perfidy

Yes, it's time for reality vs. Bush, Episode MXVCVIIIMCII.

Speaking on his tax cuts for the top bracket, El Bush pontificates thusly (if mangled words can be considered such):

"If you're worried about job growth, it seems like it makes sense to give a little fuel to those who create jobs, the small-business sector," Bush told a gathering of the nation's governors at the White House. "So I'll vigorously defend the permanency of the tax cuts, not only for the sake of the economy, but for the sake of the entrepreneurial spirit."

Internal Revenue Service statistics cited by a Democratic senator this month show that the vast majority of small businesses do not earn nearly enough money to fall into the highest income tax bracket. According to IRS data from the 2001 tax year, 3.8 percent of the 18.2 million business tax returns filed that year reported taxable income of $200,000 or more. The top tax bracket last year kicked in at $311,950 of taxable income.

So -- yeah, the estate tax helps farmers, except nobody can identify a single farm that's been saved. And the top bracket tax cut helps small business, except according to the IRS data, it doesn't.

Exactly how much more of this bullshit are the reasonable people in this country going to put up with?

If the man's judgement is this badly impaired (either by lack of capacity or poor information delivery), why exactly do many "conservative" people in this country think he's so damn qualified to prosecute the war against terrorism?

Bush is a walking misjudgement.

Damn, that better be a word. It's frickin' late, I've just put in a 15 hour day, and I'm wiped. I get a free one here. Little blinky lights everywhere are telling me to pay attention to the outside world. Maybe they're floaty spots.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: Since the tax cut thing didn't work out and all it did was make a bunch of GOP political donors even more ridiculously wealthy, can we have the money back?

Right. And when we put the tax rates back after November, they'll bitch, bitch, bitch about the fact that the rich are being singled out for a tax hike.

The Post has given us an essential timeline on the Bush "tax cuts", the effects that were promised at the time, and what we've seen.

Bush and his "economic team" perform about as well as psychics at a county fair.

Before you raise the chorus of terrorism, war, and recession, keep in mind that these predictions were made after those things happened.

Here are some helpful mathematic elements for your consideration:

Today's debt as % of GDP : ~40%.
Historical high debt as % of GDP: ~50%.
Bush Debt as % of GDP: 6%/year.

Dick Cheney tells us that worldwide oil consumption is increasing at 3% a year, and reserves are decreasing by 2% a year. He should know.

Taxes lost to cheaters, every year: ~$300 Billion ($1000 for every man, woman and child in the country).

Odds of being audited if your income is less than 15k/year: 1 in 47.
Odds of being audited if your income is more than 100k/year: 1 in 66.

Amount stolen from working class people's social security fund to give tax cuts to the wealthiest, since 1983: $1.7 Trillion.

Ratio of Americans who pay more in social security taxes than they do in federal income taxes: 3/4.

Income rise in constant dollars since 1972, bottom 99%: 4%.
Income rise in constant dollars since 1972, top 1%: 500%.

Amount of income working class Americans can save, tax-free, per year: about $12,000.
Amount a public corporation officer can save, due to a loophole in the law: Unlimited, as deferred income.

Number of penalties assessed against American corporations for cheating on taxes in 1993: 2,400.
Number of penalties assessed against American corporations for cheating on taxes in 2002: 22.

Number of offshore credit cards issued to American citizens: somewhere between 1 and 2 million. Estimated tax cheating: around $70 Billion loss.

US trade deficit, 2003: $489 Billion.

Number of farms lost in the last 20 years to estate taxes: 0.

Purchase price of a data series from the IRS, so a concerned taxpayer can do his OWN analysis of the tax system: $3300, for one copied CD-ROM.

Murdoc has a post up on the possible fate of the Shuttle. He links to a Jeffrey Bell article that argues that after the CAIB, there is really no way that the shuttle can return to service, given the high (40%, according to Bell) likelihood that we'd lose another shuttle just doing the limited ISS-maintenance flights that are currently imagined.

The shuttle has long been everything but what NASA has claimed it to be. It is expensive, inefficient, has impossibly long turn around times, and most important, it's lethal to its crews. The fact that we will almost certainly lose Hubble due to the problems with the shuttle is an unfortunate, though predictable fact. We have not been even remotely sensible about space travel in almost a half century. (And yes, I am aware of how old the space age is.)

It's a sad fact that China and Russia - using forty year old technology - have a more robust and capable manned space flight capability than we do with our thirty year old technology. There have been no significant advances in space transportation since the shuttle flew back in '81, and that wasn't much of an advance, as Murdoc has pointed out. There are three things we need for a decent space transportation infrastructure, and we have only one of them.

We have disposable launchers that can reliably put satellites and other moderate sized, unmanned payloads into orbit, for a fairly reasonable price. The other two things are a safe and reasonably priced manned vehicle, and a heavy lift vehicle. We have known almost from the beginning of the shuttle era that despite the smoke NASA's been blowing, the shuttle is none of these things.

I simply can't believe that with all we (and the Russkies) have learned since 1961, Lockheed or Boeing could not design a simple manned capsule, even one that could do a glider reentry - in a weekend. The design studies have been done. We have better computers, materials, and everything you need to design and build space vehicles than when we did it the first time over forty years ago. A minishuttle/X24 lookalike should not take half a decade to build. And once built, there is no reason that we couldn't launch it on one of our disposable rockets.

Similarly, for a heavy lift vehicle, we already have everything we need. If you consider that the entire mass of the shuttle orbiter is in fact payload reaching orbit, why not just get rid of the orbiter and replace it with a cargo shell with shuttle main engines at the bottom? All the components have been tested, and again the design studies already completed. If we really wanted to, we could have a full-fledged, reliable, flexible and robust space transportation system in little more than a year. And we could easily save Hubble, as we could easily have saved Skylab back in '79 had we not foolishly thrown all our eggs into the shuttle basket.

