مقارنة المقترحات الضريبية بين أوباما و ماكين The actual tax plan figures compared

 


من المؤسف عدم إستطاعة المرء متابعة المقترحات المماثلة فى مسرحنا السياسى المحلى نظرا لإنعدام مثل هذا الوضوح و الـ "إعلام" فى الصحافة المحلية.

Contrary to what is being claimed by the GOP and the media, eg, Mitchell Rofsky's misleading article at the LA Times, the Obama tax plan does not increase taxes on those that earn 250,000 per annum, as the infographic from the Washington Post shows below:



It clearly shows that Obama's plan carries no change at all for households/families in the 22698 - 603402 income bracket. All that earn below that would experience a tax reduction, while only those earning over 603402 would face a tax increase.

I encountered the infographic at Ben Fry's blog.

In a follow-up post Fry points to a modified graphic

that shows that Obama's plan would increase taxes only for the top 0.9% of the population.



By comparison, the perfidy of McCain's plan becomes clear. It really exposes the hack and slave of power that McCain is. His plan reduces taxes for everybody, but crucially, the largest percentage decreases in taxes are for the top 1% of earners (-3 to -4.4% in tax reduction) , whereas the poorest would only experience the magnanimous decrease of 0.2 %. I know a lot of people what this means, but unfortunately many more do not realize what it means: These percentages are nothing to do with the amounts those people will pay, but amounts relative to what they earn. So irrespective of the income, you get -0.2% reduction if you're poor, but if you're rich you get a -3.3% reduction.

By contrast, Obama offers the poorest earners a -5.5% tax reduction.

Leaving aside any sentimentality (let alone ethical imperative!) about which group needs more load off its back, Obama's plan, even to an economic noninitiate like this writer , seems to be the sounder approach to relieving how far down the herculean financial crap shoot to which the GOP (those that lament BIG gvmt the loudest, yet are the most zealous in running a BIG brother public service system) have plunged that Public Service system's budget and trade balances.


---

Meanwhile, I wish I could be informed as clearly and succinctly about the politics of my own country. Alas, discussions of the sort in the local press remain impervious to me , with most of the discourse either devoid of information (the mainstream press) or full of wrongdoings of the ruling party (the opposition press) ranging in scope from emotional press scoop, to National Enquirer style gossip and slander.

- sigh - ... Read more

We must not mine the moon يـنـبغى عدم التعدين على القمر

يتوجب على البشرية الإمتناع عن إستخراج المعادن من القمر لحين توفر تقنيات الدفع التى
تسمح بإستغلال الثروات المعدنية للأجرام السماوية الأبعد.

ذلك لأننا لا نعلم الا القليل عن أثر القمر على الدورات الحيوية و المائية على الأرض بخلاف الآثار التجاذبية المتمثلة فى حركة المد و الجذر.

من شأن عمليات التعدين الصناعى على القمر ما قد يؤدى لتكون غلاف من التلوث ناتج من غازات العادم و تناثر جسيمات التربة القمرية قد يؤدى الى إحتباس حرارى غلى سطح القمر.

بالإضافة الى هذا ما هى آثار الكثير من عمليات الهبوط و الإقلاع على جسم يقل فى كتلته و حجمه (مائة مرة فى الحالتين) و كثافته (النصف) عن الأرض؟

لذا يتوجب الحذر المتمثل فى حظر على الإضرار بالتوازن الدقيق للنظام الأرضى-القمرى فى أى تخطيط بعيد المدى لإستغلال ثروات المجموعة الشمسية.

One cannot stress this strongly enough: there must not be any mining on the moon.

This must be an important component in any space colonization strategy.

Once with propulsion costs overcome there is ample opportunity for mineral extraction throughout the solar system. But until we have the breakthroughs in propulsion and efficiency to motivate the endeavour we must persevere and resist the temptation to exploit the moon minerally as the prohibitiveness of the cost of moon mining will likely be overcome before that of the mining of much further objects like asteroids or Mars.

