Sorry Elvis, You May As Well Come Back Home!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

We all know politicians and their bureaucratic lap dogs are stupid. We also know that they fanny around trying to find ways to steal more of our money and then waste it on laws and other interference we neither want nor need.

But sometimes their efforts are just staggeringly unnecessary and stupid.

Did you know, for example, that the morons in the US Congress wasted time, money, energy, not to mention paper and ink, discussing and clarifying that any income earned by U.S. residents while in space would be subject to U.S. taxes!

During the Apollo missions we already witnessed the nonsensical spectacle of national heroes like Neil Armstrong having to be processed through US Customs and Immigration when they returned from the Moon. Talk about bureaucratic jobsworth claptrap!

Now the idiots in Congress have declared that colonists on Mars, of whom there are currently, and for the foreseeable future, none, zero and nil, will be taxed on the income they earn while en route to, and living on, the Red Planet. I suppose to continue the madness, the US authorities will try to make the Martians themselves  –  if we find any  –  subject to US taxes too!

It’s enough to make you get your antennae in a tangle!

It’s all because the US government is broke and because it wants to have total control over its citizens (not the uber rich ones, of course, they can do whatever they want). Unlike most countries, the United States uses a ‘worldwide’ system of taxation, under which it taxes all income earned by U.S. citizens and residents, regardless of where it is earned.

The arrogance of a ‘worldwide’ catchment is apparently not enough, now America thinks it must have a ‘pan-galactic’ tax system.

At seven times the size of the humongous novel ‘War and Peace’, and at around four million words and counting, the US Tax Code is already monstrously over-sized, but with the whole Universe to cater for it’s only going to get bigger and more complicated. For example, I foresee vast sections trying to explain how to cater for an Earth year of 365 days being factored into a Martian year of 687 days.

Make that getting your antennae in a knot rather than just a tangle.

But no doubt the bureaucrats back on Earth are already salivating at the prospect of drafting even more crap.

As for those with Martian ambitions?

Sorry Elvis, you might as well come back home. We miss you!

.

==========================

.

Silly Statistics!

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Mark Twain is famous for having said, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies and statistics.”

Well, just to prove you can have a bit of fun with statistics have a look at this set of nonsense that came to me in an email a while ago.

They are a complete reversal of the usual figures which continually highlight the increasing world population and the problems that will cause in the future.

These numbers look at the world if it was scaled down to just one hundred people.

It might make you think or it might not.

But it is a new way of looking at population statistics, so I hope you enjoy them anyway.

.

 If The World

Was Scaled Down

To Only 100 People

.

SEVEN

would have a college degree

.

TWENTY-TWO

would own a computer

.

TWENTY-SIX

would be children

 

THIRTEEN

of those children would live in poverty

.

SEVENTY-FOUR

would be adults

.

EIGHT

of those adults would be 65 years or older

.

FIFTY FIFTY

There would be an equal

number of males and females

.

There would be

SIXTY

Asians,

FIFTEEN

Africans,

FOURTEEN

people from the Americas,

and

ELEVEN

Europeans

.

SEVENTEEN

wouldn’t be able to read or write

.

TWENTY-THREE

wouldn’t have any shelter

.

ONE

would be dying of starvation

.

FIFTEEN

would be undernourished

.

TWENTY-ONE

would be overweight

.

THIRTEEN

wouldn’t have access to clean water

.

FIFTY-ONE

would live in cities

 .

TWENTY-TWO

wouldn’t have electricity

.

Of those that do have electricity,

most would only use it for light at night

 .

SIXTEEN

wouldn’t have toilets

.

SEVENTY-FIVE

would be cell phone users

.

THIRTY

would be active internet users

.

FORTY-EIGHT

would live on less than $2 per day

.

SEVEN

people would own an automobile

.

THIRTY

would be employed in Agriculture

.

FIVE

would own 32% of the wealth

.

The poorest

THIRTY-THREE

people would only receive 3% of the income

.

By the end of the year

ONE

person would die and

TWO

new people would be born.

 

.

=================================

.

Is Your Life Insured?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

It’s an interesting question.

But worry not, I am not going to try to sell you an insurance policy nor even recommend one.

Quite the reverse in fact.

Many people have some kind of life insurance for the financial protection of their families if they should be unfortunate to pass away unexpectedly.

It is usually for enough money to pay off the mortgage with a little left over to provide some kind of income for the wife and kids.

At least that’s how it should be.

But there is a growing trend for employers to insure their employees. A nice gesture you might think at first. Until you find out that the beneficiary of the insurance would not be the survivors or estate of the insured employee, but the corporate pension plan!

It is unofficially known as “dead peasant” insurance, and hundreds of corporations have already taken out policies worth hundreds of billions of dollars, on thousands of employees, providing companies with a steady stream of income as current and former employees die  –  even decades after they have retired or left the company.

