[from 12/22/10]
Let’s talk about a stupid sentence!
I heard this sentence on a stupid TV news show, uttered by a stupid “conservative” member of Congress: “You can’t balance budgets by taxing.” Whaaa?!
We don’t need to know who said that. We don’t want to get personal here at Adventures in Irony. We just want to laugh at the stupidity of stupid, stupid ideas. And this Dumbo’s idea is a doozy!
Let’s eliminate all our taxes then, and balance our budgets your way, “conservative” Dumbo! Start flapping your ears! Hey, everybody, clear the room! Elephant flapping his ears!
I’m sorry. Not only was that last comment entirely based on supposition, in that I don’t really know how the stupid “conservative” thinks budgets can be balanced without taxing, I also used a reference to a movie that 95% of my readers are too young to remember. I should have found a way to get my point across using Lady Gaga.
No, let me go back even before the flying elephant movie. Let’s go back to Joseph & Mary. That’s right. It’s Christmas. Here’s my gratuitous Christmas reference. Joseph & Mary knew all about taxes. They traveled by donkey 100 miles to pay their taxes in tax season, without a hotel reservation.
“So, what’s your point this time, Wes?” Well, I’ll tell you, Wes. Two thousand years ago the parents of JESUS didn’t have to be defeated in Congress to pay THEIR taxes, they paid them willingly, even when it meant riding a stinking donkey for over a week.
And how does all that fit in with this “conservative” label? How is balancing budgets using taxes some new-fangled liberal idea, when 2000 years ago the Romans were funding THEIR empire by taxing?
OK, let’s turn that observation around. How SHOULD the Romans have funded their Empire? Setting aside for the moment the notion that the Romans ought not to have had an empire, should they have funded it with bake sales? Rummage sales? Used book sales? Rock music benefits? Pledge drives? Subscriptions? “Your ad on this shield?” Selling naming rights to monuments?
I don’t know that they didn’t do all that and a lot more! The Romans, give credit where credit is due, were very creative. They invented ipso facto. They invented indoor heated flush toilets. They invented bat spit crazy politics. They were the real inventors of French fries, which are misnamed, as you all know, only they didn’t make them out of potatoes, they used parsnips. The French today call them “Panais frits” and make you wait an hour for them, then only bring two bites worth with a teaspoon of gravy on top.
But that’s beside the point! You can’t fund a whole empire charging a quarter quadrans per toilet use, or exporting fried parsnips to the Teutons. Even those and all the other tricks I’ve mentioned put together aren’t enough. Empires are very expensive.
So what’s it going to be, “conservatives”? Are we going to go so far back to the good old days that we don’t even have an empire? Seriously? Are we withdrawing from Afghanistan, Iraq, the Korean DMZ, our German bases, Diego Garcia, Okinawa, Kosovo?
Hell no, we won’t go. We never go. We’re going to be the Empire of a Thousand Years. So how do you fund an empire? How do you ALWAYS fund an empire? What’s the plain old normal way that all conservative governments that do things plain old-fashioned old normal ways use to fund an empire? They tax. Tax, tax and tax some more.
Going into Christmas time, or whatever you heathens call it, “End of the personal year” “No COLA Time”, “Unemployment”, let’s try to keep in mind that there could be no War on Christmas if there were no Christmas, and there’d be no Christmas without imperial tax collectors.
This is real conservatism: You balance budgets any way you can, and if that means raising taxes, you get on it. Grow up, people who want to call themselves conservatives.
Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label taxes. Show all posts
Monday, January 17, 2011
So, Bill Gates Is a Communist, Then
[from 10/13/10]
Lets talk about I-1098, so we can sound communist to people who’ve forgotten what communism is!
I-1098 would institute a state income tax on “rich” people, namely those with incomes $200,000 or more if individuals, $400,000 or more if married filing jointly. In return, it’ll crank down statewide property taxes and Business and Occupation taxes. That’s really generous, since the “rich” people have most of the taxed properties anyway. It’s a little give and take.
