Humor

     So, a priest and a lawyer die and go to Heaven.  St. Peter greets them and says "Will you please follow me?  I'll take you to your final abodes."  After walking for a while, they come to a giant mansion, and St. Peter says to the lawyer, "This is for you."  The lawyer thanks St. Peter and goes into his new, eternal home.  St. Peter and the priest walk further, entering a city, walking through narrow streets, where they enter a huge high rise.  They go up the elevator to the 245th floor and down a narrow hall and open a door to a tiny studio apartment.  St Peter says "And this is your new eternal home."  The priest is looking a bit puzzled, but thanks St. Peter and then says "Wait, why did that lawyer get a mansion, while all I got was this small apartment?"  "Well," says St Peter, "we've got millions of priests, but that was our first lawyer."

     So, a priest and a cabbie die and go to Heaven.  St. Peter greets them and says "Will you please follow me?  I'll take you to your final abodes."  After walking for a while, they come to a giant mansion, and St. Peter says to the cabbie, "This is for you."  The cabbie thanks St. Peter and goes into his new, eternal home.  St. Peter and the priest walk further, entering a city, walking through narrow streets, where they enter a huge high rise.  They go up the elevator to the 245th floor and down a narrow hall and open a door to a tiny studio apartment.  St Peter says "And this is your new eternal home."  The priest is looking a bit puzzled, but thanks St. Peter and then says "Wait, why did that cab driver get a mansion, while all I got was this small apartment?"  "Well," says St Peter, "while you were praying, your flock was sleeping, but while that cabbie was driving, his passengers were praying."

     I would _really_ love a third one of these.  Thanks in advance.

     And, totally disgusting, with graphic verbal descriptions of sex acts, this is still hilarious Flash Animation political humor, "Leave it to Bush" One, Two, and Three.  In any event, very funny.

Republicans Declare Themselves Victorious, Eventually and Inevitably

     Any Loyal Party Member approves of the Long Term Plan to defeat the Global Terrorist Menace.  The Republicans have decided to pass this into law, by actually setting aside a major amount of time to debate H Res 861(pdf)

(7) Declares that the United States will prevail in the Global War on Terror, the noble struggle to protect freedom from the terrorist adversary.

Above and Below

     Wouldn't it be heavenly to cause something to happen which would result in the Middle East spiraling uncontrollably towards peace?  I don't even think I need a ticket to France...

     Why should you care about voting systems (see post below)?  Because that's the only way sane way to vote!  What we do know isn't a plot by the two parties to make a two party system, it is just bad math.  It does, however, make a two party system.  Not only that, pretty much every time in US history that a President lost because of "radicals" who supported a third party, the result was that the hyper-enthusiasts caused their own side to lose.  It happened twice with anti-Slavery people losing to pro-Slavery people because of the votes of abolitionists.  It looks like it happened a few other times, and it most certainly happened in 1912, when Woodrow Wilson won and brought segregation to Washington, DC.  Taft and Roosevelt split their side.

Just the Facts, Ma'am

     The Mathematics of Voting Systems.  Criteria listed in order of (generally) decreasing importance.

	S c h u l z e	T i d e m a n	C o p e l a n d	R a y n a u d	B a l d w i n	N a n s o n	D o d g s o n	S i m p s o n	B u c k l i n	H a r e aka I R V	B o r d a	C a r e y	C o o m b s
Pareto-Optimal	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES
Majority	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES	NO
Condorcet	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Monotonic	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	YES	YES	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO
Clone-Independent	YES	YES	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO	NO
Mutual majority	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO
Smith	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Reverse-Symmetric	YES	YES	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO
Reinforcing	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	YES	NO	NO
Schwartz	YES	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO
Nonmanipulable	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO	NO

Shamelessly copied (if somewhat improved) from a voting math amateur enthusiast's webpage here.

NOTE: All of the Libertarian Party, the Green Party, and famous political scientist David Hume like IRV.  The only explanation is that they can not do the math, or that the mathematicians have taken no interest in the matter, or have taken an interest, and lack the explanatory powers.