And new “dead peasant”policies worth at least $1 billion are being put in place every year!

Unsurprisingly the greedy money-grabbing banksters are especially fond of the practice. Bank of America’s policies have a cash surrender value of at least $17.6 billion; Wells Fargo’s at least $12.7 billion; and JPMorgan Chase at least $5 billion, according to filings with the Federal Financial Institutions Examination Council.

Of course the tax-men are to blame too – aren’t they always? – because so-called company-owned life insurance offers employers generous tax breaks. For example, company-paid premiums are tax-free, as are any investment returns on the policies and the death benefits eventually received. Although having said that it has to be admitted (grudgingly) that the I.R.S. has taken companies including Winn-Dixie and Camelot Music to court for using such policies as tax avoidance schemes.

Many people faced with a request from an employer to consent to such a policy are too afraid not to comply in case it affects their job or promotion prospects. They shouldn’t be because that would probably be illegal as well as unethical. Class-action lawsuits against several companies with such policies are already underway or have been settled. Several companies, including Walmart, settled the suits, paying millions to low-ranking employees who had been covered.

So if you are uncomfortable with the thought that your company might profit from your death, don’t sign up.

And as for the corporations? I’m as fond of making a few bucks as the next man, but you have to draw a line somewhere and I think corporations should be content with the contribution their employees make to their company profits when they are alive, instead of conniving to profit from their deaths also.

.

==============================================

.

Did You Know? More From The Strange Fact File

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Here is another very random selection of strange facts from fasab’s files.

As with other in this series, by the time you have read these you will know more than you did and possible more than you want to.

But have a look anyway.

Enjoy.

.

.

The adult electric eel can produce a five hundred volt shock,

which is enough to stun a horse

– and I don’t mean a seahorse!

.

. 

As an iceberg melts, it makes a fizzing sound
because of the compressed air bubbles popping in the ice

. 

. 

Kermit the frog delivered the commencement address

at Southampton College located in the state of New York in 1996

. 

. 

The mythical Scottish town of Brigadoon

appears for one day every one hundred years

. 

. 

A rainbow can occur only when the sun

is 40 degrees or less above the horizon

. 

. 

The most common injury caused by cosmetics

is to the eye by a mascara wand

. 

. 

The sound made by the toadfish when mating underwater

is so loud that it can be heard by humans on the shore

. 

. 

In America, approximately 20% of children between

the ages of 2 – 7 have televisions in their rooms

. 

. 

Families who do turn off the television during meals tend to eat healthier.

This was regardless of family income, or education

. 

. 

Two out of five people end up marrying their first love

. 

. 

Forty-one percent of women apply body and

hand moisturizer at least three times a day

. 

. 

Scientists have determined that having guilty feelings

may actually damage your immune system

. 

. 

The first box of Crayola that was ever sold

had the same eight colours that are sold in the box today

consisting of red, blue, yellow, green, violet, orange, black and brown.

The box was sold for a nickel in 1903

. 

. 

The best time for a person to buy shoes is in the afternoon.

This is because the foot tends to swell a bit around this time

. 

. 

According to psychologists, the shoe and the foot

are the most common sources of sexual fetishism in Western society

. 

. 

Bank robber John Dillinger played professional baseball

John Dillinger top left

. 

. 

The first company to mass produce teddy bears was the Ideal Toy Company

. 

. 

Flight pioneer and pilot, Orville Wright,

was involved in the first aircraft accident.

His passenger was killed.

. 

. 

The mother of famous astronomer Johannes Kepler

was accused of being a witch

Johannes Kepler 1610

. 

. 

In the past 60 years, the groundhog has only predicted

the weather correctly 28% of the time.

The rushing back and forth from burrows

is believed to indicate sexual activity, not shadow seeking

. 

=================================

. 

It Never Rains But It Pours – Chicken Maryland Anyone?

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”
.

I did a short series a few months back about some of the stupid laws stupid politicians had made. They were quite funny and most of them dated back many years, they just hadn’t been taken off the statute books.

That excused the old laws, maybe.

But they are still at it even today!

I know that you shouldn’t expect too much when a group of uninformed and irresponsible people go out and vote to elect a smaller group of uninformed and irresponsible politicians, while most people stay at home. But we call that democracy these days. And in what passes for normal times you can get away with it.

But these are not normal times we are living in. America, and most of the western world, is in desperate trouble economically. We need help from our politicians.

Help to stimulate economic growth; help to make it easier to do business in and from the US; help to protect us from cheap inferior crap being imported that has destroyed local jobs and industries; help for entrepreneurs to establish new wealth generating businesses; and help from the socialist bureaucratic nightmare that is completely out of hand.

As regard the stupid laws, these days most of them center around ways that bankrupt governments, whether national or local, can think up to extract more and more from the people who elected them.