The moon's importance to the global biotic and water cycles is known only through the tidal effects of gravitation. But little else is known. Thus we do not know how a lot of high powered landings , take-offs and mining can affect the moon , its properties and perhaps even its motion.

Unforeseen effects which have haunted much of human modern (==global-scale) technology can be as bad as those experienced on Earth today or worse.

Such risk is definitely not worth it.

There are enough minerals in Earth to cover humanity's needs indefinitely or until some ecologically-imposed limit. There is no need whatever to risk damaging a delicate and intricate Earth-moon system in the time it will take to make heavy-payload interplanetary travel cheap enough for industrial exploitation. ... Read more

nice UI v latent critique

Video using the ITheora player and the Theora video format.

.

The "UI" refers to the rotating desktop environment in the video.


27.X.2008

Criticism to follow would be in order.

So - i don't wanna play the file again so memory might fail - the user in the vid uses several pieces of software on different desktops and virtual platforms, but how is this different from running all the software he ran on the same machine, perhaps on multiple desktops as has been possible with linux and solaris for the past umpteen years? The only difference is that 3d finding nemo school of fish and whales . But do I really need that when i'm trying to render a 3d model of a humongous data set with some software? or when i'm trying to test the performance of some java Web Publishing Platform and rule engine combination ? In other words, for computer usage that requires performance , this pretty cube is undesirable. Unless on sitting on terabytes of memory; but this is rarely the case except in very big high-risk servers. and ironically, all any important realtime server, will be addressed with a minimal sort of graphic UI on control consoles.

So who else would benefit from the pretty linux UI except those that actually do nothing with their computers but open and close web browsers and play videos ?

Ironically again, a lot of those will become stuck at some point on some linux arcanum that would frustrate the aesthetic gains.

Though linux, does have other gains to be fair. ... Read more

My eyes have seen you

Theora is an open video codec. perhaps; since i don't know the difference between a codec, an encoder, a format. i could distinguish a player from the foregoing. there are however also media containers. So the open source eager beaver coders don't actually have to do anything but skin up the container and reduce it to a subset of functions of their choice.



It comes from the open source Xiph.org Foundation and community; which in part speaks french.







They are the people who brought us the Ogg Vorbis and FLAC audio codecs.





There is a Theora wiki



which lists links to Theora video players like ITheora. It is an alternative to proprietary players and flash video. Their motto is "you can tube but I Theora".



Both the theora wiki and ITheora link to Theora Sea, a video sharing area that links to videos that the users themselves host locally rather than upload.


... Read more

The killing of children in schools must Stop!

The continued murder of Children in Khorasan and the Sindh (Pak-Afghan) by Americans, NATO and other "coalition" members - or by others anywhere - should be stopped!

It behooves the civilized world to take action to stop this impunity, and stop such bleeding.

Mind you , this leaves as "civilized world" only some of the nations of the Non-Aligned movement (it still exists, if they want it). [note: they are civilized rather in their ethical compass though less so in their civic habits :) ]

The murder of children for attending a school to study the Qur'an serves none of the stated purposes of the perpetrators, though it may serve rather sinister unstated ones. It smacks of a religious genocide here, or at best an attempt to uproot natural vectors of a religion's history and sociological trends by lethal force , by martial force, by the unconscionable instrument of war.

We should have seen by now that attempts to tinker with nature, to alter a naturally evolved path has terrible consequences. Due to our ignorance of what we're pretending to understand and presuming to alter , it disrupts the whole system and sends natural equilibria into disarray.

Those actions are not justifiable on religious grounds, because the initial effort to even closely understand the "other" (the target of hostility) has not even yet begun. It has been rejected not on lack of intellectual or spiritual merit, but on zealous prejudice, and a priori rejection.

It is an action motivated at the base by concerns of financial and ethnocultural supremacy.

