"Cities Are Paying Criminals $1000 Per Month "Not To Kill""

Zero Hedge:  It is widely known that in the past 6 months there has been a loud debate about helicopter money, i.e., giving out ordinary people (bypassing the banks) money directly printed by the Fed. What is less known is that when it comes to the most despicable underbelly of American society, cash to the tune of $1000 per month is already being "helicoptered" to some of the most brazen criminals living in the US today with one simple condition: "don't kill people."

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Take the case of Lonnie Holmes, 21, who lives in Richmond, a working-class suburb north of San Francisco and whose four his cousins had died in shootings. He was a passenger in a car involved in a drive-by shooting, police said. And he was arrested for carrying a loaded gun. When Holmes was released from prison last year, officials in this city offered something unusual to try to keep him alive: money. They began paying Holmes as much as $1,000 a month not to commit another gun crime.

This is not just appeasement: it's sheer idiocy pure and simple, and it's only just starting.

According to the WaPo, "cities across the country, beginning with the District of Columbia, are moving to copy Richmond’s controversial approach because early indications show it has helped reduce homicide rates."

If readers are shocked by this "modest payment" it is for a good reason: the program requires governments to reject some basic tenets of law enforcement even as it challenges notions of appropriate ways to spend tax dollars. (more)

"A decade into a project to digitize U.S. immigration forms, just 1 is online"

Your tax dollars at work... or something.

Heaving under mountains of paperwork, the government has spent more than $1 billion trying to replace its antiquated approach to managing immigration with a system of digitized records, online applications and a full suite of nearly 100 electronic forms.

A decade in, all that officials have to show for the effort is a single form that’s now available for online applications and a single type of fee that immigrants pay electronically. The 94 other forms can be filed only with paper.

This project, run by U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, was originally supposed to cost a half-billion dollars and be finished in 2013. Instead, it’s now projected to reach up to $3.1 billion and be done nearly four years from now, putting in jeopardy efforts to overhaul the nation’s immigration policies, handle immigrants already seeking citizenship and detect national security threats, according to documents and interviews with former and current federal officials. (read more)

By the way. Did Obamacare include a provision for digitizing medical records? I seem to have a vague recollection of that.

If simple immigration forms is costing billions, I'd imagine digitizing medical records could run into the trillions.

"Judge Blocks Alabama From Ending Planned Parenthood Funding"

"U.S. District Judge Myron Thompson issued an order that temporarily bars Alabama from cutting off Medicaid contracts with the group's clinics in Alabama. Planned Parenthood Southeast and a Medicaid recipient filed suit in August, days after Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley announced he was ending the Medicaid agreements with the two clinics."

In his 66-page opinion, Thompson said Alabama did not identify a legal reason to cut off funding to Planned Parenthood and that the state's action likely violated a free-choice-of-provider provision of the federal Medicaid Act that limits a state's ability to bar family planning providers for reasons unrelated to quality of care...

Thompson noted Alabama's termination letter to Planned Parenthood did not give a reason for the ending the provider agreement that the organization could appeal through administrative channels.

The bulk of Planned Parenthood services is abortion, which seems to be somehow linked to "health". What does a woman's health have to do with abortion?

The First Lady Goes To China, On Taxpayer Dime, without Free Press to Watch

"First lady Michelle Obama, her two daughters, Malia and Sasha, and her mother touched down Thursday in China for what’s being touted as a weeklong feel-good tourist event, amid increasing murmurs back home about U.S. taxpayers having to foot the bill."

Mrs. Obama is supposed to use her visit for soft diplomacy only, and shy from the more controversial topics that plague U.S.-China relations, namely human rights and economics. No reporters accompanied the family on the trip.

“The nature of her visit is really quite different,” deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes told reporters ahead of the trip. “What the first lady really brings is the power of her own story, the power of American values.”

The White House also announced that Mrs. Obama wouldn’t field any questions from journalists she encountered in Beijing, which rankled some members of the press and the private sector, given her trip — complete with an entourage of about 70 — was still being paid for with tax dollars.

Any chance the first lady will bring up income inequality to the Chinese?

Icepick on bulletproof whiteboards for professors

From the Baltimore Sun:

Eastern Shore professors to get bulletproof whiteboards

Calling "campus violence a reality" to prepare for, the University of Maryland Eastern Shore announced plans Thursday to spend $60,000 on the Clark Kent of teacher supplies: an innocuous-looking white board that can stop bullets.

The high-tech tablet — which hangs on a hook, measures 18 by 20 inches and comes in pink, blue and green — can be used as a personal shield for professors under attack, according to the company that makes it, and a portable writing pad in quieter times.

18" x 20"? I could hide my head and part of my upper body behind that. (I just checked, and I'm about 22" across at the shoulders.) Of course, covering my head and upper torso would be a good thing. If we've learned nothing else from the movies we have learned that it can take days to die from a bullet to the gut.

But the man behind the bullet-resistant white boards envisions an ancient phalanx.

[George] Tunis envisions teachers using the whiteboards to fend off attackers individually or as a group, standing side-by-side to create a wall that could shield evacuating students or to fend off an attacker.

"It's designed to be a last resort and to buy you some extra time," he said.

Yeah, extra time is good. I can see a shooter faced by a phalanx of professors (possibly including wannabe Hoplites from the Classics Department) holding these white boards up in formation, blocking all of 20" of vertical target, max. All he'd have to do is aim low and chop them down like a Ma Deuce through the under-growth in Vietnam. It'd take a committed mad man whole milliseconds to figure this out.

Also from the article:

"It needs to be a great whiteboard and a useful tool so that it doesn't get hidden in the closet," said maker George Tunis. His Worcester County company Hardwire LLC starting out making military armor, then adapted it for the classroom after the tragic shootings last year at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., where 20 children and six adults were killed.

Maybe it's be useful if you're writing answers down and flashing them to the class? I don't know. But we used most of the large blackboards that measured their dimensions in feet when I was a TA in college, and I don't ever remember a professor only using a space that measured that small. So these things aren't even all that practical for a classroom, despite the claims of the manufacturer.

Distressingly, the school in question doesn't seem to have anyone capable of doing a cost-benefit analysis. How many classrooms does the nation have? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands? How many of these classrooms see the kind of random violence where such a device MIGHT have an impact?

These things cost $299 a pop, so they're not cheap. But at least they come in a variety of attractive colors! I'd suggest that they add red to the pink, blue and green currently offered. It would better hide blood spatter and thus be more intimidating to any shooters out there. (See "red coats" for more.) Or perhaps they should be rainbow-colored on the non-writing side, to demonstrate the school's commitment to diversity.

Spending $60,000 on these for this one college in a backwater part of Maryland seems ludicrous. It would be ludicrous for just about any other school as well. (And if there is a school for which this isn't a ludicrous expense, they need to MOVE THE SCHOOL!) Surely there are other things that can be done with the money.

So, can anyone else think of how the school could have better spent the money? Remember that this is a one-time expense (or at least not a regular expense) so hiring an additional security guard is out, as that is an ongoing expense.

What better ideas has everyone got?

Icepick