Currently US bureaucrats are frantically trying to think up another way to tax the internet. Previous attempts failed because of public outcry, but sooner or later they will do it and who will it help? Everybody who isn’t in business in America and the EU probably, because it won’t apply anywhere else!

The mantra of these idiot bureaucrats is to make America more productive and prosperous by making America less competitive and poorer. It sits nicely with their other mantra of solving economic woes by extracting more and more tax from less and less income. Neither works and never will.

What prompted this rant? 

Well only the unbelievable fact that the idiot politicians in Maryland have decided to tax rain.

What????

Tax what????

Yes, you read it right, the idiot politicians in Maryland have decided to tax rain.

They call it by a fancy name, of course, the “Impervious Surfaces tax”, or ”storm water management fee”, but what it in effect does is to charge Maryland residents for rainwater that falls on their property.

Naturally, the bureaucrats are dressing up this latest money grab with the lie that it is for the benefit of the people. It’s bit like a pick pocket excusing his theft by saying he was relieving you of the burden of carrying your wallet around in your coat pocket. And it makes just as much sense!

Thankfully, however, there seems to be a few with a working brain left in local government. Anne Arundel County Executive Laura Neuman, for example, vetoed the tax proposal which unfortunately won’t kill it, but will give a little bit of breathing space.

But if the residents of Maryland are “chicken” enough to fall in line with this new tax – and so far it seems most of them have been dumb enough not to even notice it at all – then it won’t be the end of it.

Democratic Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who guided the passage of the storm water tax earlier this month, despite efforts from Republicans to dismantle the bill, has already been responsible for implementing 37 other taxes and fees since taking office — at a cost to residents estimated at somewhere in the region of $3.1 billion annually.

Does anyone really think an idiot like this is going to let the people have air and sunshine for free???

 

.

===========================================

.

Cyprus Theft Update

“Fight Against Stupidity And Bureaucracy”

.

Anyone who has been following this story that I posted about a few days ago, (here if you missed it), will know that the European Union bureaucrats made an attempt to steal the savings of the Cypriot people right out of their bank accounts.

With at least one eye on their chances of being re-elected, the Cypriot parliament rejected the proposal out of hand. The proper thing to do no doubt, but there is also no doubt that this will not be the end of it. Indeed the fallout continues.

Western governments are desperate because of the financial mess that they and their bankster accomplices have created. And desperate governments are known to take desperate measures to try to patch things up.

Look out for more attempts by these governments to steal your money, whether it be in the form of savings in the bank, government bonds, stocks or in pension plans. Nothing is safe from the clutches of these thieves.

The goings on in Cyprus has already proven their intent and alarm bells have begun to sound among those who are awake and paying attention. The bureaucrats’ attempted money grab has already sparked off suspicion and panic throughout Europe and elsewhere as to the amount of trust people can have in their governments.

Even among the financially stronger nations the trend is clear. In Germany, for example, a recent opinion poll showed that the majority of Germans do not trust their leader, Merkel’s, pronouncements that their money is safe in a bank.

Throughout Europe those who can are moving their money to offshore locations away from the thieving hands of their own governments. Big corporations, including US corporations, are doing the same. It has already happened in Ireland and Spain and France and, to a lesser extent, in the UK too.

What a sad commentary on how these stupid politicians and bureaucrats have mismanaged our affairs.

Will it hit America as well?

That depends just how stupid the political administration in Washington really is – which is perhaps a kind way of saying, please err on the side of caution if you are an American citizen.

The $ as a currency will probably be okay for a while, despite the humongous debt that Obama is piling up, but eventually it will become impossible to print their way out of trouble.

All those highly paid morons and herd followers called ‘money managers’ who work for the various funds that you entrust your savings and pensions to, and who do little more than buy up T-Bills with it, may find that their strategy is going to backfire. Like the banksters, however, they will still charge you a fee for looking after your money whether they invest it wisely or lose it all.

But whilst the bureaucrats will never be able to figure out how to run an economy – their, “take more and more taxes out of less and less income” strategy will never add up – eventually the penny will drop with the good citizens and they will waken up and realize they have been completely shafted by incompetent politicians and greedy banksters.

Then the brown stuff will hit the fan – big time – and people will get real mad. And then the powers that be will have no choice but to turn on their own citizens if they are to cling to power. Preparations for this started under Bush and now Obama has added even more legislation to make this possible.  

It is a rather bleak scenario, particularly for those who choose to ignore what is happening around them. But whether it happens in one year or another five, if the politicians and bureaucrats do not wise up – and their is little sign of them doing that especially when they have yet to realize how incompetent they are – it will happen.

So start to think seriously about your own circumstances and what you can do to protect what you have from thieving governments. Or just settle down and get another 40 winks assured in the knowledge that those in Washington, Brussels, London and Berlin know what they’re doing.

Cyprus ATM

===========================

.