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Quandary

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Back in the U.S., I normally play the lottery each week (shuddup, it’s my retirement plan and it’s only a couple bucks “investment” each time), mostly when the payout is respectable.

So this past Tuesday, I bought a Euromillions lottery ticket because the payout is €70 million ($79 million). The tax on that $79 mill works out to about $32 million — except that all over Europe and the U.K., Euromillions lottery winnings are not taxed. This is not the case in the U.S., of course, where the godless fiends of the IRS will swoop down and take Uncle Sam’s 40% (pound of flesh) share at gunpoint.

Which leads to an interesting thought.

$79 million is an awful lot of “fuck you” money — a lot more than the post-tax $47 million. Needless to say, U.S. citizens are forbidden to have overseas bank accounts without disclosing such accounts and their contents to the IR fucking S, so that Uncle Sam, in this case, could collect the aforementioned 32 million pounds of flesh.

But the lottery is paid out Over Here, not in the U.S.

What would stop the winner from saying a simple “fuck you!” to the IRS, give up his U.S. citizenship, refuse to pay them their “goodbye” tax (“fuck you again”) and take up residence somewhere like Monaco, Liechtenstein, or one of the several tax havens scattered around this part of the world? (Believe me: show up at one of those countries’ embassy or consulate with $79 million cash and ask for “asylum”, and they’d get into fistfights to get you to pick their country over the others.)

In other words, at what point does one say that citizenship isn’t worth the price one has to pay for it — especially when all the USGov will do with your money is piss it away on the usual government wastage like Solyndra subsidies or welfare for illegal aliens?

I know I probably sound like some liberal asshole who doesn’t want their tax dollars to go to military spending, but in my case it’s the exact reverse sentiment: if I could pay my “windfall” lottery taxes direct to the Pentagon, specifically earmarked towards a new aircraft carrier, F-35 or couple of M1 Abrams tanks, I’d do it in a moment, without hesitation. But you can’t do that, can you? Tax dollars go into the “General Fund”, and are then siphoned off by the usual suspects into subsidies for objectionable art projects or even worse, to federal funding for Oberlin College, while the Pentagon gets fractions of a penny from the tax dollar, literally.

I’m making something of a joke about this situation because I’d never do it — my citizenship is too precious to me, I’d feel like I’d betrayed my adopted homeland, and I could not face never being able to visit my kids, family and friends back in the U.S. for the rest of my life.

But I have to tell you, I wouldn’t attack someone who made the opposite decision. Which should tell you how far our beloved government has fallen in public esteem — because if I, one of our country’s proudest and most grateful adopted citizens can even be tempted to thinking about this option, how badly have they screwed things up?

So come on, all you loyal Americans out there: what would you do with $79 million sitting in Europe, waiting to be given to you? Stay over there forever, living in luxury, or pay the taxes and live here in 40% less luxury?

And just to put this thing into perspective: assuming you dedicate 10% of your new non-taxed fortune to housing (and that’s not a bad principle), what you could get for your money in the Principality is the top floor of this little thing:

Not Since 1971

Behind Enemy Lines

Last night was the cricket match between the local team (for which Mr. FM’s Son&Heir plays) and a team from one of the neighboring villages.

The previous night had seen the rain bucketing down and more was forecast for the evening, so I quite expected the match to be called off. Not so; these lads from Hardy Country are, well, hardy, and the match started promptly at 6:15pm — shortened because the light was terrible (low, ominous black clouds), and they only expected to get a couple of hours’ play in, even without any rain.

I expected to find a dodgy little field with bumps and lumps all over the place; instead was a pitch I’d have happily played on myself, on the outskirts of the town — and in fact, it had won a prize for “Best in County”. Here’s the clubhouse (complete with advertising hoardings, alas, but someone has to pay the bills, I suppose):

The visitors took the field, clad in traditional white

…and the game began:

I’m not going to go into a ball-by-ball account of the game, because it will be largely incomprehensible to the majority of my Loyal Readers and in any event, I need to get that second cup of coffee into me. One incident, however, had me in stitches of laughter.

One of our lads, a strapping fellow named Stan, hit a towering six (home run equivalent) clear over the road and over one of the neighboring houses, as marked:

Someone among the spectators wasn’t watching, and when the cry of “Six! Six!” went up, he asked, “Where did it go?”

“Over the house where the Angry People live!” came the response, and I fell over laughing, because I knew exactly what they were referring to.

