlingly like a holiday weekend you just lived through.

The second ending is the freeze. Not cinematic collapse but something quieter and, in the database, more common than anyone expects: the sixty percent. The society technically continues. The flag still flies and the anthems still play. But the state loses, year by year, the ability to actually do things: to build, to fix, to protect, to agree on what is true. Sometimes a strongman consolidates the wreckage and calls it order. The country remains on the map and disappears in fact. If the fire is a heart attack, the freeze is the long illness, and its first symptom is a legislature that shuts down over the rules of its own elections.

The third ending is the exit, and this is why I wrote you this article. Scattered through the database, rare but real, are the societies that walked out. Britain in the 1830s and 1840s stood where America stands now, with a starving underclass, a surplus of furious young elites, and open talk of revolution, and its leadership chose sweeping reform over repression, releasing the pressure without a single guillotine. And here is the finding I need you to hold onto: the clearest case of the peaceful exit in Turchin’s entire dataset is the United States of America. The Gilded Age ran the wealth pump exactly as it runs today, complete with private armies, street bombings, and contempt between the classes. And then, across the Progressive Era and the New Deal, the pump was deliberately throttled: taxation of great fortunes, the breakup of monopolies, the legalization of unions, the great expansion of education that gave surplus elites somewhere to go. What followed was the only period in the database where inequality reversed peacefully: the postwar decades of shared prosperity. If you are over sixty, you were born inside the third ending. It is not a theory. It is your childhood.
...
Turchin’s equations can see a society of 340 million people, but they cannot see you, and that blindness is the good news. The model’s variables are nothing but millions of small human choices, aggregated. Trust extended or withdrawn. Institutions attended or abandoned. Ballots cast or surrendered. You are not a spectator to the forecast. You are the forecast.

So here is what I would do this week, and none of it requires you to change your politics, only to refuse the two bad endings. First, take ten minutes and confirm your voter registration and your state’s current voting rules, because as you saw over the holiday, those rules are being actively fought over four months before a national election, and the freeze begins wherever citizens stop showing up to be counted. Second, do one deliberately cohesive thing this month: attend one local meeting, rejoin one association, have one unhurried conversation with a neighbor whose yard sign you dislike. I know how small that sounds against a 10,000-year database. But cross-society, the variable that drains before every fire and refills before every exit is ordinary social trust, and it is rebuilt at exactly that scale, by hand, by people like you.