Mark Shea wrote this: "[L]ibertarianism is a philosophy for people with no children."
Why is marriage such a big deal? Why do some people care deeply enough about marriage to want to expand the historical and traditional definition to include same-sex couples, and others care deeply enough to claim that such an expansion would destroy marriage?
My wife and I were talking this over on Wednesday and one of the points that came up is that marriage is a partnership contract like no other. In a typical business partnership, there is a "shotgun clause" which allows one the partners to terminate the contract by offering to buy out the other. A partnership can be ended unilaterally; and the resolution is fair and final.
Marriage, on the other hand, is a putatively lifelong contract. The rules for terminating a marriage have been jury-rigged on to our legal tradition in the last few hundred years, and then twisted in the last fifty. The concept of alimony makes much more sense when you're talking about a pre-WWII divorce for cause, rather than a modern "no-fault" divorce.
Contrasting marriage to a business partnership point by point, we see that a marriage can be ended unilaterally, like a partnership. But there is no "shotgun" -- no means of pricing the marriage. Instead the marriage assets are divided evenly. And divorce is not final. A court can award alimony and child support, which continue indefinitely. I suppose this is an attempt to fairly value the lifelong commitment promised in the marriage; but the effect is rather nasty.
Alimony (and child support) are initially based on the higher-earning spouse's current income (in the case of child support, the non-custodial spouse; but this is usually also the higher-earning one). As the years pass, they are adjusted to track current income. Or perhaps the higher-earning spouse is malingering by deliberately taking a low-paying job or returning to college? That's OK -- alimony will be based on "imputed income" -- on the amount of money the malingering spouse could have been earning.
Basically, after a divorce, you can wind up with a nondischargeable claim on your ex-spouse's future earning capacity -- and also with the ability to compel this person to work at the best of their ability to support you. Of course the alimony claim can be forgiven by the recipient. In earlier times I believe this was called "manumission".
Here's Larry Elder on marriage and gay marriage, proposing King Solomon's solution: okay, we'll cut the baby in half! One side wants gay marriage, the other side wants no gay marriage -- let's have no marriage at all!
I have begun to think that this is the only consistent position for the supporters of current marriage rules to take. Certainly I would expect that if same-sex marriage becomes state-sanctioned, religious groups who strongly oppose same-sex marriage will refuse to perform civil marriages. Perhaps they won't -- perhaps, like the case of rubella vaccine, made possible by tissue taken from an aborted fetus, the church will weasel and take both positions, claiming that gay marriage is wrong but still acting for the state in certifying opposite-sex marriages.
Certainly there is a political risk in refusing to conduct civil marriages: many people may leave the church over it. (But haven't they left already?)
I was working on our taxes the other night and I had some loose thoughts about campaign finance and the difference between the American and Canadian systems.
But first, why was I working on our taxes in February when they're not due until April 30th?
Because employers have to file the T4 summary form (documenting all payroll taxes paid for all employees) by February 29, and we are technically an employer -- at least, our corporation is. I had better records this year, so I was able to set up what I needed in about half an hour. It then took me nearly an hour to file with Revenue Canada's T4 Web Forms. Much of the time was spent getting my access code issued (never received one in the mail) and then re-issued ("Hmmm... that does seem to be your access code. And you can't log in with it? I'll just issue you a new one.")
That was Monday. Tuesday, Revenue Canada printed me up a "TAX DEDUCTION, CANADA PENSION PLAN AND EMPLOYMENT INSURANCE DISCREPANCY NOTICE" which I received in today's mail, but it's OK. I was prepared for it. Back in January I nearly had a heart attack when I noticed that the total amount that we should have collected for the year was different from the amount that Revenue Canada reports is in our payroll tax account, by somewhat over two thousand dollars.
The difference is in our favor -- we overpaid, which is actually worse than if we had underpaid. If we had underpaid, Revenue Canada would have just charged us some interest and that would be that. But since we overpaid, they want to know why.