I think dollar to dollar, we could calculate that erradication of religiosity in a tribal country that translates into a stemming of anti-colonial intellectual and political activity among muslims at large, or at best an altering in muslim mainstream dogma that would be more amenable to presentday neoliberal economic beleifs could ultimately translate into a few millions more dollars in increased profits for multinationals in some ideal future, decades from now.

Is this what it is then? this "war"? And since when is shooting fish in a barrel - mind you with unmanned drones, perhaps remote controlled like video games and toys - called a war? And since is war anything but heinous? And why is "terrorism" or regressivism or even fundamentalism, a war and not a crime???

We will be reminded to this date no effort has been made to capture the big kahunas of terrorism organizations.

You want to tell us, a consortium of the most powerful nation states in the world cannot go in and do a house to house sweep until all fugitives are held?

What , you can't bribe the tribes with millions of dollars and services?

You know this Laden guy is not a good man. He is neither a saint, nor a holy man nor a scholar of any authority .

I find it patently unacceotable that any of the tribes would give him shelter for so long. What would be their motivation? Sorry , traditional generosity and oath of protection of guests, just doesn't cut it today. I am not buying it.

If someone wants to be my guest and then he brings down a world war on my head, sorry but I would ask them to leave. I don't care if I were Godfearing or mother theresa . I would ask them to leave.

Hence the adage, "Something stinks". nearly quite literally, quoth the bard Shakespeare, "something stinks in denmark" . [Actually the quote "Something is rotten in the state of Denmark"]

Not to mention that the tactics of the so-called insurgents themselves are in stark violation of tribal and religious mores.

It is clear then, that either the Laden nexus is a rank illusion , or that the nexus is itself part of the bloody colonialist machinery.

I take this as the most plausible.

Meanwhile this enormous lie is used to justify the murder of children and innocents every day from the air by unmanned drones.

The depths of criminality and cowardice in the above sentence are staggering.

it therefore that we must say again:

It is necessary to save the children and to save freedom and the right to live and the right to be a poor Muslim in a dust bowl village. ... Read more

life imitating art

I recall the real life images that seem to have provided the direct inspiration to some of herge's cases.

But here is an example of something that seems to take after his art,




The pictures show a research submarine drone and its designer. Details can be found here.

For images showing where some of Hergé's cases imitated life, we have,

"Hergé sous influence !"



and from the excellent site À la découverte de Tintin,

"Le case German Research in World War II"




A picture very similar to the Karaboudjan, here,

... Read more

Film revu draft: Cloverfield

Reviewing this one from the makers of 'LOST' need not take a lot of writing. All I have to say is:


OMFG , they're pimping 9/11 !!! ... Read more

film revu draft: don't mess with the Zionist

I remember a line from the hit HBO series "Mad Men".

In the episode where Israel and jews are inevitably plugged, the uber dignified and classy jewish retail heiress advises her ad agency exec fling about his Israeli government clients - a not so subtle word to the wise on israelis : "Never cross them!" (the exclamation is mine though).

Sandler makes good on this in his latest soft-porn outing, and does good by his zio-jewish roots.

Putting lipstick (or slapstick) on a pig? You betcha jewish nose, er, ass.

It would be funny, if the pig he was selling wasn't responsible for a continuous stream of war crimes and violations of international law like ethnic cleansing wars of agression and false flag terrorist campaigns.

Of course all the JAP extras in the movie are going gaga over the cod-piece-adorned jewish pretty boy.

Contrary to the apparent patronizing, arab stereotypes remain unchallenged in this shlock and are notched up - but what else could we expect from an israel promotional film?

Here's a joke from the movie: A palestinian business would succeed if only they hired an israeli to pork their neshakhim customers. Geddit? Most arab viewers don't! they just laugh at this shit, not realizing the joke's on them.

Here's another "problem" this film aims to to solve. Arabic mainstream cinema still holding out on profanities, unlike the European counterparts? No problemo. let's work arab profanities into the dialogue of the arab characters used in jewish movies.

