Category: Uncategorized

From the Washington Times: Students in Maryland again scored dismally on high school competency examinations last year, according to results posted recently by the state Education Department…. About half of 65,000 students failed the algebra and biology tests in 2003 – about the same rate as in 2002. Four in 10 failed government, and six in 10 failed English.

That would be why one reason I don’t want government schools teaching religion, or anything else for that matter.

IM writes: A dark day! As a new supporter of the Axis of Naughty, and one of your loyal fans, I must say that I am disappointed in your support of a centrallized, organized Alliance… I joined the Axis precisely because it is a decentrallized, truly free movement of individuals seeking to support a man who has been viciously demonized by his detractors…..

Viciously demonized? What other form of demonization is appropriate for a man who is known to have invested large portions of his ill-gotten puppy-blending gains in the Mark of the Beast?

The results of a poll taken by Kevin McCullough after the radio show I did with him on Tolkein. Who is the hero of The Lord of the Rings?

Sam: 511

Frodo: 126

The Entire Fellowship: 63

Gandalf: 49

Aragorn: 28

Eowyn: 21

Gollum: 2

I’d be curious to know if there’s any difference between those who have read the book and those who have only seen the movie. Space Bunny points out that although Sam did resist the lure of the Ring, so did Frodo before he’d spent all that time carrying it. Samwise is heroic, to be sure, but the hero of the trilogy? I’d put Frodo first, followed closely by Aragorn, with everyone and anyone else a distant third.

Speaking of the show, Kevin writes: Several of you have been writing asking if you can re-hear that segment with VOX, we may re-run it on the air today or sometime this week… Cool. Or heck, let’s just do another one discussing why 511 people are off their rockers, or better yet, this.

GH has a few beers and writes: Every time there’s an accident the non-aviation media print more misconceptions then the truth. I do not consider myself an aviation expert, for the subject areas of aviation are too vast for any one individual to claim themselves an expert. I have 36 years of experience in aviation. I have license and certificates that say I have the knowledge and skill to perform the task required by the law. I define my knowledge of aviation to my students by this comparison. I am only a case of beer in the vastness of all the beer and you are the empty cup waiting to be filled. Some have called me a keg. I’ll drink to that.

The press is a half empty shot glass, the other half is 99.999% misconception. My experience is that it takes a minimum of eight months with a big emphases on minimum to find out the truth. The press is too impatient to wait that long. They need closure. They will find individuals with a six pack of more or less knowledge than me. They give them their fifteen minutes of fame and the title of expert. The conclusion is based on opinion, not fact. When the truth does come out a year later it is a non-story.

I was on the light side when I said a million hits. It’s election year, I have no doubt that you will. Blast your political foes. People are going to say did you read Vox Day blog today.

Being a libertarian is never having to fear dearth of political targets.

PZ demonstrates his failure to learn that touching a hot stove is a bad idea: People like you want the Ten Commandments in public buildings but you don’t erect massive granite stones in your churches our your backyards.

Right, as if no church has the Ten Commandments displayed somewhere. Those little monuments and friezes hardly stand comparison with the grandeur of many a cathedral, or the overpowering sci-fi aesthetics of one church that a Jewish friend describes as “the church with the direct link to God”. (Seriously, the massive spire looks like an antenna designed to reach the Horsehead Nebula.) I don’t see any real need for such monuments, but there’s nothing wrong with them if the people of a community want one.

For those who are too simple to understand why there’s nothing wrong with them, I’ll elucidate:

1. A public building is not Congress. Nor is a judge or a community board.

2. A monument is not a law.

3. Erecting a religious monument in a public place is not the establishment of a state religion. Have a look at the Church of England or the Sharia for details if you are confused as to what comprises a state religion.

People like you want prayer in school because you’re too lazy to pray with your own children. It’s not the place of government to teach your children religion. That’s why we have Churches.

Right, two million children are being homeschooled by parents who are too lazy to even pray with them. What a blitheringly stupid assertion! We’re not only teaching our children the Lord’s Prayer, we’re teaching them to read the New Testament in Greek and the Vulgate in Latin, while the government schools are teaching those poor kids with indifferent or ignorant parents how to put a condom on a banana. It’s not the place of government to teach children anything.

PZ, that big thing sticking out of your back is a fork. You’re done.

The 2004 Stadium Debate: Why it will be different

Happy New Year, and welcome to the 10th annual Great Minnesota Sports and Public Policy Scrum, otherwise known as The Stadium Debate. Rep. Phil Krinkie, a longtime opponent of sports plans, describes another stadium battle as “same [stuff], different day,” adding that it’s similar to a rider saying, “Hey, cab driver, one more time around the block!” But Roy Terwilliger, chairman of the Metropolitan Sports Facilities Commission, said he feels “a real sense of urgency” this go-round….There’s a sense among stadium proponents that opposition seen in earlier episodes might be subsiding.

We’ve heard that one before. In fact, we’ve heard all of them before, including the bit about interest rates never being lower. This time, however, the interest rate point is probably true. Nevertheless, no government should fund sports stadiums. Ever. Period. The very notion is ridiculous and every argument for it has been repeatedly exploded.

But greed and the desire to spend other people’s money knows no bounds.

All 148 passengers and crew perished when chartered Egyptian Air Flash airliner crashed in Red Sea Saturday minutes after takeoff from Sharm el-Sheikh. Plane carrying mostly French tourists and 13-man crew was bound for Paris via Cairo. No signal from pilot before plane disappeared from radar screens 11 km south of Sharm airport.