And the reason why is that in 2002, I didn't keep very good records, and we found ourselves having underpaid our payroll taxes by rather a lot. And therefore owing rather a lot plus interest, in April of all times, and therefore having to pay rather a lot all at once. Then for some reason, Revenue Canada took our arrears payment for 2002 and interpreted it as a tax payment for 2003, and then they decided that our monthly payroll tax payment for 2003 was rather a lot and sent us a few bills for that amount. This all took a while to straighten out, and in the end we had overpaid 2002 by an amount of money which is somewhat over two thousand dollars, which was subsequently (June 18th if you must know) transferred to 2003. And this is what Revenue Canada wants to know about now.
Anyway, back to why I was doing our personal taxes. One of the products of the T4 Web Forms application is a set of beautifully-printed T4's, so I decided to throw the numbers into Excel and see what the damage was in our personal taxes.
And now we can get back to campaign finance. I'm not sure of this, but I think in the United States, political contributions are not tax-deductible. On your tax return there's a box you can check if you want $3 to go to the federal election fund, but it says right on the form that it won't affect how much tax you owe. Other than that I've never noticed any political stuff on our tax forms.
Here in Canada, however, you can get a tax deduction for making a political contribution. Yes. Actually it's worse than that. In Canada's screwy tax system, there aren't very many personal deductions; most things handled as deductions in the States are handled as tax credits here. For example, instead of deducting your student loan interest from your taxable income, you get a nonrefundable credit of 16% (which happens to be the lowest marginal tax rate) of your student loan interest. So a credit can never pull you down into a lower tax bracket, while a deduction can. Put another way, in the U.S., deductions come off the top of your income; in Canada, off the bottom. Charitable gifts are a little more complicated; your credit is 16% of the first $200, and 29% (the highest marginal rate) after that, up to 75% of your total income.
But as I said, it's even worse with political contributions. If you give $100 to a political party, you get a credit of $75. So instead of getting a credit at the lowest marginal rate (as with student loan interest) or at a mixed marginal rate (as with a charitable gift), you get a credit at nearly five times the lowest marginal rate or more than twice the highest. After $200 in contributions the rate drops to 50%; after $550 to 33.33% up to $1,075 in contributions ($550 in credit).
It's still a loss for the individual taxpayer, even at the best rate. You have a choice of giving $75 to the government or $100 to a political party; if you choose the latter, you're still out the additional $25. But look at your matching funds: the government matches you 3 for 1 for your first $50 in political contributions. Not bad, eh?
Except that this is a horrible abuse of government power. If the state is going to collect income tax, it has to allow deductions for the costs of doing business. Further, it usually (ab)uses its power and creates deductions to encourage certain behavior in its citizens: hence the charitable gift deduction to encourage giving; the student loan interest deduction to encourage education; in the U.S., the mortgage interest deduction to encourage homeownership.
But for the political contributions, which is it? Does the government of Canada recognize political contributions as a "cost of doing business"? Or does the government want to encourage money gifts to political parties?
Somebody, please tell me again how the campaign finance system in the U.S. is corrupt.
An excellent amusement at the Claremont Colleges last night would have been to make a few hundred small crosses (say three feet high) and hammer them into the grass all over campus so people found them this morning.
What are they for? Are they because it's Ash Wednesday today? Because of the movie (Mel Gibson's Passion opens today)? Because of the cross-burning?
What would the administration do with them? Pull them up and throw them out? Certainly not burn them!
There is a 4-kg bag of sugar in my cupboard right now, and it's nearly full. I could go and eat it all. It would taste good. I would surely be sick later, though, and because I know that would be the consequence, it's hard for me even to seriously consider doing it.
I came up with this example this morning as I was thinking about the more adult forms of self-denial that I should (or do) practice. Often I feel an impulse to self-denial -- or I know I should feel one -- but I do not know the consequence well enough to have that as a reason to follow through. Perhaps I don't understand viscerally what the consequence will be (as I do with the sugar), or I simply don't know or can't predict the result of my action. And so I am left with an impulse to self-denial warring with my desire.
This morning I asked myself: When I came to the Church, did I really expect that it would always be easy to do what was right? Did I expect that I would not feel temptations, or that if I did they would be easy to overcome? Did I expect that I would not be tested?
Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, a day of fasting and abstinence. It's a good day for it outside: there is a heavy fog, unusual for Edmonton, and the air itself looks ashy. The fog reminds me of unpleasant things; to me it is the miasma of the whole human race, a visible manifestation of our sins.
Cheerful, yes? Usually on Ash Wednesday I read T S Eliot's poem of that name:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.
Pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death
Pray for us now and at the hour of our death.
GST = Got Screwed Today! Ah yes, the mail-order GST. Colby got bitten by it today. If you receive a product by mail from overseas, Canada Post collects the GST for you -- which is to say, from you. Plus a $5.00 handling fee. The worst story I've heard is about someone who ordered a 15-cent lightbulb for his car, which was only available from by mail-order from the U.S. GST on that comes to one cent. So that's a total tax of 3300% if you count the handling "fee" as part of the tax....
I have often fantasized about starting a business which offers Canadians a postbox in the States where their US deliveries can be sent. I would then truck the goods across the border, paying the GST, and mail them in Canada. For this I would charge less than $5.00, undercutting Canada Post.
Sadly, this business would probably still lose money, since Canada Post is taxpayer-funded. And it would probably infringe on CP's postal monopoly. And I don't live close to the US-Canadian border, either. But I can dream.
Incidentally, Colby should make the bullet points in this entry a teensy bit bigger. I can see them now, but when I first read this part:
Perhaps I'm helping to spoil a useful male pressure tactic, but I can only think this guy got what he deserved.it looked like a continuation of the previous item, about Christ. (If you follow the link, it's obviously not.)
Now it certainly could be claimed that Christ was getting "what he deserved" for fomenting rebellion (though the central tenet of Christianity is that He got what we all deserve), it's unusual for Cosh to just toss off a phrase like that -- usually when he's attacking Christianity, he has a point. I looked a little harder and found the bullets separating the items. (Dude: use <li>)
UPDATE: It is accomplished!
Of course, some of us know that Spot's actually just gone undercover to supervise Halliburton's construction of a pipeline from the oil fields of Mars to West Texas....
The editor of prestigious British medical journal The Lancet wishes that a 1998 study purportedly linking the MMR vaccine to autism had never been published. Seems that the study author failed to disclose a conflict of interest -- he was also working for a legal aid firm, attempting to help determine if parents of children harmed by MMR vaccines had grounds to sue.
CDC has a summary of good MMR-autism research.
From Joanne Jacobs, this link to a dialect survey. Sadly, the survey is no longer open to participants, but you can view the results. The best so far?
I'd call it a "Water strider" but whoever came up with "Jesus bug" deserves a award for "Most Inventive Blasphemy".
Oh yes, and What do you call a drive-through liquor store? -- where do they still have those?
From his campaign web site:
The Democrats need to be shown in the field how to appeal to the millions of voters whom they have turned their back on because many of them are against abortion and gun control. It is one thing when litmus paper tests are applied to candidate by groups or voters, but candidates are foolish to do this in reverse -- after all even your friends don't agree with you on everything.
Where's that flying pig graphic when I need it?
I too feel that the Democratic party does not want members who are pro-life or pro-gun rights. And I don't understand why not -- because a pro-life Democrat cannot reasonably expect to get pro-life policies if his candidate wins, the candidate should be happy to have a pro-life vote -- it's a free vote with no strings attached.
... to more Claremont colleges cross-burning news.
So the march was held, and Pomona's The Student Life covered it in this article.
There's a big elision in the article in this paragraph:
On January 9, two students from Harvey Mudd and one student each [something is missing here] the Daily Bulletin covered the march.
Despite that, excellent quotes abound. For example, we have Marcelo Lund, the creator of the original cross artwork (can we have a photo please?) that was burned, saying:
“I was looking to create art that opened up something of the experience of the cross, and someone took it and recreated one of the most horrible images of American history for all of us,” Lund said. “Besides, my anger and disgust over the theft of my work and its desecration, I’m also disturbed at the attitude of the Harvey Mudd administration in getting rid of the evidence, the remains, full-speed.”
This would be the HMC administration acting in response to HMC staff who "found the charred effigy offensive", as reported in The Student Life by the same Jay Antenen who was covering the march. Hey Jay, next time give Marcelo the big shout out as to why the remains don't remain.
