Category: 40yrs

I Didn’t Know that Moose Went to UMass

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Because this story brings back some memories:

A man in western Sweden came home from work Tuesday night to find a drunken moose stuck in his neighbor’s tree.

The moose had apparently climbed part way up into the tree to reach an apple where it became stuck with only one hoof on the ground and the other three up in the tree, tangled in the limbs and branches of the tree.

When Per Johansson arrived home from work, he told reporters that he heard a bellowing noise coming from his neighbor’s yard.

I don’t think that I ever got that drunk at UMass, I was medically prohibited from drinking during my sojourn there, but I certainly dealt with people who were that drunk.

H/t Littledog at the Stellar Parthenon BBS.

Some Sanity on Non-Profits in Illinois

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In Illinois, the state Department of Revenue regularly certifies non-profits, with the idea making sure that they behave in a not-for-profit manner, as opposed to accumulating mountains of cash and overpaying their executives.

Well they have now denied tax exemptions to three hospitals, and are reviewing 15 more because they are abrogating their responsibility to serve their communities:

The Illinois Department of Revenue has denied property tax exemptions to three hospitals and is reviewing applications from 15 others, officials said Tuesday, signaling that the state plans to get tough on nonprofit hospitals it believes operate more like businesses than charities.

At stake are millions of dollars in tax revenues that the hospitals could contribute to cities, parks and schools by paying taxes.

Northwestern Memorial’s Prentice Women’s Hospital in Chicago’s Gold Coast neighborhood, Edward Hospital in Naperville and Decatur Memorial Hospital in Decatur were informed of the decisions Tuesday morning, Revenue Department officials told The Associated Press.

They follow last year’s Illinois Supreme Court ruling that found a central Illinois hospital wasn’t doing enough free or discounted treatment of the poor to qualify for an exemption, obligating it to pay $1.2 million in local property tax payments per year.

The hospitals have 60 days to ask an administrative law judge to review the decisions. In Illinois, property taxes are collected by county governments, and the Department of Revenue decides which institutions are eligible for tax exemptions.

This is actually something bears on my personal past, not from the hospital angle, but from the undeserving non-profit angle.

A little over 20 years (!) ago, I incorporated a not-for profit tax exempt corporation as a 501(c)3 that puts on Science Fiction conventions, which in that case meant that I represented it as an educational organization.  While technically legal, I’ve always felt that the organization was more properly a 501(c)7, a social organization.

I filled out the forms, and chased them through the state and federal bureaucracies.  And it was all technically legal, and I did not materially misrepresent anything in the applications

That being said, even at the time, I felt that this was an undeserving use of this status.

I was aware of the differences between a (c)3 and a (c)7 at the time, but we felt that we needed the ability for people to deduct donations, and (more importantly) the postage discount available for the (c)3.

The more scrutiny that is placed on organizations that use these sorts of status as a shield (501(c)4 tend to be used as political front group, for example), the better.

There are a lot of slimy things under the rocks that are section 501 of the IRS code.

H/t Washington Monthly.

I Love My Wife

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But helping her work with her phone and computer makes me f%$#ing crazy.

I am so not a teacher, but I married one, go figure.

I’m showing her how to sync her android phone directly to her Outlook.

(Hint: it uses a PIM called MyPhone Explorer which is actually pretty slick)

I have to have her press all the buttons, because otherwise, she would not get it, and she would be asking me how to do this over, and over, and over, and over again.

Still, getting her over the hump on this drives me buggy.

Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth the Dad

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So, we want to a Bar Mitzvah today, and we told Charlie that since he was only 12, he needed to wear a suit jacket and a tie.

He was OK on the tie, but refused to wear a suit jacket.

We are talking yelling, and screaming, and passive aggressive resistance.

Eventually, we got him into the car, and put the jacket in the back, and when when we got there, it was held at the old Washington Post building, we got him to take the jacket in, but not to wear it.

Toward the end of the evening, I asked Charlie if he could put on the jacket for 15 seconds, so that I could snap a picture of it.

He put on the jacket, and I reminded him that he was turning 12 next month, and that  his Bar Mitzvah would be a year from that.

I then informed him that a suit jacket with tie was non-negotiable for his Bar Mitzvah, and as it sunk in, I snapped this picture.

