First the IRS ate your Christmas turkey. Now they are coming to crush your childhood dreams, too.
(Via Technology Liberation Front 2007-01-29.)
LOS ANGELES, California (AP) — Brian Emmett’s childhood fantasy came true when he won a free trip to outer space.
But the 31-year-old was crushed when he had to cancel his reservation because of Uncle Sam.
Emmett won his ticket to the stars in a 2005 sweepstakes by Oracle Corp., in which he answered a series of online questions on Java computer code.
He became an instant celebrity, giving media interviews and appearing on stage at Oracle’s trade show.
For the self-described space buff who has attended space camp and watched shuttle launches from Kennedy Space Center, it seemed like a chance to become an astronaut on a dime.
Then reality hit. After some number-crunching, Emmett realized he would have to report the $138,000 galactic joy ride as income and owe $25,000 in taxes.
Unwilling to sink into debt, the software consultant from the San Francisco Bay area gave up his seat.
There was definitely a period of mourning. I was totally crestfallen,Emmett said.Everything you had hoped for as a kid sort of evaporates in front of you.
Normally you would think that winning a contest would be the only way that people other than the hyper-rich might have a chance to experience space tourism in the near future; right now the cash price of a space trip is prohibitiely expensive for anyone else. So prohibitively expensive that just paying the tax on that much income would be prohibitively expensive for anyone else, too.
But if the tax bureaucrats didn’t make sure that you pay for your once-in-a-lifetime chance a trip to the stars, at a rate assessed according to the current, prohibitively expensive cash value of that trip, then who would? Best to keep the rabble away from a chance at being astronauts anyway; hopes and dreams can be dangerous things.
Bureaucratic rationality, n. The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy without permission.
So it turns out that yesterday was officially proclaimed Milton Friedman Day in the state of California, by executive edict of the Governor. Because, really, what better way is there to honor a libertarian intellectual’s memory than to get a tax-raising, insurance-mandating government windbag to proclaim a day for praising his accomplishments and influence?
I was busy working for a living last night; so I seem to have missed the Spontaneous Demonstration. Well, damn. Maybe I can catch the next big event, like when the USPS issues a Lysander Spooner stamp.
File under “bizarre, but interesting:”
I just got off the phone with a friend in Hollywood, who tells me that she’s heard from another Hollywood source (here we go, a friend of a friend) that Susan Sarandon is considering seeking the Libertarian Party’s 2008 presidential nomination, with … get this … either husband Tim Robbins or friend Sean Penn possibly throwing in for the VP slot.
Reliable? Who knows? Impossible? I don’t think so. Sarandon has a record of financially supporting third parties (not the LP, the Greens and Natural Law), and third party/independent candidates including Ralph Nader and Bernie Sanders. It wouldn’t be the first time that third party flirtations have been followed by an LP involvement.
She might be a hard sell to libertarians, but she does have some libertarian-leaning credentials:
- Anti-war, of course.
- Pro-choice (of all her documented political contributions, the most frequent have been to the pro-choice PAC “Emily’s List”).
- 
Narrator of the outstanding documentary on American political prisoners, Through The Wire, among other “political media” projects.
As for myself? Very mixed feelings (I have a candidate I support already)… but if it’s true, it’s the biggest “celebrity candidate” possibility that’s popped up in my memory.
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Technorati Tags: Politics, Politics, libertarian, Libertarian Party, Election 2008, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn
IceRocket Tags: Politics, Politics, libertarian, Libertarian Party, Election 2008, Susan Sarandon, Tim Robbins, Sean Penn
Y’all can follow what books I’m reading at the moment thanks to the “currently reading” Library Thing widget down in the bottom-bar. A book I started reading a couple of days ago is Sandor Ellix Katz’s new book titled The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved: Inside America’s Underground Food Movements.
I’ll write a full review of the book once I’m finished reading it, but for now I’d like to offer up a brief excerpt from the introduction. The following should make one think about some of the unintended consequences of statist meddling, along with the many possibilities for counter-economic action.
“Here is a small glimpse of the revolution I see happening: It’s not a militant confrontation at all but rather a quiet culinary mutiny. It’s what’s known as ‘the bread club’ in a Western town of about eight thousand people, which I cannot identify without jeopardizing the club’s continued existence. The club started in 2002 as the pickup site for bread baked by B., a fellow fermentation enthusiast I met in my travels.
