Fast growing Cedar City UT wants to build a pipeline 66 miles long to pump enormous amounts of water from Pine Valley where Paiutes own the water rights. The city has not even consulted or met with Paiutes about this. Gosh. Welcome to the always ongoing water wars of the American West.

Happily, multiple activist groups like the small but mighty Great Basin Water Network are working to block this hideous idea. They are a fine example of “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” Also in the fight is the Center for Biological Diversity. Both groups have won major victories.

Diverting that much water from those aquifers would dry up multiple regions in the area reaching as far as the Great Basin in Nevada to the west. The image here is of Great Basin National Park, large mountains in the middle of a huge, baking desert. Multiple counties in UT have written to Cedar City expressing concern about this ill-though-out, very expensive plan.

Cedar currently enjoys very low water rates. This pipeline, by their own reckoning, would at least triple water prices. There are other, less expensive options too! A local group of conservatives at Iron County Water says, set prices to the free market, convert surplus agricultural water, install meters on secondary water users, and reuse water.

These wastewater treatment plant improvements would cost $21 million and the water savings amount to $10,500 per acre-foot. By comparison the Pine Valley Project would cost $260 million and deliver 15,000 acre-feet of water, at a rate of $17,300 per acre-foot. That makes the Pine Valley Project water nearly 70% more expensive than water from the reuse alternative.

Make your voice heard. Tell BLM to not approve the project. Comments on the Final Environmental Impact Statement are due by December 23, 2025.

The proposed pipeline will hurt communities like Milford, Beaver, and Baker. Additionally, it could harm places like Great Basin National Park, Fish Springs National Wildlife Refuge, the Great Salt Lake, and sacred tribal sites.

Act now. Get the work out Stop the Cedar City pipeline water grab.

New documentary about far-right politicians and the totally not a front group, Moms for Fascism – whoops sorry – I meant Moms for Liberty, have tried to get books banned in schools. Actual lovers of liberty have fought back and won victories.

Q&A after the movie today at Beverly Theater in Vegas was led by activists and school librarians. Pick a fight with librarians at your peril! They will fight ferociously for your freedom to read books. Seriously.

Yes, the fascist moms are trying to make inroads in Vegas too.

The moms only want to ban books about sex, LGBTQAI, anything about people of color or what questions white supremacy. Like history books. And, well, reality.

Much of the fightback is done at school board meetings and by publicizing attempts to ban books. It’s hard work.

Read Freely Nevada is a grassroots group mobilized to stop them.
“We are a group of educators and community members that believe in literacy freedom.”

No Racism in Schools is another group opposing racism in schools and book bans. The two issues are interlinked. They say, get involved with and monitor what your school boards are doing.

I do taxes at H&R Block. Could AI tax returns replace me? For simple stuff, possibly. But not for anything even slightly complicated. I mean, taxes can get really convoluted fast. Plus, tax code is not all in one place. It’s in multiple places which are updated whenever needed.

From the IRS.

“The IRC is complex, and its sections must be read in the context of the entire Code, the Treasury Regulations, and the court decisions that interpret it.”

This means a LLM would need to slurp up tax code, Treasury regs, and court decisions continually and determine if something has changed, been revoked, or superseded. And it must do everything in the correct chronological order. Also, tax code in particular may be embedded in a larger bill, so the AI would somehow need to know what is relevant and what isn’t.

Tax pros sign the returns. Thus, we would need to double check what the AI did. No hallucinations, please! If it made something up and we miss that in our review, it’s on us. Ramifications could be serious.

For an example of the complexities, a client has foreign income exclusion and rental properties in two states. Will AI know that foreign income excluded in AGI is added back into MAGI to determine if the rentals can show a deductible loss on the return? Because claiming that loss when it shouldn’t will probably get the taxpayer an IRS letter.

Will AI know of any agreements between those two states to offset taxes paid in the other state? To do so, it would need to slurp up all state tax code too. (Good luck with OH, which some tax pros won’t do because it’s so convoluted.)

AI tax returns can’t have hallucinations, but they will. H&R Block (and other) industrial-strength tax software is maintained by teams of hundreds, updating them constantly, and testing and checking everything for errors. To my knowledge, AI is nowhere near capable of doing this.