Susan Hutchison, who wishes she were King County Executive, said, while making a sad “please don’t make us be communist” frowny-frown face, “I don’t know a soul who makes $200,000 who considers themselves rich.” Ha! They’re all soul-less!
Ms. Hutchison misses a key point. It’s not important whether her friends consider themselves rich, or not rich enough. What matters is what other people, those people who DON’T live on 6-8 times the state’s median income, think.
The best part of the initiative is that 70% of the income tax has to go toward education, and the rest toward health. This is very important.
They could have written the law so that 70% went to buy crackers and brie for Susan Hutchison’s friends. Or they could have written it so 95% of the money collected would be burned, and the other 5% used to buy the lighter fluid, wieners and marshmallows. Those would be interesting choices. But instead it’s to fund education and health.
“Why is that important, Wes?” “Why don’t poor people work hard to buy their own educations and healths and leave rich people alone?” “Gasp! Isn’t that communist?” These are the sort of deep questions that make me proud to be an American in these times of deepness.
For one thing rich people don’t get rich by trading each others money back and forth. They get money by paying people to work for them and keeping a share of the profits, or by loaning their money out at interest and keeping the interest, or renting property out, or by selling goods to people. All these methods require solvent less-than-rich people to feed the machine of wealth! That’s not communism! That’s how capitalism works and I JUST LOVE IT!
Educations and healths cost too much now, so there’s getting to be a shortage of solvent less-than-rich people! Pretty soon there won’t be any solvent less-than-rich people, there will only be the non-solvent kind, otherwise known as poor people. When there are only poor people, rich people can only get so rich and no richer. The machine of wealth starves! Boo.
Housing costs too much now, too, but we’re capping the property taxes lower, OK?
So here’s the deal: in return for a tiny bite of income taxes at the high end (not near what the feds take) rich people get more educated and more healthy solvent less-than-rich people to employ, loan money to, rent and sell to. The result will be richer rich people!
If you don’t think I’m right about that, ask yourself why both Bill Gates, Sr. and Bill Gates, Jr. are for this initiative. (Hint: they know how to get really rich!)
Further questions to tax the credulous
1. In 1960 just the rate of federal taxes alone for a married couple on the equivalent of today’s $400,000 (around $54,000) would have been more than 50%. The combined effect of today’s federal tax and I-1098 will bring that rate to only 38%. Remember the Seattle World’s Fair? Good times, huh? Too bad we were a communist country back then, paying for all those good times on the backs of the rich.
2. Consider a central planned economy where all the industry is owned by the state, and a system of “taxation”, where the industry is relatively free of state controls, but profits are taxed. Find at least one difference between them. Lose the difference. Find it again. Lose it, find it, lose it, find it. Until you can’t lose it any more. Please.
Lets talk about I-1098, so we can sound communist to people who’ve forgotten what communism is!
I-1098 would institute a state income tax on “rich” people, namely those with incomes $200,000 or more if individuals, $400,000 or more if married filing jointly. In return, it’ll crank down statewide property taxes and Business and Occupation taxes. That’s really generous, since the “rich” people have most of the taxed properties anyway. It’s a little give and take.
Susan Hutchison, who wishes she were King County Executive, said, while making a sad “please don’t make us be communist” frowny-frown face, “I don’t know a soul who makes $200,000 who considers themselves rich.” Ha! They’re all soul-less!
Ms. Hutchison misses a key point. It’s not important whether her friends consider themselves rich, or not rich enough. What matters is what other people, those people who DON’T live on 6-8 times the state’s median income, think.
The best part of the initiative is that 70% of the income tax has to go toward education, and the rest toward health. This is very important.
They could have written the law so that 70% went to buy crackers and brie for Susan Hutchison’s friends. Or they could have written it so 95% of the money collected would be burned, and the other 5% used to buy the lighter fluid, wieners and marshmallows. Those would be interesting choices. But instead it’s to fund education and health.
