Taking responsibility

I don't want to cheapen the tragedy of the Japanese rail crash in any way, but I have to say, the Japanese really have a very different sense of responsibility than certain other institutions in the West. While investigators are still pulling apart the wreckage looking for clues Takeshi Kakiuchi, President of Japan Railway West is resigning. In a situation where perhaps no one will ever, beyond doubt, be fingered with personal responsibility, Kakiuchi is making a statement, that on his watch no such "accident" should have happened.

As I heard one person say about Abu Ghraib - you can delegate authority but you can't deligate responsibility. Blogging from a country where finding a fall guy to blame for every mistake is the modus operandi I have to say I find it almost refreshing to read about a country where responsibility is considered a top down thing.

Lewd and lacivious cohabitation

Although at the moment I don't blog every day I would say that not a day passes without something I could blog about occuring to me. Today its been the whole pope thing which completely ruined my morning of listening to KQED Forum and Talk of the Nation. I'd mentally started a blog about the irony of Bush railing against undemocratic leaders and countries while just today 1 billion Catholics were celebrating their voluntary subjugation to an undemocratically elected leader who could literally dictate their every behaviour and conduct (assuming they aren't "a la carte" Catholics)...

Whether I would post that blog entry I don't know - probably I don't need to now - 'nuff said. As it turns out the IRS just provided me with a more juicy and blog worthy topic, and one much less likely to be lost in the noise of all the other pope-centric blog entries today.

What happened was I on Thursday I tried to e-file my federal taxes as I've done for as many years as its been possible. To my surprise they bounced them back telling me that someone else had already filed a 1040 claiming my dependent as their dependent. I was like WTF! This lead me with no alternative but to file by mail which wouldn't have been a big deal normally except that Uncle Sam owes me a not inconsiderable amount of cash this year. Yes, thanks to not working for a year now I was actually in the enviable position of having to pay less federal taxes for 2004 than I paid my local Alameda County in taxes. That gave me a good feeling because I know that Alameda County will put my money to much better use than Uncle Sam - if nothing else because AC doesn't spend 50% of its budget on military purposes.

Anyway, I digress... this morning I called up Uncle Sam to ask "What gives" (no I didn't tell them "WTF!") and a very helpful man from the IRS proceeded to tell me what would happen next. Basically they'll investigate - but that's by the by. What really made my jaw drop was when he asked "Have you checked that your local city or state laws don't prohibit cohabitation with an opposite sex dependent?". At that point I really did have to bite my tongue to avoid an utterence of "WTF!" In fact I was thinking it so hard I'm sure he could feel my mental disconbobulations all the way over in Florida. How did I know he was in Florida? Well because he proceeded to say "Oh yes, in Florida its illegal to cohabit with an opposite sex dependent and we would deny your claim if you lived in Florida". What is more he went on to tell me there are no less than seven states that have equivalent laws and hence where my claim would be denied. Now naturally this wouldn't apply if we were married, and interestingly I wonder if it would apply my dependent and I were same sex. I'm also wondering WTF the IRS is taking into consideration state and city laws in levying of Federal taxes - surely that's up to the individual states to do in their state tax computations???

Natuarally I had to go and find out more about this, and no it wasn't April 1st and no he wasn't pulling my leg. I found an article that lists Florida, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, North Dakota, Virginia and West Virginia as the seven deadly states I should not ever consider living in unlawful unwedded lewd and lacivious cohabitation. The article cites instances of companies people to reveal such information on job application forms, of judges requiring defendents to get married, move out or be charged, and all kinds of other discrimination based on this lewd and lacivious cohabitation.

And then there's the news that Virginia has only just repealed its law against sex between unmarried people, but isn't yet ready to strike their sodomy laws from the books. All I can say is thank goodness I live in California where all I have to worry about is identity theft from the shoe store and taxation without representation by a former bodybuilder and movie star.

The Hunters

The mammal was a scourge on the planet, an arrogant species that thought it was the highest form of life all the while multiplying without constraint and consuming without limit. A filthy pond scum festering on the surface of a beautiful green and blue oasis, it was smothering and choking the living daylights from its very own life source. It had to be stopped, it could not go on.

Then came the hunters.

First they came for the cats, then they came for the dogs^*, and then they came for the homo sapiens. At first it was just the dangerous ones, then the poor and starving who could not defend themselves, and then it was those that just wouldn't follow the rules and get their RFID implants.

What were these miscreants up to? Dodging the rules of society, trying to hide, trying to escape without their medication, without their every move being tracked for homeland security. They were a menance, a threat to society. "Kill them, kill them all", came the cry, "Death to wild humans!".

And so the hunter became the hunted.^**.

^* Trust me, any animal lover shouldn't click on this link, I added it purely as a reminder of what "hunting" animals can really be like - a casual and callous slaughter for entertainment's sake.

