Nobody Asked Me…

This is the kind of ‘stuff’ that really pisses me off…

Do you know what Arizona, California, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, New York, Rhode Island, and Virginia all have in common? Yes, they’re blue or blue-ish states, but they’re also using your tax dollars to send those who receive Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits out for a night on the town. According to Sen. Joni Ernst (R-Iowa), approximately $250 million worth of SNAP benefits is spent at restaurants, mostly fast food joints, each year in those states. 

When SNAP was first established in 1964, the goal was for those who couldn’t afford it to buy basics: meat, fruit, vegetables, etc., that one could cook at home. Hot food or food already ready to consume was not eligible. However, according to Ernst’s office, a 1977 loophole allowed states to opt into something called the Restaurant Meals Program. 

Full article, HERE from PJ Media.

It’s bad enough that they can get candy and soft drinks, especially candy ‘I’ can’t afford, but they can routinely go to McDonalds, Panda Express, and other fast food joints? WTH???

No wonder they are so obese! Hell, if I ate that much fast food, I’d weigh 400 lbs too!

One of the ‘real’ problems with the SNAP is that it was supposed to be supplemental aid to flesh to (so to speak), food that you cooked and served at home. Beans, rice, etc. plus the good old Government cheese (which wasn’t actually bad). I am now fully in the camp that the entire program needs to be restarted, including reapplying, a real approval process, and cutting the program back to its original intent.

There is no reason for people to be able to go spend $10+ on Mickey D’s for a Big Mac to feed one, when $10 will get beans and rice enough to feed a family. Yes, they’d actually have to not only have a pan, but know how to actually cook the rice and beans. Yes, I subsisted on rice and beans a few times in college when I got stupid, I’ll freely admit it. And potatoes and onions… sigh… Thankfully I learned how to save bacon grease as a kid, so I had something to give the potatoes and onions some flavoring.

What say you?

Soooo, the latest tranch of Epstein emails has revealed some ‘interesting’ things…

Last week’s Democratic attempt to weaponize Jeffrey Epstein’s emails against Trump backfired spectacularly. The supposedly damning evidence against Trump turned out to be a nothingburger, and the GOP’s subsequent release of 23,000 emails has already claimed its first casualty — though not the target Democrats had hoped for.

Larry Summers, the former Harvard president who also served as Bill Clinton’s treasury secretary and director of Obama’s National Economic Council, announced Monday that he’s “stepping back from public commitments.”

According to a statement he gave to The Harvard Crimson, Summers’s retreat is part of an effort “to rebuild trust and repair relationships with the people closest to me.”

Full article, HERE from PJ Media.

First, if you’re looking for a/the ‘list’, I don’t think it exists. At best, there are the records of who flew on Lolita Airlines, but that’s about it.

If you’re part of that ‘class’ of folks, you don’t keep records of who is providing what to who. That is a guaranteed way to get dead. Those folks don’t like things getting put on paper or any kind of media, as their ‘reputations’ are protected by ‘consultants’ to make sure there is no way for someone to blackmail their customers.

If you tried, you’d probably win the cement overshoes ‘award’, and a swim with the fishes…

What there will be are the email strings. That is already paying dividends in ways the Dems didn’t want or expect. Witness the fallout in DC already.

The other thing folks seem to forget is that IF there had actually been damaging information, wouldn’t the Dems have already used it? Also, how much of what is being released is ‘accurate’? How long have people been ‘massaging’ that dataset?

Personally, I’d like to see the original evidence from 2008 that went to the grand jury in Florida. That data is probably the purest, and probably included interviews from the girls he co opted.

I doubt the MSM is exactly being fair in their coverage either, slanting stories as hard as they can to pacify their Dem handlers and the deep state.

But folks will believe what they want, regardless of the facts… sigh

Conversation we’ve been having in a little discussion group about Socialists/Communists…

Anyone who has studied Russian or Chinese history knows this…

And Seattle went the same way NYC did… They now have a socialist mayor, Katie Wilson, who has NO experience. Her speech is HERE, and if you go six minutes in, she starts talking about her ‘agenda’. And it’s truly scary…

Redistribution of ‘wealth’, food for all, housing for all, progressive tax options, new taxes on businesses making over $7M a year, etc. But some of the specifics echo what Mandami has said, like control of grocery stores (90 days notice to close one and ‘preventing’ closure of ones that are poor performers), among other things.

I’m just glad I’m not living out there…

I want to share what EL said in our chat about the differences between capitalism and socialism…

What these effete, moronic savants fail to understand is that wealth is a collective figment of human imagination driven by our innate avarice.  Scarcity does not make something valuable; desire, however, makes something scarce expensive.  Our collective desire makes something easily produced common and relatively inexpensive while also making the producers wealthy.  People say they will kill for a morning cup of coffee, but it’s only $3.95 at Starbucks (medium roast Pike Place).  The Starbucks market capitalization is $98.23 billion.

What is ironic is that the atheistic Marxist has a Biblical view of wealth: they believe the total amount of wealth in the world is fixed, and that the evil wealthy stole it. But the fixed wealth proposition is an easily exposed lie: at its peak around 150 AD, the approximately 70 million people in the Roman Empire were worth about $43.4 billion dollars  (2008 analysis by economists Walter Scheidel and Steven J. Friese).  Yet according to the renown scholar, Google, the 450.4 million people in the European Union, roughly the same land as the Roman Empire, are worth $80 trillion.  And the Romans didn’t have coffee.

Because wealth is a figment of the imagination, it cannot be redistributed; but it can be destroyed by crushing dreams and aspirations.  What can be distributed, however, is knowledge: the knowledge of how to recognize opportunities, of how to develop and manufacture products; and of building businesses to market and distribute products.   But the Marxist decree capitalism to be inhumane and reject learning and teaching its principles, means, and methods.  Then, in their utopian dreams and worldly ignorance, they propose seizing the means of production and placing it under state control.  Bureaucrats, however, get paid whether something is produced and put on the shelf or not, and the dream-denied populace, reduced to state controlled serfdom with worthless ration cards, starve in dark, cold, dingy state provided cells called apartments.

Capitalism exploits human desires, dreams, inventiveness, and energy to create a robust economy.  It’s potential excesses are tempered by another human, innate trait: altruism. 
Marxism, with what amounts to the economic paradigm of ant or bee colonies, rejects and crushes human instinct, with predictable and inevitable results.  Forcing an oversize square peg into a round hole leaves neither a square peg nor a round hole; both are irreparably damaged.

This in a nutshell is pretty much the genesis of the quote, you can vote yourself into socialism, but you have to shoot your way out of it.

What happens next in both places is yet to be seen…