“Why is that important, Wes?” “Why don’t poor people work hard to buy their own educations and healths and leave rich people alone?” “Gasp! Isn’t that communist?” These are the sort of deep questions that make me proud to be an American in these times of deepness.
For one thing rich people don’t get rich by trading each others money back and forth. They get money by paying people to work for them and keeping a share of the profits, or by loaning their money out at interest and keeping the interest, or renting property out, or by selling goods to people. All these methods require solvent less-than-rich people to feed the machine of wealth! That’s not communism! That’s how capitalism works and I JUST LOVE IT!
Educations and healths cost too much now, so there’s getting to be a shortage of solvent less-than-rich people! Pretty soon there won’t be any solvent less-than-rich people, there will only be the non-solvent kind, otherwise known as poor people. When there are only poor people, rich people can only get so rich and no richer. The machine of wealth starves! Boo.
Housing costs too much now, too, but we’re capping the property taxes lower, OK?
So here’s the deal: in return for a tiny bite of income taxes at the high end (not near what the feds take) rich people get more educated and more healthy solvent less-than-rich people to employ, loan money to, rent and sell to. The result will be richer rich people!
If you don’t think I’m right about that, ask yourself why both Bill Gates, Sr. and Bill Gates, Jr. are for this initiative. (Hint: they know how to get really rich!)
Further questions to tax the credulous
1. In 1960 just the rate of federal taxes alone for a married couple on the equivalent of today’s $400,000 (around $54,000) would have been more than 50%. The combined effect of today’s federal tax and I-1098 will bring that rate to only 38%. Remember the Seattle World’s Fair? Good times, huh? Too bad we were a communist country back then, paying for all those good times on the backs of the rich.
2. Consider a central planned economy where all the industry is owned by the state, and a system of “taxation”, where the industry is relatively free of state controls, but profits are taxed. Find at least one difference between them. Lose the difference. Find it again. Lose it, find it, lose it, find it. Until you can’t lose it any more. Please.
Sunday, January 16, 2011
Drunken Space-Giraffes Are As Good As You
[from 7/28/10]
I was going to talk about the Afghan War Diary, but the book was too long and too repetitive, like most diaries, so I decided to go with the next best thing.
Let’s talk about death & taxes!
I’m being taxed more than ever lately, as I enjoy the occasional commercially brewed beverage. If, by occasional, you mean nightly. If, by nightly, you mean morningly.
Whatever you mean, I’m not going to complain. In fact, I’m glad to pay to keep the ship of the state afloat. And how better to float Washington State than on beer? I can enjoy the poetry of it as much as the next guy.
At the same time, I worry we’re overlooking other good revenue sources. We’re not taxing enough. We’re especially not taxing the dead enough. We should tax them at least till they howl.
Also, supposedly sometime in September, Democrats in Washington D.C. will get around to deciding whether to drop Bush’s tax cuts. You remember Bush’s tax cuts, right? Those were the tax cuts we got in order to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, I said support! The theory was that taxing rich people undermines the economy so much that you end up getting less money in taxes from everybody else. But if you hardly tax the rich at all, the economy gets souped up, there’s a middle class to tax, and you can buy all the tanks you need.
That theory didn’t work. It was the economy that tanked.
OK then, let’s try something else. Here’s my idea: Every time there’s a war, anywhere in the world, rich people everywhere get richer. Don’t ask me how. It just happens. I’m a mathematician, not some brainiac.
So we should do this: Whenever anyone dies in a war on either side, no matter what war or where, whether civilians or not, we increases the taxes on rich people by just a tad. Ideally worldwide, but it won’t hurt to start unilaterally in America, since we start most of the really long wars anyway.
We’ll exempt, say, farmers who actually get rich growing food, if we can find any.
By a tad, I’m thinking, it would be enough to ratchet up the taxes on income by a measly 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent per dead person on people making more than 10 million US per year. That’s only $10 per year per dead for someone on the margin. I’m thinking that little bit is all it would take, because it will add up fast.
The idea is, for the stinking rich, war is great, because it generates investment opportunities that they can leverage into more wealth. So they need a disincentive in order to cut back. It’s like cigarette taxes. Don’t think of how much the taxes hurt, think of the lives you could save.
