Paul M. Jones

The unspoken 600-pound gorilla in the room is that the IRS did not go after Republican Party groups. There has been some noise made in that direction, but it is just that--noise. The real IRS vendetta was aimed at the Tea Party movement and not at the myriad GOP inside-the-beltway groups like American Crossroads or Americans for Job Security or any of the other interlocking GOP seen as front groups for corporate America.

As I stated elsewhere recently, The Republican Establishment is pea green with envy but also embarrassment "that the IRS did not think them worthy of harassing, or even worse, on the same side as the IRS. In other words, the IRS saw the GOP as too feckless to worry about. Either explanation is not very appealing for the national Republicans.”

via Why the IRS Went After the Tea Party Instead of Establishment Republicans.

'You and your children will be next': Islamic fanatics wielding meat cleavers butcher and try to behead a British soldier, taking their war on the West to a new level of horror

One of the men arrested is believed to be Michael Adebolajo

Two men repeatedly stab and tried to behead off-duty soldier in SE London

They shouted 'Allah Akbar' attack and told witnesses to film them

Charged at police officers with rusty revolver, knives and meat cleavers

Killing took place 200 yards from barracks and close to primary school

Both men placed under arrest after being treated for gunshot wounds

PM: Killing is 'sickening' and Britain will 'never buckle' in face of terror

World War 4 is still going on, folks. Via Woolwich attack: Two men 'hack soldier wearing Help for Heroes T-shirt to death with machetes in suspected terror attack' | Mail Online.

The dismal performance of the IRS is but a symptom of a much larger disease which has taken root in the charters of many of the major administrative agencies in the United States today: the permit power. Private individuals are not allowed to engage in certain activities or to claim certain benefits without the approval of some major government agency. The standards for approval are nebulous at best, which makes it hard for any outside reviewer to overturn the agency’s decision on a particular application.

That power also gives the agency discretion to drag out its review, since few individuals or groups are foolhardy enough to jump the gun and set up shop without obtaining the necessary approvals first. It takes literally a few minutes for a skilled government administrator to demand information that costs millions of dollars to collect and that can tie up a project for years. That delay becomes even longer for projects that need approval from multiple agencies at the federal or state level, or both.

The beauty of all of this (for the government) is that there is no effective legal remedy. Any lawsuit that protests the improper government delay only delays the matter more. Worse still, it also invites that agency (and other agencies with which it has good relations) to slow down the clock on any other applications that the same party brings to the table. Faced with this unappetizing scenario, most sophisticated applicants prefer quiet diplomacy to frontal assault, especially if their solid connections or campaign contributions might expedite the application process. Every eager applicant may also be stymied by astute competitors intent on slowing the approval process down, in order to protect their own financial profits. So more quiet diplomacy leads to further social waste.

Get rid of the IRS and the income tax, and replace with either a flat tax, or my preferred Fair Tax (a retail consumption tax). Via The Real Lesson of the IRS Scandal | Hoover Institution.

This is just genius:

POE has no truck with Indians or Nature. He makes no bones about Red Brothers and Wigwams.

He is absolutely concerned with the disintegration-processes of his own psyche. As we have said, the rhythm of American art-activity is dual.

(1) A disintegrating and sloughing of the old consciousness.

(2) The forming of a new consciousness underneath.

Fenimore Cooper has the two vibrations going on together. Poe has only one, only the disintegrative vibration. This makes him almost more a scientist than an artist.

Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's 'morbid' tales need have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die and disintegrate, because the old write psyche has to be gradually broken down before anything else can come to pass.

Man must be stripped even of himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process.

Via DHL Chapter 6, hat tip to Tyler Cowen.

Last week we updated the project site layout with a variation on Bootstrap called Spacelab, and incorporated our new logo. Along with that, over the past few weeks, we have been quietly releasing updated versions of all our library packages. Many thanks to everyone who contributed ...

Via http://auraphp.com/blog/2013/05/09/new-site-logo-releases/.

If you like clean code, fully decoupled libraries, and truly independent packages, then the Aura project is for you. Download a single package and start using it in your project today, with no added dependencies.

Consider the reality we're living in today. Schoolchildren kept in line by use of drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall. Technology that is as exasperating as it is necessary. Criminal syndicates operating at the speed of light from the other side of the world. A president with a record so convoluted and opaque that it's impossible to tell what is false and what isn't. (See Dick's short story, "The Mold of Yancy," in which a presidential candidate is totally unavailable and never seen outside of his video ads, because, it turns out, he doesn't actually exist.) Masses of people living in virtual alternate universes -- game clubs, social media -- in preference to dealing with the world as it exists. An encroaching surveillance state intent on tracking every living individual at all times under every possible circumstance. A would-be aristocracy slowly separating itself from the masses. Effectively invisible weapons that can kill from high altitude without the victim even knowing he was targeted.