From the start there was an underground aspect to the bread distribution. ‘I would gladly bake the way I do legally if I could,’ says B. ‘The fact is it is impossible on my scale. For me to build a certified kitchen with attached oven, I would have to go greatly into debt and then bake my ass off just to pay off that debt, probably seven days a week, and then I’d grow to hate baking and hire other people to bake, and then I would just be a business owner. And so I bake underground, every other week, because I love to, and after two and a half years I still love it, and I actually make a little bit of money doing it. I just imagine all the underemployed people I know being able to do something like this, and be proud of it, and make a little money, and not be a minimum-wage slave, but it’s not legal. And that’s wrong.”
That is the topic for the second installment of the Carnival of Anarchy.
My entry for the carnival is a truncated reflection on socialism. You’ll find out why it’s truncated by checking it out for yourself, along with the fine contributions of the other participants. Since it’ll be the last carnival entry written under the auspices of Micro$oft Windows, my future entries should be sans truncation.
"The smoking gun is definitely lying on the table as we speak," said top U.S. climate scientist Jerry Mahlman, who reviewed all 1,600 pages of the first segment of a giant four-part report. "The evidence ... is compelling."
The real question is, "is this anything that new?" The majority of respected climatologists have been trying to direct attention toward climate change for decades now.
The earth is a complex, dynamic, living system. Climatologists and earth systems scientists study how many different factors affect one another on this lively sphere. They've developed computer models that can handle far more factors of interaction than a human mind can, and that, while far from perfect, are capabable of predicting much of what is likely to happen from given information (to show how much we rely on such models, consider that modern meteorology depends on them). One of the most striking effects of the earth system is the positive feedback loop--the effect that, once a certain process starts, reinforces change, leading to more change, which becomes a runaway process that doesn't stop until some natural threshold or factor outside the closed loop stops it. For example, polar ice caps have a significant "albedo" effect--they reflect much of solar radiation back into space without absorbing it as heat on earth. But as they melt, that effect is decreased, and arctic regions absorb more heat, hastening the melting of the ice caps. What's more, there is a significant amount of carbon dioxide in the ice that is released into the atmosphere as it melts, increasing the concentration of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere. It is easy to see how such a feedback loop, once reaching a critical level, could go on and on until some unspecified limit. For the earth, that limit could be a world significantly different from the one we live in now--different from the one to which our agriculture and fisheries, populations and cities, ways of life, and even much of our technologies are sensitively tuned. While the earth has certainly in its history been warmer than it is now, it has never happened like this, especially in human history. And the few times that there have been cataclysmic climate change events have also coincided with mass extinction events.
So the point then, that I'm trying to make, is that this is something that is important--really, really important. When climate scientists started pointing to striking evidence of climate changes even possibly associated with human activity, then was the time to start taking it seriously, then was the time to start doing something about it. But we didn't. And I'm not just talking about the government. I'm talking about everyone. I'm talking about ordinary citizens, community organizations, and industry itself. Why is that? I think anyone who thinks about it a little bit can come up with some pretty good answers by themselves. I've always thought, "complacency." But you know what? That's not the answer. Complacency with something this big isn't innate. It has to be taught and reinforced.
People are still buying SUV's with horrible fuel economy compared to what they could buy that is just as practical if not in many cases more practical. People still leave lights and appliances on in their homes when not using them. Standards by and large still don't take environmental impact into account. And why? "Because there's nothing wrong with that," has said the messages we've been given. George W. Bush just made his first expression of real acknowledgement that climate change is a problem in his State of the Union address. Unless it actually leads to some changing policies, however, it's an empty gesture. Hopefully, at least, the United States government will stop actively reinforcing the message that climate change isn't enough of a problem to change attitudes or behavior.
My hope is limited, though. For one, there should be a huge acknowledgement by some people and entities that they were wrong. That would be something really effectual. People would wake up to how real climate change is if some important people actually admitted their fault, and said, "okay, I was/we were wrong, and now we need to address this." But I doubt they'll do that. Instead, what they'll do is either accept the reality of climate change while continuing to deny the risks or causes associated with the phenomenon, or, conversely, whitewash their own history of denial, and make it seem as though they were always aware of climate change and its risks. In either case, those entities won't be doing anything about climate change, only serving their image or objectives.
