mld, March 21, 2002 at 3:28:22 AM CET

My Solution To the Palestinian Problem

OK, so Israel is completely dependent on US military and economic aid to remain viable, correct? They probably get more than NASA does, but, as Mr. Saturday Night says, don't get me started...

So, that ought to give us a good bit of leverage.

Here's what we tell them:

"Your nation is about twelve miles wide (at it's narrowest) and not two hundred miles long, about 27.7k km squared, fer Yahweh's sake; not even as big as New Jersey. We can drop your ass into any number of places - I think there are counties in Texas of similar size.

You like to live in the desert, evidently, and you like to fight. So, we'll move your whole country to say, Utah, and give you twice as much land as you have now. We'll double the amount of foriegn aid you get, and provide all the infrastructure needed for your people. Furthermore, we'll take the Wailing Wall, and any other relics, monuments, or whatever, pick them up and haul them off to your new lands. If we can move Abu Simbel and the London Bridge, you ain't got nothing we can't handle. If the Saudis et al don't like it, well, we can make them choke it down.

Now comes the like to fight part - we'll let you and the Mormons duke it out, of course, we'll have to arm them, too, (but prolly just a little bit, I don't think they have tanks). The Mormons can feel free to recruit from all the disaffected US militia types, so we can drain our domestic swamps, and kill two birds with one stone.

If you don't like that, you're cut off. Feel free to try to make it on your own. Good Luck, Mr Prime Minister."

Then let the Middle East sink under it's own weight, without having us to blame. Our policy would then become "We don't give a wombat's ass what goes on over there, so long as the oil keeps pumpin'."

This alone would scare the dogmeat out of the Saudis and Kuwaitis, among others, if we could get them to believe we'd just as readily pump oil from Saddam as the House of Saud. Maybe then they'd quit funneling moolah to the fundamentalist clerics that preach the doctrines that threaten them.

There are lots of other details - timetables and the like, to make it truly workable, but this is just a brainstorm, OK?

 

... Link (0 comments) ... Comment

mld, March 16, 2002 at 11:10:00 AM CET

A Plague On Both Their Houses

"Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right."

H.L. Mencken

A bit back, while I was out of town for the weekend, some friends of mine decided to have a political discussion about the nature of the Right vs. the Left. My take follows...

"Well, y'all hadda go and start a political discussion whilst I was otherwise engaged.

This could be a Veeeeerrryyy Long Hyperbolic Diatribe, but here's the Reader's Digest Condensed Version - "A plague on both their houses."

The question of Right vs. Left vs. Center is, umm, well, hmmm, - poorly worded. The Center is mostly comprised of the Sheepul that are too apathetic or poorly informed to be influenced by anything much more substantive than the quality of the campaign ads, the Madison Avenue spin on the candidates, and their respective haircuts.

The Right and Left are more alike than not - they both are engaged primarily in getting the Sheepul to lay down for more taxation and spending, thus increasing their ability to buy the votes of the taxed. The only discenible difference is that each of the parties has a traditional set of issues associated with them - as trivial examples, over the last few decades, the Elephants have claimed Defense as their own, while the Donkeys lay claim to Entitlement programs as their turf.

That any of those issues may, or may not, actually have some intrinsic merit is merely coincidental to the Grand Game of Winning Hearts and Minds.

As a strategy, they sniff the polls to attempt to gain an advantage by describing exactly where they want to spend the money in order to increase their constituents, typically my making incremental changes to their basic platforms with the aim of bolstering votes by stealing some from the opposition, with the least possible erosion of their current voter base.

Each of those blocs are guilty of basing their behavior more on political expediency than any tightly held ideals. As a case in point - during their defense of the clearly illegal actions of Slick Willie, the Donkeys recycled many of the exact same arguments the Elephants used in their less successful attempt to defend Tricky Dick, and the Elephants replied with salvos of offensive rhetoric lifted straight from the Donkey Apologists, as quoted from their incarnations in the earlier era.

The more accurate way to represent the political spectrum, I believe, is to place them on the spectrum of Individual Freedom vs. Collective Control.

Fascism and Communism seem to have little in common, other than in this most critical quality - Centralized Authority.

Elephants want your money for more tanks, etc. Donkeys want it for Education. Whatever. Elephants want to control what you see, (porno) Donkeys want to control what you say (hate speech)

While the verses are different, the song remains the same. The Common Refrain?

"There Ought to be a Law."

Allow me to present a recent example - aviation security. After 9/11, the only serious debate was as to what flavor of federal interventions the Congress would enact. Result - increased taxes, more federal employees, industry bailouts with a cost to the taxpayers half again as large as NASA's budget.

Allow me to present an alternative solution - leave the industry to its own devices. Along with the flying public.

Gasp! The Horror!

Allow airlines to implement whatever reasonable measures they wanted, and market the differences to various segments of the flying public.

You wanna board the plane ten minutes before the flight? Quick, cheap, anonymous transport? Fly Easy Access Airlines, and show your flea market ID at the gate.

Are you paranoid? Fly Kevlar Air, with El Al trained screeners, mandatory security interrogations to include all manner of biometric scanning, airline issued IDs, armed aircrew, and exhaustive examinations of the airframe before each flight, complete with complimentary $100 million insurance policies for each passenger lost in any inflight mishap, whatever the cause, along with big media campaigns to tout the unbreachable interlocking layered walls of defense.