And despite much thinking about it, I really have no idea why it isn't being done - aside from a few more or less paranoid conspiracy theories I'm not confortable with. It seems impossible to me that NASA could be so completely lacking even the dimmest vision of how we can get into space, especially as all the pieces are right out in full view.

More and more, I think the only answer is an end to civilian government sponsored spaceflight. Let the military develop what they need - they have a far better track record than NASA. And let private industry meet all the other needs. If we are moderately careful about how we do it, we could have an amazing change in space travel in a very short time. To be sure, government provides money that has given us what we have so far, but I think the stultifying effects of bureaucracy and central planning has done far more harm than good. Imagine what kind of computers we'd have now if NASA had been designing them.

BTD links to the annual Gallup international beauty contest. The judges are the American public and according to them, Great Britain, Canada and Australia are dead sexy. Japan is looking pretty cute; and if we drink enough beer, even France and Germany might verge on doable.

The double bagger contingent is headed up by incurable hag North Korea, followed closely by the Palestinian Authority, Iran and Iraq. This snap judgement conceals the fact that Iraq was once last in our affections, but a little makeup and strategic plastic surgery has made her four times cuter than last year.

The Chinese have announced that next time, they're going to launch two chinkonauts into orbit. [I know I said I wouldn't use that word anymore. I lied. It makes me giggle.] The next mission, sometime in 2005, is expected to last seven to ten days. The ChiComs also reaffirmed their plans to follow up their initial manned missions with the construction of an orbital base. Which they will undoubtedly use for nefarious and inscrutable purposes. Depending on when the launch actually happens, we may or may not have a manned spaceflight program of our own.

It appears that the situation in Haiti is quickly descending into sadly typical chaos. The United States is sending fifty Marines from the Fleet Anti-Terrorist Security Team to Port-au-Prince to help guard the US Embassy there, but there is no sign that the United States has any plans for large scale intervention. US Forces have libervated Haiti several times in the over 200 years since Haiti won its independence from France. The recent rebellion follows a pattern that is a hallowed tradition in Haitian politics. The rich Haitians get tired of the current government, and hire rebels to overthrow it. The rebels get money, loot and the opportunity for youthful hijinks. The former president and cronies move away to a comfortable retirement. The rich Haitians make some windfall profits, and one fo their number is elevated to the presidency. Then, he begins his year and a half to ten years of kleptocracy - until the cycle repeats itself.

In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when our propensity to invade other countries was higher than currently, periods of American occupation were the only relief that Haitans had from this regular cycle of theft and violence. Later, the Duvalier regime managed to avoid the cycle through brutal repression of potential rebels. For all the hopes many had for Aristide, he seems to be more than anything a throwback to the typical Haitian leaders of the past - and the current rebellion is the traditional response.

Anyone interested in the history of America's long history of military interventions and the generally positive results thereof, I highly recommend Max Boot's excellent history, The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

Except for the President Gore bit, this is extraordinarily cool. Just read the damn thing. Discuss in the comments.

Actually, that is sadly untrue. Weekly World News founder and editor Eddie Clontz died recently, and the world is a less entertaining place for it.

Somewhere, the BatBoy is crying his giant, preternaturally sensive eyes out, the King has bowed his pomaded head in mourning, and Ed Anger is blaming it all on the Jews, the environmentalists, and the queers who are kidnapping our pets.

Thrill to exciting Trek combat music! Participate in epic battle! Subsume your identity into that of your favorite Trek captain!

Joe Bob says check it out!

Various news services are reporting today (here's the NY Times) that a new study by cosmologists suggests the improbable: that "dark energy" really is one of the shaping forces of the Universe.

"Dark energy" has until recently been considered little more than an update of "ether" "phlogiston" or "life essence," a convenient anomaly conjured to explain why the universe's numbers don't fit our projections. Basically, it's what keeps the weak force of gravity from sucking the universe back together again. Ever since it was discovered that the universe is expanding faster and faster over time, rather than slowing under the influence of gravity, another force has been needed to explain this. Hence, dark energy. A universal fudge of sorts.

Even stranger, the strength of the dark energy seems to conform to Einstein's most famous fudge, the "cosmological constant." Later derided by him as his biggest mistake, it was Einstein's efforts to tally his theories with the work of later physicists and cosmologists. But it seems he was right.

Nutty, nutty, nutty.

This research also bolsters the arguments of string-theory advocates, whose models predict that otherwise barren stretches of space contain massive amounts of energy vibrating in eleven dimen...

Ok. Ok. Ok. I've recently been taking mostly good-natured potshots at organized religion, since I myself am not a particulary pious person. Also, God gets used as an excuse a lot. But I ask you: what is the weirder story:

Some super-being made the Universe as humanity's playground and birthright, and two thousand years ago his son got nailed to a tree for saying how good it would be to be nice to each other for a change (with apologies to Douglas Adams). Now, that super-being and his son watch us all from another dimension, and when we die our deeds will be measured against their teachings and the good apples get a gold star.

Or: The three-dimensional physical universe sprang into being randomly as a mere manifestation of a larger host of dimensions numbering eleven in total (or maybe sixteen), and through a staggeringly improbable set of coincidences, physics, chemistry and chance combined to produce a universe neither too hot nor too cold, with just the right number of unfolded dimensions, neither too big nor too small, with juuuust the right amount of energy that some of it can lump together into stars and galaxies and yappy bichon dogs. Oh, and the numbers don't add up like they should.

I guess it's all a matter of what you choose to put your faith in.