And a bit of much needed relief.....
Saturday, September 11, 2010
We Need A Battalion Of Men Like This
Wouldn't want to over do it.
"Men of Cornwall stop your dreaming
Can't you see their spear points gleaming?
See their warriors' pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready.STAND AND NEVER YIELD!"
- "Men of Harlech"
Sung by Rick Rescorla in the Ia Drang Valley 1965
Can't you see their spear points gleaming?
See their warriors' pennants streaming
To this battlefield.
Men of Cornwall stand ye steady
It cannot be ever said ye
for the battle were not ready.STAND AND NEVER YIELD!"
- "Men of Harlech"
Sung by Rick Rescorla in the Ia Drang Valley 1965
and in the stairway of WTC Tower 2 on September 11, 2001
Getting It
From the NY Post...
...
The attacks were acts of mass murder, committed to advance political goals that were -- and remain -- antithetical to civilization itself....
Lenin wrote that the purpose of terror ism is to terrorize, and he was right. In this case, the object was to weaken the will of the established order to resist murderous medievalists who meant to drag the West back to the 9th century.
Who still mean to.
Even if important people don't see it.
For all its horror, 9/11 was not a declaration of war by radical Islam.
Rather, it was a dramatic escalation of a war that had begun decades earlier -- in Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran, in the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Lebanon, in the first World Trade Center bombing and in the attack on USS Cole.
Obama notes that America is "not at war with Islam." That may be true, but it means absolutely nothing if ele ments of Islam are at war with America.
...
Today, America looks back and mourns -- appropriately so.If that was the lesson, than have we passed the test?
But America also needs leaders willing to stop pretending that the threat is something other than what it is -- organizationally diffuse, yes, but ideologically united and firmly committed to the destruction of any society that doesn't embrace its nihilistic imperatives.
That's the lesson of 9/11.
James Lileks And A Bit Of Wisdom
Glenn Reynolds has posted a link to something that James Lileks wrote two years after 9/11/2001. James is a tremendous writer. I've been reading his stuff for decades.
He has a couple things spot on...
The people who attacked us will not be satisfied with a diminished US presence on the world stage. They want our beacon of individual liberty extinguished precisely because the premise of an individual being free to reject their distorted, tortured ideology undermines their authority to dictate how people live...or not.
The continued refusal by some to understand this simple truth is a "grim comfort", as James puts it. If they can remain willfully blind to the objectives of our enemy in this conflict, then we must be doing a pretty fair job of fighting it.
It will be a long war. And not unlike the spring of 1942, it isn't exactly clear that we will win. I have no doubt that we have the brains, the people, and the resources to utterly destroy the intolerant and extremist strain of Islam that is causing so much trouble in the world.
I wonder if we have the will to do so.
He has a couple things spot on...
Two years later I take a certain grim comfort in some people’s disinterest in the war; if you’d told me two years ago that people would be piling on the President and bitching about slow progress in Iraq, I would have known in a second that the nation hadn’t suffered another attack. When the precise location of Madonna’s tongue is big news, you can bet the hospitals aren’t full of smallpox victims. Of course some people are impatient with those who still recall the shock of 9/11; the same people were crowding the message boards of internet sites on the afternoon of the attacks, eager to blame everyone but the hijackers. They hate this nation. In their hearts, they hate humanity. They would rather cheer the perfect devils than come to the aid of a compromised angel. They can talk for hours about how wrong it was to kill babies, busboys, businessmen, receptionists, janitors, fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers - and then they lean towards you, eyes wide, and they say the fatal word:
But.
And then you realize that the eulogy is just a preface. All that concern for the dead is nothing more than the knuckle-cracking of an organist who’s going to play an E minor chord until we all agree we had it coming.
The people who attacked us will not be satisfied with a diminished US presence on the world stage. They want our beacon of individual liberty extinguished precisely because the premise of an individual being free to reject their distorted, tortured ideology undermines their authority to dictate how people live...or not.
The continued refusal by some to understand this simple truth is a "grim comfort", as James puts it. If they can remain willfully blind to the objectives of our enemy in this conflict, then we must be doing a pretty fair job of fighting it.
