Teacher, my brain is full. May I be excused?

This is not The Onion - it is a cover from a catalog of courses for accountants put out by a firm in Bozeman.
This is not The Onion – it is a cover from a catalog of courses for accountants put out by a firm in Bozeman.
Phew! What a relief now to have my continuing education credits in place, and a grueling 16-hour tax conference behind me. My daughter, a non-accountant who works for a CPA firm in Montana, tells me that the people in that office all behave as if they are the exception to the rule that accountants are rigid and dull and humorless. They are not exceptions, she says.

She also says that I used to be like that when she was young. My daughter, you see, is very smart in human relations, knowing how to play her dad.

My most lasting reflection on the conference is how it focused almost entirely on the problems of the rich, and at the opportunities we have to save them a buck here or there, keeping a slice for ourselves of course. The tax law has yielded many new opportunities in that regard. There was also quite a bit on the health care law, nothing earth-shattering. As it is a room full of starched-shirt right-wing accountants, few are aware that the lower classes are now a conduit for a huge subsidy to the important classes: the corporations, their well-paid managers and employees. (I mean only the upper-tier employees.) No one in the room questions the need for health insurance companies, as worthless a societal segment as those who used to make their living bringing slaves to the new world. Some institutions we can do without.

The trade magazine for the profession is called the “Journal of Accountancy,” and not the “Progressive Magazine.”

Ah, but I am light of foot today, full of new energy, ready to clear my desk and get on with life. It’s over! My license is in place for two more years. My brain is hereby clicked to its “off” position.

A rare opportunity

Tax conferring today … Not fun but necessary. This paragraph that follows needs emphasis, as if affects everyone:

You will receive a notice from the IRS stating that you owe the penalty (for failure to have health insurance). The IRS can collect the money by reducing the amount of any tax refund that you are owed in the future. But the law says that you will not be subject to criminal prosecution and the government cannot file a notice of lien or file a levy on your property.

Got that? They went off the rails. The health insurance industry wrote and passed ACA, mandating that we purchase products from private companies. They must have assumed that a penalty on a private mandate would be unconstitutional, if not the mandate itself. But AHIP was insistent. So they wrote a penalty and made it unenforceable.

I expect this to change, as the mullahs in black robes ruled that the mandate is a tax. But for the time being, if you are penalized for failure to have insurance and are not owed a refund, tell IRS to f*** off. It’s rare we can do that.

Deadland

deadwood_wideweb__430x303_2I just walked around our house opening blinds – it is 6:40 AM and it is pitch black outside. This time of year we normally subscribe to television, but mainstream fare is too laden with advertising to be palatable, no matter the quality of the programming inserted between the commercials. I do from time-to-time hop around those channels, often hitting five or six channels before finding one not in ad mode. What I see is pretty silly, even stupid.

Sitcoms are so poorly written and acted that they merely highlight the sham of laugh tracks. Unless openly perverse and mocking and having no intent of offering a serious message (Seinfeld in the 90’s, Two and One-Half Men more recently), they are either cheesy soap operas or lurid tales of hyper-sexual twenty-somethings. I haven’t sat through serious drama – I refuse to believe that beautiful men and women become brilliant doctors, police and lawyers, and at young age to boot. Have you been to a hospital? People of physical beauty do not have to work or study hard to succeed.
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“And we won.”

If is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it. (Upton Sinclair)

If the strategy of the Pew Charitable Trusts is divide and conquer, it has succeeded. Pew has systematically over the past few decades become one of the most active funding sources for mainstream environmental groups. As a legacy of the Sinclair oil fortune, its activities might represent a guilty collective conscious. More likely, it’s an ongoing effort to neutralize opponents.

This article, by John S. Adams in the Great Falls Tribune, demonstrates divide and conquer success. There are deep divides now among environmentalists in Montana.

The divide is not philosophical, at least on the surface. All parties involved claim to have conservation as their primary goal. However, since the late 1980’s there’s been a split, and this coincides with the dominance of Pew as a primary funding source. The split is best described as “activists” and “collaborators.”
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Syrian butchers: Views differ

I can tell you from my viewpoint that spinning Montana’s newspapers was as easy as spinning a top. There’s precious little congressional news that is actually broken by a Montana newspaper. That works to the advantage of the politician. Absolutely. When you are free from a burrowing press, you pretty much have clear sailing. (Pat Williams, on leaving office in 1997)

Speaking of managed news, what I’ve seen today reminds me of an event involving former Montana Senator Conrad Burns back in the election campaign of 2000. One of his campaign staffers called a newspaper reporter and went on a rant about his opponent that year – Bryan Schweitzer. The words and accusations were so hard and furious as to cause the reporter to go directly to press with it, and the story caught wind.

