I first saw this video years ago. Ran across it again today.
Living proof, a smoking gun really, that shows we could all get along just fine if we could just figure out how to do without governments.
Tax hikes on “the rich” hit everyone.
Perfect example cited at a second or third remove over on the Whatever. Read it.
It certainly is a little lame to complain about not having enough money when you’re making 250K and have to let your nanny, gardener and housecleaner go because of a tax hike. I recommend not doing that except among other similarly afflicted socialites. Here’s the world’s smallest violin.
However, ask yourself where the sympathy is for the nanny, gardener, and house cleaner. They’re being let go as a direct result of that tax hike. The same taxes that “stick it to the man” also stick it to the everyday joe the man employs. This is true whether it’s directly as a gardener, nanny or housecleaner to said man or indirectly as the pool guy whose services are no longer required, or even the maid at the one hotel the man doesn’t go to when he shortens his vacation this year due to financial concerns.
Corporations don’t let VPs go when they get hit with a big tax hike, they lay off guys and gals like me.
To Mr. Scalzi’s point, Henderson is still doing just fine. It’s those domestic servants out looking for work now, not Henderson. But, I suppose that’s alright as long as the politicians can crow about ‘taxing the rich’ and everybody thinks that’s smart.
Sometimes you must.
I’ve run across a strange plethora of internodes today referencing pets and dogs and cats as companions and friends. Not the least of these was Wil Wheaton’s post about his new dog and his old dog. As well as OK Go’s video for their song White Knuckles.
This has left me with a strong desire to ramble interminably on about my own feelings on pets. I grew up with cats, lots of cats. Dogs are OK too, though they tend to smell. Then I went and married a woman who not only doesn’t particularly like cats but is strongly allergic to them as well as anything else with fur. No cats in my house. This leaves a nostalgic emotional gap.
Once, in Afghanistan, I almost got in a knife fight with a teammate to protect a cat that had pooped in his HMMV’s seat. No blood was shed, though I soon arranged a new home for the cat on our next trip outside the FOB.
So, I still like cats even though I can’t keep any. I’ll always stop to pet one and it fills the gap a little to feel the warmth and hear the purr.
The most significant cat event in my life in the last ten years was not the knife fight either. It’s not a happy memory, so be warned.
It happened on a busy business district street in Salt Lake City, Utah. I was stopped three cars back from the light in the middle of three lanes. All the lanes were full at least twenty cars back. Up ahead of me, at the head of the lane to my left, some truly evil people rolled down the window of their beater car to up-end a kitten out of a bag and onto the road. The kitten, probably 4 or 5 months old, landed on its feet and looked back where it had come from. The light changed. I started forward slowly so the people behind wouldn’t rear end me when I stopped to pick up the kitten.
The kitten, freaked out by the cars suddenly moving, dashed to hide under the first car in my lane, the rear tires of which caught its hips. The poor thing went down and started yowling, screaming really, and flipping its crushed and broken body around in paroxysms of pain. I was horrified. The second car missed the kitten entirely. As I rolled up on the pitiful spasming thing I realized there was only one thing I could do. Gritting my teeth I accelerated and steered my front tire over the kitten’s front end. The screaming stopped.
I continued through the intersection and caught a glimpse of the beater car disappearing down the road where it had turned left. I considered turning left illegally and following the blackhearted bastards until they stopped and I could confront them. I knew how that would turn out though, with me in jail facing an assault charge.
I continued on to work and parked. Face in my hands I worked the tears out then wiped my eyes and went inside.
I’ve been trying to forget that for 9 years. No luck, so now I immortalize it.
If you people in the beater car ever read this, you’ll know who you are. It’ll take you a while to live that one down you filthy animals. I’ll be happy to help you balance your account though.
