Aggravated assaults hit a 20-year high in 2024 at 8,039. The more-serio

 TopFownCharts

 

Congressional Graft 2025

Senator Sheldon (D-RI)

 Ethics watchdog the Foundation for Accountability & Civic Trust (FACT) on Tuesday filed a complaint accusing Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., of violating Senate ethics policy by advocating for legislation to award his wife’s nonprofit $7 million.

The senator’s wife Sandra Whitehouse works for the advocacy group Ocean Conservancy, which received over $14 million in government grants since she started in 2008. Half of this money came in fall 2024 alone and was supported by Sen. Whitehouse, FACT wrote.  

Senator Whitehouse said that his wife received no pay and that he had been cleared of the same a year ago. 

Sandra Whitehouse holds a Ph.D. in marine biology and has been a senior policy advisor to the Ocean Conservancy, a major environmental group, since 2008. Ocean Conservancy’s most recent tax filing shows its $52 million budget for the 2023 fiscal year included $280,000 paid to Sandra Whitehouse’s firm, Ocean Wonks LLC.

Senator Whitehouse’s most recent financial disclosure form shows his wife had two sources of self-employment income in 2023, one being Ocean Conservancy, and the other Running Tides Technologies Inc., a Maine-based carbon-removal startup that shut down last year.

Kendra Arnold, FACT’s executive director, noted that Ocean Conservancy has received $6.9 million in federal grants in recent years funded by either the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law or the 2024 appropriations act. Whitehouse voted for both measures, which passed the Senate by votes of 69-30 and 75-22, respectively.

Hary G Johnson on Bias in Hypothesis Testing

 

Bias in research is not a new discovery.  Harry G Johnson (1975, p.92) famously remarked that “..the ‘testing of hypothesis’ is frequently merely a euphemism for obtaining plausible numbers to provide ceremonial adequacy for a theory chosen and defended on a priori grounds.”

American Economic Review, 1971.

Asians & Men Do A Little Better on Student Loan Repayment

 

Federal Gov't Expenditures by Type

 

Comparing Presidential Voting Patterns by Demographics for Recent Presidential Elections

 

The substack posting looks closely at the voting by various demographic groups (racial, sex) according to polls.  He compares the votes by whites for recent presidential races and for the Trump/Harris race.  

https://musaalgharbi.substack.com/p/a-graveyard-of-bad-election-narratives

Symbolic Capital(ism)

A Graveyard of Bad Election Narratives

All the prominent but obviously false narratives about the 2024 election prepared for burial in one convenient post.

Musa al-Gharbi

Nov 11, 2024

Percent Cancellation Among USAID's Largest Partners (None For WB, UN Food, Fight AIDS)

 Cancellations have been unevenly distributed amongst USAID largest grant and contract partners. 

USAID’s three biggest contractual partners in FY2024—the World Bank Group, the UN World Food Programme, and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria have seen no agreements terminated, nor have two others in the top ten in 2024: UNICEF and Catholic Relief Services. 

But four other top-ten partners—Chemonics, DAI, FHI 360, and RTI—have seen cancellations worth between about 22 and 55 percent of their FY2024 agreement values.

 The final top-ten FY2024 supplier, the International Organization for Migration, has seen cancellations equal to about six percent of FY2024 active agreement value.

 Former Federal Worker gives an inside look at Federal Workers

“When I was hired, my boss bragged that it was basically impossible to get fired from the federal government.And that in her entire time working for the government, she'd only seen one person fired”

“When I worked for the government, we were allowed to work 50% in the office and 50% from home, for the most part. In some cases, if you'd worked there, like, I think over 10 years or something, you could actually work from home three days a week and work from the office two days a week”

“One employee spent his time remote working, running his own farm.”

“Another employee bragged about drunk driving and going out to lunch with her friends for margaritas when she was supposed to be remote working. No one would log into their computers and you can see it because they're not on Teams and no one ever checked. Ever.”

“There's something called the 80-20 rule where 80% of the work in government is done by 20% of the people and this is very, very true”

“People who get a job in the government a lot of times find out that it's very difficult to fire them and they take advantage of this.”

“Another employee would take the government truck on an almost daily basis so that he could go out to lunch and then go and take a nap in his favorite park under a shady tree in the government truck.”

“Our government is filled with the most incompetent and most lazy people and an occasional hard worker. And those hard workers are severely punished every time they outwork their colleagues. Because then the colleagues realize people will see that they're lazy and they don't want to have to work more. They're just buying time until they retire in almost every case.”