Locking the debt ceiling

JeffK wants the USA government to limit taking on additional debt. He wants the government to stop spending money on these TLAs: EPA, DOE, USDA, DHS, BEA, BLM.

JeffK's article here.

Have you thought it through Jeff?
Without the EPA it would be a free for all to pollute the land.
Without the DOE doing planning, your future energy would be in doubt.
Without the USDA there would be no food standards. Who would stop somebody from adulterating food. Snake oil salesmen would make a comeback.
DHS. OK Jeff, you have a valid one there. While failing to catch terrorists it serves to inconvenience innocent people.
BEA: Somebody needs to monitor the economy.
BLM: Again, this manages the environment by controlling land use. Left to businessmen they would pulp the trees, rip coal from surface mines and what was left turned over to suburban housing.
Even the UN makes a valuable contribution to World peace but Jeff would abandon all these things. Apart from the DHS these are all agencies that make the country a better and safer place.

Why is there a huge debt anyway? Jeff blames it on the government which is sort of true. The government failed to regulate the banks properly. It was the banks playing Las Vegas with the economy and losing and requiring a huge injection of cash to stop the banking system from collapsing. Did any bankers get punished for destroying the economy? No (except for Bernard Madhoff). Put some of them in jail and see if they dare gamble again.

What ways could money be saved instead? Jeff mentions foreign aid and this is a more worthy target. A couple billion to Egypt? Oh dear. That doesn't look so wise now. And why does the USA give billions of dollars to Israel? Surely for that kind of money Obama could ask Israel to stop building on occupied land and make serious peace with the Palestinians? We had such high hopes for Obama. Instead he vetoes a UN resolution that would criticize the Israeli settlements. Also the many billions going down the drain to Iraq after a war that should never have been fought.

There is plenty that can be cut without cutting things that benefit the country.

Alcohol and Firearms

In Georgia, Gov. Perdue signed a bill that allows people to carry concealed handguns in bars. Now what could possibly go wrong when you mix drunk people and guns? Is Roy Wetherington the only person to spot a possible problem with that? Tifton Gazette Opinion

Then and Now - Cirencester

I remember a coach trip to Cirencester in the 1960s. It was an awful long way from London and we parked in the Forum. It was near the source of the Thames so why did we trawl the shops for an hour instead of going to see a muddy spring somewhere? I didn't quite get the point of going all that way for that but I was intrigued by the fact that even the most mundane wall was made of Cotswold stone instead of the bricks that I was used to. And 45 years later I find myself living down the road from Cirencester with an handful of transparencies from that era.
The Romans built the Tetbury road almost completely straight and so it stayed until the 20th century. Then an airfield cut it in two and the Cirencester end had a bypass built. The discarded fragment of the Tetbury road is still straight but doesn't go very far and used to look like this:

From Box-G6

nowadays full of parked cars

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The building at the end of the Roman road was the Petty Sessional Court and Police Station. By the time that Peter Coleman took the picture it was occupied by Avonprint.

From G2721

Nowadays an estate agent for the wealthy.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

Why did a busy town like Cirencester lose both of its railway stations? A lot of commuters end up having to go to Kemble to catch a London train. Here is the station probably having been closed a few years earlier.

From Box-G6

And here is the station not changed much at all apart from the canopy being missing.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The Blue School on a bright summer morning.

From Box-G6

Trees are trying to take over. Also we found that the road was really difficult to cross, being infested with many expensive German sports cars.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

The plaque used to look like this

From G2721

But it has been repainted with different text and it is very faded. In Feb 2011 the newspapers said that this building would be converted into flats.

From 2010-02-12Cirencester

Tifton

One feature of the the Tifton Gazette is the Rants and Raves section. Messages get posted without any form of identification As all comments are anonymous there are sometimes some rude ones. Take for example this one.

Small town

“You really don’t know how small Tifton, Ga., is until you get out of town. Closeminded town with closeminded people.”

I can assure you that not all the people of Tifton are like this, my wife for one. Fortunately you can rely on people like Roy Wetherington for a broader outlook and common sense.

Signalling

One thing a cyclist needs to know is which way a car is going to go. It would be a great help if all motorists indicated properly. One person who indicated was driving a small dark hatchback T306AES and who at 16:48 on 02 February 2011 blundered from Slad Road onto Merrywalks roundabout in the path of another car that managed to stop.

Instead of being apologetic he stopped, opened the door and used a hand gesture not found in the Highway Code. Then drove off.