Tag: taxes

State Department funding ‘drag theater performances’ in Ecuador to ‘promote diversity and inclusion’

The U.S. Department of State has awarded more than $20,000 for a cultural center in Ecuador to host “drag theater performances” in the name of diversity and inclusion. 

The State Department awarded a $20,600 grant on Sept. 23 to the Centro Ecuatoriano Norteamericano (CEN), a non-profit organization supported by the U.S. Embassy and Consulate in Ecuador, to “promote diversity and inclusion” in the region.

The project at CEN, which started Sept. 30 and runs until Aug. 31, 2023, will include “3 workshops,” “12 drag theater performances,” and a “2-minute documentary,” according to the State Department’s grant listed on the USASpending.gov website.

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Chicago’s Guaranteed Income Pilot Program Open To Illegal Immigrants

A Chicago-area guaranteed income pilot program will be open to illegal immigrants, who can apply for the chance to become one of 3,250 residents who will receive $500 per month in cash assistance for two years.

The only requirement for the program is that applicants must be adults residents of Cook County, and make less than 250% of the federal poverty level – or less than $69,375 for a house of four, Fox News reports.

Applicants will not be asked about citizenship status, according to the website.

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To Save the Republic, Abolish the Black Budget

I have been puzzling over the ever-augmenting Black Budget since about the time the U.S. government began openly assassinating suspects, including U.S. citizens, without indictment, much less conviction in a court of law, for capital crimes. Tim Weiner’s groundbreaking work Blank Check: The Pentagon’s Black Budget (1990) explains how the means to commit crimes under cover of state secrets privilege all began with the Manhattan Project. Like so many other aspects of the sprawling defense and security apparatus which continues to expand like an amoeba, engulfing nearly every aspect of American culture, the Black Budget took on a life of its on during the Cold War.

The stakes were admittedly high: freedom or slavery? Put that way, it seemed eminently reasonable to policymakers at the time to devise intricate mechanisms shrouded from public view in order to do whatever needed to be done to keep the inhabitants of the Western world both safe and free. In their view, it was strategic; it was tactical; and it had to be secret, in order to succeed. Beginning with the Manhattan Project, through which atomic bombs were developed for the first time in human history, the perceived need to keep newly developed weapons systems shrouded in secrecy, for fear that the enemy might develop the same, arose out of a recognition of just how devastating those weapons could be. Little Boy and Fat Man were notoriously tested on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in early August 1945, and with the U.S. government’s demonstrated willingness to deploy such weapons, the nuclear arms race was on.

Once a chunk of the defense budget had been made black to keep new weapons technology secret, it did not take long for entire systems of clandestine operations, today known as “black ops,” to emerge and expand as well. Again, we have Tim Weiner to thank for having done us the service of documenting in his indispensable work Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA (2007) at least some of what went on during the Cold War. Legacy of Ashes is based on a trove of some 50,000 CIA documents first declassified near the end of the twentieth century. But today, long after the Soviet Union collapsed, the secrecy apparatus put in place by well-meaning—if sometimes confused, inept, deluded and occasionally outright insane—bureaucrats has come to be a seemingly permanent fixture of our world. At more than $80 billion, the Black Budget now exceeds the entire military budget of nearly all other governments.

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Defense Secretary Agrees to $62.5 Million Renaming of Select Military Bases

The United States will rename nine military bases that honor Confederate officers after Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin signed off on the move, the Department of Defense (DOD) announced on Oct. 6.

In a press release, the DOD said the bases will be renamed by no later than January 2024.

The decision comes after the Naming Commission, established by Congress last year to plan for the removal of Confederate-linked “names, symbols, displays, monuments, or paraphernalia” that honor or commemorate the Confederate States of America, completed its analysis on Sept. 19.

The commission is made up of eight volunteers selected by Congress and the defense secretary.

Following 18 months of work, which included “extensive consultations with experts, historians, and the communities rooted in the bases in question,” it found nine Army bases that were named in commemoration of the Confederacy and its leaders.

“The installations and facilities that our Department operates are more than vital national security assets. They are also powerful public symbols of our military, and of course, they are the places where our Service members and their families work and live,” Austin wrote in a memo on the decision on Thursday.

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Pennsylvania Man Has Not Filed Income Taxes in 17 Years

The Pledge of Allegiance states that America is “one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.”

Liberty, the dictionary says, is living free from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one’s way of life, behavior, or political views.

Pennsylvania author Barry Durmaz says he is living his life in liberty. That means, among other things, he has not filed income taxes for the last 17 years, and recently he stopped licensing his car. Instead, he had a custom license plate made that says “Private, DOT exempt, for non-commercial use only.”

As a person of liberty, he no longer consents to disclosing private information to the government or filling out forms for taxes or for a car license.

The married father of five is soon to publish his first book, “What Is An American: How the Virtuous Government of America’s Unseen King Deals a Death Blow to the Evils of Socialism, Marxism, and Communism.” In it, he says the liberty of each individual household is the key to America’s freedom.

After considering the Bible, history, and the U.S. Constitution, Durmaz has come to believe that ultimate liberty is faith and self-government, or self-control. That comes from being independently dependent upon God.

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