Questions for extra credit. You want extra credit, yes, you know you want it.
1. It’s been said rich people should keep their money because what they do with it improves the economy. The hidden assumption is that what poor people would do with money, if they had any, wouldn’t improve the economy. Whose economy are we talking about, anyway? Present your answer in the form of a question, for all the good it will do.
2. Fact A: Some people don’t like us to tax the absurdly rich, because they dream of being absurdly rich themselves. Fact B: Some people think the Barefoot Bandit is cool, because they dream of being equally huge jerks. Create a diorama relating these facts. If your Dad won’t help you make the diorama, you may instead write a 500 word essay on how much he sucks.
3. Ayn Rand says that if her heirs don’t deserve her money, because they didn’t earn it, well, neither do you. Prove that is not a valid argument. Hint: Substitute “drunken space-giraffes” for “her heirs.” Should drunken space-giraffes have inherited Ayn Rand’s wealth? Did they?
I was going to talk about the Afghan War Diary, but the book was too long and too repetitive, like most diaries, so I decided to go with the next best thing.
Let’s talk about death & taxes!
I’m being taxed more than ever lately, as I enjoy the occasional commercially brewed beverage. If, by occasional, you mean nightly. If, by nightly, you mean morningly.
Whatever you mean, I’m not going to complain. In fact, I’m glad to pay to keep the ship of the state afloat. And how better to float Washington State than on beer? I can enjoy the poetry of it as much as the next guy.
At the same time, I worry we’re overlooking other good revenue sources. We’re not taxing enough. We’re especially not taxing the dead enough. We should tax them at least till they howl.
Also, supposedly sometime in September, Democrats in Washington D.C. will get around to deciding whether to drop Bush’s tax cuts. You remember Bush’s tax cuts, right? Those were the tax cuts we got in order to support the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Yes, I said support! The theory was that taxing rich people undermines the economy so much that you end up getting less money in taxes from everybody else. But if you hardly tax the rich at all, the economy gets souped up, there’s a middle class to tax, and you can buy all the tanks you need.
That theory didn’t work. It was the economy that tanked.
OK then, let’s try something else. Here’s my idea: Every time there’s a war, anywhere in the world, rich people everywhere get richer. Don’t ask me how. It just happens. I’m a mathematician, not some brainiac.
So we should do this: Whenever anyone dies in a war on either side, no matter what war or where, whether civilians or not, we increases the taxes on rich people by just a tad. Ideally worldwide, but it won’t hurt to start unilaterally in America, since we start most of the really long wars anyway.
We’ll exempt, say, farmers who actually get rich growing food, if we can find any.
By a tad, I’m thinking, it would be enough to ratchet up the taxes on income by a measly 1 percent of 1 percent of 1 percent per dead person on people making more than 10 million US per year. That’s only $10 per year per dead for someone on the margin. I’m thinking that little bit is all it would take, because it will add up fast.
The idea is, for the stinking rich, war is great, because it generates investment opportunities that they can leverage into more wealth. So they need a disincentive in order to cut back. It’s like cigarette taxes. Don’t think of how much the taxes hurt, think of the lives you could save.
Questions for extra credit. You want extra credit, yes, you know you want it.
1. It’s been said rich people should keep their money because what they do with it improves the economy. The hidden assumption is that what poor people would do with money, if they had any, wouldn’t improve the economy. Whose economy are we talking about, anyway? Present your answer in the form of a question, for all the good it will do.
2. Fact A: Some people don’t like us to tax the absurdly rich, because they dream of being absurdly rich themselves. Fact B: Some people think the Barefoot Bandit is cool, because they dream of being equally huge jerks. Create a diorama relating these facts. If your Dad won’t help you make the diorama, you may instead write a 500 word essay on how much he sucks.
