Category Archives: Down the drain

SNAP, etc

Sidney Lanier says:
Sidney Lanier SNAP is a subsidy program for food producers and distributors. A regular subsidy to individual households, as Switzerland is proposing and as both Nixon and McGovern supported in the ’72 election, would be more equitable and efficient. But, that would violare the fundamental prejudice that people have no money because they do not know how to manage it. Which of course is contrary to the reality that all dollars come out of the U.S. Treasury and, if people have none, it is because they were given none from the public purse and have not been clever enough to steal some. See, the problem with paper and electronic dollars is that they are inedible, undrinkable, unwearable and non-protective. Indeed, unlike the gold and silver, of which they used to be made, they cannot even be turned into artifacts or baubles which someone might value more. A cross of gold would be more useful than a pallet of Benjamins. Personally, I think anyone with an eleemosynary impulse should start carrying some Benjamins and hand them out more or less at random to people who will spend them and prime the economic pump. The dollar’s current has been slowing since about 1991. See that graph?

Deadbeats of Glynn

Here in Glynn County we are surrounded by dead beats–near 7000 water and sewer account holders who can’t pay their bills on time. As a result, our public sanitation utility is owed over three million dollars that are not available for upkeep and repair.
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IRI–International Republican Institute

Ah, the joy of telling other people what to do.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Republican_Institute

IRI has dramatically increased its efforts to bring institutional structure to Arab countries whose social and political fabric was frayed by the Arab Spring.[4] IRI controversially was helping organize Haitian workers and farmers in Haiti prior to the 2004 Haitian coup d’état,[5] organized conservative political parties in Poland,[6] and has been involved in organizing women in Egypt during and after the Arab Spring.[7]

Of horses and bureaucrats

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Just so, you can hold a bureaucrat to account, but you can’t make him talk.
From a bureaucrat’s perspective, to speak is to surrender power.
Roger Stone is wrong. Bureaucrats get paid; henchmen get protection. Unless they are counting on someone unreliable like the Dude in the White House.

50 Oaks and 22 Violations

A communication from Jane Fraser to the Island Planning Commission. Keep in mind that the violations are technical in the sense that they are contrary to rules and regulations that may or may not be consistent with preventing destruction to the natural environment. I learned that yesterday at a meeting of the Georgia Shore Protection Committee where staff could not see a violation in a rubble dump because it wasn’t a condition covered by the permit. A non-existent condition that’s a variant on pre-existent conditions?
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Sympathy for the self-made orphan

They have got to be kidding!  When Sea Island Acquisitions applied for a permit to build another erosion-producing groin along the shore in 2015, the data they submitted was already out of date. Now, three years later, after one hurricane (Matthew) and one significant tropical storm (Irma), as well as periodic super high tides have eroded the shore even more, the new owners (as addled as the old ones?) are sending their landscape guy to ask for permission to pump sand onto the beach from four miles out at sea. They also want a long term commitment to keep re-shaping the beach with heavy machinery, whenever erosion occurs.
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NDA

Why would the President’s counsel promote the signing of Non Disclosure Agreements by White House staff? Do none of these people realize they work for the people, who govern and pay them?