Not a happy young man, huh?

I Carry Within Me the Threat of a Global Mass Extinction Event…

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Most people are unaware of this, but the extinction of the dinosaurs (except for the birds) was not the most massive extinction event.

In fact, the mass extinction that led to the dinosaurs was the largest of all time.

So, how does this involve me?

Well to those who know me, in particularly my relatives, will understand from the headline:

Did Giant Earth Fart Give Rise to the Dinosaurs?

A huge release of methane gas may have triggered the prehistoric mass extinctions that allowed dinosaurs to become the dominant life form on earth, according to a new study.

About 201 million years ago, half of known species vanished in an event that signaled the end of the Triassic period and created the lack of natural competition necessary for the ascendance of dinosaurs. The oldest known dinosaur fossiles date back to about 230 million years ago, but they do not take over until about 30 million years later.

Scientists had attributed the mass extinctions to 600,000 years of rampant volcanic activity, but a team of researchers at the University of Copenhagen’s Nordic Center for Earth Evolution develop that theory further by arguing that a surge in volcanic activity released methane trapped in the sea floor, sending temperatures soaring.

“A small release of carbon monoxide from volcanism initiated global warming of the atmosphere, increasing temperatures in the oceans,” lead researcher Micha Ruhl told FoxNews.com. “Methane is stored in the sea floor — it’s a molecule which is caught in some kind of ice structure. As soon as the temperatures got above a certain threshold, the ice melted and that methane was released.”

Ruhl and his team studied the chemical remains of plants that had lived on the ocean floor and found a dramatic spike in carbon levels that lasted for a much shorter time than the period of volcanic eruptions, suggesting a shorter, more intense release of methane gases. Methane is more powerful than the carbon monoxide released by the volcanoes, and could have created a period of intense warming.

Be afraid, be very very afraid.

On a slightly less silly note, the idea that there is a tipping point where solid methane hydrate on the ocean floor (and in the tundra) would start outgassing at a ferocious rate, creating a horrific cascade.

I Think That He Needs to Get a Younger Girlfriend………*

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Baltimore is a strange place

So, I was driving home from shopping with my family, and come up on a motorcyclist who has a decidedly atypical companion on the back of the bike:  a skeleton, complete with wig and helmet.

I asked Sharon† to snap some pictures of this, and here they are.

As you can see, he saw our interest, and my wife snapping pictures, and posed a bit for us.

It added a bit of the surreal to this day.

*I cannot claim credit for this bon mot. It was coined by my daughter, Natalie.
†Love of my life, light of the cosmos, she who must be obeyed, my wife.

Our Society is So Completely F%$#ed Up……

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That a man just robbed a bank so that he would be thrown in jail and get healthcare:

A 59-year-old man recently walked into a bank in Gastonia, NC, intent on robbing one dollar — no more or less — from the financial institution. Was it because he was aiming low for his first foray into bank robbery? No, he says it was because he needs medical care and the only way he could think to afford it was by going to prison.

“It wasn’t done for the monetary value. It was done for medical reasons,” he tells WCNC-TV in the video interview below. “I went in knowing i was going to jail.”

In fact, the man told the teller he robbed that he was unarmed and that he’d be waiting for the police in a chair near the entrance.

Before going on his wild crime spree, the man, who says he’s got a bad back, sore foot and a growth on his chest, wrote a letter to the Gaston Gazette newspaper explaining his reasons and saying, “I am of sound mind but not so much sound body.”

The man has only been charged with larceny from a person, which carries a lesser penalty than bank robbery. His bail was reduced to $2,000 but he’s obviously refusing to pay it so long as he’s being tended to by doctors.

This is a completely rational reaction to what Republicans call “the best healthcare system in the world”.

Our healthcare system is completely insane.

Not Friday Cat Blogging, It’s Friday Catty Blogging

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Germany held a beauty pageant for cows, and much to my surprise, German Chancellor Angela Merkel did not win:

Forget Germany’s Next Top Model and Heidi Klum. This week, the German gaze was trained on the country’s most beautiful cow. “Krista” became the envy of bovine beauty queens across the land when she won the grand prize at the 2011 German Holstein Show, her second time to take the pageant’s top honor.

