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This happened without me
Rally for national sales tax draws overflow crowd
About 4,500 raucous tax protesters packed the Gwinnett Convention Center on Wednesday night to hear politicians, musicians and talk show celebrities call for the end of the federal income tax and the creation of a 23 percent national sales tax to replace it.I have yet to hear the logic of what gets taxed and what doesn’t, and why the IRS doesn’t morph into some national enforcement arm, but it’s a good trend.
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A couple of classics
News anchor slips up, in a very funny way. And surprisingly, this page of Emo Phillips quotes.
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Victory was mine (somehow)
I did the open mic last night at Limerick. I played a rather weak set of Walkin’ Cane, my Tom Waits’ song, the new one (Left Alone) and Raining this Morning. Somehow I won.
I’m going to be practicing the songs instead of the flatpicking all week now.
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Quick Monday round up
- Interesting stats on tattoos (and the people who love them)
- Weddings are costly, asymmetrical boondogles everywhere.
- An inspiring story of a woman donating a kidney to a good friend.
- Creating a 1099 Misc form for blackmail seems about right.
- An interesting chart about the progressivity of the tax code under Bush. One little known fact is that he has actually made taxation MORE progressive, not less, mostly by removing millions of people from the tax rolls. No supply-sider he.
- Dear NSA. Not as good as Postsecret, but similar.
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The power and glory of YouTube
In case anyone has wondered what I’m trying to do on the guitar, this video of Doc and Merle Watson says it all.
Also, check out these videos of the Velvet Underground (with Nico) doing acoustic versions of Heroin and Femme Fatale in 1972.
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Abortion and immigration
A long one.
I predict that soon someone will make some correlation between legal abortion and increased illegal immigration, similar to Steven Levitt’s abortion-crime idea as told in his book Freakonomics.
For those of you who haven’t read the book it spends a lot of time explaining his theory that abortions are disproportionately had by women who would otherwise bear criminal children (to put it bluntly). Those children are never born, which reduces the number of criminals, which reduces crime rates. He has a large amount of documentation and math to support this idea. Bear in mind that the 80-20 rule applies here, something like 20% of the women who get abortions have 80% of all abortions.
A similar idea (unique to me so far) is that were there no abortion, there would be many more children who would grow up to be low-skilled, low wage workers. That creates an artificial void on the bottom of the income ladder, which the Mexicans and other illegals fill.
I’ve been thinking about this quite a bit lately, and it’s all part of my emerging theory on open-source eugenics and artificial evolution, which I’ll explain more when I flesh it out.
On a related note, the pro-choice argument and the usual nativist argument are essentially the same. There is ownership in a country, as there is in one’s body. It is up to the owner; the citizens of the country collectively or the individual woman to determine who can be there (to put it crassly). Every child is a wanted child, and every immigrant, is a legal immigrant.Or that’s what I think right now anyway. Thoughts anyone?
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Pound for pound photo sites
My favorite is still NashvillePortraits.com. And, as they came up in conversation last night (I think I did a poor job explaining my point but oh well) here are his shots of Guy & Susanna Clark and Townes van Zandt.
To be that good…
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Never go to Baltimore
A couple is arrested for asking for directions. Really.
Via the Agitator
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The best yet
With the help of the lovely and talented Kathy Leland I was able to get the closest yet to the fiddler in silouette. This is far and away the best batch so far.
She is also, to date the only actual fiddler to model for the fiddler series.
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Circle of friends
I often read the surveys filled out by the happy wanderers of MySpace. One of the recurring questions is “Are your friends mostly male or female?”.
Were one to put a timer on the amount of time I spend talking/hanging out with people, I imagine I would spend a slight majority of my time with my male friends, but in absolute numbers, I would imagine that two thirds of my friends are female.
Interestingly, while my conversations with my male friends tend to be general purpose, conversations with the female friends tend to be more specialized. Some I talk to just talk to about work, some about art, some about music, some about family, and one I talk to almost exclusively about health and emotions. It’s odd when you think about it.