^** Yes this is one of my darkest posts in two years, but remember this is the long dark tea-time of the soul.

Going on up to the spirit in the sky...

Oh lordy, lordy. Until a little while ago I was blissfully ignorant of "The Rapture" and then Dave over at Chicken or Beef went and spoiled it all for me. Now I wake up this morning to the sound of excavation of a huge hole in the building site across the street and low and behold there they are - two different articles on The Rapture staring at me right from my laptop.

First we have Apocalypse how from the Chicago Tribune, and then there's Mark Morford's latest column Earth To Humankind: Back Off. The idea that whacko evangelicals are encouraging Israel to continue bulldozing the West Bank for its own purposes because it will hasten the onset of rapture frankly explains a lot.

Clearly GWB is working for the rapture crowd, going about the world stiring it up like a kid with a stick in a hornets nest, setting man against man, man against beast (thanks again C or B, more on that later) and all because a bunch of whackos are in hurry to get to heaven. Why can't they just go to their garage start the car up, or rent a big abandoned Wal-Mart somewhere and all put plastic bags over their heads like the rest of the cultists do? Suicide can be painless, but global war is bloody murder - just ask my mum who lived through one.

Hallelujah

After a week of media beatification of the late Pope John Paul 2 I've waiting for Christopher Hitchens, my favourite contrarian to lay into the old pontif. I mean he managed to write an entire book about how bad Mother Theresa was, so clearly he has now limits to his naysaying. However it seems that Arianna Huffington has managed to beat Hitchens too it in her latest column A Cornucopia of Death.

There's nothing new and suprising in Arianna's column, but I congratulate her on trying to be a little more balanced than 99% of the writing about JP in the last week. Maybe it was just too soon to expect to hear contrarian opinions, I mean after 9/11 no one was rushing to say "thank goodness, those buildings were too small anyway", but now that is the driving force behind all the new development at that site.

So will the flaws of JP's reign rise make it into the Catholic zeitgeist soon enough to make a difference in the selection of his successor? Or will they instead just go for a JP-clone who'll continue to spread the primary message of propogation uber-alles and blind-faith denial in the face of continuing moral decay from within the Catholic Church.

Who knows - the jury is out and we're waiting for smoke signals.

Recommended reading

I came across this article by Timothy Karr called Is cheap broadband un-American?. Having read it I can tell he and I have the same kind of angry bee in our bonnets over corporate legal meddling to stop municipalities from setting up their own broadband infrastructure. I've expounded on this several times already here and elsewhere, but in case you need a refresher I've posted a comment on this article which I'm too lazy to repost here (hey, I've been doing my taxes all day!). I'm sure I'll be reading more of Karr's mediacitizen blog in the future.

Peak Oil

Alternet has a nice write up on how peak oil has passed from crack pot idea to mainstream theory with oil peak dates issued by even the Department of Energy. The discussion of taking preemptive action about oil production peaking reminds me of the social security debate. Even the most conservative prediction for oil peak (2037 from the DOE) beats the day when social security starts running in deficit mode, and the consequences are far more severe. The world has two options - burn baby burn, or immediate conservation efforts.

As the article points out, a 60 year resource assuming a 4% growth rate in demand can be turned into a 300 year resource assuming a 0% growth rate. But with an annual 4% decline in demand the same resource can last effectively forever, wouldn't that be a nice legacy to leave for our decendents?

But no, the only response we've seen from the government is to just keep down the same path of burning oil like its an unlimited resource. Once in a while they'll pooh-pooh conservationists and mutter stuff about leaving the problem to "market forces". However what people forget is that the world has already experienced what happens when growth is left to market forces - its called the boom and bust cycle. This happened over and over until the 1930's when government started getting involved in regulating the economy and controlling the reaping of the commons. So with market forces in control the best we can expect is boom and bust in the energy world, something that was widely agreed to be a bad thing when applied to the rest of the economy.

However by heavily subsidising the oil economy (it's the free roads, tax breaks for oil exploration, production and free license to pollute stupid!) the government is actually putting its foot firmly on the energy growth accelerator. If the government was doing the same with regular fiscal policy it would be like cutting interest rates to 0% and opening up the spigot of government spending to the max, again widely agreed to be not a good thing.

Personally I believe market forces on the demand side will eventually catch up with the energy business. People will begin to take matters into their own hands and demand less demand, if you see what I mean. However at that point it may be way too late in the energy game. Countries like China and India that have a history of dealing with scarcee resources may actually have leapfrogged the USA in the conservation game and we'll be heavily dependent on their technology, and their products to get along. Really that might not be such a bad thing because being self-proclaimed top-dog in the world has definitely starved this country of humility and respect for our fellow people on this earth.