Double Blind has some amusing/depressing excerpts from the recent clarifications to GST law.
Isn’t bureaucracy grand? So anytime you go to a bakery, just ask for a 230 gram cookie, not a 229 gram cookie, otherwise they’ll charge you GST.Why not simply "if it is intended to be eaten, no GST"? Imagine how much effort must go into attempting to comply with these regulations.
Xkcd translates George Washington's "farewell address" into modern casual speech.
A Bastardization of George Washington’s Farewell AddressI don't know the original text well enough to judge how much is lost in translation, but this version sure is a lot easier to read!
Sup.
Elections are coming up, and it’s time to figure out who we wanna give the keys to. I figure it might clear things up if I take a sec to explain why I’m not running.
Now, I care about the future, don’t get me wrong, and thanks for your trust so far. I just think me quitting is a good idea on all counts.
I’ve been president twice now, and I didn’t want to do it either time. I tried to quit the first time, but the country was in trouble and every single person around me begged me to stay on.
I’m glad to say we’re pretty much in the clear now and I can get out of here without getting screamed at or letting things fall apart completely.
The Volokh Conspiracy has an interesting discussion up regarding the constitutionality of the US Air Force.
One argument that is often made against originalist and textualist approaches to constitutional interpretation is the claim that they would render the Air Force unconstitutional. Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution seems to give Congress the authority to creat an Army and Navy, but not an Air Force.I gather that proponents of the "living Constitution" use this as an argument against holding to the original intent of the framers. This strikes me as silly, since an originalist would welcome the challenge and the subsequent constitutional amendment if needed.
jGnash is one of many free (open source) accounting packages available. It is however the only one that I have found to be both reasonably full featured and can run on Windows.
Requiring double entry accounting, it is not entirely easy for a novice to understand. The GnuCash (an allegedly superior but non-Windows accounting package) documentation is quite good at explaining the general principals.
As you may have guessed by now, jGnash documentation is slim to none. Luckily it is simple enough that you won't have too much trouble finding the features you want. Don't be afraid to just try things either - you can always start fresh (or with a backup of your accounts).
The core features are:
Quality at Vancouver's "Las Margaritas" is slipping.
It wasn't so long ago that I had a number of excellent meals there. Excellent enough that I managed to ignore several terrible subsequent experiences. But I can't pretend any longer - the food at Las Margaritas simply isn't good anymore. Everything is bland and oversalted.
Given that the place never really had anything else going for it (dark, low ceilings, bad acoustics, way too loud, etc), I don't think I'll be going back.
I now have no place to go for Mexican food in Greater Vancouver. Very sad.
Fasten your seatbelts, kids. This could get bumpy...
One of the standard flippant responses that people like myself like to give when confronted by someone freaking out about global warming climate change is "if we can't predict the weather accurately two days in the future, why should we have any confidence in predictions 100 years down the road?" This is normally countered with the (largely correct) assertion that micro weather prediction and macro temperature prediction are like apples and oranges - largely unrelated. But you have still elevated their blood pressure significantly and maybe caused some screaming by then, so it was worth it :-)
Now Dr. Heidi Cullen of the Weather Channel has proposed stripping weathermen of their official credentials if they don't toe the line on climate change. That's right. She has effectively stated that a weatherman's "expertise" in weather prediction should also lead them to the correct stance on climate change, and that not reaching that conclusion casts doubt on their professional abilities. Now, where I live the weatherman only has about a 75% success record for right now, let alone tomorrow. If there really is a common skill set used to analyze the weather and predict climate change then climate research has just lost all credibility with me.
Climate change folks should distance themselves from Dr. Cullen before she undermines them any further.
At the very least I have gained a new tool for my arsenal of antagonism with which I can prolong the comparison of weather prediction and climate change prediction!
Stephane Dion is clearly a fan of the Chretien style of leadership. Not caring if the Liberal party has even the appearance of honesty, he has stated he has no objections to the return of disgraced Chretien supporters who Paul Martin banned from the party for life.
During the Gomery inquiry into the sponsorship scandal, Cote testified that he received $120,000 in $100 bills from the executive director of the party's Quebec wing. He distributed that money to 12 Liberal candidates in the 1997 federal election.The Conservative party must be having trouble believing their good luck in getting this guy as their primary opponent.
Dion -- who was never implicated in the scandal -- was the unity minister when the Chretien government created the sponsorship program, which was administered through the public works ministry. It was designed to help raise the federal government's profile in Quebec but ended up funneling millions to Liberal-connected ad agencies for work of little or no value. Some of that money then made its way to the Quebec wing of the Liberals.