Another Remain Calm Endorsement
This Time from the Indonesian Government

     I captured this HTML from News.Google.Com yesterday, but I have to say, my current capacity to house Volcano victims is limited, but they can all come to the blog.

The Capitalist's Argument for the Estate Tax

Previously,
with little thought to my own welfare
I've defended the Inheritance Tax on
Moral
Libertarian/Minimalist Governance,
anti-IRS,
Communist,
and efficiency grounds.
Tonight I tackle the Capitalist Argument for the Estate Tax.

I begin by relying on a couple premises, both of which are expounded upon in a working paper of the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Board, Accounting for the Rich, edited by Douglas Clement.

The first point is strictly about where wealth comes from.
Do people earn most of the wealth in this country?
Is most wealth in tax rebates for the poor?
According to economists Kotlikoff and Summers,
80% of all wealth is inherited.
Economist Modigliani disagrees, and says it 25%, but that the difference reflects
"mainly definitional differences."

The second point is about the very basis of Capitalism
Entrepreneurship (omg, is that a French word?)
Who becomes an entrepreneur?
One would need, according to a model derived by economists De Nardi and Cagnetti:

• inclination
• ability
• capital

Yet, if a substantial minority,
or maybe a vast majority,
of all wealth is handed out solely on a hereditary basis
how can it be available to the entrepreneur?
It can sadden one to think of it.

Yet the Capitalist might say (and amazingly, today on the Senate floor actual US Senators, like Jefferson Beauregard Sessions, were arguing that the Inheritance Tax is bad for entrepreneurs)
taxes are not good for Capitalism,
and to that
I'd have to say "yet".

"Yet" think about the alternatives.
Which is better for entrepreneurs,
I simply ask you
to take money from productive citizens while they are alive
or after they are dead?

Late Remain Calm Endorsement

     When the Anthrax Letters were being sent to newspapers and democrats, I was working in downtown NYC, at a temporary office that my company had set up after my office had been destroyed (scroll down a bit). 

     There was a large TV in the lobby of the building, and as people filed in for work in the morning, they gruesomely collected watched the screen to see how far these new attacks would go.  It wasn't clear at that stage that it was most likely a psychopath like Dr. Hatfill.  It was fairly tense.  No one was making jokes about white powder letters that I could hear, and people were wasting a lot of time going to CNN.com for breaking information.

     Which leads me to the upside of this post, that according to a cartoonist, the President encouraged _everyone_ to come to my blog...
(emphasis mine)

Sudan?  HELL NO, Congo!

     Most all Democrats and Republicans I hear talk about the tragedy in Sudan.  How bad is it there, compared to other places?  The UN often tries to do the tallies, and they said that 50,000 Sudanese had been killed by the Janjaweed, the militia of the government.  It would be pointless to go into a discussion of the true number of Iraqi civilians killed by Americans in Iraq here.  The Sudanese government said it was more like five thousand, lower than any estimate of Iraqi civilian dead.

     Might there be something worse?  If there is, why don't you know about it? 

     What is going on in the Democratic Republic of Congo is worse, and there are more than a few reasons you don't know. 

     The UN is saying that in DRC 31,000 people were dying per month, and that far more than 3,800,000 people have died in the last eight years, most of which was while Bush has been President!.  Saddam, it might be noted, was killing only a hundred or two Iraqis per year while Bush was in office.

     Of course you care about senseless wastes of humanity.  The American Christian Right, the Arab haters, the francophone nature of DRC, the oil men, and political realities for Washington all prevent you from learning about this.

     Recent (repeat) White House guest, the butcher Kagame of Rwanda, sends troops into Congo to steal and slaughter.  The US Press would rather be a lapdog and play nicey-nice with Bush than point this out when Kagame comes to town.

     The Christian Right uses their radio and television stations to beat their viewers senseless with information about the tragedy in Sudan, and ignore Congo.  The Sudanese government, after all, is not Christian!  Uganda and Rwanda, some of the worst slaughterers in Congo, are.  Sudan also used to beat up Christians in the South, and things are not super yet, by any means, in that oil-rich part of the country.

