Ursus Pacificus

President Obama wants to cap the executive compensation for firms which receive “bailout money” to $500,000 per year.

Tell you what, Barack… I’ll go you one better.

It’s the Buck B. Bagawk Economic Realignment Plan. This is a two phase plan, which Eliminates the National Debt.

Phase 1: Until the National Debt is paid off:

1. Rewrite the tax code to eliminate all current deductions, credits, loopholes. New tax code works like this:
   • Persons earning less than the national poverty level will receive a tax credit to make up 90% of the difference
   • Persons making between the national poverty level and $5 million will be taxed at a flat rate (around 30%)
   • Any personal income over and above $5 million in any one year will be taxed at 90%
   • Personal wealth (holdings) will be taxed. Tax personal net worth over and above $100 million at 90%
   • Corporate profits will be taxed at 30%
2. Federal spending is frozen, with annual adjustments for inflation.
3. Any company with an average market capitalization of greater than $100 billion for any one calendar year must split, spin-off, right-size or otherwise become “not too big to fail”

“No one can live on ‘poverty-level’ income!” I hear you shouting… well, then, maybe it’s time to recalculate what poverty means. Set a minimum standard of living, below which no one should be allowed to fall. Period. Whatever that is, is the National Poverty Level. If you are an adult responsible for your own care, the Federal Government should guarantee you 90% of a poverty lifestyle. Virtually no one wants to live in impoverished squalor, but it’s reassuring to know that that’s as far down as you can go, and from there, you stand a chance of climbing back up to “working class”.

Once the National Debt is paid off, we move into Phase 2:

• The tax code remains unchanged, except that the tax rate (around 30%) is adjusted based on previous year’s spending and borrowing (if any)
• The Federal Government of The USA operates at a slight surplus, accumulating a “rainy day” savings (targeted to 50% of the previous year’s Federal Budget)
• The Federal Government of The USA carries no long-term debt (greater than 5 years), and borrows only in cases of extreme emergency

Taxing WEALTH?! HOLDINGS?! That’s UNAMERICAN!!!

No. Bleeding America dry is unamerican.

There is no way an individual (or even a single-income family of five) can spend a million dollars a year on things they need. Sure,new Escalades every 3 months for every member of the household… OK… but that’s wasteful. I’m talking about groceries, comfortable shelter, reasonable transportation, heat, electricity and so on. A million dollars a year is a lot of money. 5 million is 5 lots of money. If you can’t live within your means on $5 million, maybe living isn’t for you.

What about $100 million in net worth? The bottom line is that dudes like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are sitting on flipping great wads of cash and doing nothing with it, or they’re playing with it, or they’re making petty values judgments as to who should receive charitable gifts. Screw that. Bill, Warren, the rest of you billionaires… Worry about your own well-being. We have a country to save. Here’s your hundred million a piece. The rest goes into frugally-managed public projects to restore and improve education, transportation, water, sewage treatment, communications, renewable energy and jobs in this country.

Oh, and as an extra little incentive to keep things on the straight and narrow, all contracts will require no less than 3 bids. Cost over-runs will be investigated by federal auditors, and any uncovered corruption will be federally prosecuted as a felony. Convictions will result in full restitution and federal prison time for all parties involved.

Here’s a look at the news headlines for Wednesday, February 4, 2009.

The latest reports show the Obama economic package will cost over $900 billion. Just a few weeks ago, ExxonMobil reported a record annual profit of $45.2 billion. The year before that ExxonMobil reported an annual profit of $40.6 billion. That’s one oil company. Strangely, the Obama administration doesn’t seem to be on any kind of tear to nationalize the oil industry.

Sam Wurzelbacher, known to some as “Joe The Plumber”, to others as “Joe The War Correspondent”, and to most rational people as “That Irrelevant Douchebag From Ohio”, now fancies himself a political strategist. He was the featured guest at the “Conservative Working Group” yesterday. His area of specialty? Tax policy and economic stimulus, of course.

Someone cares about what happens next to/for Rod Blagojevich.

