About Fraudulent Charities

I formerly worked for the Missouri Attorney General's Office and part of my job was to investigate fraudulent charities.  Beware any organization that presents itself as a charity. Many of them are blatant frauds. Case in point:

The American Red Cross took in 500M, then claimed to have provided homes for more than 130,000 people.

Investigations by ProPublica and NPR revealed that only six permanent houses were actually built with these funds. The organization had to resort to other methods like rental subsidies due to issues with land acquisition and other practical challenges.

Further accusations in Haiti were directed to the Clinton Foundation:

Keep this in mind as we figure out what is really going on with USAID.

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About Focusing on One’s Priorities

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." Socrates

As a gift to myself this year, I've been doubling-down on my need to spent my waning hours my intentionally. Waning? I'm 68, so I've already lived most of my life. That said, I'm in good physical shape and I'm passionate about my work as a civil rights attorney (especially First Amendment). Every day I treasure opportunities to engage with friends and family, especially the love of my life, Beverly, who I met one year ago today. I am a serious musician and an exhibiting artist. I'm lucky in more ways than I can count.

But numbers don't lie. Last year I made an intrepid assumption that I'll live about 20 more years. Simple math reveals that this is only 240 more months. Last month went quickly. In fact, the better I am at living a mindful, principled and socially engaged life, the more quickly the months flash by. My endgame: If I'm really fortunate, I'll be able to look back at my 20 year Plan and consider that it was a life well-lived, which will make it much easier to deal with my inevitable decay and death. But how do I keep on track, giving my cravings to attend to more things than I can possibly absorb?

This year I committed to unsubscribing from emails lists that seemed like good ideas at the time. There are also many commercial emails that keep popping in, unsolicited. In the past few weeks, I have unsubscribed from about 200 email lists, which makes my inbox much more inviting. Now, most of my inbox consists of emails that I will either read or at least scan. This has also addressed my concern that I might overlook important emails because they are hidden among low (or no) priority emails. I recommend this to everyone. If an email list seems interesting, but not interesting enough to subscribe to, I follow the organization or person on X (Twitter), which circumvents my inbox.

I also decided to commit (for the umpteenth time) to do a better job of making and adhering to a daily to-do list that I create either that morning or the night before. I use a combination of paper and pen at my desk and the Reminders app on my iPhone. This simple tactic works extremely well.

I also make better use of my iPhone DND feature when trying to focus, sometimes for hours. This is heaven. How did we ever get to this point where so many people assume that you will immediately respond to texts and phone calls?

These three simple things have made a noticeable difference to help me spend quality time on the things that I have personally identified as my priorities. The alternative is the lose time chasing squirrels all day, which is admittedly sometimes valuable for generating unexpected but important insights, ideas and projects, but this daydreaming and brainstorming time needs to be consciously kept in check or else it destroys one's ability to deeply concentrate one's own priorities.

Today I received a mass emailing from Cal Newport announcing a new online course called Life of Focus. I won't be signing up, but I do appreciate his three goals for his course, which closely align with my own resolutions:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. You'll restructure your work life to feature less distraction and more depth.

Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. You'll implement a digital declutter to help you break screen additions and cultivate a more deliberate relationship with the digital tools in your personal life.

Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages your mind and your soul in something meaningful.

v Along these same lines I recommend Newport's book: "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

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Is Christmas About Jesus? Residential Christmas Light Displays Offer a Clue

To what extent is Christmas about Jesus? On evening of Dec 18, I conducted a survey of Christmas lights in south St. Louis. I walked through neighborhoods to photograph residential Christmas displays. I walked through several neighborhoods (in the vicinity Ted Drews, for those of you from St. Louis).

