On the Shoulders of Giants

Too Rich To Tax

Imagine a fairy tale where I offer you a choice between two jobs. You can have a tax free job or a job with a 90% tax on its income. You might jump at the tax free job, but a smart person would ask what are the salaries of the two jobs. I’d say the…

Never Vote For the Lessor of Two Evils (Or why I will never vote for Hillary Clinton)

I hope Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, but if he does not I will be voting for the Green Party (likely Jill Stein). The reason I will not vote for a mainstream candidate arises, ironically, from Bill Clinton’s first term. Unfortunately I was a naïve party line voter at the time so I voted…

Trump vs Sanders Would Be Great News For America

You’d never guess that a Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders match up would be good for the country if you listen to the media. The media elites for each side say their respective candidates would be unelectable. The Republican leaning press claims Trump is too racist, xenophobic, and just plain too obnoxious to win the…

Tell Me What You Eat, I’ll Tell You Who You Are

Or as Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826: Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es Food is quite possibly the first area where practicality began to develop into philosophy. As we got past the most basic, I must eat to survive, and began…

Masks

Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist said, “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” With all due respect to Oscar Wilde it should have been “give him anonymity, and he will tell you the truth.” Masks are what we…

Possible Petty Partisan Politics Payback

As most people know Antonin Scalia passed away this weekend. Say what you will, I agreed with some of his positions on the 4th amendment, not much else. Mark Twain could have been talking about Justice Scalia when he said in, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: You see, he knew his own laws…

New York Values Aren’t America’s (Politicians) Values

It wasn’t Ted Cruz who said, “Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?”; Kevin Phillips a Richard Nixon’s campaign strategist said it. Ted Cruz is just the latest politician to complain about New York values not being his. They are right, New York values of hard work (working…

The Ironic Advice of a Billionaire

“How many yachts can you water-ski behind? How much is enough, huh?” Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), Wall Street (1987) The Powerball lottery prize is up over $1,400,000,000 this week. If you win and take the lump sum, which in my opinion you should, you would have about $651 million left after tax. Needless to say…

Happy New Year 2016

Winter snow falls, or not Days grow short; cold wind blusters New Year renews life

I Thought Fascism Went Out of Fashion

The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Attributed to Edmund Burke, (by Charles Aked 1920) Trump scares me. As his campaign that I thought of as a joke (just like all the late night hosts from Colbert to Wilmore), goes on gaining more and more steam it…

Haiku: The Ultimate Wordsmithing

A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words. -Robert Frost, Letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916). It’s been a rough month; kids coming home for holidays, kids leaving for good, getting ready to move to New York, and getting the house downsized and ready for…

Problem Solving Makes My Problems Worse

Basic human problems can have no final solutions. Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967) I love problems. Give me a disaster in my house I can sit down and solve that. Calling the right people, or getting the materials to fix it, fixing it or helping other fix it. All those actions take…