Also on today’s menu:
Government Surplus Revenues
Tracking Americans’ Behavior
Following traffic rules can be viewed as suspicious behavior. So can hanging an air freshener from a mirror, driving a rental car, or having an unusually clean vehicle. The New Hampshire State Police Mobile Enforcement Team has used such “pretextual stops” in its efforts to curb illegal drug use.
Michael Vazquez provided one example when, rather than speeding up to pass the car in front of him, he tapped his brakes to stay in his lane. Trooper Michael Arteaga wrote in his arrest report, “I became suspicious the operator was purposefully trying to maintain a speed of 65 miles per hour or under.”
Another traffic stop occurred because “The vehicle had drawn my attention to it due to how clean it was, given the age of the vehicle and current weather conditions in New England.”
A judge threw out a case when the pretext for stopping the car was the trooper noticing that “the driver tensed up and put his hands at 10 and 2 on the wheel” when he noticed the parked cruiser.
Joseph Lascaze, an organizer with the ACLU of New Hampshire who served on Governor Chris Sununu’s Commission on Law Enforcement Accountability, Community and Transparency, spoke of being pulled over while driving through Hooksett in a white Mercedes-Benz. He said he made eye contact with a local police officer, who followed him for a while and then pulled him over. The officer’s reason for the stop was that Lascaze he had swerved to avoid a pothole.
Many of those stops do lead to drug forfeitures, but data suggest that the Mobile Enforcement Team has disproportionately stopped Black and Latino drivers on the pretext of minor infractions. “Police in the United States have used pretextual stops since at least the 1980s, when the DEA began training state and local officers to spot cars that fit supposed ‘drug courier’ profiles. At times, officers were taught to look for explicitly racialized characteristics, like someone with dreadlocks or two Latino men in a car. … [P]retextual stops can be stressful and humiliating, and send a message about who the police view with suspicion,” the series of articles by the The Granite State News Collaborative and The Concord Monitor suggest.
Government Surplus Revenues
You may have missed it among all the news coverage about inflation, but the U.S. government posted a record $308 billion surplus in April, with receipts nearly twice the number from a year earlier. The previous record monthly surplus was $214 billion in April 2018. Receipts last month rose 97 percent from the year-earlier period, to $864 billion, also a record for any month, according to the U.S. Treasury.
For the first seven months of the 2022 fiscal year, the government reported a deficit of $360 billion, 81 percent less than the 2021 deficit $1.932 trillion. It was the lowest deficit for the first seven months of a fiscal year since a $344 billion gap for the same period of fiscal 2017, prior to the enactment of the Republican-backed tax cut package.
The Treasury said the strong receipts would allow it to pay down $26 billion in debt during the second quarter.
Tracking Americans’ Behavior
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention bought access to location data harvested from tens of millions of phones in the United States to analyze compliance with curfews, track patterns of people visiting K-12 schools, and monitor the effectiveness of policy in the Navajo Nation, according to CDC documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act by Motherboard. The documents also show that, although the CDC used COVID-19 as a reason to buy access to the data more quickly, it intended to use it for more-general CDC purposes.
Location data can then show where a person lives, works, and travels. While the data the CDC bought was aggregated, researchers have raised concerns with how location data can be deanonymized and used to track specific people.
Zach Edwards, a cybersecurity researcher who reviewed the documents, said, “The CDC seems to have purposefully created an open-ended list of use cases, which included monitoring curfews, neighbor-to-neighbor visits, visits to [places of worship], schools, and pharmacies, and also a variety of analysis with this data specifically focused on ‘violence.’”
Café Chatter: Time To Make Changes
Today, I had an eye opener, reality check, slap in the face, call it what you want, can you guess what it was?
It’s the cost of heating oil. Heating oil is now up to $6.50 per gallon. If you were to get a delivery of 200 gallons, that fill-up will cost $1,300. A year ago, I paid $400. Folks, that is more than tripled in price.
If this continues to increase, then I’ll have to start making drastic changes. I’ll car pool for groceries, buy less food or buy food that can be used for several dishes. Reduce traveling to see my kids or grandkids and stop taking them out for a meal/ice cream. I’ll have to spend less on gifts this year. I’ll cut out the luxury items like coffee with friends every week or even having coffee every day. I’ll let the chickens’ free range to save on feed and hope a predator doesn’t get them.
What changes can you make now so you can buy heating oil for next winter because winter will come again faster than we want it to? And it’s not just oil, but oil drives everything, from groceries, clothing, trucks, farming, electricity, plastics, and more.
Is this caused by President Joe Biden? Well, he is our leader and he has to own it. Russia is not the cause; we only get three percent of oil from them. Biden and our leaders are destroying our country and failing us, especially the Democrats since they have the power to make changes and don’t.
My idea is for all of us to repent and ask Jesus/God to save us and the USA and if we all can’t do that, then vote Republican and hope they can fix this mess.
Got any better ideas?
— John Sellers, Bristol
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