This is the last chance to give me your full name if you are a qualified contributor and want it listed that way. I’m particularly interested in “Leland.”
Bitcoin
Can you live on it? Secret CIA mole Betsy Woodruff gives it a whirl. Unfortunately, it won’t help her avoid the IRS, at least until we rein it in.
The Ice Sheets
Randall Munroe graphically describes why I worry more about global cooling than global warming.
“Art”
A screed:
I’m not in favor of obscenity trials, except when children are involved. You can make the case that a talented photographer forces us to confront adolescent sexuality by taking pictures of naked young people, and I can make the case that he’s a creep, because there has to be something . . . askew in an adult’s makeup to find this a compelling subject that must be expressed explicitly. There is something lacking in the hearts of people who dasn’t admit to themselves that the artist might be trusting the critical establishment to give him cover precisely because he dresses up his dank needs as Art.
If someone wants to protest child abuse, well: a painting of a child with haunted eyes, a dim room, a figure in the background. Color, composition, tone, shadow, the horrible truth implied with all the power Western representational art accumulated over the centuries.
Or, you can glue pictures you got from a google search, printed out and cut up and pasted on screen grabs from porno movies. Because you’re working in the new vernacular, the new global interconnected web of mysterious source material given meaning by recontextualization.
Also, you can’t draw worth a damn, so that whole “painting” thing is off the table.
No one skewers pretentious “transgressives” like Lileks.
The Space Policy Mess
A depressing Twitter discussion.
I wasn’t on Twitter yesterday, or I would have weighed in. I like the comment about re-engineering the solar system to make it SLS/Orion friendly.
As The Middle East Burns
…the White House fiddles:
The combination of grave and growing dangers in the Middle East with a lightweight policy response in Washington is genuinely frightening. We have no doubt that the administration wants a peaceful and stable Middle East that is moving toward greater democracy and greater respect for human rights. We share its desire to see this happen without massive US intervention. But the evidence is mounting that America’s present course in the Middle East is leading to a very bad place; real trouble looms unless the administration can begin to engage in a much more serious and thoughtful way.
Serious and thoughtful ways are not a hallmark of this administration. And this sort of fecklessness is no less than any intelligent person would have expected from the neophyte’s campaign rhetoric in 2008.
Destroying Business
…with government regulations:
A big part of our success are the hundreds of parents — both consignors and shoppers — who voluntarily work brief shifts to help set up before the sale starts. In exchange, these parents get to shop first with more choices and better merchandise.
In January, though, the Department of Labor noticed all this cooperation going on. Months later, investigators concluded that volunteers are “employees” under the Fair Labor Standards Act.
This means paying the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour, filling out IRS paperwork and complying with who-knows-what other rules. And all for a pop-up business that lasts days.
Think about that for a second. I’ve offered regular parents the same opportunities that eBay gives independent resellers. When I do it in the real world to recycle used clothes, the Department of Labor says no way. That’s bunk. My volunteers are not employees or independent contractors. They’re customers.
By this dreadful logic, Build-a-Bear Workshop employs child labor when it lets its young customers assemble their own teddy bears.
Unfortunately, as my situation shows, too many new ideas are being held back by rules that are stuck in the past. When the Fair Labor Standards Act was written in 1938, nobody was imagining a collaborative, social business like mine. And I’m far from the only entrepreneur stifled by outmoded dictates from a world I never lived in.
You’re not allowed to freely cooperate or exchange without the permission of the State, citizen.
[Update a while later]
Tocqueville would have been saddened, but perhaps not surprised:
Tocqueville would not recognize America today. Indeed, so completely has associational life collapsed, and so enormously has the state grown, that he would be forced to conclude that, at some point between 1833 and 2013, France must have conquered the United States.
…[He] also foresaw exactly how this regulatory state would suffocate the spirit of free enterprise: “It rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting; it does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes, and finally reduces [the] nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Except the government is not a shepherd — it is becoming the wolf, against which we need sheepdogs.
Subverting Democracy
…with government lies:
Lois Lerner, one of the IRS’s top officials, would not answer simple questions about her agency’s conduct during congressional testimony, instead pleading the Fifth Amendment. Any taxpayer who tried that with an IRS auditor would end up fined, if not in jail.
Almost everything that IRS officials have reported about the agency’s unlawful targeting of conservative groups has proven false. IRS malfeasance was not limited only to the Cincinnati office, as alleged, but followed directives sent from higher-ups in Washington. Lois Lerner confessed to the scandal only through a rigged public query by a planted questioner, designed to preempt an upcoming critical inspector general’s report. There is legitimate dispute over both the number and the purpose of former IRS commissioner Douglas Shulman’s visits to the White House and nearby executive office buildings, but he did his credibility no good by snidely remarking to Congress that at least one of those visits was to take his kids to the White House Easter Egg Roll.
And that’s just the IRS.
I hope that historians will have the opportunity to point out the irony that, just as Barack Obama was the greatest gun salesman in history, his evil-clown car of an administration finally broke the back of Big Government.
[Update a few minutes later]
More IRS lies seem to come out every day.
[Update a while later]
“We have not yet begun to investigate.”
Chuck Hagel
Once again demonstrates his room-temperature IQ.
And the Senate actually confirmed him to run the Pentagon.
The country’s in the very best of hands.
[Update a few minutes later]
And then there’s this:
According to the Sun and the Financial Times, Mr Obama apologised to the chancellor for calling him Jeffrey three times during the meeting – saying: “I’m sorry, man. I must have confused you with my favourite R&B singer”.
We know how this would be covered by the media if that famous moron, George Bush, had made a similar gaffe.
The Zimmerman Trial
Is it about race? Or gun rights?
Sadly, the media will try to make it about both.