I photographed every front yard that had a person or a thing on the front yard, excluding houses that merely had Christmas lights without figures. I also excluded houses with only Christmas tree images and those displaying only angels. I wanted to know the percentage of homes that displayed Jesus or the Nativity Scene. If a house displayed Jesus plus other figures, I counted it as a house that displayed an image of Jesus. I'm fully aware that this was not a scientific survey. There are likely many religious people who choose (for many reasons) to refrain from displaying images of Jesus in their Christmas front yard displays.

Out of 164 Christmas displays I photographed, only 13 (8%) displays a representation of Jesus.

At the end of this article I’ve listed many of the other personalities and objects you’ll find on neighborhood lawns to celebrate Christmas. In addition to Santas and reindeer, these figures include Harry Potter, penguins, unicorns, pigs wearing sunglasses and the Grinch.

Why would I do this survey? I was not trying to point out America’s loss of religiosity. I’m an atheist. My position is to each to his or her own. Feel free to follow a religion or no religion as long as you celebrate the right of all other people to celebrate their own religion (or no religion).

My purpose was inspired by the following passage by Thomas Sowell, from Knowledge and Decisions (1980):

Perhaps the most important feature of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions is simply its analysis of decision-making processes and institutions in terms of the characteristics and consequences of those processes themselves—irrespective of their goals. As noted in Chapter 6, this approach rejects the common practice of “characterizing processes by their hoped-for results rather than their actual mechanics.” “Profit-making” businesses, “public interest” law firms, and “drug prevention” programs are just some of the many things commonly defined by their hoped-for results, rather than by the characteristics of die decision-making processes involved and the incentives created by those processes. So called “profit-making” businesses, for example, often fail to make a profit and most of them become extinct within a decade after being founded. In Knowledge and Decisions the owners of such businesses are defined not as profit makers but as residual claimants to the firm’s income—that is, to what is left over after employees, suppliers, and others have been paid. Put this way, it is dear from the outset that what is left over may be positive, negative, or zero. There is no more reason to expect "drug prevention” programs to prevent drug usage or “public interest” law firms to serve the public interest than to expect that most “profit-making” enterprises will in fact make profits. Whether any of these organizations do or do not live up to their expectations or claims is a question of empirical evidence. Pending the presentation of such evidence, such organizations can be analyzed in terms of what they actually do, not what they hope or claim to achieve.

Is Christmas about Jesus? Somewhat, but evidence abounds suggesting that Christmas is, mostly, for most Americans, about other things, including an orgy of consumerism. A Martian anthropologist who objectively studied Christmas behavior, including America’s choices in Christmas lights, would probably agree with me. Yes, Jesus is discussed in churches, but where are figurines of Jesus in grocery stores and hardware stores? Is Jesus discussed to any meaningful degree at family dinner tables? How often do people spontaneously discuss Jesus at cocktail parties?

Christmas, as a national institution, is mostly not about Jesus. It’s mostly about other things. It is my belief that it has become more and more about things since my childhood (I was born in the mid-1950s) and it has been a slow imperceptible drift. Jesus is the frog in the pot.

But the institution of Christmas is merely one example of many such drifting institutions. It appears to me that most American Institutions have been hollowed out over the years. They no longer do what they claim to do. Hence, the caveat offered by Thomas Sowell.

Wikipedia, which claims to offer a “neutral” point of view, is one of these hollowed-out institutions. And see here. 

Also note this about Wikipedia's annual budget:

Consider also the FDA, which is almost completely captured by pharmaceutical money. Consider the Department of “Defense,” which has waged numerous wars of discretion for decades, all of these wars supported by corporate media marching in lockstep.

And speaking of the corporate “news” media, it is clear that one can expect mostly to be misguided and propagandized by these institutions, not well-informed. Here are more than 300 examples of that.

Is a school functioning as a school?  You need to dig in deep to figure it out.  Don't just read the word school on the building and assume that children are being educated inside.

In conclusion, I refer back to the wise words of Thomas Sowell. Don’t ever assume that an institution actually does what it claims to do. I’m from Missouri, the “Show Me” state and I recommend that we all take on this attitude.