US car buyers finally realize American manufacturers have tried nothing and they’re all out of ideas. GM, Ford and Chrysler shed 49%, 40% and 52% of previous year’s sales for January. At this rate, in another month, we can finally be rid of them.

President Obama wants to place a $500,000 compensation cap on executives of companies getting government money. While it’s a nice symbolic gesture few people who’ve actually held money in their hands see this as changing anything real.

OK, Nadya Suleman, 33, of Whittier, CA, gave birth to 8 children via scheduled C-section on January 26, 2009.

Octuplets.

That’s 8 more kids than I have. Her fist children? Oh, no… she has six (SIX!!!!) other children. That’s right. She’s 33 years old, and has 14 children. The Wikipedia article on the octuplets, which also goes into Nadya’s personal life and living situation, reads like a who’s-who punch list of symptoms requiring immediate and permanent institutionalization.

Mental case? You decide:

• Lives with her parents and her 6 children in a 1500 square foot, 3 bedroom tract home
• One of her pre-octuplet children is autistic
• Her family (parents?) filed for bankruptcy (claiming $1M in liabilities) and abandoned another home in late 2007
• Already having six children, she sought fertility treatments to have more.
• Her family is asking $2M from media interviews and commercial sponsors to help raise her 14 children.
• She now plans to embark on a career… wait for it…. as a “television childcare expert”.

And now, and Open Letter to Nadya Suleman

Dear Nadya,

Nadya, you’re an idiot. You’re a lunatic. You’re the sort of person who’s bringing the human race to its knees. I don’t know what psychological issue you’re trying to quell by hoarding children, but what ever it is, seek help for it, and STOP BREEDING!!! If you choose to have more children in one birth than you can carry without special equipment, you’re an irresponsible imbecile. If you choose to bear more children than you can breastfeed simultaneously, you’re signing the rest up for a life of disappointment.

How can you possibly hope to feed, clothe, bathe, change, educate, and love all these children? There are only 24 hours in a day, and, eventually the world will lose interest in the fact that you have CHOSEN to have so many children. You will have to find a way to PAY for all the things your 14 children need.

And, since no one else seems to want to tell you this, I guess it’s my job. You are a cancer on humanity. In your lifetime, the human population of the Earth has jumped by almost 50%. There are people starving all over the world. The soil can’t support the necessary crops, the rains can’t provide enough water, and there’s no where near enough social support to sustain your level of breeding across the population.

What’s worse, is that you will receive media attention. The news media wouldn’t dare come right out and say, “She’s a dangerous and irresponsible lunatic, and all her children should be taken away.” Anything short of that will come across as either glorification or promotion as a sideshow freak. The women seeking glory will take away the glory message, and the women seeking attention at any cost will take away the freak message. Then, when the media’s lost interest in you, the checks will stop coming in. You will have gotten used to the rate of income, and will have squandered all that money on things you could never afford on your own, and a lifestyle you could never maintain without subsidy. You will be an otherwise forgotten footnote in medical history and your children will carry the mark of your idiocy to their graves.

You are sick, and need to stop having children.

Sincerely,

Paul Tourville

And now, and open letter to Kaiser Permanente

To whom it may concern,

I understand that the Hippocratic oath demands that you do no harm. In engineering there is an acronym: TINSTAAFL, which means, “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” This means that if you want light it will cost you electric current. If you want heat, it will cost you fuel.

To support Ms. Suleman in her quest to be The Old Woman Who Lived In A Shoe is irresponsible, unethical, and just plain wrong.

I shudder to think what the birth and post-partum care bill (not the co-pay, the total bill) for this therapeutic misadventure will turn out to be, but I’m sure it will be in the millions. Who pays for that? The rest of us. There’s some harm.

While in the hospital, Ms. Suleman and her litter will be taking limited care resources from other more sensible people having only one child at a time. There’s some harm.

Ms. Suleman will then go home to her 1,500 square foot, three-bedroom home in Whittier, with her 14 children and 2 parents, and do what?! Give interviews? This woman has been pregnant for the last 7 years. What means of support for this brood does she possess? There aren’t enough waking hours in the day to care properly for 14 children as a single mother. She can’t possibly work, because she can’t possibly afford daycare. There’s some harm.