One of the quickest ways to identify right wing partisans* is to find out whether they believe it is hypocritical to support the troops but not the mission. Every variant of this sentiment that I have heard has been shockingly stupid; of course it is possible to support one and not the other.
Making a localized analogy, almost everyone has known someone that was put in a situation where he or she had to make some hard decisions. We don't tend to toss out our friends if they work for a company with policies we disapprove of. In this kind of case it is not inconsistent to hope for the best for our friends while wishing failure upon their employer.
Soldiers have far less choice than employees - they will be court martialed if they refuse to follow orders and their employer often reverses policies every few years (so there is no guarantee that the policies you joined to support will end up being the ones you implement).
*people that largely cannot be trusted to criticize their own
“My first interest was for the society of animals, not of man,” he recalls. “We had a neighbour named Gaston Moisan, a biologist who was a deputy minister of natural resources. He set traps for the rabbits, to band them, and used to take me with him. He was 5-foot-7, but he was a giant for me.”I find these kinds of incidents to be bizarre - it's one thing to misname a foreign leader, and quite another to not remember your own experiences accurately. I'm not sure who is impressed by these kinds of anecdotes, making it all the stranger to expose yourself to mockery and possibly undermining your political career.
A charming childhood anecdote — except, according to Mr. Moisan, it never happened. “I don't know how he could have imagined that,” the retired bureaucrat and university professor says. “I had nothing to do with Stéphane. And I never sensed any interest on his part for my work.”
He's probably going to get in trouble again, but Soghoian's airline antics will be fun until then. He is currently using every flight he takes as a testing ground to see just how stupid TSA security rules are.
My absolute favourite question during this chat was the following:
Q: How do you know if I didn't just write the letters "SSSS" on the boarding pass myself
A: We know. There are secret things that the airline staff will write that you won't recognize.
Q: But the woman at Continental forgot one of the S's on this boarding pass. Are you sure they know your secret signals?
A: Move along.
Asking a friend (who I think can fairly be characterized as pretty far to the left on the political spectrum) what his ideal course of action in Iraq is, he replied with the following:
I'd like to see the US pour money into rebuilding Iraq and creating a functional and democratic state, which probably means spending more on social programs than has already been spent on the war. The only reconstruction funds I'm aware of are $20B permitted with the first $80B post invasion spending approval, and only $2B of that was spent in the first year after the invasion. I'm not sure what you'd think of this spending, but even in the anti-war 'left', there doesn't seem to be much support.This reminded me of a recent op-ed by Rudy Giuliani and Newt Gingrich in which they advocate removing the terrorist breeding grounds by buying up all the unemployed young men. The idea would be to keep Iraqis busy doing productive work so that a) they aren't tempted to join whatever crackpot resistance happens to be popular that day, and b) their efforts are improving the day to day lives of all citizens. Giuliani and Gingrich believe that this would be eminently affordable for America, and is critical in restoring long term stability.
The population of Iraq is roughly 30 million with a pre-war median annual income equivalent to $700. Subsidizing unemployed Iraqis with a meaningful wage in exchange for meaningful work rebuilding their society is well within the means of the U.S. and its allies.I don't object to spending of this nature (and I think I am largely convinced of its importance), but I have to admit that I haven't given it much thought; my focus has largely been on whether the military tactics being used were optimal or not (a big no right there, most of the time).
Via Powerline, a Fox News poll that generally shows Bush and the Republicans in bad shape with registered voters. But halfway through comes this gem of a question:
19. Do you personally want the Iraq plan President Bush announced last week to succeed?Over 20% of registered voters hope the plan (22,000 more troops in Baghdad) fails? Opposition to the plan is an easily defensible and honorable position, but this is mighty strange. I am going to assume that these voters would prefer an Iraqi civil war to one or more of the following results of success:Yes No (Don’t know)
16-17 Jan 07 63% 22 15
Democrats 51% 34 15
Republicans 79% 11 10
Independents 63% 19 17
One of the Powerline guys has written an article about the US ambassador that Arafat had killed, and the successful State Department efforts to keep that from becoming common knowledge.