I’ve no doubt that if Seattle or Boston or Manhattan goes up in a bright white flash there will be those who blame it all on Bush. We squandered the world’s good will. We threw away the opportunity to atone, and lashed out. Really? You want to see lashing out? Imagine Kabul and Mecca and Baghdad and Tehran on 9/14 crowned with mushroom clouds: that’s lashing out. Imagine the President in the National Cathedral castigating Islam instead of sitting next to an Imam who's giving a homily. Mosques burned, oil fields occupied, smart bombs slamming into Syrian palaces. We could have gone full Roman on anyone we wanted, but we didn’t. And we won’t.
Which is why this war will be long.
It will be a long war. And not unlike the spring of 1942, it isn't exactly clear that we will win. I have no doubt that we have the brains, the people, and the resources to utterly destroy the intolerant and extremist strain of Islam that is causing so much trouble in the world.
I wonder if we have the will to do so.
The Only Memory Doomed Not To Fade
I don't want it to be 9/11 anymore. I don't want to think about people racing down choked staircases. I don't want to think about firemen running up them. I don't want to think about people deciding whether or not to take a 1300 foot fall or stay in a burning building. I don't want to see the ones that jumped falling. I don't want to imagine the ones that stayed. I don't want to see those two buildings as they slowly implode; pancaking floor after floor until nothing is left but dust and smoke and the knowledge that utter meanness still walks the earth.
I want to go back to 9/10/2001 when the most significant issues of the day were Gary Condit, and the next iteration of "campaign finance reform". I want to go back to wondering when the other shoe would drop.
Instead, I am doomed to remember. Do you?
Or have you forgotten.
I want to go back to 9/10/2001 when the most significant issues of the day were Gary Condit, and the next iteration of "campaign finance reform". I want to go back to wondering when the other shoe would drop.
Instead, I am doomed to remember. Do you?
Or have you forgotten.
Friday, September 10, 2010
Tax Delinquency......With Lessons Learned!!
I saw this item today over at Glenn Reynolds' Instapundit site:
One aspect of the current government criticisms currently on display is the differential...dare I say disproportionate in many cases...treatment that the IRS offers to those who theoretically owe federal incomes taxes. The two current poster boys are US Representative Charles Rangel who "forgot" to report well over US$1 million dollars in income over a number of years and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who owed $14,847 in back taxes. Mr. Geithner apparently had no intention of paying until he was nominated for his current post.
Mr. Rangel has provided amended returns and paid the taxes that were owed. He has not paid any interest nor was he assessed any penalties. Mr. Geithner paid $15,000 in interest, but was assessed no penalties by the IRS.
No normal citizen could expect such lenient treatment from the IRS when they experience a legitimate tax debt. Trust me. I had one. We weren't in the same league as Mr. Rangel and Mr. Geithner. Yet when I asked to receive the same treatment that Messrs. Rangel an Geithner received, I was told that the IRS cannot guarantee equal treatment for all taxpayers.
Apparently, the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution is not applicable when it comes to matters related to US income taxes.
Glenn has been following the fiscal follies of both Messrs. Rangel and Geithner for quite some time. Additionally, Glenn has been following the huge disconnect between those that run our government. Part of that disconnect is the penalties that our government "masters" and the well connected never seem to pay for violating public laws and policies while us little folks bear the brunt of an overly officious, oafish, and offensive federal government.
Pitchforks were made for situations where public servants forget who they work for.
I believe that Glenn was attempting to demonstrate that people in the federal government were disproportionately above the (tax) law. Glenn's post linked to this LA Times blog which continued the theme of federal workers that were unduly delinquent in paying their taxes. The blog points out several federal departments who's employees have significant tax delinquency issues and who also employ several well connected individuals with tax delinquency issues.
That LA Times blog entry was based on this Washington Post story by T.W. Farnam. T.W.'s story is focused on Capital Hill employees with tax delinquency issues. The general thought again was that the people that are imposing laws on us are apparently unable or unwilling to abide by them as well. In his story, he pointed out that the employees of the Executive Office of the President owed about as much under Barack Obama in 2009 as they had under George W. Bush in 2008.
And that got me to thinking.
If you take the federal civilian employees, the US Postal service (which are not counted as federal employees), and those serving in uniform, the US federal government employs roughly 5.3 million people. The total labor force runs roughly 154.5 million people. That makes federal employees be roughly 3.4% of the total labor force.
Alternatively, if you count only taxpayers, there are 138 million people. That makes federal employees be roughly 3.8% of the total.
