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Okay, Who Want 600 Large to Study Why Flies Hate Being Swatted?

Jimmie | August 4, 2010 | Comments (1)

Do you remember the panicky days of early 2009 when we absolutely had to have a trillion dollar Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill or the nation would kerplode like a planet hollowed out by greedy Dark Matter miners? The President and various flunkies from the White House and Congress spread throughout the land like locusts and claimed that if we would only put our nation in hock for a generation or two, his stimulus package would “save or create” eleventy bazillion jobs and would keep the unemployment rate below 8 percent. He put pistol-packing Sheriff Joe Biden on duty to keep the special interests’ greedy varmint’s hands offin the gubmint’s pile o’cash! Months later, after we noticed that the jobs we bought still hadn’t arrives, he took a good glance at the stimulus machinery and found it in perfect working order with not a shred of waste or abuse to be found even though his very own auditor said that a significant amount of waste and fraud was inevitable.

So here we are, over 18 months later and we’re still waiting for the jobs to arrive. Perhaps, though, we’re not looking in the right places. We expected the jobs to appear in the usual places — construction sites, restaurants, office buildings, factories — but we obviously aren’t magnificently-creative “outside the box thinkers” like President Obama is. Fortunately, Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain took a peek outside the box and found, well, a veritable bounty of economic stimulus (PDF Link). Why there’s plenty of money going to state governments, colleges and universities, Indian tribes, and all the places that usually get big cash payments called “pork” from their members of Congress. In fact, if you dig into the report, you won’t find any difference at all, really, between a project funded by the Vote Buying Act Stimulus Bill and some earmark from a member of Congress hungry for re-election dollars. Let me show you one of my favorite projects from the report.

20. Monkey and Chimpanzee Responses to Inequity (Atlanta, GA) – $677,462

While much is known about how humans respond to inequity and injustice, researchers at Georgia State University are using almost $700,000 in stimulus funds to study why monkeys respond negatively to inequity and unfairness. “Seven species of primates will be asked to make decisions about whether or not to accept rewards in a series of studies in which their outcomes vary relative to their social partners. The influence of social factors like group membership and individual factors like personality will also be investigated. The results of this research will clarify how decision-making is affected by unequal outcomes.” Previous research by the investigator on this project had found that “Chimpanzees respond with temper tantrums if they do not get what they desire,” and that “Capuchin monkeys and chimpanzees both respond negatively to distributional inequity.”

So, this university is getting enough money to pay 10 people a bit less than $70,000 per year and they’re wasting it on a study that proves what we already know: monkeys really do act like small children or Congressional Democrats.

Georgia State University is in Atlanta, which sits right in the middle of the 5th Congressional District. The current Representative for that District is Democratic veteran and senior member of the Congressional Black Caucus John Lewis. By the way, if Lewis’ name sounds familiar, he was one of the ringleaders behind the Tea Partiers racism lie that’s become part of the MSM’s accepted truth. Lewis and Georgia State University are not strangers. The college got a half-million dollar earmark from Lewis in FY’09 for “inmate programs in the Georgia prison system”. I’m not intimately familiar with how things work in Georgia, but I’m pretty sure it has a state government capable of funding its own prison and college system.

The report is stuffed full of similarly corrupt and wasteful stimulus payouts. I think I might share a few more with you throughout the week. I’ve only read 22 pages into the report and there are a couple real gems in there.