In the 1930s Saul Alinsky led a Chicago meatpacker’s strike. He was given photos of the company CEO having gay sex, in an era when making them public would have ended the CEO’s career. He didn’t use them but only because he didn’t have to.

“So far, so noble; but, if I had been convinced that the only way we could win was to use it, then without any reservations I would have used it.

What was my alternative?

To draw myself up into righteous “moral” indignation saying, “I would rather lose than corrupt my principles,” and then go home with my ethical hymen intact?

The fact that 40,000 poor would lose their war against hopelessness and despair was just too tragic.

That their condition would even be worsened by the vindictiveness of the corporation was also terrible and unfortunate, but that’s life. After all, one has to remember means and ends. It’s true that I might have trouble getting to sleep because it takes time to tuck those big, angelic, moral wings under the covers.

To me that would be utter immorality.”

The Texas redistricting plan, ordered by Trump, wants to steal the 2026 House elections for Republicans. California has responded hard and may redistrict in retaliation. In such a war, most any means will be used to get the win.

MAGA clowns running IRS now want to hire back fired workers to do customer support as contractors. Even though they won’t have experience. They also want to use the magic of AI to answer questions! I’m a as a taxpro, I guarantee AI can’t accurately answer anything complicated about taxes.

AI chokes on enormous sets of data. Like US tax code, which isn’t just in one place. And changes every year. “Oh, hi inexperienced IRS support, if I amend my 2022 S Corp return, can I carryforward [obscure credit].” Answering this requires actual people with expertise!

“I don’t understand why they have let so many experienced people go, and then are hiring new people who have no experience and will take years to get up to speed on what they need to know to help taxpayers.”

Because they are incompetent ideologue idiots?

“Taxpayer issues are very complex as is the IRS. And I think [using AI] just means that taxpayer service will be dumbed down and generalized to limited options.”

Specialists used to answer these complicated tax questions. But they’ve mostly been fired or assigned elsewhere.

My prediction of the coming tax season. It’ll be a train wreck. 25% of IRS employees are already gone. They have been fired or took forced retirement. Blame MAGA, not the remaining IRS employees for the mess that is coming.

Social Security erroneously overpaid some retirees. It is now withholding 50% of retiree monthly benefits to correct errors they made. Yes, you read that right. They originally wanted to withhold 100% of the benefits, However, public outrage forced them to rescind that to the still horrendous 50%.

Terrified seniors worried about how they will pay bills are encouraged to fill out SSA-632-BK Request for Waiver of Overpayment Recovery. It’s just a mere ten pages asking for detailed financial info. Might want to do this before becoming exhausted picking those strawberries.

But wait, there’s more! Form SSA-561 Request for Reconsideration, if you think you weren’t overpaid, or weren’t overpaid as much as Social says. Yes, this is another intuitively obvious form!

Finally, there is SSA-634 Request for Change in Overpayment Recovery Rate to try to get the monthly amount you owe reduced. Whee.

This is just repulsive. Seniors will suffer because Social Security made mistakes. Sure, they owe the money. They were having 10% withheld, which is doable. 50% though will create hardships, especially for seniors whose sole income is Social Security.

I’m a tax pro at H&R Block. We can tell you what SSA forms you might want to fill out. However, we cannot help you fill them out or give you specific advice. I hope agencies and NGOs who help seniors will be able to assist here.

Forget the PR bilge from Social Security about how the Breathtakingly Bad Bill is “historic tax relief” for seniors. It’s not. Yes, the budget bill does add an additional standard deduction for seniors of $6,000 for filing Single, $12,000 for Married. Which might sound great but isn’t. First off, this doesn’t help low-income seniors, who generally pay no tax now. So, those who could really use a tax break get nothing.

Join me in being surprised that this does help the more prosperous. Imagine that! “The new deduction would be more meaningful for upper-middle-class seniors.” The deduction phases out at $150,000 income for upper-middle class married seniors. This is a 22% tax bracket, so the max savings would be $2,640. Not a whole lot for those at that income level.