Marcelo Lund goes on:
“In a sense, [Harvey Mudd] completed what the little Ku K1ux K1an enthusiasts began. They completed the robbery and destruction of my structure,” Lund said. [Google-hiding '1's not in original]I'd have to agree with part of that -- someone has been involved with the destruction of Lund's sentence structure. (He probably means the theft, not the robbery of his "structure" aka artwork. I'd like to see a sculpture be robbed sometime.)
Addressing substance over style, I like the part where he calls the vandals "Ku K1ux K1an enthusiasts." Super-chouette! Apparently Mr. Lund can see into the minds of these students, whom he presumably has never met, and determine their enthusiasms! A fascinating talent.
After the march and some moments of silence at North Dorm, the marchers reconvene at the hated Rec Center:
[P]rotesters reconvened in the Linde Activities Center to hear three more speeches. Harvey Mudd senior Alexis Kaushansky, Pomona Professor Valorie Thomas, and Lisa Harper of the Inner Varsity Christian Fellowship, all spoke.Yeah, because this couldn't be left to the Outer Varsity Christians.
[emphasis added]
Kaushansky said Harvey Mudd students discuss chemistry over lunch but never ask about what happens on the other side of Foothill Boulevard.I was a chem major, and maybe I'm weird, but I seem to recall discussing politics and our social lives over lunch, not work. And the other side of Foothill Boulevard? Don't they mean Twelfth Street? Unless they've developed very quickly, the other side of Foothill Boulevard was where some people wanted to build a little fuzzy bunny refuge, and others wanted to build a New Venture. Perhaps Ms. Kaushansky is having the TSL reporter on?
“We need to tear off our social blinders,” said Kaushansky.
Anyway, the good discussion is happening over at the CMCStudents.com forums
I may take a break from this thing, but I am still strangely fascinated.
EDITED 3/14/2004 and removed quote from cmcstudents.com forums.
My traffic just spiked because this post is currently high on the Google results list for "Cl@remont cr0ss burn!ng" and "H@rvey Mudd h@te cr!me". I don't mind, but it's not like I have anything of value to contribute to the discussion or analysis. After all, I left the school over five years ago.
But here's another article on the subject, this time from the Pomona student newspaper, The Student Life. Not at all surprisingly, TSL manages to get quotes from Mudd students, other college administrators, and Campus "Safety", while the Collage (the putative five-college newspaper) only managed to interview Pomona students. Let's see what they're saying:
Campus Safety then ... determined that the incident did not appear to be a hate crime, and Harvey Mudd elected to handle the matter internally.“Harvey Mudd made the decision that it was not a hate crime,” [Campus Safety Director Lena] Robinson said. “We never talked to the students involved.”
Harvey Mudd Dean of Students Jeanne Noda said she could not comment on the incident being racially motivated, but she did not believe that any student at Harvey Mudd would not have known the historical significance of burning a cross. “Every student raised in this country understands the symbolism,” she said.
A Harvey Mudd student proctor[...] “Though it is clear to us that there is a big difference between ignorance and malice, in this case it wasn’t racially motivated,” he said. “The bigger question is why someone would steal someone else’s artwork and burn it.”
A senior math major: “One has a strong feeling of respect here,” she said. “It’s unthinkable for most people to believe that they had malicious intent. People just don’t know how to deal with it.”
So, who to believe? Two students think it's unlikely that it's racially motivated. Dean Noda refuses comment. Campus Safety strongly implied that the decision was made at Mudd not to treat it as a hate crime. Sounds like Noda disagrees --- if so that would mean the decision was made by a committee and the Dean of Students was outvoted. So where does that thought lead -- President's office? Dean of Faculty, at least.
But maybe she doesn't disagree. Note that what Noda actually said is also very interesting-- “Every student raised in this country understands the symbolism.” (emphasis added) My wife, who was not raised in the U.S., was ignorant of the symbolism and learned what a burning cross means only after some time in the U.S. Perhaps the students involved were not raised here? Perhaps they were, and Noda feels that the case was handled incorrectly?