3. Ayn Rand says that if her heirs don’t deserve her money, because they didn’t earn it, well, neither do you. Prove that is not a valid argument. Hint: Substitute “drunken space-giraffes” for “her heirs.” Should drunken space-giraffes have inherited Ayn Rand’s wealth? Did they?
The Economy Cries Whenever a Rich Man Is Taxed
[from 4/14/10]
It was Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the hundred dollar bill, who said there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes. That simplifies by noting death is just your last and deepest tax. Your tax for having taken up space and used the Earth is to be put back into it. To put it another way, it's your tax for having been personally taxing on the rest of the planet. It's only a shame it's not a progressive tax, and it's assessed on such an unfair and haphazard schedule. People who take more than their fair share should go sooner. The poor and parsimonious should at least get a proportional pass, based on use.
If death were a use tax, I figure the average poor person scraping by at the poverty level in America should get to live about twice as long as someone at the median income level, and roughly 1,000 to 10,000 times as long as a billionaire.
But not to worry, you billionaires, because I care about you and don't really want to see all of you dead by age one week. So in my perfect world, rich people could buy death abatements from poor people. Let's say you make a quarter million per year before taxes. That would be enough to buy fifty years of extended life, five each from ten different poor people, and still leave you with enough to live on. Combined with your pre-existing allotment, that would even everything out. Of course, you'd be poor, too, by then, but that would be your choice.
Alternatively, you could get credits for working to extend the lives of the poor. For example, you could give health care to people who can't afford it. Then we let you live longer, too. A win-win-win all around.
Having said all that, it will probably surprise some of you that I'm all for the current WA State Legislature's plan to tax the bejeezus out of stuff poor people like, like candy, beer, soda pop, cigarettes, fuzzy dice, microwave burritos, scratch tickets, and paintings on velvet. (I'm not sure about all of those, not having read the proposal.)
I'm thinking how much worse the alternative would be. We all know that the only alternative to making poor people more miserable than they already are, is to make rich people give the state some of their money. We can't do that because to make rich people give the state any money would hurt the economy.
In fact, it hurts the economy so much when rich people have to give up any of their money, we shouldn't tax rich people financially at all. No income taxes, no estate taxes, not even sales taxes. If you can prove you're rich, you should even be exempt from sales and property taxes, because taxing the rich hurts the economy, and that hurts everybody.
Just think of what a great country this would be if only poor people were taxed. The economy would never be hurt. What a happy economy that would be!
Conversely, if we continue to tax the rich as we do, I'm afraid the day will come when we won't have any rich people. Then you'll all be sorry. You'd have no one to pay you to bus their tables at restaurants you couldn't afford yourself anymore. You'd have no one to pay you to clean their toilets after exploding them. What will you do, work at a candy manufacturing company?
Without rich people, who would buy all the high end merchandise that is priced forever out of your reach? No one, so that merchandise would stop being made and marketed, and you wouldn't ever be able to not buy it again. We're not just talking mansions and yachts here, we're talking Lamborghinis, Lear Jets, and major league teams. You and your neighbors would have to put on your own ball games and risk driving to them in Hondas, or take the bus. The horror.
It was Benjamin Franklin, the inventor of the hundred dollar bill, who said there is nothing certain in this world except death and taxes. That simplifies by noting death is just your last and deepest tax. Your tax for having taken up space and used the Earth is to be put back into it. To put it another way, it's your tax for having been personally taxing on the rest of the planet. It's only a shame it's not a progressive tax, and it's assessed on such an unfair and haphazard schedule. People who take more than their fair share should go sooner. The poor and parsimonious should at least get a proportional pass, based on use.
If death were a use tax, I figure the average poor person scraping by at the poverty level in America should get to live about twice as long as someone at the median income level, and roughly 1,000 to 10,000 times as long as a billionaire.
But not to worry, you billionaires, because I care about you and don't really want to see all of you dead by age one week. So in my perfect world, rich people could buy death abatements from poor people. Let's say you make a quarter million per year before taxes. That would be enough to buy fifty years of extended life, five each from ten different poor people, and still leave you with enough to live on. Combined with your pre-existing allotment, that would even everything out. Of course, you'd be poor, too, by then, but that would be your choice.