Tips: Taxpayers can deduct up to $25,000 in tips from taxable income. This phases out over $150,000 income. An unwanted side effect of this will probably be that people will tip less, and employers will reduce base pay.

I do taxes. Many tip income returns are married or Head of Household parents who do it part time. With child tax credits and earned income credits, they already don’t owe tax and have sometimes sizable refunds. And, these new provisions are deductions, not refundable credits.

Overtime: Can deduct up to $12,500 in overtime if filing Single, $25,000 for MFJ. Again, employers could drop base pay if some OT is not taxable. Yes, of course, some employers will do this.

The budget bill really hurts lower income taxpayers because Medicaid, SNAP, ACA will be reduced or eliminated. They will be worse off, even if they qualify for these deductions

AOC:

“The cap on that is $25,000 while you’re jacking up taxes on people who make less than $50,0000 across the United States, while taking away their SNAP, while taking away their Medicaid, while kicking them off of the ACA and their health care extensions. So if you’re at home and you’re living off tips, you do the math. Is that worth it to you? Losing all your health care, not able to feed your babies, not being able to put a diaper on their bottom in exchange for what? This bill is a deal with the devil.”

Apparently, we’ve learned nothing since 2003. This time the war pigs want regime change in Iran. Which means boots on the ground, and Iran War, justified by the lie that Iran is close to having nukes. (There was a different lie for invading Iraq in 2003, that Saddam had WMDs.)

Saddam had no WMDs. The Bush regime made up this lie, fed it to a compliant media who amplified it uncritically as a pretext for war. Sound familiar? The result was “Bush lied, thousands died.” And for what end? We did not help Iraq. (The photo is me helping organize a 2003 Iraq War protest in L.A.)

U.S. intelligence including DNI Tulsi Gabbard, says Iran is not close to having nuclear weapons, a claim that the war pigs have been making for thirty years so they can have their jolly little war. Trump is of course ignoring what these experts say.

Iran is bigger than Iraq, with a powerful well-trained military, 92 million people, and is mountainous. Not an auspicious place to invade.

We will no doubt hear from war apologists about how Iranians will spread rose petals to greet American military liberating them.

Yes, Bush propagandists actually said this about Iraq. The opposite happened. And will happen again if we invade Iran.

1) Yes, they are watching and monitoring you. Don’t say dumb things on social media or phones. Be smart. Satire is a great weapon.

2) If you are protesting at a federal building, be careful. The sidewalk is safe. Everything is federal land and governed by federal law. It’s the Hammer of Thor compared to state law. Sentences can be severe, are mandated, and the lawyers are expensive.

3) Make sure friends have your contact info so they can track where you are being held and bail you out, if needed. This is especially true if you do a staged sit-down protest in a street. Some jurisdictions require full birth name and DOB to look up someone in custody.

4) If they declare unlawful assembly, you can be arrested if you don’t leave. If you interfere with a police officer (or he says you did) that might get you a felony arrest, instead of a minor misdemeanor.

This is how the game is played, I don’t make the rules.

5) To avoid all this, just go, have fun, yell and scream and protest, then post it all on social media. The point is to rally people to the cause, and to make friends and allies. No need to get yourself arrested!

DOGE bros are creating havoc. However, maybe they can edit specific records. IMO though, they can’t make major (or even minor) coding changes. Here’s why.

These systems are enormous. Just understanding how they work could easily take a newbie months.

And they aren’t just one system. There will be dozens, maybe hundreds of legacy subsystems, written in multiple languages and on different platforms. This will absolutely include code written decades ago in COBOL and FORTRAN.

But surely there will be pristine and understandable documentation, including source code comments so incoming programmers will be able to make changes easily? A HA HA HA. No. That won’t exist. Instead, it will be a convoluted rat’s nest of black hole code.

Think I’m exaggerating? Some years back Microsoft released Windows source code for all to see. Everyone thought surely it would be amazing code, clear and understandable. Nope, there was lots of spaghetti.

A few years ago, the IRS commissioner said their system were immune from hacking because they were so ancient that outsiders had no idea what they were looking at or how to get in.

So, no, DOGE bros almost certainly can’t make major code changes now. Let’s hope it stays that way.