In any case, some at Pomona are out for blood:
Much of the debate at the forum centered on the topic of whether or not the students who burned the cross realized the significance of their actions.“If we assume the students are not guilty, then the school [HMC] must be guilty. Some one is in the wrong,” James Davis ‘05 said.
If the students are innocent, then the school is guilty? Even if I bought this claim, how to proceed? How do you propose to punish the school? Suspend it for a semester? Make it live off campus? Abolish it?
Here's another good quote, this time from a Pomona art prof who should know better:
At a lunchtime discussion on Wednesday, Pomona Art History Professor Phyllis Jackson said that ignorance of the law is not an excuse. “Intent is irrelevant,” she said. “Stealing property is a crime.”Jackson asserted that the students who burned the cross were criminals and cowards.
“Am I supposed to accept stupidity as a defense,” she asked. “There is nothing you can tell me that would prove that they didn’t know.”
Right on almost every count, but very very wrong on one. "Stealing property is a crime" - right. "[T]he students who burned the cross were criminals" - check. "[A]nd cowards" - no evidence, but I'll let it slide. But where the good professor gets hung up is on the question of intent.
Intent is not irrelevant. Intent is very important in our criminal law. Intent is the difference between manslaughter and murder. (Not motive, intent.) In this case, intent is the difference between theft, vandalism, and "petty arson" (or whatever it's called when you burn something illegally --probably some sort of citation for illegal burning of garbage) on the one hand, and a hate crime on the other.
California law explicitly prohibits hate crimes, so I'm told. But the governing law is quite clear, since the Supreme Court recently decided that state laws can prohibit cross-burning only where there is an intent to intimidate. But as Chemerinsky explains, the intent to intimidate must be proven; it cannot be inferred merely from the fact of the cross-burning.
UPDATED: This post was edited for clarity 2/20/04
I check my search engine words periodically and usually there's nothing very good in there. But now I discover that someone reached this site by searching for:
"per cap!ta" aFRICA "pen!s size"
Not only do we not have that information here, I'm not really sure what use, statistically speaking, a per-cap!ta pen!s size number would be.
That's the beauty of the internet. Someone in the vicinity of Raleigh, North Carolina wanted to know what the African per-cap!ta pen!s size was the day before Valentine's day. And I, a total stranger with no information to contribute, am made aware of it. Whoever you are, I'm sorry I can't be of help. Good luck.
(I am deliberately substituting '!' for 'i' to help prevent future such visitors.)
Just one quote out of the article:
Kerry was the policy wonk, noted for his expertise in international crime, arms and drug dealing, and intelligence.
Noted for his expertise in international crime and drug dealing. Wow. Somebody call the copy desk.
I was messing around with Google sets last night. I entered "sorrow" and "despair" and got a lot of strange results -- "Association with hateful ones"? "New becoming rebirth"? So I googled those terms and learned something about Buddhism.
Google sets is cool.
I learn via Volokh, no less, of a recent cross-burning incident at my college. Here's the article from the Inland Valley Daily Bulletin. Note that the article is about the reaction to a "racial controversy" about a scavenger hunt, and the cross-burning is in the background.
Just a few weeks before the scavenger hunt, students returning to campus for spring semester were informed that four drunken Claremont Colleges students had stolen an 11-foot-high cross from a Pomona art student over the break, carried it several blocks to Harvey Mudd College and burned it in front of a dorm.
Now I don't know about you, but when I read this, I was thinking Please don't let it be West Dorm. So I dug up the Collage article:
On January 9th, four students from Harvey Mudd, Claremont McKenna, and Scripps colleges stole a student-made cross, brought it to Harvey Mudd's North Dorm, and burned it. In response to widespread concern among students, faculty, and administrators, Pomona College convened a student forum on February 4th to discuss the meaning of the incident and its aftermath.
Thank God it wasn't West. I bet whoever the West Dorm Proctor is, he's getting down on his knees every night thanking God it wasn't West. (Even if he's an atheist? -Ed Especially if he's an atheist! -SOM)
Gotta love the Collage, by the way. No non-Pomona student is quoted. Here are the best copy-editing failures from that article:
"to try and exonerate what happened without first speaking to students of color.... I think that speaks highly[!] of race relations at Pomona"
I think you mean "speaks volumes", dear.