Conan didn’t read many books
So, as I mentioned earlier on this blog, I got a chance to go to Ranger School in late August of 2010. Ranger School is a 60 day school. Add two weeks to the front for National Guard guys like me to go through the mandatory Pre-Ranger training and you get two and a half months. Notice please that it is early September and, since I am writing this, I am clearly not in Ranger School.
I failed out. I do not feel bad about this. How and why make for a story that I won’t be telling in this post but which culminates in my burning desire to go back and try again.
So why this digression on Ranger School? Because of the look.
9/11 2010
So this is the obligatory post. I have lots of thoughts on the events of this nine year old date and their aftermath, but I’m only going to cover one set today.
Sacrifice. Quite a few people today have talked about honoring the sacrifice of those who lost their lives on this day.
What exactly is a sacrifice? Dictionary.com says … well, it has a lot of definitions, not all of which apply, but all of which involve some deliberate effort by those performing the sacrifice. Rushing up the stairs of a burning building to save who and what you can, knowing the risk, is a sacrifice. Crashing the plane you are on rather than letting it be used for further atrocity, that’s a sacrifice. Even stepping up and attempting to impose order on the chaos of your co-workers in a crowded stairwell, giving up your place in the rush in order to stand on a bit of high ground and get things moving more smoothly, is a sacrifice. Showing up to work in one of the towers or even the pentagon was not. It was just bad luck. Calling it a sacrifice cheapens the concept and the efforts of those who did, and have been attempting to, actually do something about those events and their consequences.
So, in the interest of my peace of mind I’ve been busily assuming that all the people yammering about the sacrifice of those those who died on 9/11 are talking about those people who have lost their lives while doing something about those events. I’ll save the honor I have to give for them, thank you.
Kick Ass
Kicked ass. Best movie I’ve seen in years. Jumped right to the top of my list of all time favorites, perhaps falling one position under Equilibrium, perhaps shouldering it to one side with a bit of truculence. We shall see how it bears more watchings. Already seen it three times, loved it more each and every one.
Determined to dress up for halloween this year as Hit Girl. My wife may not let me. But maybe I can get her into a purple wig? Would that be wrong?
Climate Gate. Wow.
Phil Jones of the CRU (Climatic Research Unit) said, when asked to share the data his organization had been collecting on historical temperatures of the Earth, “We have 25 or so years invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”
Maybe, Phil, because that’s the entire bloody point of scientific work, to find something wrong with it. You, sir, if you were acting as a true scientist in this case, should have been eagerly lining up for someone to point out possible flaws in your data collection methods or conclusions thereon. For that is how scientific truth is discovered. Make a hypothesis, collect data, and then try and knock holes in it. When all the people who disagree with you can no longer find actual flaws in your data or conclusions, you’ve found something. But, I suppose, if you never look for those flaws you can cling to whatever hypothesis gets you more tax money.
That quote and the continued resistance to sharing the collected data says more about the group’s scientific creds than anything else ever could.
Liberal Gun Nuts
So, I get this tweet from Eric James Stone (I and his other millions of fans) linking to a post written by someone he claimed to be a liberal making sense on the second amendment. On the Daily Kos no less. Being as enamored of mythical beasts as well as jackalopes I clicked through for a looksee. … He was right.
Not only did the guy make sense, he did it without simply invalidating all those things the liberals hold most dear in this one, oh so special, case in which he was called upon to make sense. Bravo sir. Bravo.
His larger point though, the car he was riding in if you will, was not so logical and it’s where most of his power to be persuasive from a liberal point of view came from. He was saying, in that oh so self-righteous way we all know and love, that conservatives are about taking rights away from the people while liberals are about keeping rights in the people’s hands.
This only works if you consider putting the control of any given right into the hands of the government to be keeping it in the hands of the people. I beg to differ. I already have the right to donate money to Maplethorpe, or, conversely, to NOT donate money to Maplethorpe. Funding the NEA with tax dollars actually takes that second right away. I already have the right to donate money to the poor. Funding welfare projects with tax dollars takes that right away. The principle is universal.