Alternatively, you could get credits for working to extend the lives of the poor. For example, you could give health care to people who can't afford it. Then we let you live longer, too. A win-win-win all around.
Having said all that, it will probably surprise some of you that I'm all for the current WA State Legislature's plan to tax the bejeezus out of stuff poor people like, like candy, beer, soda pop, cigarettes, fuzzy dice, microwave burritos, scratch tickets, and paintings on velvet. (I'm not sure about all of those, not having read the proposal.)
I'm thinking how much worse the alternative would be. We all know that the only alternative to making poor people more miserable than they already are, is to make rich people give the state some of their money. We can't do that because to make rich people give the state any money would hurt the economy.
In fact, it hurts the economy so much when rich people have to give up any of their money, we shouldn't tax rich people financially at all. No income taxes, no estate taxes, not even sales taxes. If you can prove you're rich, you should even be exempt from sales and property taxes, because taxing the rich hurts the economy, and that hurts everybody.
Just think of what a great country this would be if only poor people were taxed. The economy would never be hurt. What a happy economy that would be!
Conversely, if we continue to tax the rich as we do, I'm afraid the day will come when we won't have any rich people. Then you'll all be sorry. You'd have no one to pay you to bus their tables at restaurants you couldn't afford yourself anymore. You'd have no one to pay you to clean their toilets after exploding them. What will you do, work at a candy manufacturing company?
Without rich people, who would buy all the high end merchandise that is priced forever out of your reach? No one, so that merchandise would stop being made and marketed, and you wouldn't ever be able to not buy it again. We're not just talking mansions and yachts here, we're talking Lamborghinis, Lear Jets, and major league teams. You and your neighbors would have to put on your own ball games and risk driving to them in Hondas, or take the bus. The horror.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Unstimulated
Everybody get ready, we're all about to be economically stimulated!The Dems and Reps finally agreed on an economic stimulus package. Barring a Bush signing statement that says something like, "Thanks loads; I'll give all the money out to my rich friends," this means most of us will get lump sums of money to stimulate the economy.
Being poor, I was interested, I would even say stimulated, by this news. I wanted to know what the actual law said so I could see if I was going to get some, and how much. This meant going to the federal government website and guessing the magic combination that would unlock the bill's text. I won't bother you with the details of that quest, it's enough to say, "many Bothans died to bring us this information." What I learned after reading the text of the law (HR 1540.ENR) plus supporting law (the Social Security Act, and relevant IRS code) is that if the chicken's innards fall eastward when the moon is high in the west, then I will in fact get a check for $300 by the end of the bureaucratic summer. This is because when I put my income sources together my total income exceeds the lower cutoff of $3000.
Oh, I might have to file an income tax form this year (I don't, usually, because I don't ever come close to owing taxes) but that's OK, because I never owe taxes, because I'm too poor.
But then I thought, "Whoa, what if I was so poor that my income for all of 2007 was less than $3000?" In that case Congress has seen to it that I wouldn't get a dime. It's times like this I wish Congress got a signing statement of its own. They could use it to tell us What They Were Thinking. Since there is no such thing, it falls to me to tell you What They Might Have Been Thinking, if they indeed were. Several possibilities occur.
1. If we're going to stimulate the economy, we need to give money to people who know how to spend it. Would someone who makes less than $3000 a year know how to spend money? Obviously not! Not enough experience!
2. Triage. There's no point in trying to stimulate a sector of the economy that's going to die no matter what we're willing to do to revive it.3. They'd only spend the money on food and rent. No money would go to the major corporations that have done massive out-sourcing. When we talk about "the American economy," what else did you think we meant? Did you think we meant Willamette Valley cranberry farmers? Get real.
4. You stimulate the economy you have, not the economy you wish you had.
5. You know what happens when a poor person wins $30,000,000 in the lottery? How they end up as poor as ever within a year, and worse off than ever, because they're all Jerry Springer fodder? It would be like that if we gave them $300. Only 1/100,000ths as much.