The movie makes a lot of points.

First off the bat, Israelis are kickass at hacky sack. Those israelis, they're such peace-loving hippies.

Notice the Arabesque work on the windows at Sandler's israeli home. I couldn't help wondering how many of the American and Arab fans of this movie realize it is probably because the house once belonged to Arabs who were kicked out of it.

And while israelis enjoy the fine healthy low-cholestrol vegetarian cuisine of baba ghanoush and hommos dips , arabs the actual originators of that cuisine and those names eat the bogus "Mukhin Tukhin" - sort of like the Khlash Kalash in the Simpsons episode "Homer vs. the city of the New York" . uh, huh. What else?

Also one learns from this movie that Arabs just love their goats. You gotta wonder why.

And where are the Americans in this movie?

Check out the American's mom getting serviced by the Israeli guys. She doesn't mind even over the protests of her emasculated american son. Must say there's a tad a realism there. After all, if it ain't sexually promiscious it ain't american.

D'ailleurs, only in America does an actor like Sandler get to become a movie star and then get away with bashing and stereotyping Americans as either rich republican community-destroying tycoons or as white supremacist militant gunnuts (or as ex-topless model nymphomaniacs with genital sores like the character portrayed by jewish Lainie Kazan - a real life ex-topless model).

Well, the last i checked Walmart, and all the banks, movie studios and newspapers were owned and run by second and third generation naturalized jewish immigrants.

But why let that get in they way of bashing and demonizing Sandler's own country, huh?

Heck the true blue all-american congressmen and women already debase their own country, way more than Sandler or Shpielberg or Eisner or Weinstein do in their movies.

And Mel Gibson? Bashing Mel Gibson? Ouch.

Why? because he filmed a passion play and said the jews are behind all the wars? It isn't like he was wrong on that one.


There's more. Arabs in the US are not professsionals and academics. But taxi drivers and newspaper stand sellers who order stuff from terrorist shopping lines , and look fearfully over their backs when speaking ill of "Khizballah shmizballah" - as if NYC is awash with arab terrorist ears , rather than with Israeli intel and smuggling mafia.

Back to Arab stereotypes though. Not only they're cab drivers rather than high-end professionals, they're also extremely rude, calling their old lady customers "old cow" and "die in hell".

In contrast of course, the Israeli commando come hair stylist protag is so nice to old ladies, he generates the bulk of the business to the fledgling palestinian hair styling business, literally by turning it into a whorehouse for the aging esteem- and attention-starved ladies.

Are arabs thumbing their nose at this? I highly doubt it. They're too busy eating each other for breakfast and putting each other down , while they're oblivious to this shit. In fact the arabs actually enjoy this crapola, too thick to see the rank anti-arabism and israeli promotion on display here.

The actress' bimbo character has this exchange of lines with Sandnigger, er, Sandler (emphasis mine):

prototypical arab-american bimbo - "i got sick of all the hate, on BOTH sides"
Sandnigger,er, Sandler - "yes , especially yours".

And the arab character takes it, lets that line pass. Her next line?

the model arab female for the jewish producers of this film says: "Both sides crazy".

Both sides crazy?


Where is Said when you need him? Sandler's arab "other" in this film is again feminized. Let me elaborate: It wouldn't be so becoming / seemly /acceptable if jewish commediennes Tina Fey or Molly Shannon or Sarah Silverman played leading parts where they fall in love with an Arab male. Geddit? That's the point.

But to give credit where credit's due, the extras dressed up in veils sitting around John Turturo's character in the one of the scenes at the "mukhy tukhy" restaurant , do indeed look like the veiled Arab sluts and prostitutes that adorn the streets of most Arab capitals. Nice touch , Smigel and Apatow.

Smigel? Smeagul?

In closing, the main point that comes across in this movie is taken: Zionists are as messed up as ever. ... Read more