The Weekly Round-up

Wherein I have no real good idea for a blog post, so I just talk about some random stuff.

I confess, I was a wee bit disappointed by the results of the Iowa caucuses.  No, not on the Democratic side, that’s like, oh, any one of the candidates would be, you know, pretty much great. (And that’s “Democratic” not “Democrat,” for our Fox-News-listening readers.  I hate to confuse y’all with the actual name of the Democratic Party, but I just can’t stand how extra stupid you sound every time you deliberately mispronounce the name.  I’m talking to you, George.)

I was disappointed that instead of voting for the cross-dressing, philandering, shithouse crazy, pro-abortion candidate, the Republicans chose the former-preacher, shithouse crazy, anti-choice candidate.  Who, and god love ‘im, is advocating doing away with the income tax and instituting a 23% federal sales tax.

This idea plays well to his base:  morons.

Now, in all fairness, if you don’t actually think for longer than a nanosecond about how this whole thing would work, it might sound like a good idea.  You only pay taxes on the stuff you buy. 

But if you’ve ever had a class in ciphering, you know that there is no more regressive tax.  Doing away with the income tax places a far greater burden on middle-income and lower-income folks than on the wealthy.

The dirtiest little secret about this idea is that in order to replace lost income tax funds, we’d have to run the national sales tax at more like 50%.

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When I first saw this photo I thought it was CGI–wonderful, mechanical-biological CGI but like a lot of the CGI in films. But it’s not. These are real machines on exhibit in Nantes, France. Extraordinary machines that move and, some of them, walk. This speaks to the same impulses in us that make us want to climb the steps inside the Statue of Liberty and look out of her crown. This is the desire that is behind Da Vinci’s drawing of the flying machine. This is somehow wired deeply to the part of my brain that says, ‘Cool Toy!’  This is sensa-wonder territory–which means that for me it’s science fiction.

I’d love to go to Nantes and see this.  But even more, I’d love to ride one down the street.

(via Mysdirection.)