Apparently, there is a new dating service where you can find your perfect DNA match for only $2k.
The Penn & Teller Episode on Love should be required viewing for all singles.
Names
An interesting take from Patrick Michaels on the contention that NOAA is naming more storms. They clearly are — since average storm intensity has dropped. But it also may be justified since even low intensity storms can cause massive flooding.
Thursday Linkorama
The Juice
I’m a huge baseball fan so I’m going to post a few random thoughts about the Mitchell Report:
ESPN’s coverage has been very good. Rob Parker, in particular made an outstanding point that we can’t ban or strip records from players named today, because it implicitly exonerates everyone else. We have to apply the correction to the entire era and have a tougher standard for the HOF. Even the players who weren’t doing it were silent.
Nate Silver has a neat post at BP Unfiltered where he points out that we have a mix of stars and borderline players. This backs up his long contention that the PEDs were mostly used by players trying to become stars rather than stars and the statistical impact may not be very big.
I think people are missing the point of Mitchell’s report. He wasn’t trying to compile a comprehensive list of everyone who did the juice but more looking into how this happened and how it can be stopped.
Chipmunks
Good God, does that Chipmunks movie look bad. The sooner it gets into the theaters and flops, the sooner its awful ads will be off the air and the happier I will be.
(Memo to Hollywood: parodying The Matrix is no longer funny.)
Attacking the fair Tax: Pimps
From Boortz today:
Taranto’s first attack this week on the FairTax occurred on Monday. In Monday’s “Best of the Web” Taranto implied that Mike Huckabee thinks that under the FairTax prostitutes would collect the 23 percent tax (a use tax?) and forward it to the federal government. Now what Huckabee had actually said was that under the FairTax “You end the underground economy, Illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers, drug dealers–everybody pays taxes.” It doesn’t take much grey matter to figure out that Huckabee was referring to the fact that these miscreants of the underground economy would pay the FairTax along with everyone else when they used their earnings to purchase goods and services.
Neal, they are already paying the embedded tax when they buy those things. You have said, repeatedly, that the total price of legal purchases will stay the same. All that’s changing is that the embedded tax is coming through Fair Tax rather than the current system. If that is the case, then the legal purchases of illegals, prostitutes, pimps, gamblers and drug dealers pay the same tax they always were. Net gain: zero. The only way the Fair Tax would increase revenue from the shadow economy is if drug dealers started charging the Fair Tax.
I’ve never seen anyone as mathematically ignorant as the Fair Tax Movementarians.
Tuesday Morning Linkorama
Attacking the Fair Tax: Naivete
Usual caveat: While I oppose the Fair Tax, that doesn’t mean I support the current system. I would just prefer a VAT or a flat tax.
I’ve attacked the Fair Tax because it falsely promises a big pay hike for Americans (a claim Boortz himself has withdrawn) and because I think the prebate would be a disaster. But I’ll hit it again because I need the blog traffic from the Fair Tax Movementarians responding.
One common argument for the Fair Tax over the flat tax goes like so:
We tried a flat tax with Reagan’s tax reform. And it wasn’t flat for long. Congress immediately began revising the tax and making it hideously complicated again.
This has two problems. The first is factual — the 1986 Tax Reform did not create anything approaching a flat tax. It simplified the taxes but not very much, as anyone who owns a business could tell you. It created all kinds of tax incentives and breaks. Claiming that the 1986 Tax Reform Act was the equivalent of a flat tax is like claiming my cat is a hippopotamus. Yes, they are both fat mammals. The similarities end there.
The second problem is naivete. The Fair Taxers assert that the Fair Tax will start simple and stay simple. That Congress will be unable to work all kinds of strange complications into it.
This is total garbage. Just to list a few things Congress will try to do with the the Fair Tax:
Granted, the potential for political abuse is a little lower and more transparent than with the current system. But to sit here and claim that the Fair Tax will be magically immune from the Washington need to endlessly tinker and update and improve is incredibly naive.
Boortz on Huckabee on AIDS
The Fair Tax Movementarians are so devoted to their silly tax plan that they will fall in line behind anyone who claims to support it. Witness Boortz’ limp defense of Huckabee’s 1992 call for AIDS patients to be quarantined:
We’ll let Huckabee respond to the charges
First, they’re not charges — he said it. Second, he has refused to address the issue and admit he was wrong. I once thought AIDS patients should be quarantined. I was also 16 and uninformed.
So .. what’s the difference? Simple. The reason Huckabee is taking such heat here is that while AIDS has a political constituency, Tuberculosis does not.
It might also have something to do with tuberculosis being spread by casual contact while AIDS is not. Well, that is, unless you believe what the abstinence-only crowd is peddling.
All Time
ESPN has their list of top 25 all time college football players. I’m assuming Barry Sanders and Red Grange will be 1-2.
Notice something? The list reads like a Heisman ballot. 17 (!!!!) running backs, four quarterbacks. No offensive linemen (John Hannah? Orlando Pace? Nope.). Only four defensive players, if you count Bronko Nagurski, who was also — stop me if you’re heard this — a running back. The other three are Butkus, Green an Woodson (who was also a receiver).
What the hell? This is the best they can do? Their college football experts came up with a list a few drunken fans and google could compile. In fact, google gives me this list, which is compiled by God knows who and includes Deion, John Hannah, Bubba Smith, LT and Dave Rimington in its top 25 (although they have Vince Young at #5, so they aren’t precisely in Earth orbit).
Seriously, folks. What the hell is the sports media’s job. I’m just some guy with a blog and even I would have the sense to put Orlando Pace, easily one of the best college football players I’ve ever seen, in the top 25.
Friday Night Linkorama
Felony Murder
The NYT has a nice, if not exactly definitive, article on the felony murder statute. Worth a read. I hate to say this but I am growing rapidly fatigues with victim’s rights groups. They have a point but they often seem far more interested in vengeance than justice.
I also like that after the mother finds her daughter brutally murdered, the prosecutors give her a three-year prison sentence because the dead daughter had pot in the safe. Nice.
Wednesday Night Linkorama
The government used to protect poor people, and young people, and people with bad credit histories, from getting loans, by making it illegal to charge the high interest rates that would make those loans profitable. Were they better off? They didn’t have credit card debt, to be sure, or huge mortgages. Instead they had pawnshops, or time payments, or convictions for kiting checks, all of which used to be popular ways of handling things like emergency car repairs.
Borrowers may have had help getting in over their heads, but at the end of the day, “variable interest rates vary” is not in the realm of things it is unreasonable to expect them to have understood when they signed on for a gigantic mortgage. Indeed, many of the defaulters seem not to be able to afford their teaser rates, which is certainly something they should have been able to figure out on their own. One of the reasons that I do not currently own a home is that I cannot afford one. Now I get to pitch in my tax dollars to bail out people who also could not afford a home, but went ahead and bought one anyway.
Gifts
The Onion’s gift guide:
Chef Mario’s Dining Disasters: Stretchghetti & Critters ($1)
So how exactly does a tiny dish filled with rubbery fake spaghetti and little plastic rats and roaches constitute a “toy?” How do you play with it, exactly? Do you ditch the “critters” and fling the “stretchghetti” around? Re-enact scenes from Ratatouille? And what should we make of the package’s warning: “Do not leave stretchghetti on wood, fabric or other porous materials?” What alien civilization has foisted this abomination upon us, and how are they going to use it to control our young? One thing’s for sure: Chef Mario’s bound to lose a Michelin star over this.
Strange.