The story by T.W. Farnam had a link to a more complete listing of federal employee tax delinquency that was broken down by department/group. You can sort that list a couple of different ways. But the one way you cannot sort it is by the average tax debt per person within a given group. I had to do that myself. We will get there in a moment.
The total tax delinquency of federal employees was roughly US$3.3 billion. The total tax delinquency for the entire United States was roughly US$120 billion in 2003. That's the only number I could readily find. At that rate, federal employees are only 2.76% of the total delinquent tax bill. Given the state of the economy since 2003, I think it is safe to say that the total tax delinquency has gone up just a bit. Which makes federal employees responsible for less than 2.7% of the total bill owed.
So the big lesson learned here is always get to the data before you draw a conclusion. While I do think that the larger point of government policy makers creating laws and policies that they have no intention of obeying, but that they certainly expect us to obey holds true, this particular story doesn't necessarily justify Glenn's comment from above.
Sort of.
The more complete listing linked above had 85 categories of people. It took the data and calculated the average tax debt per person in each category. I then ranked the groups on that average data. The results were surprising.
The table below shows the top 20 categories, plus some others that I found interesting.
The first big surprise is how many government agencies that are directly responsible for either setting or enforcing tax policies have employees that cannot follow those policies. And we're not talking about chump change!
The Executive Office of the President comes in at number 5 on the list!
The Administrative Office of the Courts comes in at number 13.
The US House is 15th on the list.
Perhaps there is some validity to the idea that our government is staffed by people that are unwilling to live under the laws and policies that the rest of us have to observe and obey.
You would think that money men would know how to pay their taxes. Yet the US Federal Reserve - Board of Governors ranks 23rd on the list. The US Treasury department came in at number 67. I am not sure how comforting it is to know that 1200 Treasury department employees cannot satisfy their tax bill in a timely manner.
Due to my military service, I am naturally curious about the military related categories.
Active duty personnel came in at a very respectable 74 out of 85 categories. That may be the result of their lower than average pay simply limiting their ability to get into trouble with the IRS.
Yet the civilian component of the military services....the people responsible for maintaining civilian control....all fared much worse. The Navy at #43, the DoD at #53, the Air Force at #56, and the Army at #57. How can these civilians claim any authority over the active duty military when they cannot complete the simple task of paying their tax debt is beyond me.
Even worse, military retirees were 9th on the list with 84,000 tax scofflaws while civilian government retirees were 39th with only 40,000 tax reprobates! Unacceptable!
When we think about elected or appointed policy makers, I think the general theme of people that pass laws for us to obey, but not necessarily for them is sound. Mr. Rangel and Mr. Geithner are simply the last in a very long line of people that either do not understand or do not care how laws and policies affect the rest of us.
At the same time, I think we ought to be careful about using something as innocuous as tax debt data to slur all federal employees. That brush is more than a little too broad.
I didn't do a rigorous statistical regression, but a plot of the data is mostly linear. While there is a big difference in the dollars owed per person from 2nd to 85th on the list, each office is only incrementally more delinquent than the group below it. The exception at the top of the list is the Presidio Trust with a whopping $68,000 per tax debtor.
The other notable exceptions were at the bottom of the list where six agencies have 35 tax debtors with a cumulative tax debt that is less than the average delinquent from the Presidio Trust.
I would like to have population data for each category as well as some hard numbers of total taxpayers for comparison purposes. I think it is pretty easy to see where the Presidio Trust is a hotbed of tax delinquency, but it would be good to know what percentage of Presidio Trust employees are tax debtors. It would also be good to compare that percentage with the percentage of the general population.
There is no such thing as too much data.
It’s easy to see why these people don’t mind higher taxes. They don’t plan on paying ‘em anyway . . . .
One aspect of the current government criticisms currently on display is the differential...dare I say disproportionate in many cases...treatment that the IRS offers to those who theoretically owe federal incomes taxes. The two current poster boys are US Representative Charles Rangel who "forgot" to report well over US$1 million dollars in income over a number of years and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner who owed $14,847 in back taxes. Mr. Geithner apparently had no intention of paying until he was nominated for his current post.
Mr. Rangel has provided amended returns and paid the taxes that were owed. He has not paid any interest nor was he assessed any penalties. Mr. Geithner paid $15,000 in interest, but was assessed no penalties by the IRS.