I later interviewed Schweitzer for my little public access show at that time, oddly enough called “Piece of Mind.” I mentioned that event to him, and he gave me a bit of inside baseball. Burns had gone off leash, gotten drunk and went into a racist anti-Indian tirade with enough people witnessing to cause problems. The campaign was in damage control mode, and used the telephone call to the reporter as a deflection device. It worked. The phone call became the story, and the rant never made the news. Our news media is ever so pliable!

This came to mind this morning as I read the following two stories. Judge for yourself what the underlying reality might be.

From RT.com: ‘Whole families murdered’: Syrian rebels execute over 80 civilians outside Damascus

From Huffington Post: The Butcher kills another 76

One might be tempted to assume that the truth lies somewhere between the extremes. That’s a logical fallacy, in my opinion. The truth can lie anywhere, on the edges, in the middle, or not even apparent. From my frame of reference, I am inclined to think that HuffPo is lying or exaggerating or dissembling, as it has been my experience that the US news media is corrupt at the top and clueless at the bottom.

But I am open to suggestion.

Chinese exceptionalism

Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president, in unflattering photo used to advance narrative here
Jiang Zemin, former Chinese president, in unflattering photo used to advance narrative here
Travel is a good thing. It allows us to experience foreign cultures first-hand. If done without stereotypes interfering with impressions, it can be a rich experience.

On the other hand, being in a country for a short time, experiencing mostly the tourist interface, tempts us to form far-reaching conclusions based on scant evidence.

That in mind, I wanted to share a couple of experiences, not direct interactions, with Chinese people on our Asia trip.
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Working on theme here …

Give me time please. The mountains are Annapurna and Annapurna South in the Himalayas, which were our backdrop for our recent six day trek. I like that photo because we took it ourselves, however, the foreground is overwritten. I have the ability use others, but not today.

Too much sky – maybe cropping would help. But then too much white? Accountants do not do good web page.

Pigs cannot fly

  • Truism: A claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device and is the opposite of falsism.
  • Falsism: A falsism is a claim that is clearly and self-evidently wrong. A falsism is usually used merely as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device. An example is “pigs can fly.”

“America does not at the moment have a functioning democracy. (Former President Jimmy Carter)

Falsism? If so, evidence would include the matter being open for discussion, with raging debate, condemnations, discussions at high levels, and television and radio pundits blowing wind from all directions.

Truism? If so, the matter would be ignored in all mainstream media, and only reported in the foreign country where it was made (Germany), not even in the English-language section of the Spiegel website, which printed the original interview.

Truism.

It all goes back to the Bay of Pigs

Castro, ruthless, cunning bastard
Castro, ruthless, cunning bastard
Part of the problem with Swede coming in here as he does with his link-farts is that various topics of discussion are not explored in a rational manner. Worse yet is that his demonization of all that is non-American causes an equal and opposite reaction. Such is the case with our neighbor to the south, Cuba.

Allen Dulles, ruthless, cunning bastard
Allen Dulles, ruthless, cunning bastard
Swede has the American propaganda model firmly in place, that of evil terrorists (Oops! Wrong century) communists and their firing squads as noble Americans try to rescue them. In the face of such blather one must face the reality of Cuba, good and bad on all sides. But in Swede’s mind, any evil on the part of Castro makes his argument a slam-dunk winner.

Back during the time of McKinley and JP Morgan’s stooge Teddy Roosevelt, a Cuban revolution to oust Spain was hijacked by the Americans. A courageous revolution of liberation was diverted to the benefit of a new oppressor.
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The unnaturalness of celibacy

1466292_563152120423382_61342453_nThose who know me also know that my older brother was a Catholic priest. He died in 2011. Anyone who knew Fr. Steve Tokarski also knew that he was a man of impeccable character and credentials. Nary a hint of scandal came within a thousand miles of him during his life, and for good reason.

The logo to the left, taken from a Meanwhile in Art post, was designed for a Catholic Archdiocesan Youth Commission in 1973, and seems appropriate. It won an award at that time, and now appears creepy. But there is a reason for the misbehavior of priests.

I can explain part of it. I do not condone it. I can explain the behavior of an abused child who in turn abuses other children as an adult. That does not mean that jail sentences, shame and shunning are not in order. Explaining does not justify.
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