You see, the people living in said house were among those tools who move into a place where some activity is going on, and then proceed to complain about said activity (e.g. people who move into a house in an airport’s flight landing path, and then complain about the jet noise). And thus it was with this bunch. They’d bought a house next to a cricket pitch, and then were somehow surprised when cricket balls began raining into their front lawn during a cricket match. (To be honest, it’s a hell of a distance — the pic has foreshortened the distance between pitch and house — so it’s never actually raining cricket balls, but over the years, I guess it does add up.)

The irate home owners had once even called the police to complain. (The rozzers showed up, looked at the pitch and the cricketers, said, “Nice shot,” and left, no doubt after telling the Angry People to stop being dickheads, very politely of course.)

Anyway, our lads won in a nail-biter — the match was decided on the very last ball — and so the inevitable celebration followed at the local pub (both visitors and home team drinking their pints together in utterly convivial fashion). Here was my contribution, one of several:

Mr. Free Market himself was unable to attend — some capitalist stuff about making money and grinding the working classes underfoot — but I kept him abreast of the match via text. So I sent him the final score (along with his Son&Heir’s contribution, a doughty 27 not out — i.e. he was still batting when play was called), and then after telling him that our lads had won, I sent an afterthought:

“Actually, cricket won.”

Complete sportsmanship, applause for good play regardless of which team performed them, and only one fielding error in nearly three hours’ cricket.

As the somewhat cryptic title of this post states, I hadn’t watched a live cricket match since 1971 — a Test match between South Africa and Australia — but I’ll be at the next village match on Wednesday evening, and two days later I’ll be at Lord’s to watch South Africa play England.

“Happiness” does not begin to describe how I feel.

Living Conditions

Travels

A couple of people have written to me, asking under what conditions I am being forced to live, here at Free Market Towers. While Mr. FM of course insists on a reasonable degree of privacy, Mrs. FM did okay these shots of their “little place in the country” [sic]. Here’s the front aspect:

Over on the left of the picture is the Annex, in which are tucked my mean quarters:

Pure hell, I tell you. This morning I had to wait for at least fifteen minutes after ringing down for coffee. I’d speak to Mrs. FM about it, but I think there have been enough staff floggings of late. We’ll see how they do tomorrow. Here’s the Guest Library, which lies just underneath my bedroom:

Absolute squalor; but I’m only a guest from the Colonies, so I can’t complain too much.

In the meantime, I’m off to lunch, pie and sausage roll again, washed down with 6X, lovely stuff. Tonight, if the rain holds off (a dubious prospect; it’s pissing down as I write this), I’m going to watch Mr. FM’s Son&Heir play cricket for the village team — it gets dark here at about ten p.m., so there’s lots of time. Afterwards will be spent in the local pub either celebrating their victory or consoling them in defeat. Or if play is washed out, we’ll just go to the pub anyway. Whatever happens, there will be 6X involved.

Thank goodness for the time difference, which enables me to sleep off my hangovers before posting.

 

 

Another Useless Fucking Study

Bad News

So now it appears that if you drink black coffee, you’re a psychopath.

I drink black coffee.

Happily, however, the same study states that additional clues to psychopathy are a fondness for radishes, celery and tonic water. Fortunately, I hate radishes and want to puke at even the thought of eating celery. I do like tonic water, but only when it’s the delivery mechanism for gin. Maybe I’m only half a psychopath, then? A quarter?

Just to be on the safe side, though, I think I’ll switch to drinking my gin with bitter lemon; that is, until another study comes out stating that a fondness for bitter lemon is an indicator that one is a homosexual pedophile, or that drinking bitter lemon causes one to grow an extra buttock.

Did I already mention that I don’t put much stock in medical / academic / scientific studies?

That’s All I Need

Men & Women

Apparently. some study has come out [sic] that all the 50+ set needs is to have more nookie, because that will help their brains.

It’s been a while (no details necessary), but I seem to recall that sex has the opposite effect on my brain, in that as I recall, I become really stupid during the act itself — the Goofy-like facial expressions alone are the giveaway — and pass out in some kind of coma shortly thereafter. I know that some people claim that sex makes them feel “more alive”, whatever that means, but they’re probably the same people who claim to have sex 7.9 times a week, the lying bastards.

I mean, seriously: does sex help your brain more than. say, reading a Thomas Sowell book on economics? That just doesn’t seem feasible. And yes, I know that economics puts people to sleep; but then again, so does sex. Afterwards, not during, although I seem to recall a few embarrassing occasions when I fell asleep during sex — but that was years ago, my memory is fading, and maybe I fell asleep while reading an economics book rather than while having sex. It’s an easy mistake to make when the two activities are so similar (it’s been an even longer time since I read an economics book.)