     Oil men, of course, like oil. Sudan has some.

     And, honestly, of course, it is easier for an English speaking person to go into Sudan and meet with people and talk and find out the rumors.  Sudan was part of Anglo Egypt-Sudan for a long time, while, during Colonial times, Congo was Belgian Congo.  It seems to me that Americans have always had more contact with former British Colonies (see: Iraq) than with the Dutch speaking ones.

     Please help the world get its priorities straight. 

Long Term Secessionist Trend in Iraqi Kurdistan

     In Irbil, Sulaymaniyah and Dahuk and you don't even learn Arabic, and the only ones taking it are those who need to take it to teach in High School.  In the long run, the disconnect (allegedly not even watching or listening to Arabic language TV or radio) between the Arabic and Kurdish cultures will strengthen.

Coalition of the Unwinning

Examining Democratic election results in "Coalition" countries.

Source for most government form data came from the CIA World Factbook, election results from the news.

Republic: Democratically elected leader who controls foreign policy, X equals Yes
US/UK: Former possession of the US or UK, former or currently militarily occupied by the US/UK
Next Vote: Date of next elections. L means the elections are for the Legislature only, and no Presidential elections are held.
If possible it will be indicated whether the government in power SUCCEEDED or FAILED to win re-election.

One of the camps of Anti-Federalists had the rallying cry "Where Annual Elections End, Tyranny Begins!"

UPDATE:  Looks like former members of the British Empire are immune.  Probably a linguistic (culture vector->news) element.

Country	Republic	US/UK	Next Vote
Iceland	X,f		04/03	Success, change in Head of Government
Rwanda			08/03	Strongman Kagame wins 95% of vote
Azerbaijan	e		10/03	Son of former Soviet Commissar elected!
Marshall Islands	b	X	11/03	SUCCESS
Georgia	X		11/03	US Backed "Rose Revolution" replaces Shevardnadze
Latvia	b		03/04	Coalition falls apart day after election, PM rules with minority
El-Salvador	X		03/04	New Leader, Same Party
Spain	c		L 03/04	FAILED
Panama	X	?	06/04	FAILED
Mongolia	X		06/04	FAILED
Macedonia	X		10/04	President dies in plane crash, same party wins in early elections
Dominican Republic	X	X	05/04	FAILED
Philippines	X	X	05/04	Arroyo, unelected Pres., wins first term
Slovakia	X		05/04	FAILED
Japan	c	X	06/04	LDP has lost majorities in both Houses
Australia	a,c	X	L 10/04	Howard Returned
Afghanistan	X	X	11/04	Karzai stays, not elected in first place
America	X	X	11/04	ELECTION FRAUD? SUCCESS
Ukraine	X		11/04	Yuschenko finally wins, had promised troop pull out
Palau	X	X	11/04	SUCCESS
Romania	X		11/04	Former Communist, Promised to Withdraw, Unseated.
Hungary	X		06/05	Leftists stay in power
Denmark	c		L by 10/05	Majority Rightist Coalition Loses Seats, Keeps Power
Honduras	X	X	11/05	Leftist Defeat Incumbents
Poland	X		11/05	Rightists Defeat Incumbents
Solomon Islands	a,c	X	L by 12/05	Ruling Party drops from 20 to 4 seats
Portugal	X		02/06	Biggest Socialist Party Victory Ever
Great Britain	c	X	05/06	suck
Costa Rica	X		05/06	Pacheco AND PUSC defeated
Italy	X	X	05/06	Prodi defeats Berlusconi
Colombia	X		05/06	Uribe Returned
Czech	X		06/06	deadlock
Singapore	f		by 08/06
Nicaragua	X		11/06
Bulgaria	X		??/06
Estonia	X		??/06
Micronesia	d	X	L 05/07
Turkey	X		05/07
Albania	X		06/07
Ethiopia	X		10/07
Netherlands	c		L ??/07
Lithuania	X		??/07
South Korea	X		12/07
Uzbekistan	e		??/07
Angola				Elections indefinitely cancelled, last held in 1992
Eritrea				Isaias national leader, elections postponed indefinitely since 2001
Kuwait				Hereditary Monarchy
Tonga				Monarchy
Uganda				Museveni in power since 1986, no elections for President