"...we're letting in students into these college who are so ignorant than the fact that they don't even know what burning a cross means."
I think it's worse that we're "letting in students into these college" who don't even know how to speak.
And the PoMoney quote is: "The second thing....is that we're told it's a broader 5-C issue and there's only so much Pomona can do." Yes! It's true: Pomona is like Belgium! Apparently they want to be able to discipline the students of the other colleges for hate crimes now. Perhaps they will start prosecuting war crimes next, eh? How long before no-one is safe from the long arm of Pomoonie justice?
I hope the idiot students who did this get smacked down appropriately, but I expect they'll probably be over-smacked. Probably they'll get kicked off campus and mandatory diversity training, which is almost certainly overkill. I would be very surprised to learn there was any racial or hateful motivation: more likely the four are anti-art, or at worst, anti-Christian.
It was good work getting Scripps involved: HMC alone would be very bad. HMC+CMC still bad but at least the blame is spread onto two campuses. A full-on CMS art-stealing-and-burning dilutes the blame heavily.
Just going from what's in the two articles, I would guess that what's going on is:
So basically, the first event has probably no racial content, is a crime (theft, vandalism, playing with matches, whatever), and is off-Pomona. The second event has racial content ("a photo with 10 or more Asians") but is probably not motivated by racism; is not a crime, but instead is merely speech; and doesn't ever happen, since the administration steps in before the scavenger hunt actually starts.
But: pretend you're Ann Quinlan, Pomona's Dean of Students. The wolves are howling, the local press is already involved, what to do? Shoot the students, of course. As Volokh points out, Pomona College may well be breaking California law by punishing the students for exercising their free speech rights.
Two great tastes that taste great together.
Here's an excerpt from an interesting speech by Irving Kristol (the 'father' of neoconservatism):
Realists do not live just in America. I found one in Finland. During the 1997 negotiations in Oslo over the land mine treaty, one of the rare holdouts, interestingly enough, was Finland. The Finnish prime minister stoutly opposed the land mine ban. And for that he was scolded by his Scandinavian neighbors. To which he responded tartly that this was a “very convenient” pose for the “other Nordic countries”--after all, Finland is their land mine.
Eastern Finland is heavily mined, so that if the Russians try again what they did in 1939, they will pay a heavy price for the first few kilometers.
And here's a fun historical fact: the last attempt at relevance by the League of Nations was to expel the USSR for invading Finland in 1939. Stalin was unimpressed.
Last night I heard "The Only Gay Eskimo" on the radio. Here are the lyrics so you can follow along.
At first, I thought: Great! Another stupid offensive song! Let's make fun of the Inuit! And gay people! What a great idea! And let's use the fact that they have funny names and do funny things as the main hook for our humor!
Seriously: this is a song with the depth of Dead Puppies Aren't Much Fun but without the humor.
But then it got to the end and almost redeemed itself. At the end the singer repeats the chorus in a variety of musical styles -- "Like Bob Dylan! Like the Proclaimers would do it! Like Ric Ocasek from The Cars" and when he hit the last line, in true Cars fashion --
I'm the only gay eskimo, I laughed. I couldn't help hyself. This sad and offensive song ends in very accurate and funny musical parody.
I'm the only one I know
I'm the only gay eskimo
And she used to me mi-i-i-ine
Today I looked the artist up and the song apparently originates with a comedian named Phil Nicol, but it's been covered at least once. Here's an interview with Phil Nicol where he talks about his show.
And now I'm torn: because the multilevel irony that Nichol describes is exactly the kind of thing I find the most funny. But I've gotten into trouble more than once in my life by indulging my taste for irony and being misunderstood by serious people. Since then I've toned down my humor.
So I'd probably enjoy a Phil Nicol show. But then I would feel like I must be compromising some of my principles, or at least playing into his hands-- after all, the stylistic parody at the end of "Only Gay Eskimo" is a deliberate attempt to soften his character:
— play them my own weird songs — and then make them comfortable, as when I play versions of my I’m the Only Gay Eskimo song as done by Dylan, Morrissey, Elvis, Björk ...