Unfortunately (and this is a recurring theme on this blog), this advice means that oh FFS, the senescent Baby Boomers, already one of the most sexually-obsessed generations in human history, are going to try to coax yet more erections from their exhausted phalli and pound on Gammy’s worn-out genitalia even more than they have already, just so they can remember what The Who sounded like at Woodstock.

And if that concept doesn’t give you the heebies, I don’t know what will.

Fortunately, this does not affect Your Humble Narrator because, well, none of your business, and also because my memory is just fine — even though I can’t remember movie titles, the actors’ names who starred in them, or anything other than the fact that a couple of scenes showed Julie Christie’s nipples. Or maybe it was Susan George’s pubic hair, or Vanessa Redgrave’s buttocks. Whatever. What I do remember, with blinding clarity, is the dismay I felt when Urkel Obama was elected POTUS, the joy I felt when God-Emperor Trump ended the Socialist Years, and the bitter tears that were shed by the foul socialists when Hillary Bitch Clinton came out of the 2016 presidential election looking like a complete tit. Oh, I remember the good stuff, you betcha. Don’t need sex for that, thank God.

I have always thought that memory is like a computer’s hard drive: there seems to be a limit on the amount of stuff one can hold in storage, as it were, and as one gets older, the damn thing gets fuller and fuller — not only with worthwhile stuff like the plot line of Hugo’s Les Misèrables, but sadly with the biggest load of crap, like Fonzie’s hairstyle in Happy Days. Now if having sex meant that you could somehow erase all the latter bullshit to make space for more of the worthwhile stuff, I’d park my RV outside Dennis Hof’s Chicken Ranch in Nevada and run all my credit cards up to the max in a matter of days. Assuming that Big Pharma could manufacture sufficient quantities of those pills that give one a woody, of course.

But no. My bet is that if more sex improved my memory, I’d just start remembering more bullshit, like the Girl Scout Incident of 1975 or the Great Parking Lot Affair of 1992. (Or was it 1993?) Or if more sex actually improved my brain function, it would doubtless enable me to understand still-more worthless bullshit, such as the difference between M1 and M2 — the economic things, not the British motorways.

I seem to have forgotten the original premise of this post. Sorry about that. Maybe all I need is some nookie. With some woman who will not puke at the thought of having sex with me. Oh good grief. Gimme the pills — and not those damn Viagra things, either.

Or maybe I’ll just have (another) drink. Gin works wonders with the memory — or maybe it was foreplay which does that.

I forget.

 

Training Vs. Education

Seen On Campus

Here’s something I wrote back in 2008, and unbelievably, it’s just as valid today than it was then, perhaps even more so. I’ve also added a few things to clean it up a little and make it better.

The “Power” Elite

July 9, 2008
8:00 AM CDT

The required reading for today’s class is, first, William Deresiewicz’s article about the transformation of our elite universities into high-priced trade schools:

Our best universities have forgotten that the reason they exist is to make minds, not careers.

Next, you should read Mary Grabar’s bleak article about how the college curriculum itself is becoming less academic, and more like an Oprah Winfrey show:

Oprah is us. Course offerings on Oprah appear in college catalogs, while those on Milton disappear.

When you’re done with both, have swept up the broken glass and china, and repaired the bullet-holes in the walls, come back here and read the rest.

As long as there are people, there will be elites (and elitists) — and as long as there are those, there will be institutions which cater to them, and attempt to perpetuate them. Thus the phenomenon of “Oxbridge” (Cambridge and Oxford universities) in the UK, the “Ivy League” (Yale, Harvard, et al.) on this side of the Atlantic, and their “feeder” schools (Eton, Harrow, Groton and so on), all of which exist to provide an education to the scions of the elite families. The primary difference between the elites of yesteryear and those of today is that social standing was more important then, while wealth is more of a deciding factor today. (More on this in a moment.)

‘Twas ever thus, and to be frank, they served their purpose, up to a point: that point was where the mediocre assumed positions of power simply because of who they were and where they’d been to school, rather than on pure merit (G.W. Bush is the most famous example, in the modern era, although history is littered with them).

To be frank, the elite institutions are not a bad thing in and of themselves. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with catering to the elites, just as there’s nothing wrong with catering to the working classes. At least, it can be said, those institutions helped the elites prepare to govern and to manage in their later lives.

What interests me about the fall of the “Ivies” in the United States is that because they have become so dependent on wealth for their survival, it should come as no surprise that their focus has likewise become narrowed towards creating wealthy alumni. In other words, what was once a happy coincidence is now a grim necessity — so there can be little doubt that the focus of universities would shift towards careerism and wealth accumulation, and away from actual education. Small wonder that Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School and the Harvard School of Business are the tails wagging the Harvard dog, because those alumni will be more financially desirable to Harvard than, say, a Harvard-trained tenured professor of English tucked away at some small Midwest school.

