FTA -
In the meeting with Ellison were Salim Said, co-owner of the Safari Restaurant in south Minneapolis, and Ikram Mohamed, a consultant for Feeding Our Future. Both eventually faced federal indictments for their alleged role in the scam. (Said has been convicted on 21 counts of fraud, while Ikram is awaiting trial.) Ellison assured his guests that the money would continue flowing through FOF. It was the state government, which Ellison in theory represented, that would soon be on the defensive, the attorney general told them. "[Governor Tim] Walz agrees with me that this piddly, stupid stuff running small people out of business is terrible," said Ellison. "Let's go fight these people," he declared, "these people" being rightfully cautious state officials. Ellison suggested that Salim "send the names of all these people who are hanging on by a thread" " the Somali businesses and nonprofits that existed at the public's expense, many of them through fraud " so that he could personally needle senior bureaucrats into restoring their funding.

Pardon the Gaslighter type post, but I found this passage of the article incredibly insightful on how the "patronage" works in MN, possibly more States.

The RW focuses on the Somali's but IMO this type of "system" probably permeates the US governments (local,city, county, state, fed). The Somalis are just doing what everyone else is doing.

Its not an indictment of Somali's but of the system itself. The purpose of these NGO type units was to avoid governmental fraud that existed in the 1930-40s. You can read all about this transition in the book "WhyNothingWorks". But now its appears its been subverted into a patronage system of spoils.

Now you can defend the fraud with narrative inducing arguments but this only leads to the corrosive mindset that "taxpayers" are suckers.
America needs to face this fraud epidemic or your system is over in a very short period.

Greene says she didn't like MAGA Mar-a-Lago sexualization'

LOL the irony given her audition.

Shameless opportunists, nothing more, nothing less.
#3 | Posted by jpw

You have no idea ....

MTG's viral alter ego' Stefanie Sugarman bombing her 2002 American Idol audition!
Just 6 days left till her resignation hits (Jan 5, 2026)"back to cheese marketing and Hollywood dreams?

So far Trump has lowered violent crime and rescheduled MJ and you nutters can't deal with it.

#12 | POSTED BY LFTHNDTHRDS

This could be true. But I don't think rescheduling MJ is a long term good idea. But Lumpers did say it would reduce crime, and violent crime.

Can dispensaries now put their money in legit banks?

SO, in 2024 the trend started under Biden,

What caused the drop? Are you claiming Biden caused it?

Again I go back to medical advancements (more violence, less deaths), and the distance from COVID lock down mayhem.

I am mixed on the AI data center craze.

A data center in the past, the software was the key, sure speed was important but SW cloud design could make slower machines appear faster when scaled.

But they are buying millions of NVidia AI devices and putting them in these centers.

IMO its similar to buying millions of GPUs and putting them in data centers.

The architecture for AI isn't set in stone. NVideo just dropped $20Billion to get exclusivity with GroqInc, a blazing-fast AI chip startup that's been nipping at their heels in inference. Grok specializes in fast AI inference, the part of where the chatbot or AI actually puts the words on the screen. NVidia makes the chipset the builds/trains models.

Groq hosts these AI models on their own hardware and figured out how to spit output faster than NVidia.

Wont these centers be obsolete in 5 years or so? Seems like huge investments/evaluations for a fast moving industry.

If someone has to pay 2 million dollars per dose for me to live just shoot me and get it over with. My God that's highway robbery.

#5 | POSTED BY LAURAMOHR

This is an interesting point.

Boomers today would take their "generational" wealth and spend it on this drug until they were wiped out.

I know lots of GenXers thinking they will inherit from their Boomer parents. But seriously the parents are going to go broke trying to survive.

And like the great RickyBobby says - "No one lives forever, no one. But with advances in modern science and my high level income, it's not crazy to think I can live to be 245, maybe 300."

"Its story upends the widely held conception that high prices reflect huge industry investments in innovation."

I never once thought the high price of drugs was due to the "innovation". Hell anyone can pour two chemicals together, isn't that PoS JPW a chemist or something?

As the book Abundance makes clear the issue is getting government OK, and then Liability Insurance

Indeed, but it hasn't always been the case that practically all the gains have gone to the top 20%. That started in 1975.
#38 | POSTED BY SNOOFY

The reason for this is the financialization of the US economy, NY finally over took London as the financial capital of the world.

Capital earns more "productivity" than Labor.

Bin Laden wins Again.

He knew America's weakness and pushed the right buttons.

Obsession with "Security", is America's Achilles heel.
~ FeetSmell

Security ... LOL ... its Tolerance ..

Less than 25 years after thousands of New Yorkers were killed on 9/11, the Chief Counsel of New York is going to be an Islamist lawyer who came to this country after 9/11 specifically to defend the very Al Qaeda terrorists we were fighting against.

As I famously like to say, tolerance is the lube that helps slip the dildo of dysfunction into the ass of a civilized society.