Blue Zone political culture is empty. There’s nothing in it. They don’t make anything, they don’t do anything, they aren’t trying to do anything.

Let’s bracket a great piece of journalism with more details and some context.

By now, I assume most readers here have seen the magnificent work of the independent journalist Nick Shirley in Minnesota, showing widespread Somali fraud in government-funded programs by simply walking up to the front doors of daycare centers and healthcare organizations and inquiring about their services.

Daycare centers with millions of dollars in government funding and no children inside, and neighbors who say they’ve never seen children going in or coming out. This is a slam dunk, and I couldn’t possibly love it any more.

He names the daycare centers he visits, so you can start to find out how much the state of Minnesota knows about the scam without getting off the couch. Daycare centers are licensed and inspected: government inspectors regularly show up with a clipboard and look around. So go look at the record of inspections for Quality Learning Center of Minneapolis, the one in the video with the misspelled sign over the door. The whole thing instantly becomes darkly funny, because there’s no way anyone has ever believed that this is a functioning daycare center running at anything near its declared and funded capacity of 99 children:

I had to shrink the list of violations from the first inspection, in May of 2022, to get a screenshot:

This inspection implies that there have been some children on site at some point, possibly family, but the inspector couldn’t identify anyone in the building: “The program did not have a file for each child,” and, “The program did not have a file for each staff person.” No training, no equipment, no records. This place has never been a functioning daycare center. No one has ever believed that it was. But the government checks kept coming, and government inspectors kept coming around and playing make-believe.

The context for this not-terribly-subtle crony class featherbedding:

As government does more and spends more, government does less. Explosive budget growth leads to declining effectiveness and quality. Low-tax red states pave the roads. High-tax blue states slop cash around to friends. Progressive elected officials view the task of governance as a series of costumed performances.

They’re not trying to run anything. They intend to make faces for the camera and steer money to their friends, the end. Poor infrastructure and “license inspections” that endlessly note “violations” without consequence are — I’m sorry, what was I saying?

I know all of this in my bones, ladies and gentlemen, because I live in California. The California state auditor, screaming in the wilderness, released a long report this month on state programs that have been operated with a high degree of financial risk, without serious efforts to address the risks:

And so this is just normal stuff, California being California:

A story in the New York Times this weekend notes that California has dropped its lawsuit against THAT ORANGE [——-] for withdrawing federal funding to the state’s alleged high-speed rail project. The project was approved in 2008, the Times notes, and has been under active construction for a decade. The plan was to link Los Angeles and San Francisco with bullet trains by 2020. Result: “About 80 miles of guideway have been completed in the Central Valley, according to the authority,” without tracks. I walked around on some of that guideway back in August, if you remember the pictures.

Money is spent. People receive the money. And then … uh … wait, are you saying you actually expected to find childcare at this childcare center? .

Chris Bray, The Federalist