And the Ivy League schools, unlike the unglamorous places like the University of Michigan, do not have the luxury of successful sports teams to bring in alumnus support, so, in the absence of actual merit (that ugly word) they have to rely on the cachet (a far more romantic one) of their names.

Of course, once the Ivies descend from their lofty perches of academic excellence to become simple training facilities, they are exposed to stiff competition from non-Ivy League institutions. At one point, for example, more Fortune 500 CFOs were alumni of Chicago’s Northwestern University than any two Ivy League schools combined, while the Harvard MBA has, generally, been a real-world synonym for “expensive failure”, except as consultants, where they are a synonym for “expensive disaster”.

At some point — probably now — the Ivy League ought to lose their title of “universities” and become mere “colleges”. No longer are they institutes of higher learning, but simple trade schools. (It should be noted that it has only been a fairly recent development that Law, Medicine and Commerce became fields of study, rather than just the product of apprenticeships.)

Certainly, this process is being hastened by the demise of classical education at all colleges, if Mary Grabar is to be believed (and even a cursory glance at the curricula being offered in today’s Humanities departments should provide substantial proof thereof). In place of rigorous study and its attendant discipline, students instead are being taught to rely on their “feelings” and “opinions”, as though the untutored and callow sentiments of youthful inexperience are worth as much as thoughtful, studied analysis.

(A personal aside: I remember once using a translated quote from a Roman philosopher to further an oral argument in a freshman Philosophy class, only to receive a stinging rebuke from the professor, who quoted the entire passage back to me in the original Latin, and proved that I’d misread the intent of the argument completely. One wonders if any modern-day professor is equipped to do the same.)

Professor Grabar is refreshingly blunt about the problem:

I blame it on women, specifically those women who, instead of working their ways into the club through rules of evidence, common values, and objective scholarship, have pushed in their alternate “ways of knowing.” The feminization of education has led to the idolization of Oprah. In the matriarchal upheaval in the academy, the great works of the canon that draw from our Western tradition, like Milton’s majestic Paradise Lost, are replaced by crudely rendered emotive investigations into oppression, like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” or any of the “multicultural” offerings in the latest anthology.
In addition to eviscerating the canon to add women’s writing, of whatever dubious value (personal letters, diary entries, popular books), the academic feminists’ project was to attack the base of our way of thinking, which they correctly traced back to the notion of a monotheistic God who created a universe with an order based on reason, however indiscernible that at times might be to those he endowed with reason. The matriarchs’ attacks began on linearity, logic, argumentation — the very notion of the individual thinking self. Theorists promoting the “maternal presence in the classroom” accused even the thesis statement of the freshman five-paragraph essay of having embedded within it masculine goal-oriented thinking that in a rapacious manner eliminates weaker ideas.

And thus, the real danger of this nonsense is revealed. The recipients of degrees earned by the embrace of “alternate ways of knowing” are going on to positions of government and management.

So “weaker ideas” are given as much consideration and weight as ideas proven to be logical, effective and workable. It’s risible when this approach is taken by teachers, but it’s not so funny when this thoughtless nonsense becomes the basis of laws, government and commerce.

We should not be surprised, therefore, when a young, inexperienced Presidential candidate [Urkel Obama] uses as his platform a vacuous belief in soft, unattainable (and unprovable) concepts such as “hope” and “change”. We should likewise be unsurprised when this vacuity finds strong support from a bloc of youthful idealists who have been schooled only in similar terms, as well as the intellectually-lazy older group of voters who believe that Oprah Winfrey has actually contributed anything of value to the social and political worlds.

We should also show no surprise when the modern corporation favors unfocused “group decision-making” over individual responsibility and management, even when the end result is no result (an excellent example: the WTC “memorial” which, ten years after 9/11, was still pretty much a large hole in the ground).

It is even less surprising that this so-called “management style” has started to pervade the military: where a sniper has to get approval from “higher authority” to destroy a target already designated as one worthy of destruction.

At some point, of course, all this will collapse on itself. Emotion and feelings are no substitute for logic, reason and experience: and institutions which accept the former must, eventually fall prey to their competitors who use the latter.

What is most depressing is not that this is happening, as much as the fact that the process has been designed, aided and abetted by those who are supposed to keep us away from such mistakes. That would be academia, the so-called gatekeepers of learning and education.

But they’re no longer educators: they’re trainers. Even worse, they’re trainers who are training people in a way which will, eventually guarantee failure.

The only bit of good news is that the people who started this nonsense may be dying off (somewhat too slowly for my liking). But their disappearance will likely come too late.