Twenty years before he joined Bill Clinton and Yitzhak Rabin in Washington for that famous handshake--and proceeded to become Clinton's most frequent foreign guest at the White House--Yasser Arafat planned and directed the murder of an American ambassador and his deputy chief of mission. From the first moment of the deadly operation, which took place in Khartoum on March 1, 1973, the State Department possessed direct evidence of Arafat's responsibility, yet neither the State Department nor any other government agency made public its knowledge. Indeed, as recently as the summer of 2002, the State Department denied that such evidence existed. Across seven administrations, the State Department hewed to silence and denial.The idea that the State Department is playing long term, multi-administration games of their own makes me extremely uncomfortable. It seems to be the case that no administration beyond Nixon's was made aware of Arafat's guilt in the matter, and that State actively denied the connection up until a recent automated document release.
A Republican House Representative is accusing the Democrats of trying to subvert the Constitution and add more Democrats to the House.
Looking at the text of the bill itself, my layman's impression is not very positive. Depending on the legal interpretation of the text quoted below, this proposed rule change would either waste a lot of time and money, or undermine the Constitution and waste a lot of time and money.
(h) Whenever a recorded vote on any question has been decided by a margin within which the votes cast by the Delegates and the Resident Commissioner have been decisive, the Committee of the Whole shall rise and the Speaker shall put such question de novo without intervening motion. Upon the announcement of the vote on that question, the Committee of the Whole shall resume its sitting without intervening motion.Can that really mean that the House will have pointless re-votes if the the non-voting Delegates may have been the margin of victory, or does it mean that there will be a second vote in which their votes won't be counted?
It sucks, I tells ya.
Pieter rightfully called me on senselessly regurgitating Mark Steyn's poorly researched claims the other day.
I find it hard to convince myself to do the corroborating research when something interesting like that is posted by a writer who I (used to) have a fair bit of trust in. The jury is still out as to whether I cut Steyn from my RSS feeds, or just look at his stuff more skeptically from now on.
*hangs head in shame and slinks away*
Update: Per the comments on this post, this is almost certainly a load of crap. At the very least it requires cherry picking the geographical region and then choosing the population estimates that best suit your purpose. Steyn is totally off my Christmas card list.
In response to France's cheering about its superior birthrate, Mark Steyn claims a pretty shocking correlation between the % of the population that is Muslim and the birthrate in European countries.
Take France and its neighbors and rank them in order of healthiest fertility rates (2005 official Eurostat figures):I am suddenly reminded of the talk of genocidal wars across Europe in the coming years.
1) France
2) Netherlands
3) Belgium
4) Switzerland
5) Austria
6) Germany
7) Italy
8) Spain
Now rank them in order of highest proportion of Muslims (no central source, but compiled from national data, European Muslim groups, UN and State Dept figures):
1) France
2) Netherlands
3) Belgium
4) Switzerland
5) Austria
6) Germany
7) Italy
8) Spain
On Jan. 23rd, 2007 Canadians will need a passport to fly across the US border. This has resulted in massive lineups of procrastinators at the Passport Canada offices.
Passport Canada's response? Cut service below normal levels to save on overtime. My source in the Vancouver office tells me that until very recently the policy was "everyone in the office by 4:30 gets served". This has now been changed to "everyone out at 4:30".
Michael Totten interviews Sayyed Husseini, a peace promoting Lebanese Muslim cleric who is working against Nasrallah.
My translator Henry informed me that Lebanese journalists are no longer allowed to publish or interview Sayyed Husseini. Dissent from the likes of this man is intolerable and has to be smashed. Hezbollah issued its threats. After the two-year spree of car-bombs against journalists, threats from Nasrallah pack weight.More focus on leaders like these (rather than groups like CAIR) would do wonders for the image of Muslims around the world. It's a little mysterious to me that the main-stream-media (which largely has obvious goals of advancing multiculturalism) doesn't realize the damage it does to Muslims in its selection of representatives.*
An ex-Greenpeacer (although not obviously anti-Greenpeace) writes at length in favor of more logging (and more trees in general). He criticizes environmental groups that fight logging on general principles and the theoretical predictions of extinction that are paraded around as fact.
I love this kind of article - rather than screaming about doom and gloom Moore is thinking the alternatives through and coming up with ideas that don't obviously require a massive restructuring of society and the world.
