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…
Author: Robert Emond
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…
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…
The (MMO) World According to Robert – Part 1
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. Yogi Berra – When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball’s Greatest Heroes So far on this blog I have only written about politics and spirituality. Now is the time for me to…
Scary Tax Stories From Beyond the Grave
[I]n this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin Letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (13 November 1789); reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919) Yesterday when I wrote about income inequality it may have seemed like I implied the solution to the problem would only come when people…
The Problem with No Face
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1096.a5 As election day approaches it’s been easy to see some of the ugly problems facing the United States…
The Illusionary Value of Gold
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more that gold. -William Scott Downey, Proverbs Ch 1, #11 (1858) In the article, The Shared Delusion of Money, I discussed some of the delusions surrounding the “value” of money. The other day I overheard someone talking about how they wanted gold and diamonds for the…
Crazy People, I Salute You
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. -Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works Change is in the air, and not just because it’s autumn. Governments and cultures all over the world are being called upon to change. This desire for change is occurring because social structures are not working well for the…
Net Neutrality
I’m urging everyone to go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and use their form to comment to the FCC on net neutrality. The open comment period as been extended once again until Sept. 15th. The Internet is one of the greatest tools for freedom, and like other such tools (printing presses to swords) the powerful…
Lazy Hazy Days of Summer
Do you remember when you were nine or ten? School’s out and it’s a lazy hazy summer day. Sitting under a tree, nothing to do, looking up at the deep blue blue sky. A cool breeze blowing the puffy white clouds across the sky as you gaze at that huge, infinite deep blue sky. The…
Attack of the Killer Robots
Klaatu barada nikto -The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dir. Robert Wise (1951) Science fiction is rife with stories of robots threatening humanity such as: Terminator, The Matrix, Robocop, etc. In fact as we see drones striking America’s enemies across the world, the DARPA robotics challenge, and Google purchasing a military robot company, it’s hard…
