Fortunately, they're Chaotic Evil, and they're bored with doing the work

[nancylebov]

About the three page request for 3,757,735.63 miles of money if you could go at light speed for a dollar a mile:

The point here being that we wrote a lot of grants.

And the thing is that every one of those grants was longer, more detailed and better documented than the sorry excuse for a memo that Paulson threw together to request $700 billion from the public coffers.

A three-page memo with no details means your grant application gets turned down. It means your $15,000 grant application gets turned down. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and if you're going to ask someone to hand over that kind of cash, then you're going to have to do your homework. You're going to have to explain, in detail, what the money is for, where and when it's going to be spent. You're going to have to explain how you intend to report back, with detailed documentation, after the money is spent. And you're probably going to have to describe a detailed plan ensuring that you won't need to come back six months later to ask for another $15,000 for exactly the same thing.

Fail to provide that kind of documentation and detail and your grant application will be rejected. Not only that, but you'll be lucky if you're ever allowed to come back and re-apply with the same foundation. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and when you ask someone to give you $15,000 without the courtesy of telling them what precisely it's for, they tend to take offense. And the failure to do your homework and put together a decent, detailed application is viewed as evidence that you're not responsible enough to handle the money wisely. "We're lazy and disorganized -- give us money" is not considered a winning grant-writing strategy.

In other news, Fred's also finished his paragraph by paragraph sporkification of Left Behind, so if you like that kind of fun, there's plenty of it.