I decided to do my Christmas light survey because it was easy: people reveal in lights what is on their mind about the reason for the season. It’s much more difficult to tell what is really going on with most other institutions. Whenever institutions make claims that they are doing good things for society, demand that they open up and show you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Merry Christmas to all, whatever that might mean to you!

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Coleman Hughes Contemplates the End of Life

Coleman Hughes has written a personal account of the excruciating death of his mother. What follows is an excerpt from "My Mom—and the Case for Assisted Death: My dying mother chose to end terrible suffering. I want others to have that choice, too."

Instead of a slippery slope, what has emerged over the past three decades are two distinct policies: one restricted to people on their deathbed and exemplified by Oregon, Australia, and New Zealand; and the other open to anyone who is “suffering” and exemplified by the Benelux nations and Canada, without any slippage between the two. It is not a coincidence that all the horror stories come from the latter. The lesson for the rest of the world is not to throw out assisted dying altogether, but to copy the policy that works, and avoid the policy that doesn’t.

Aside from the major objections, critics have leveled many practical objections: Do doctors always know when someone has six months to live? Are fatal drugs always painless? What if relatives pressure someone to commit suicide? I may go through these one by one some other time, but here I will simply say this: Once you understand how much suffering is on the other side of this moral equation—that is, once you understand just how bad “bad deaths” are—then you must view these practical objections as problems to be addressed, rather than as reasons to jettison the whole policy.

It is commonly said that a huge percentage of our healthcare spending comes in the last year of life. But the far more important corollary is rarely said: In many cases, a huge portion—perhaps a majority—of our lifetime suffering comes not just in the last year, but in the last few months. Assisted dying therefore represents an opportunity to prevent an immense amount of needless suffering in the world. If my mother’s story can help even one person come around to this view, then I can say that she did not suffer completely in vain.

I think of these issues every so often. And I often think back to my college days when I volunteered as a counselor and trainer for Suicide Prevention in St. Louis. After doing my best for several years I left. I had had several cases where I did my best to encourage people to live another day, but where I privately wondered whether that was the kind of advice I would want were I in a situation that was truly (not merely apparently) hopeless. I'm referring to people who were terminally ill, jobless, in constant pain, who had no longer had family or friends to look out for them. People who had worked hard for months to find reasons to keep on living but no longer could. People for whom the things that once brought them great joy were no longer interesting to them.

I hope that humane people will step up to help me in my moment of need, people who have the courage to show mercy rather than to obsess about the "rules."

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RFK, Jr.: Bill Gates Profited Immensely from the Pfizer COVID Vax

From Camus on X:

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on How Bill Gates Made 242 Million in Pfizer Stock Scheme:

"And the last one of these was in 2020 or 2019 in October. And it was hosted by Bill Gates, I. Fauci and by Avril Haines. I'm sure a lot of you have gone and looked at this on YouTube, it's called Event 201. That same week, Bill Gates, who was overseeing this simulation, made about 1.1 million shares of BioNTech vaccine, which later became the Pfizer vaccine."

"He then sold that, almost all that stock, 87%, two years later, at a $242 million profit. And a week after that, he publicly announced the vaccine didn't work. This is what you call a pump and dump scheme."

"Because he was the guy who was on TV with his minion, Peter Hotez, who took $52 million from Gates for his, Gates made his institution. So you had the pair of them pumping up this stock for two years and then dumping it a week before he goes on TV and says, oh, it didn't work after all."

That's not all. Kennedy:

"Gates practices philanthrocapitalism. "You use philanthropy to make yourself rich and you use it strategically. He's gotten control over the WHO so that they mandate vaccines all over the world and the companies that make those vaccines are where Gates & others are shareholders."

I would like to see Gates thoroughly investigated. It's not possible to get virtually EVERYTHING wrong about COVID wrong without large amounts of bad faith money pulling the levers. https://x.com/VerseCannon/status/1832333692796326002

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