I hope this was said in jest, but I fear it wasn't. At a press conference with LOTR actors:
Later in the day, though, one person was finally able to judge something as wrong. When asked what he would do with the ring of power if he had the opportunity, Andy Serkis (Gollum) stated, "I would banish all religions first of all."
Bzzt! Way to miss the point of the story, Andy. Repeat after me: it is not possible to use the ring of power for good. The only moral answer to "What would you do with the ring of power?" is "Destroy it."
Oh, and if you haven't read Mark Shea's sendup of source-criticism analysis you really should.
From Matt Welch's blog, this is Ken Layne speaking:
because [the jesus-freak social-conservative right is] the one demographic Dubya will never lose unless he sacrifices a baby to Satan on CNN. Which would be funny to see, don't you think?
Oh yeah -- a real side-splitter. I guess there's another semi-celebrity in the "won't be babysitting my kids" category.
I haven't been running much because of the extreme cold weather: -30 C/-20 F, and yes, I know it's colder up in Whitehorse.
Anyway, I woke up early this morning to go for a run. And then I realized ("decided" perhaps is a better word) that when I was pushing our car out of the snow Monday evening I had pulled my groin muscle badly enough that I shouldn't run until it starts getting better. (Since Monday it's been getting worse.)
So I didn't go running, and it's the worst of both worlds: I feel like a wuss for not getting out there when it's so warm (-10 only). And I have an injury.
Steven Den Beste points out an exhibition of photography at Lehigh University. The artist (Larry Fink) uses images of women dressed as prostitutes and look-alikes of current political figures (e.g., President George W. Bush) apparently to make some sort of political point. Here's the exhibit (you may find it offensive).
What's worse than that, however, is that I recognize the style. He's ripping off -- sorry, paying homage to -- German Expressionists. For example, Otto Dix, my favorite painter. (This is not merely deduction on my part; the accompanying text by Fink explicitly recalls the German Expressionists.)
Now, Dix did much that was disgusting and nasty and he was downright misogynistic at times. But he also produced brilliant political satire (that's "Pride" who has the Hitler mustache). And he was persecuted by the Nazis for both his anti-war opinions and his anti-Nazi opinions.
Perhaps this is the greater point that Fink is driving at: perhaps he believes that the United States, like the Weimar Germany Dix depicts, is sliding towards dictatorship. I guess we'll know when Fink gets fired for political reasons, or is banned from exhibiting his work, or has his pictures confiscated. All this was done to Dix. Until then: Larry Fink, you're no Otto Dix. You're just a fink.
I have finally figured out how the Canadian government plans to finance its deficit spending. Historically, Canada has had a bigger per capita debt than the United States. And worse yet, Canada borrows money to pay for immediate expenses like health care instead of to invest in capital goods like aircraft carriers.
In any case, as I say, I figured out how they're going to pay for it all. They're going to hose every individual taxpayer, nickel-and-diming us to death. Here's how the scam works:
It's a beautiful scam, because Revenue Canada gets to set the interest rate it charges. It's as if they assume that you have taken the refund and invested it in a risk-free, tax-free totally liquid bond earning prime. Or prime plus a little, I'm not exactly sure how sweet the rate is. And depending on how long it takes them to "discover" the error they introduced into your tax return, they get more months of interest.
You can't get out of it by not cashing the original refund check, either. No, it's a beautiful scam. They have you every way.
(Note for the humor-impaired: yes, I am annoyed about my reassessment. No, I don't think it's all a conspiracy.)
So I finally went and looked into the Bush-was-AWOL claim. Here are at the documents that were obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
They're not very inspiring. No official reprimands for failure to show up at his duty station. No court-martial documents where Bush is charged with desertion or AWOL (both, we are reminded, are crimes under the Uniform Code of Military Justice). Ultimately Bush is honorably discharged and goes on to business school.
Cecil Adams is no rightie, and he sums it up nicely:
Bush's enemies say all this proves he was a cowardly deserter. Nonsense. He was a pampered rich kid who took advantage.Exactly. I'd expect similar gaps in the records of any other privileged kid who got out of the war by going into the reserves.