Be prepared to pay SugarDaddy BigBucks prices for the added peace of mind.

Of course, there could, and most likely would, be all manner of gradations between the two extremes I've mentioned, giving the public the freedom to choose their preferred level of security.

It is a telling point that such a solution was never even considered, to my knowledge.

So, the major conflict is simply Autonomy/Responsibility vs.Control/Childishness, in which the Government functions in loco parentis for induhviduals not considered capable of making their own ethical decisions, and living with the consequences.

Some of you reading this may be thinking that this is putting me more squarely in the snares of Right-Thinking.

Oh, oh, so not so.

The Right is equally as guilty as the Left. As examples, on the issues of abortion, use of the military as both a symbol of the "American Way," linking it closely into American religious values, specifically homophobism, and as a tool of US imperialism, the use of presently illegal drugs, symbolic acts such as burning flags, curtailment of other civil liberties, and restrictions on domestic living arrangements, the Elephants demonstrate their predeliction for imposing their world-view on the populace

The Left, conversely, imposes, or attempts to impose, its very own values, in such areas as collective responsibilty for induhvidual wrongdoing, the transfer of responsibilty for the disadvantaged and truly needy from family and private charity to government agencies, use of the military as a sociology lab, as opposed to a mission-oriented combat force, curtailment of civil liberties in the area of, for example, freedom in corporate hiring and promotion practices, that is to say, affirmative action, and the idealistic fantasies that are neccessary to imagine a truly pacific planet.

(Before you decide to jump my shit on the affirmative action issue, allow me to explain. It's my contention that any company that widely discriminates as regards the age, gender, or sexual orientation of its emloyees is a dinosaur doomed to a quick death in today's economy, one which is essentially a seller's market. I realize that this is not applicable to, say, Mississippi during Reconstruction, or even in NYC of the early 1960's. I've often dreamed, though, of starting a company of, say, dropout single black mothers under thirty - I betcha we'd kick some major booty on those hidebound whitebread honky mofos in any of several industries. :-)

The parties are indistinguishable in many aspects and issues - as trivial examples - the public funding of political campaigns under rules that effectively exclude any legitimate third parties, and so ossify the status quo, continued support of an litigious society effectively ruled by lawyers, continued bloat of the personal rewards and perqs associated with their roles as solons, and an arrogant hubris that tells them they are a better class of oligarchs better qualified, by virtue of having triumphed in a process designed to bring out the basest from the most power hungry, a popular election, to decide the future.

As I said, a pox on them all. Were it not for the parenthesized D's and R's after their names when we see them on the news shows, we would have a difficult time telling them and their parties apart.

I said this'd be the short version. Guess I lied once again. :-) Well, at least I meant it when I said it.

 

... Link (0 comments) ... Comment

mld, March 13, 2002 at 4:30:00 PM CET

Unfreakinbelievable...

In the unlikely event that you can even get through to the IRS with a tax question, you're only three percentage points better off than if you just guessed - even on the most frequent and simple questions.

From an article in USA Today:

"Over a recent four-day period, auditors were unable to get through to an IRS employee on 37% of 368 test calls made to the IRS toll-free number, David C. Williams, the Treasury inspector general for tax administration, told the House Ways and Means oversight subcommittee on Tuesday.

When the auditors did reach someone, IRS officials gave the wrong answer 47% of the time. That happened even though the questions were drawn directly from the agency's own list of frequently asked questions."

This is evidently not going to deter them from increasing the rate of audits, in an ever-increasing proportion on middle class taxpayers, according to this:

"The IRS reversed a long, sharp slide in the number of taxpayers facing audits, the agency reported. It audited 1 in every 172 individual tax returns in the 12 months ending Sept. 30, 2001. That was more than the year before, when 1 in 204 returns was audited."

"More than 640,000 poor and middle-income workers were audited last year, up from 518,000 the year before. If one's income was less than $100,000, the chance of an audit rose 22%. More than half of audited returns involved people who claimed the earned income tax credit, generally those earning less than $32,000 a year."

However, an IRS spokesman claims that as recent new hires get up to speed, they'll be able to get that audit rate back up for the wealthy, too. Maybe they'll get all the way to the 1996 rate of 1 in 60 returns.

Your tax dollars at work.

Methinks perhaps they oughta spend the time and effort to get the damn answers right when you call them, but since you're still liable for their mistakes, what's their incentive? It makes more sense for them to give out bad advice, then they can dun you for interest and penalties, too.

This'll be great news for the underground economy. :-)

What will it take before the nation moves to a sane method of tax collection? The tax code, allegedly simplified and reformed a bit back, is so complex and convoluted to defy comprehension even among those taxed to enforce it. The average citizen is forced to pay expensive professionals to have a fighting chance of filing a correct, legal return.

The only solution I can imagine that could make sense would be to abolish the income tax, and replace it with some other method, perhaps a national sales tax.

Perhaps even better, a "Plain English" law, one with teeth, requiring that any law passed by the states or Federal government be understandable by a person of some reasonable standard of intelligence and education, would not only force a simplification of the tax code, (with the inevitable elimination of nearly all loopholes) but also free the American public from the tyranny of a whole host of burdensome, cryptic, regulations.

 

... Link (1 comment) ... Comment