6. This is a great land of opportunity, so if anybody is that poor they must be lazy. They're SO lazy that if we give them $300 they won't get off their butts to spend it, and it won't stimulate any economy.
7. This is a great land of opportunity, so if anybody is that poor they must be criminally stupid. They're SO stupid that if we gave them checks for $300 they would eat them, and that wouldn't stimulate the economy.8. Less for the poor means more for the rest of us, and our children. (The law provides $300 for every child of middle class parents.)
9. Poor people don't vote for any of the politicians who passed this law, because you don't vote for the people who regularly rape you.
10. We have to save some money out to pay the high cost of killing people in other countries.
Wednesday, March 21, 2007
Can You Say, “Conservapedia”?
Saturday, the P-I made my day by telling me about Conservapedia, the Right-Wing Christian answer to the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. I’ll make fun of Conservapedia momentarily, but first a few words on why it’s important to know things.
I have never contributed to Wikipedia because I don’t know anything more than, say, Socrates. Like Socrates, I know that Socrates knew nothing except that he knew nothing, and that Plato was his bitch. That would make a heck of a Wikipedia entry wouldn’t it?: “Socrates, circa 470-399 BC, self-acknowledged ignoramus. Everything Plato knew, he learned from Socrates.”
But don’t do as I do, do as I say: Know things.
Some say all you have to do is read the Bible, and then you’ll know everything you need to know. Since I’ve read it, that would make me cool, but I can shoot this notion down with just two words: April, fifteenth. Not in the Bible! But you need to know it! Joseph and Mary knew that taxes were due the same time she was. They wouldn’t have if they’d only gone by what was in the Bible in their day.
A woman I met was incensed when told to appear at a later hearing after pleading innocent to a minor charge. She said, “That’s not fair, I said I was innocent, why didn’t they believe me? Why are they making me do more stuff?” I guess it wasn’t enough that other people all around her have had this happen to them, throughout all of her life. It had to happen to her before it could get her attention. Don’t be that way. Pay attention to how others are being rooked, you’re in the same line.
One of the redeeming features of Conservapedia is its creators clearly agree on the point that I’ve been making, that it’s important to know stuff that isn’t in the Bible. That’s why they don’t only quote the Bible in their articles. Another redeeming feature is that it is still an open wiki, like Wikipedia. So anyone can edit it.
I am sorely tempted. Whenever I see a new encyclopedia I always check its math entries. So I looked up “Algebra” on Conservapedia to see algebra defined as arithmetic with letters used to stand for numbers. That’s like defining brain surgery as the rearrangement of brains with knives, as opposed to sledgehammers. There were no footnotes or references to direct the reader to more information. All that hard work, all those centuries, reduced to “algebra uses letters that stand for numbers.”
I’m also tempted to delete thousands of excess uses of the word “great.” Plutarch “wrote Plutarch’s Lives and many great essays.” “Cervantes wrote Don Quixote, a great satirical novel.” The United States “is widely considered one of the greatest and most powerful nations on Earth.” It recalls the old Chris Farley Show on SNL. Farley to Paul McCartney: “…you remember when you were with The Beatles?” McCartney: “Yeah, sure.” Farley: “That was awesome!”
Anitra found this bit concerning George Washington: “Washington is perhaps the only person other than Jesus who declined enormous worldly power... “ That should be amended to “Washington is perhaps the only slave owner who ever declined other enormous worldly power.”
My favorite article on Conservapedia is the “Greek empire” entry under “Ancient Terms G.” Except for the initial definition (the Greek empire was the land controlled by Ancient Greece) the entire article consists of answers from contributors to the question “For what would you thank the Ancient Greek Civilization?”
Answers include such gems as “the insightful literature of Plato and Aristotle, especially The Republic, which I have read several times,” “I would like to thank the classical Greek civilization for the catapult,” and, best of all, “I would like to thank classical Greek civilization for the invention of man-boy love affairs.”
That’s some damn fine stupid writing!
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