So what does that mean? I think it means that, as has been the case for decades, it's up to us to do something. We don't need the government to act for us. It really is up to us, and how we live--just like the resolution to many of the problems that plague our society. We need to feel nagging, persistent pangs of guilt that we drive SUV's with low fuel economy, or that we leave things on that we don't use, or that we have little regard for how much energy we use and its disparity with how much we need to use. Community organizations need to hold meetings to talk about ways that wasteful energy use by communities can be reduced. We need to ask for energy efficient designs, and if necessary, find a way to make our homes and buildings more energy efficient ourselves. We need to try to find the natural catalyst for change, that natural desire to preserve what is good and what matters to us most, that would have spurred us into action a long time ago had we not been lulled away into a false sense of security.
Here's a thought that might help with that: we have scientists who are specifically trained to study climate, who are more qualified than experts in any other other field to speak concerning it. And they are worried. Very, very worried.
Disclosure: I work for Steve Kubby’s presidential campaign as a volunteer in the position of communications director. This post is not a paid ad, nor am I receiving financial compensation/restitution for contributions to the campaign which may result from it. To the extent that it may be regarded as an “in-kind” contribution to the campaign on my part, I value it, in line with recent “pay per post” blogging I’ve done, at $10.
Steve Kubby’s response to the State of the Union address went up on his campaign web site before George W. Bush had left the Capitol building, and while US Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) was still delivering the Democratic response.
The “response to the response” brought our web server down as thousands of Digg readers hit the site at the same time to hear what Steve had to say. We logged more than 5,000 unique visitors in the timeframe immediately around the crash — we don’t know how many got turned away during the outage.
We’d planned on launching our first “public” fundraiser shortly, but events have pushed it up. Here’s the real thing, to which I hope you’ll respond, but I’ll cover the high points right here, and stick in the clickables, too.
Bottom line: Steve Kubby’s proving, every day, that he’s a “serious candidate.” Now we get to find out how serious you are. The people who follow these things estimate that the “major party” candidates will each spend about $500 million or more on the 2008 election. Call it a million dollars a day between now and November, 2008.
We’re not asking for a million dollars a day for 500 days. We’re asking for a thousand dollars a day for five days. That’s not a drop in the bucket to Republicans or Democrats, but it’s enough to ratchet the Kubby campaign up to the next level of activity.
I’ve already told you about the tremendous response to the State of the Union piece. We need a better web server, because that’s going to keep happening.
The campaign’s first two radio commercials have been recorded and are in post-production. Some time in the next few days, we’ll be making them available to Libertarian candidates to use in their own campaigns … and we want to air them ourselves, too.
Steve announced his candidacy in front of a crowd of 50,000 in Seattle, and campaigned in Washington for LP Senate candidate Bruce Guthrie. He spent several days in Colorado in November, campaigning for Amendment 44. He’s been attending Libertarian Party and non-LP public events all over California. He’s already confirmed that he’ll be attending LP conventions in Nevada, Oregon, New Mexico and California in February, March and April. That’s just the beginning. We have plans to send him all over the country … but plane tickets don’t buy themselves.
Steve’s made three radio appearances in the past week. More requests are already coming in and we’re proactively seeking more such opportunities. By this time next month, we’d like to have him giving three radio, television or newspaper interviews a day, and then up from there. While these affairs don’t have built-in costs, they do have overhead. Specifically, the travel described above. It’s a lot easier to get Steve on the air in Boise or Baltimore if we can tell the media that he’s going to be in Boise or Baltimore.
Oer the years, I’ve heard lots of Libertarians say (sometimes in the comments of this very blog) that we need a $10 million presidential campaign. I agree. That’s a bare minimum to be really effective.
So, how do we get to $10 million?
We get there $10 and $50 and $100 and $2,100 at a time.
And where do those $10, $50, $100 and $2,100 contributions come from?
Well, from you, of course. What, did you think there was a campaign fairy?
This next $5,000 will let us do the things we need to do to raise the $10,000 after that. That $10,000 will let us do the things we need to do to raise the next $50,000. And so on, and so forth. But it starts here, and it starts with you … if it starts at all.
Here’s the skinny:
Via PayPal or Credit Card
Make checks out to “Kubby for President.” Per FEC regulations, we ask that you note your employer/occupation on the memo line or let us know about it in a separate note. Here’s the mailing address:
Kubby for President
17415 Ocean Drive
Fort Bragg, CA 95437
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Technorati Tags: Politics, libertarian, Libertarian Party, Steve Kubby, Election 2008
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