Politics: February 2019 Archives
Quick Silver P51 Mustang - Federal Business Opportunities: Opportunities
Volumes of federal acquisition regulations exist to ensure that federal contracting is fair to every business that seeks to do work for the government. But sometimes only one company can do the job, and even then, there's a process that has to be followed, forms to be filled out, notices to be posted, even to bring in a historic aircraft for an air show flyover. Fair contracting isn't cheap.
"The 11th Contracting Squadron at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland intends to award a simplified acquisition on a sole source basis to Quick Silver P-51 Airshows for an aerial demonstration with a North American P-51D Quick Silver Mustang for the 2019 Air Show, in accordance with FAR 6.302-1(a)(2), Only one responsible source is capable of responding due to the unique or specialized nature of the work."
America's Signature Mode of Transportation Is High-Cost Rail - Hmm Daily
"American infrastructure is this costly because of immense, endemic, universal public-private corruption--systems of both direct and financialized graft at every stage of infrastructure development, from the planning to the ribbon-cutting to the use of deferred maintenance to ransack public transportation budgets for cash, year after year, after which the responsible authorities claim that fixing the century-old signals is just too damn pricey. This system of legal fraud begins with the bevies of project consultants, continues through ludicrous private contractor and labor costs, and continues when, years later, high-paid administrative fixers and new armies of consultants and contractors arrive to fix what broke because it was never maintained. It is a system of tolerated kleptocracy that may be the only thing that America still does better than anyone else in the world. It is baked into every assumption about building for the public benefit." (Hat tip to Dustbury.)
owen cyclops on Twitter - fairies, alien abductions, psychedelics, and the demonic
A fascinating but long and winding twitter thread in which the author (now a Christian) sees patterns and parallels between the stories told by people on psychedelic substances (with which he has extensive experience), and alien encounters, mysterious disappearances, demonic encounters, folklore about fairies and djinns, and fallen angels. In the end he provides a plausible explanation for why the word pharmakeia means sorcery, linking it to a passage in the apocryphal Book of Enoch.
California High-Speed Rail is Still On - Streetsblog San Francisco
They haven't killed it. They're just waiting for us hayseeds in flyover country to pay for it.
C. S. Lewis on economic independence
As quoted in a column by Joe Sobran:
"I believe a man is happier, and happy in a richer way, if he has 'the free-born mind.' But I doubt whether he can have this without economic independence, which the new society is abolishing. For economic independence allows an education not controlled by Government; and in adult life it is the man who needs, and asks, nothing of government who can criticize its acts and snap his fingers at its ideology. Read Montaigne; that's the voice of a man with his legs under his own table, eating the mutton and turnips raised on his own land. Who will talk like that when the State is everyone's schoolmaster and employer?"
Starr County woman arrested for illegally voting using dead person's identity | WOAI
"A Starr County woman has been arrested for illegally voting using a dead person's identity in 2016.
"According to a release by the Texas Attorney General's Office, Bernice Annette Garza was indicted by a Hidalgo County grand jury and charged with voter impersonation, illegal voting and providing false information on an application for an early voting ballot.
"The release stated that Garza signed and submitted an application for early voting ballot by mail for Hortencia Rio, who died nine years earlier. Garza then used the woman's identity to cast a vote by mail.
"'Mail ballots are inherently insecure. Vote harvesters, who make a living by exploiting vulnerable processes intended to make it easier for people to vote, threaten the viability of the mail ballot system and must be caught and prosecuted,' Attorney General Paxton said in a release. 'My office will continue to use everything in its power to prevent voter fraud and restore integrity to the voting process in Texas.'
"If convicted, the illegal voting charges against her are punishable by two to 20 years behind bars."