Ms. Suleman will put her neglected, ill-nourished children into public schools, where at least some of them are bound to be behavior problems, again, taking resources and opportunities away from the children of more sensible and responsible parents. There’s harm.

Eventually, the Suleman children will make their way into the workforce, seeking jobs that don’t exist. There’s some harm.

The Suleman children will, most likely, decide to each marry, and/or “start a family”, starting the cycle all over again. There’s some harm.

Finally, the Suleman children will age, and begin to put a strain on the healthcare system, requiring bushel-baskets of prescription drugs, likely for decades. Where does the money for that come from? Still more harm.

As politically incorrect as it may be to tell you this, you’ve done plenty of harm, by supporting Ms. Suleman in this effort, and not denying her fertility treatments after her second child.

Clearly, Ms. Suleman is not competent to take on a car loan, let alone raise 14 children on her own. In coddling and facilitating her through this narcissistic exercise (doing no harm in the micro context), you have doomed the rest of us to shoulder the burden of the care and feeding of her spawn (doing immeasurable harm in tha larger context), as well as having encouraged other, similarly inclined women, to pursue “love” and attention through competitive breeding.

You are guilty of malpractice, for you have harmed society, and recklessly endangered the human race by setting an example, and holding up the lunatic, Ms. Suleman, as a hero.

Shame on you.

Paul Tourville

And now, an open letter to the media

To whom it may concern,

Resist the urge. I beg you. Do not pay this woman a dime. You should be like a National Geographic expedition, hiding in a blind, using long lenses to document, but not interfere with the goings-on. Nadya Suleman should be treated like a lioness on the savanna, struggling to feed, shelter and raise her brood, succeeding or failing on her wits and merits alone.

To pay her is to interfere. It’s not news, then. It’s a freakshow. The lives of 14 children are at stake, but so is the life of the nation. To make this any more of a story than the face transplant in Ohio, a couple months ago, is to blow it out of proportion.

Coverage of this event should be little more than this:

“Octuplets. Wow. That’s a lot of babies. In other news…”

…unless, you’re willing to expose and explore the unsavory underside of excessive fertility… the impact on diet, psychology, education, healthcare and so on… The fact that there’s already far too many people in the world… that kind of thing… unless you’re willing to go there, this story belongs right next to the water-skiing squirrel.

I think the fact that she has retained a PR firm says it all. She has geared this up to be an industry. If you show up to feed at the trough, you’re all suckers.

Sincerely,

Paul Tourville

A volcano 90 miles Northwest of Tokyo erupted, spewing ash over the capital city.

In other news…

A dude got drunk and repeatedly stabbed his wife, which seems to support the idea that SuperBowl + Beer = BeatenWife It seems, tho, that there have been no thorough, well-funded studies of this phenomenon. And now a word from our sponsors.

[ Beer Ad ]
[ NFL Ad ]
[ Army Recruiting PSA ]

Now back to out top story: The Steelers won the Super Bowl.

yeesh.

Just a couple thoughts about Don Henley…

People give Don Henley a lot of grief because he’s a prima donna, or he’s an opinionated prick… well… that’s as may be, but remember: Don Henley is an arty, activist liberal from Texas, where they execute retarded people. I would imagine that’d have to leave you a little bitter.

Henley has been quoted as saying, “I’m not scary; just opinionated.” Having and expressing uncommon or unpopular opinions can be detrimental to one’s social standing, especially in the ol’ US of A. Certainly it made being in Eagles challenging. The term “Eagles pressure-cooker” has been floated by various current and former members, and since Henley and Frey are the “thru line” to the band’s origin, it makes sense that at least one of them was part of the problem. There’s an outtake on the “selected works” box set, where he says to the other musicians, who were quietly tuning up, “Excuse me a minute, fart heads, I’m trying to fix my snare drum!”

Like I said… just a couple thoughts about Don Henley.