By far the most powerful tool at our disposal to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel consumption is the growing of trees and the use of wood. Most environmentalists recognize the positive benefits of growing trees to absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. But then they say "don't cut them down or you will undo the good that's been done". This would be true if you simply piled the trees in a heap and lit them on fire. If, however, the wood is used as a substitute for fossil fuels and for building materials whose production consumes fossil fuels, we can dramatically reduce the consumption of fossil fuels and carbon dioxide emissions. For example, consider a large coal-burning power plant. If we grow trees and use the wood as a substitute for the coal we are able to offset nearly 100 percent of the carbon dioxide emissions from the power plant. That is because sustainable use of wood results in a zero net release of carbon dioxide whereas coal combustion counts for the full 100 percent. If environmentalists would recognize this fact it would inevitably lead them to believe that the answer is in growing more trees and using more wood rather than in reducing our use of this most renewable resource.
Ronald Cass at Real Clear Politics summarizes the offensiveness of Sandy Berger's destruction of classified documents and the subsequent lack of outrage over it.
Those who wrap themselves so frequently in the mantra of the people's right to know should want to know the truth - all the time. Sadly, today's would-be Woodwards and Bernsteins look more like ostriches than hawks, showing no curiosity about what Sandy Berger was hiding. Had that been the attitude when Watergate first appeared as a minor news story, Richard Nixon would have served out his full second term. The rest, as they say, is history.
24 is back, and still awesome. Jack only killed one guy tonight though - this is going to seriously hurt his seasonal average.
Still lots of hilarious computer talk, and most of the agents are way too young. The new President has already learned to always bet on Jack.
The "join the army" commercials being run (not part of the show) were pretty amusing... you too can be a hero and be left to be tortured by the Chinese for years until you are useful again! Yes! Sign me up!
Children of Men is a deeply flawed, but very entertaining movie. As long as you can ignore the heavy-handed preaching and highly unlikely population implosion scenario, it tells a wonderful story. Set roughly 20 years in the future, it explores a world in which mysterious global fertility issues have resulted in a world without children.
The director clearly wanted to make some sort of statement about the current Iraq situation, but couldn't come up with any possible way of making this Bush's fault. Instead we are treated to:
Apparently the 2006 Republican-initiated spending bills were so incomplete and/or not beneficial to the Democrats that the Democrats opted to simply toss them all and extend the 2006 budget through 2007. This kills all the pork that otherwise would have been sneaked into a new budget. I suspect it works out as a double win for the Democrats, as it limits the pork being doled out to predominantly Republican constituencies and they get to claim that they care about government spending.
One relatively pork free year is better than nothing, and the Democrats should be commended regardless of their motives. I look forward to more bi-partisan cooperation/sabotaging of this nature.
On the other hand, the Democrat leadership in the Senate tried to block the earmark reform passed in the House from being considered in the Senate. Luckily there wasn't complete buy in from all the Democratic representatives and the debate will continue.
Well, maybe the near-front lines...
Michael Totten is a member of the new breed of investigative journalist; self-financed and directly publishing his own work. The limitation of course being that he doesn't have the resources of a major news organization for fact checking, but with that in mind his work provides a much less filtered view of the state of affairs on the ground in Lebanon. Nothing too surprising - living in a war zone stinks, and Hezbollah is bad news for everyone.
Michelle Malkin is currently in Iraq doing something similar (well, this is more an aside while she researches the 60 AP "Iraq in civil war" stories all sourced to a guy that may or may not exist).
Took these pictures at the very end of 2006. It was a beautiful (if cold) day.
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| From White Rock Pier |
The ACLU must have some very generous donors if it has time to worry about equal rights in marriage based name changes.
California is not the only state with a high price tag for a groom's name change. In Illinois, a man wishing to take his wife's surname must fork over $246 for a petition and another $150 to publish the change in a newspaper. Connecticut's price is slightly lower, at only $150 for a court petition.Rather than addressing the fact that women - now owning property and signing contracts and stuff - should probably have to jump through the same hoops as men, the ACLU has chosen to undermine the intent of the formal name changing process.
According to the ACLU, the obstacles facing a husband who wishes to adopt his wife's last name violate the equal protection clause provided by the 14th Amendment of the Constitution. "California has the perfect marriage application for the 17th century," said Mark Rosenbaum, legal director of the ACLU of Southern California. "The laws reflect a mind-set that the wife is to be subordinate to the husband."
How precisely do you not notice you are about to hit an oil tanker?
A U.S. nuclear-powered submarine collided with a Japanese oil tanker in the Straits of Hormuz, through which 40 percent of the world's oil supplies travel, officials said.*Joe Hazelwood, Captain of the ill-fated Exxon Valdez. This reference needlessly complicates things since it was not the tanker's fault in this case, but it was the first thing that jumped to my mind.