No normal citizen could expect such lenient treatment from the IRS when they experience a legitimate tax debt. Trust me. I had one. We weren't in the same league as Mr. Rangel and Mr. Geithner. Yet when I asked to receive the same treatment that Messrs. Rangel an Geithner received, I was told that the IRS cannot guarantee equal treatment for all taxpayers.
Apparently, the 14th Amendment of the US Constitution is not applicable when it comes to matters related to US income taxes.
Glenn has been following the fiscal follies of both Messrs. Rangel and Geithner for quite some time. Additionally, Glenn has been following the huge disconnect between those that run our government. Part of that disconnect is the penalties that our government "masters" and the well connected never seem to pay for violating public laws and policies while us little folks bear the brunt of an overly officious, oafish, and offensive federal government.
Pitchforks were made for situations where public servants forget who they work for.
I believe that Glenn was attempting to demonstrate that people in the federal government were disproportionately above the (tax) law. Glenn's post linked to this LA Times blog which continued the theme of federal workers that were unduly delinquent in paying their taxes. The blog points out several federal departments who's employees have significant tax delinquency issues and who also employ several well connected individuals with tax delinquency issues.
That LA Times blog entry was based on this Washington Post story by T.W. Farnam. T.W.'s story is focused on Capital Hill employees with tax delinquency issues. The general thought again was that the people that are imposing laws on us are apparently unable or unwilling to abide by them as well. In his story, he pointed out that the employees of the Executive Office of the President owed about as much under Barack Obama in 2009 as they had under George W. Bush in 2008.
And that got me to thinking.
If you take the federal civilian employees, the US Postal service (which are not counted as federal employees), and those serving in uniform, the US federal government employs roughly 5.3 million people. The total labor force runs roughly 154.5 million people. That makes federal employees be roughly 3.4% of the total labor force.
Alternatively, if you count only taxpayers, there are 138 million people. That makes federal employees be roughly 3.8% of the total.
The story by T.W. Farnam had a link to a more complete listing of federal employee tax delinquency that was broken down by department/group. You can sort that list a couple of different ways. But the one way you cannot sort it is by the average tax debt per person within a given group. I had to do that myself. We will get there in a moment.
The total tax delinquency of federal employees was roughly US$3.3 billion. The total tax delinquency for the entire United States was roughly US$120 billion in 2003. That's the only number I could readily find. At that rate, federal employees are only 2.76% of the total delinquent tax bill. Given the state of the economy since 2003, I think it is safe to say that the total tax delinquency has gone up just a bit. Which makes federal employees responsible for less than 2.7% of the total bill owed.
So the big lesson learned here is always get to the data before you draw a conclusion. While I do think that the larger point of government policy makers creating laws and policies that they have no intention of obeying, but that they certainly expect us to obey holds true, this particular story doesn't necessarily justify Glenn's comment from above.
Sort of.
The more complete listing linked above had 85 categories of people. It took the data and calculated the average tax debt per person in each category. I then ranked the groups on that average data. The results were surprising.
The table below shows the top 20 categories, plus some others that I found interesting.
| Index | Organization/Type of worker to the IRS | Number of delinquent employees | Balance owed | Average Owed |
| 1 | Presidio Trust | 10 | $680,682.00 | $68,068.20 |
| 2 | Office of Government Ethics | 3 | $75,304.00 | $25,101.33 |
| 3 | Education | 163 | $3,995,066.00 | $24,509.61 |
| 4 | Tennessee Valley Authority | 292 | $6,766,333.00 | $23,172.37 |
| 5 | Executive Office of the President | 41 | $831,055.00 | $20,269.63 |
| 6 | Federal Housing Finance Board | 4 | $79,829.00 | $19,957.25 |
| 7 | National Endowment for the Humanities | 4 | $79,279.00 | $19,819.75 |
| 8 | Nuclear Regulatory Commission | 57 | $1,099,897.00 | $19,296.44 |
| 9 | Military retirees | 84034 | $1,525,688,378.00 | $18,155.61 |
| 10 | Railroad Retirement Board | 31 | $531,798.00 | $17,154.77 |
| 11 | Export-Import Bank of the United States | 10 | $166,288.00 | $16,628.80 |
| 12 | Labor | 463 | $7,481,463.00 | $16,158.67 |