Putting ‘rights’ into the hands of the government to administer lessens the rights of the people in every case. In some cases we are losing the right to be a jerk. So what. That is nevertheless a right you are actually taking away rather than leaving in my hands. I’ll wager nearly all the arguments about what the government should and should not regulate hinge on one side considering a particular behavior to be jerky that the other doesn’t. (mmm jerky)
That’s the liberal position. The government should not allow people to be jerks, and the liberals get to decide what being a jerk IS. The conservative side of that argument (Largely, I’ll not defend all things done in the name of conservatism) is to keep the government out of the matter as often as possible, thus leaving the rights in the hands of the people by default. The people who wrote the constitution were very careful to make it clear that the government had no powers other than what was specifically granted in that document for that very reason. Everything else was already inherently in the hands of the people and getting the government involved just screwed things up.
So, thank you Angry Mouse for making a cogent point from atop your tower of unassailable non-jerkiness.
If I hear of an article calling for the government to mandate that every household shall own and maintain a proficiency in the use of firearms I will point out that, once again, the author of that article has missed the point.
Russian spies not actually that smart!
The Justice Department said the suspects were supposed to have recruited intelligence agents but were not directly involved in obtaining U.S. secrets themselves. They were charged with acting as agents of a foreign government,…
Well, duh. I am astonished. In a country that lived through so many years of a cold war you’d think journalists would know that ‘deep cover’ spies act as handlers rather than Tom Cruise-esque villains. ‘ Not directly involved with obtaining
US secrets themselves’ means they didn’t put on nightvision goggles and a catsuit in order to penetrate secure facilities with a thumb drive. Nobody actually does that. Spies look for
disaffected/disgruntled/moneystrapped citizens of the target nation who already have placement and access to sensitive information. Then they pay those people to put papers from their desk into a briefcase and drop it at a pre-arranged location. The ‘drop’ is just about the most glamorous bit of espionage activity that actually happens in the real world.
Now, at this point I must say I am not impressed with the tradecraft of anyone who puts ’99 Fake street’ when buying a drop phone. Sure, when it’s your hundredth drop phone, I imagine one’s creativity could become strained. But ‘Fake street?’
It will be very interesting to see if any treason or espionage arrests come out of this busted spy ring. I hope none do. If you can level such charges and make them stick it’s likely already cost some American asset his/her life. Hopefully we caught these folks before they could do
any real damage. And, on the other side of the coin, I hope they were actually spies and that the charges are not trumped up bits of fluff designed to spur political change of some sort.
Riverworld the made for TV movie
Sigh. Another dashed hope.
The Riverworld books by Philip Jose Farmer were very good. Classic Sci-Fi a little more on the cutting edge than most for their time. Cool characters, interesting and consistently imagined world, great fun.
Unfortunately, the made for TV movie produced in 2010 was none of these things. The dialog was atrociously stilted. Painfully stupid event followed painfully stupid event. Just awful. I would blame the actors, but I can’t imagine a good way to deliver most of the drivel they were forced to mouth. And there were quite a few who had done great work in the Battlestar Galactica reboot, so I know they were capable.
You can never magically put a book on screen. Changes have to be made. Why anyone would make some of the changes made by the people who put this show together is unfathomable though. Turn Burton into the villain of the piece at the outset? Really? Completely abandon the confusion, the ‘figure out the world with the characters’ portion of the story, the problem solving and making of friends, in favor of random undisguised infodumps? Set us in a world that doesn’t make any sense, at all, why? Farmer’s world made sense. I know it did because I read the books. It was internally consistent. No such claim can be made for the movie. And as far as I could tell, the changes were made either because they happened to have people in conquistador costumes hanging around at the set next door (and hey, waste not want not right?) or because it was too difficult to imagineer sets that actually worked with the story.
Ahhhg, so painful. It could have been soooo good and yet was so bad.