No one was hurt in the accident that happened Monday night in the 34-mile wide straits, which are bordered by Iran and Oman and serve as the entrance to the Persian Gulf.
Damage to the fast-attack USS Newport News submarine and the supertanker was light and there was no resulting spill of oil or leakage of nuclear fuel, officials from the U.S. Navy and the Japanese government said.
I hereby predict that Hillary Clinton will not become President unless she divorces Bill.
Stories like this one (tabloidy as it may be) linking Belinda Stronach to Bill Clinton will drown out anything meaningful Hillary has to say. The man is an anchor around her neck.
Mark Steyn offers thoughts on anti-gay sheep drugs and the fact you can purchase a sheep for ritual sacrifice in Belgium, but not transport it in the trunk of your car.
Many of us can sympathize. The poor old sheep gets it coming and going. If he's going to end up bleeding to death while turned toward Mecca, he ought at least be able to choose his orientation in the runup to it. Might as well be hung for a ram as for a ewe. Surely a sheep should be able to celebrate his own sexuality without a lot of crazed ovine eugenicists strapping him to a gurney and shooting him the hetero-juice.
[...]
Nobody in Scotland seems to be spending much time imagining, say, nuclear technology in the hands of Iran, but in Glasgow they're up in arms about the mullahs getting sheep-straightening technology. If President Bush is looking for a casus belli against Tehran, the gay-ram angle may be the best shot at bringing the EU on board. "E U," by the way, is the abbreviation for "European Union" and not what a gay ram says in distaste when the lady sheep come strolling by en route to the dip.
In yet another sign that the Federal government is way too big, it would seem that drugs for dogs have to get FDA approval.
The obesity epidemic has spread to man's best friend, and so many dogs are getting fat that the government stepped in yesterday by approving the first doggie diet pill.It would be one thing if these dogs were intended for human consumption... The FDA has unfortunately gone out of its way to obfuscate its budget to the point where I can't tell whether or not this program is directly (not including Congressional oversight, etc.) tax dollar subsidized or not - the three year old Animal Drug/Feed program did take in over 11 million dollars in user fees last year.
The Food and Drug Administration announced the approval of Slentrol, a prescription drug that can suppress Fido's appetite while also blocking the absorption of fat from his treats.
Now that the Maoists in Nepal have mostly won their "rebellion" (planned and funded by China, have no doubt) they have turned their sights on the real enemy: Gays.
And when members of the gay rights group Blue Diamond Society met Maoist leader Dev Gurung, he reportedly said homosexuality was a by-product of capitalism. "Under Soviet rule and when China was still very much a communist state, there were no homosexuals in the Soviet Union or China," Mr Gurung is reported to have said.
"Now they are moving towards capitalism, homosexuals may have arisen there as well. So homosexuality is a product of capitalism. Under socialism this kind of problem does not exist."
Victor Davis Hanson writes on the relative success of historical troop surges, and the mistakes that must be avoided if a surge in Iraq is to be effective. He is unique (among the Middle East commentators that I read) in maintaining that Iran can be controlled through manouvers in Iraq alone.
So, yes, send more troops to Iraq — but only if they are going to be allowed to hunt down and kill vicious and sectarians in a manner that they have not been allowed to previously.
Some gems from The Wall Street Journal's Best of the Web Today feature.
Firstly, the perfect summary of crazy Cindy Sheehan turning on the Democrats (and being dropped like a hot potato):
It comes as a relief to realize that many of those who once treated Sheehan as a heroine did so merely out of partisanship, not hatred of country.Secondly, an item on John Kerry's 75,000 Christmas cards that come with instructions to mail the cards to a recycling company after the holiday season is over.
The card came in an odd-looking envelope, one of those with a return-mail flap and instructions to send it to . . . well, to a recycling company, so "it can be made into new carpet tile."As if the economics of recycling aren't bad enough without adding in the cost of mailing the item across the country!
You loved to laugh! Not many people know how to do that anymore. Real laughter doesn't come from sit-coms and comedians, real laughter comes when someone bows before you, accidentally stumbles, and then is beheaded. Especially on a staircase. Heads will roll, ha ha! Oh Saddam, if I had you back for just one moment, I would ask, if you could shoot just one person in the back of the head, who would it be? I wish it were me!
2006 is done, and it seems fitting to do a little summary.
158 posts deep, I'm up to about 200 visits per month. Probably only half of those are me proofreading my poor grammar.
The Top 5 posts of 2006 (based on number of views):