Krista successfully defended her 2009 title against a field of much heavier competition than that faced by most other beauty contestants. Of some two million hopeful dairy dames, just over 200 were chosen to lock horns over the grand prize, which comes complete with a trophy and cow-sized sash. Eight finalists strutted their stuff for a panel of jurors in the northern German city of Oldenburg on Thursday night. But it was Krista, described by juror Matthias Zens as “a perfect Holstein,” who won over the jury with her professional demeanor and pleasing physique.

“The udder should be wide and the back high,” said Zens on what makes a winner. With her straight back and strong legs, Krista has risen above the rest of the herd to rake in prizes on the bovine pageant circuit. The black and white bovine beauty has it all: a good figure, great legs and taut skin. As with human beauty contests, sagging is frowned upon. Other coveted traits include bright eyes, alertness and a plumb udder.

It’s different, at most beauty pageants, the contestants do not urinate on the runway.

Meow.

Another Shanda Before the Goyim

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The original


Der Tzitung


De Voch

Not one but two Heredim (black hat ultra Orthodox) publications, Der Tzitung and De Voch photoshopped Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and and White House aide Audrey Tomason out of the iconic picture of staff watching the progress of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound.

It appears that they consider even a photograph of a woman to be too sexually salacious.

It just proves that medieval hyper-religious nut-jobs are not limited to al Qaeda, or the talibaptist whack jobs, but includes fellow Jews.

As my brother is wont to say, “Schwer zu Sein a Yid.”  (It ain’t easy being a Jew.)

H/t Failed Messiah.

People With Way Too Much Free Time…

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Perusing what Uncle Ted called “a series of tubes,” I came across Think Tank: The Economics of Death Star Planet Destruction:

Lee
What’s the economic calculus behind the Empire’s tactic of A) building a Death Star, B) intimidating planets into submission with the threat of destruction, and C) actually carrying through with said destruction if the planet doesn’t comply?

Doesn’t the Empire take a huge economic loss from the lost productivity of an entire planet? They were presumably paying taxes and providing resources to the rest of the Empire. Presumably the loss of that planet’s output would have to be made up by increased output from other planets that were either slacking in productivity due to rebellion or threatening to rebel and withdraw from the Empire altogether. It doesn’t seem to make good economic sense.

McNeil
This is a pretty standard imperial tactic for dealing with rebellion. The Romans would do this in the eastern empire every once in a while. A city would become a hotbed of rebellion, threatening to pull other cities into the action. The Romans would wipe out that one city, no matter how wealthy (Palmyra comes to mind) to put any other potential rebels on notice. Kind of like a mastectomy. You lose one productive part of the body in order to keep cancer from spreading.

…………

Lee and Mcneil, along with Perich, Fenzel and Stokes (read the whole thing provide an interesting dialogue on economics and governance that is (I think) unintentionally a rather trenchant analysis of the current American imperial hubris.

Just read it.

No, This is Not The Onion…

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John Ashcroft is Blackwater’s Xe’s new ethics chief:

The consortium in charge of restructuring the world’s most infamous private-security firm just added a new chief in charge of keeping the company on the straight and narrow. Yes, John Ashcroft, the former U.S. attorney general, is now an “independent director” of Xe Services, formerly known as Blackwater.

Ashcroft will head Xe’s new “subcommittee on governance,” its backers announced early Wednesday in a statement. The subcommittee is designed to “maximize governance, compliance and accountability” and “promote the highest degrees of ethics and professionalism within the private-security industry.”

In other words, no more shooting civilians in Iraq and Afghanistan, no more signing for weapons its guards aren’t authorized to carry in war zones, no more impersonations of cartoon characters to acquire said weaponry, and no more ‘roids and coke on the job.

Ashcroft’s arrival at Xe is yet another clear signal it’s not giving up the quest for lucrative government security contracts now that it’s no longer owned by founder Erik Prince, even as it emphasizes the side of its business that trains law enforcement officers. In September, it won part of a $10 billion State Department contract to protect diplomats, starting with the U.S. consulate in Jerusalem.

 I don’t know which is more revolting, Ashcroft as ethics chief, or the fact that these incompetent corrupt f%$#s still get government contracts.