| 13 | Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts | 754 | $11,808,236.00 | $15,660.79 |
| 14 | Equal Employment Opportunity Commission | 84 | $1,303,316.00 | $15,515.67 |
| 15 | U.S. House of Representatives | 421 | $6,524,892.00 | $15,498.56 |
| 16 | Energy | 331 | $4,899,649.00 | $14,802.56 |
| 17 | Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation | 155 | $2,249,326.00 | $14,511.78 |
| 18 | Federal Election Commission | 8 | $115,747.00 | $14,468.38 |
| 19 | Commerce | 1556 | $22,246,314.00 | $14,297.12 |
| 20 | Office of Personnel Management | 172 | $2,367,268.00 | $13,763.19 |
| 23 | Federal Reserve System - Board of Governors | 81 | $1,076,733.00 | $13,293.00 |
| 28 | U.S. Senate | 217 | $2,774,836.00 | $12,787.26 |
| 29 | U.S. Tax Court | 4 | $51,111.00 | $12,777.75 |
| 39 | Civilian retirees | 40000 | $454,938,448.00 | $11,373.46 |
| 43 | Navy | 6841 | $72,432,604.00 | $10,588.01 |
| 53 | Defense | 4454 | $38,495,128.00 | $8,642.82 |
| 56 | Air Force | 5817 | $46,787,244.00 | $8,043.19 |
| 57 | Army | 11330 | $89,966,859.00 | $7,940.59 |
| 67 | Treasury | 1204 | $7,670,814.00 | $6,371.11 |
| 74 | Military active duty | 28853 | $109,557,536.00 | $3,797.09 |
The first big surprise is how many government agencies that are directly responsible for either setting or enforcing tax policies have employees that cannot follow those policies. And we're not talking about chump change!
The Executive Office of the President comes in at number 5 on the list!
The Administrative Office of the Courts comes in at number 13.
The US House is 15th on the list.
Perhaps there is some validity to the idea that our government is staffed by people that are unwilling to live under the laws and policies that the rest of us have to observe and obey.
You would think that money men would know how to pay their taxes. Yet the US Federal Reserve - Board of Governors ranks 23rd on the list. The US Treasury department came in at number 67. I am not sure how comforting it is to know that 1200 Treasury department employees cannot satisfy their tax bill in a timely manner.
Due to my military service, I am naturally curious about the military related categories.
Active duty personnel came in at a very respectable 74 out of 85 categories. That may be the result of their lower than average pay simply limiting their ability to get into trouble with the IRS.
Yet the civilian component of the military services....the people responsible for maintaining civilian control....all fared much worse. The Navy at #43, the DoD at #53, the Air Force at #56, and the Army at #57. How can these civilians claim any authority over the active duty military when they cannot complete the simple task of paying their tax debt is beyond me.
Even worse, military retirees were 9th on the list with 84,000 tax scofflaws while civilian government retirees were 39th with only 40,000 tax reprobates! Unacceptable!
When we think about elected or appointed policy makers, I think the general theme of people that pass laws for us to obey, but not necessarily for them is sound. Mr. Rangel and Mr. Geithner are simply the last in a very long line of people that either do not understand or do not care how laws and policies affect the rest of us.
At the same time, I think we ought to be careful about using something as innocuous as tax debt data to slur all federal employees. That brush is more than a little too broad.
I didn't do a rigorous statistical regression, but a plot of the data is mostly linear. While there is a big difference in the dollars owed per person from 2nd to 85th on the list, each office is only incrementally more delinquent than the group below it. The exception at the top of the list is the Presidio Trust with a whopping $68,000 per tax debtor.
The other notable exceptions were at the bottom of the list where six agencies have 35 tax debtors with a cumulative tax debt that is less than the average delinquent from the Presidio Trust.
I would like to have population data for each category as well as some hard numbers of total taxpayers for comparison purposes. I think it is pretty easy to see where the Presidio Trust is a hotbed of tax delinquency, but it would be good to know what percentage of Presidio Trust employees are tax debtors. It would also be good to compare that percentage with the percentage of the general population.
There is no such thing as too much data.
Thursday, September 9, 2010
Monday, September 6, 2010
An Evening With A Pair Of Strippers
In this particular case, the strippers were Stephan and Darrin. And their strips are "Pearls Before Swine" and "Candorville".
Candor and Pearls: An Evening of Social Satire from the Comics Pages from Walnut Creek Library Foundation on Vimeo.
Candor and Pearls: An Evening of Social Satire from the Comics Pages from Walnut Creek Library Foundation on Vimeo.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
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