 

What is this but a Philip K. Dick universe?

 

Dick, it seems, was a far superior prophet than the colleagues who disdained him, because, unlike many of them, he had a line on human nature, which never changes.

via Articles: Philip K. Dick and Our Predicament.

1) Revenues collected by governments for public education in the United States totaled $593.7 billion. About $261.4 billion came from local sources, $258.2 billion from state sources, and $74 billion from federal sources.

2) That’s about $1,922 from each and every American.

3) Or $2,531 from each adult, 18 and older.

4) Or $4,567 from each non-farm American worker on a payroll.

5) That amounts to 11.4 percent of the average worker’s salary, or $2.20 per hour.

6) The average American employee thus works almost one hour every day to fund public schools.

7) It would take the entire salary of 14,842,500 employees to pay for U.S. public schools, equivalent to the entire retail trade workforce.

via Seven Not-So-Fun Facts About the Costs of Public Education « The Greenroom.

... in 1938, three systems of government were contending for global supremacy. One of them is still around: yours. Anglo-American liberal democracy. Had military luck favored either of the others - National Socialism or Marxist-Leninism - we can also be sure that it would have discovered and reveled in its foes' every misdeed, and that it would have approached its own, if at all, tentatively and ambiguously.

If only one can survive, at least two must be illegitimate, and irredeemably criminal. And the survivor will certainly paint them as such. But suppose all three are irredemably criminal? If the third is an Orwellian mind-control state as well, its subjects are unlikely to regard it as such. It will certainly not prosecute itself.

The third, our third, is very different from the other two. We must remember that American democracy is categorically distinct from National Socialism and the people's democracies in too many ways to count. Since there are too many ways to count, we will not bother counting them. We remain entitled to notice parallels. (For instance, it is almost more aesthetic criticism than political or economic analysis, but do read Wolfgang Schivelbusch's Three New Deals.)

But no number of categorical distinctions from the other two can alter our estimate of the third's criminality. There are as many ways to be a criminal as there are crimes. That we hang the murderer does not mean we must award a prize to the thief.

I must admit, this is a fascinating thought. I wonder, is it true? My recent readings of The Last Psychiatrist, and indeed my re-familiarization with Orwell's 1984, make me think it is more true than I would like. Via Unqualified Reservations: A gentle introduction to Unqualified Reservations (part 1).

If you google “leading cause of injury to women”, you will immediately get a whole slew of links to domestic violence websites, where the “fact” that men are the leading cause of injury to women is repeated endlessly.

 

But it’s not true.

 

The leading cause of injury to women GLOBALLY is traffic. Yeah, cars are way more dangerous than men. The second leading cause of injury is a fall. Ladders are more dangerous than men.

Third place? "Intentional self-harm." Via Louis C.K. says men are the number one threat to women. That’s not even close to being true, so why say it? | judgybitch.

Every time that a client visited the company or a new employee was hired, management would stop at my desk and point out that I was a woman. It sometimes felt like being a freak in a circus. It was unpleasant to be seen as something other than a skilled programmer. I once turned down a job offer because they really wanted to have a woman among their 40 male developers. I immediately thought of other candidates who will be turned down merely because they were male. The decision process seemed unfair. My sense of justice could not allow that, so I removed myself from the equation and gave all these men a fair chance.

And so every time that a conference asks for more women to submit, I am reminded of that job interview. Since having more women is a clear objective, then all decisions have to be weighed against it. Sure, we all want to think that we are not biased, but we are. As soon as we make something our mission, it inevitably affects our decisions. For me, conferences have nothing to do with gender. Gender is irrelevant. We’re here to talk about technology. When presented with two proposals on the same topic, I hope that a woman would not automatically win because someone wants to see a pie chart with equal slices. That is not what equal opportunity means. I am a woman, and I don’t want unfair advantages.

Do we really need to turn gender distribution into a problem? How exactly will the world be a better place with more women speakers? It’s just a number in a spreadsheet that some choose to find annoying. I’ll tell you what’s really annoying: people not automating tests, people withholding information about threats to projects, people not indexing their database tables or over-indexing them, people not using any cache, people skipping software analysis and design, etc. These are the beast that we need to slay. The rest is just a distraction, ready to suck all our time and deviate us from the path to knowledge and collaboration. When you review my application, please consider my skills, my character and the relevance of the topic for your audience. Don’t worry about my gender.

*That* is what a successful attitude looks like. Bravo, Anna. Via Anna Filina » IT Is About Technology, Not About Gender.