Although Egyptians say cause was mechanical fault, French justice minister Perben asked for preliminary inquiry into manslaughter. DEBKAfile raises 8 points below to explain why it is too soon to eliminate terror as cause of Egyptian air crash

The Egyptians claimed that the crash of a Boeing 737, operated by the Egyptian company Flash Airlines, was “absolutely not the result of a terrorist act but is linked to a technical failure of the plane. DEBKAfile’s aviation experts say the investigators will be called upon to consider a host of anomalies and enigmas before they reach any such definite conclusion.

I should hope so. Interesting that they can say “absolutely not” before they’ve even begun to look into it. Sure, it’s possible, but this appears to be a case of the Egyptian lady protesting too much, too fast. You certainly won’t catch me flying Air Egypt.

After a perusal of a number of blogs, I have elected to join The Alliance of Free Blogs, for as one reader wrote, “What are you if not a free blogger?” Nor was he the only one to support The Alliance; the vote was unanimous. Also, I like the Physics Geek and he’s an Alliance member. It is done.

INSTAPUNDO DELENDA EST!

The Spanish milled dollar was made the unit or standard for all foreign silver coins in the American colonies in 1704 by Queen Anne (there was a Parliamentary statute in 1707). It was made the standard for the United States by the Continental Congress under the Articles of Confederation, before the Constitution was even written. So in fact the dollar preceded the writing of the Constitution. It preceded the ratification of the Constitution. It preceded the first Congress, the first President, the first Supreme Court, the Federal Reserve Board, and everything else. Do you think it might be independent of all those things, having preceded them?

As a historical fact, the dollar is independent of the Constitution. The father of the dollar, in our system, was Thomas Jefferson. He was the one who proposed it to the Continental Congress. In the first government under the Constitution, Jefferson was Secretary of State, and Alexander Hamilton was Secretary of the Treasury. They didn’t agree on very much, if anything, except this: They both agreed on the monetary system. The Federalists and the Anti-federalists were in complete agreement. And what did Congress and the Treasury do in 1792 with the first coinage act? They went out to determine what the value of this “dollar” was.

How did they do that? They went to the marketplace. In what we would call statistical analysis, they collected a large sampling of Spanish milled dollars that were circulating, and they did a chemical analysis of them to determine on average how much silver they contained. This appears in the Coinage Act of 1792 where they wrote: “The Dollar or Unit shall be of the value of a Spanish milled dollar as the same is now current, that is, running in the market, to wit, three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver.”

Now you know something that 99.999% of Americans do not know, and probably a higher percentage of lawyers. The “dollar” is a silver coin containing three hundred and seventy-one and one-quarter grains of silver and it cannot be changed by constitutional amendment, definitionally, any more than the term “year” can.

How much is a dollar worth today? 371.25 grains is .7796 troy ounces*. Silver closed at 5.95 per troy ounce yesterday, so that means one dollar equals 4.64 Federal Reserve Notes. That’s only 364 percent inflation in 202 years, or 1.8 percent a year. However, the US silver dollar coin consisted of 416 grains (.8736 troy ounces) until 1878, then was debased to 412.5 grains (.8663 troy ounces) until production was stopped in 1964. This suggests that the bulk of the inflation happened after 1964, since what was a silver dollar coin worth FRN 1 (and 1.11 dollars) is now worth FRN 5.15. That’s 415 percent inflation in 40 years, or 10.38 percent per year. What happened? The answer is simple. Bretton Woods and the imperial global reserve dollar.

This inflation looks a lot worse when measured in gold terms, however. The same dollar was also defined as 24.75 grains of gold, or .052 troy ounces. Yesterday’s gold closed at 416.10, which indicates that that same 1792 dollar also equals FRN 21.63. This gives us 2063 percent inflation over 202 years, or 10.21 percent a year. This suggests that silver is probably undervalued and repeats the ancient lesson that one is foolish to put much hope in any economy based upon the long term health of paper money.

*Thanks to GD, for catching my conversion into the wrong measure, which led to an absurd conclusion.

The Internal Revenue Service has identified 800 employees whose tax returns will face closer scrutiny, part of an effort to make sure IRS employees are filing truthful returns and complying with tax laws. The agency said Friday that these employees “face an examination on Schedule C issues, most of which are already under way.” A Schedule C deals with reporting profits or losses from a business and is filed if the taxpayer or his or her spouse runs a business.

An IRS spokesman declined to say precisely what prompted the IRS to flag the employees for review, but said that the agency had some questions about their returns. The 800 employees are just a fraction of the 115,000 full- and part-time employed by the IRS. IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said the agency is taking extra steps to make sure IRS employees are following the law. “The multistep initiative will include a new review of tax behavior of IRS employees, a deeper IRS compliance and auditing effort for employees and an expanded education and outreach effort inside the agency,” the IRS said. Earlier this year, a review found that “about half of the 25 employees identified had tax compliance issues following an investigation of their Schedule C filings,” the IRS said. “Several employees in the inquiry have already lost their jobs.”

So, are people who run their own businesses generally more or less intelligent than the norm? And would a full-time IRS employee be likely to know the tax law better or worse than the average American? There are two possibilities. One is that two-thirds of one percent of the IRS staff are both smart enough to be entrepeneurial and stupid enough to blatantly cheat. The other is that these IRS employees know perfectly well that the very foundation of the IRS is a charade and behave accordingly. Both are possible, but Occam’s Razor favors the latter, even if one ignores the evidence provided by other IRS agents who are openly condemning their lawless former employer.

I never thought much about the IRS one way or the other until they accidentally took money out of my bank account for a return I’d already paid. It wasn’t much, but I called them and told them that they’d made a mistake and asked for the money back. The IRS agent admitted the mistake after looking things up, then told me to take that amount off next year’s return without accounting for it. Incredulous, I asked him why they didn’t just put the money back. “Oh, we don’t do that,” he said. Thus began my journey into the bowels of the federal income tax charade.