Notes:
A: A hereditary Monarch selects the President/Governor-General/Whatever
B: President is elected by the Parliament.
C: The leader of the Majority Party becomes Prime Minister
D: To even call this a "country," when it is actually run by the United States, is a joke.
E: Not a politically free society.
F: Ceremonial President which is popularly elected.

New Hampshire Democratic State Convention

     Senato Feingold spoke in the morning.  I wonder if he yet gets the Bush administration.

     Resolutions passed to support Feingold's censure motion(fine, whatever), to get America into a single payer/universal coverage system (long story, overall a bad idea), and a motion to impeach the President (Doh! President Cheney?).

     Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner called Ahmadinejad a "jihadi" and "the real deal"(threatwise, as compared to Saddam).  Thanks, dipshit Warner.

---

     UPDATE1: FUCK AP: Associated Press runs headline that Warner has "bashes" President Bush and "lashes out" at Bush.  This is a criminal deception.  Did Warner criticize the President?  Certainly.  Did Warner even make jokes at the expense of the President ("that would take an administration that believes in Science")?  Yes.

     Fuck the AP hacks.  Other reports, including the fucking Times Dispatch write about Warner "blasting" and a "strong attack" on Bush. 

     All other coverage I've found, also from the Fucking AP, strongly emphasized Senator Feingold over Governor Warner.  Warner was far more "keynote" than Feingold, and far less a likely candidate, but that's how the AP can twist what actually happened, and turn people off to Democrats.  Fuck the AP

---

     UPDATE2: Not one report tells the NEWS!  New Hampshire Democratic Convention turnout highest in thirty years!  That was the Ford-Carter election.

Talking Points Memo Gets It Wrong

     Did John Solomon at AP get it right?  Definitely not.  But check out TPM Muckraker Paul Kiel bends over backwards to defend Senator Reid, and goes too far.

     Try to imagine a piece of paper that lets you into a front row seat at an event.  Does it matter _one_whit_ if it is called "a ticket" or a "credential?"  The plain fact is that it allows someone into a front row seat at a paid event.  The seat was worth, oh, $1400 or $1500. 

     Don't get me wrong.  Solomon is worthless muck for trying to suggest that Senator Reid, who voted _for_ the Comission that the "credential" givers didn't want, is somehow in the wrong here.  It is, for all I can tell, nearly a non-issue.  It is hard to imagine that attending a boxing match could in any way advance the interests of the Country is hard to imagine, but people can't work all the time, and, as entertainment goes, some people like boxing, and lots of people who gain high office like to think that people will give them things out of thanks.

I Like Gore

     Albert Gore, Jr got my vote in 2000.  I saw a NHInsider.com poll which showed Gore winning the most votes in the primary. 

     Anyone have an opinion on this?  It's "Affective Encryption Analysis"(sounds like a bogus name).  Found the link at Cursor.org.

Barbara Slavin, Ignorant Reporter Foments War With Iran

     It is hard for me to imagine a more deceitful performance than hers this morning on Washington Journal.  I don't see why she shouldn't be fired.  She is an enemy of the world.

Droll Truth from Syria

     This website had me amused for pages and pages and pages.  Syria Exposed, the opening that you will see if you read this blog soon is

Karfan and I bow in apology to the twenty-something readers and commentators that have been taking from their precious time to check on our useless rant-blog. We were not in prison, we were not arrested; rather we were living a false self-importance state of mind!

     Droll truth is what you get when you don't have to excite anyone to do anything about it.  Rich?  Pay Karfan's way to get out of Syria.  He's not in any danger, but he'd like his life back.