Hat tip to Dafydd at Big Lizards for pointing out this most excellent post from Gates of Vienna, concerning something I alluded to in a recent post; Moral Equivalancy:
Everyone knows what Moral Equivalence is. We get a big dose of it every day from the newspapers, from the TV, from the teachers in our public schools, and from our government officials.
Moral Equivalence is the worldview tells us that there’s no real distinction between good and bad, between God and the Devil.
It says that there’s no difference between Us and Them.
We see the examples of it all the time. The Israelis and the Palestinians — the “cycle of violence” and the “peace process”. Islamic terrorists and the American military — they kill civilians, but, hey, so do we. The capitalists and the communists — sure, the Soviets were bad, but we interned Japanese-Americans! And look what we’re doing to the environment! And the poor people in our inner cities have no health insurance!
And so on and so forth, ad nauseam.
One of the prerequisites for a true Moral Equivocator is a deep-seated and ineradicable loathing for one’s own culture. And, since all the practitioners of Moral Equivalence are Westerners, this means a deep-seated loathing for Western Civilization. There is no act so despicable, no atrocity so abominable, that a Moral Equivocator cannot make it exactly the same as something that we Westerners do.
Call it a Reverse Philosopher’s Stone — it turns all the gold into lead.
They behead schoolchildren. We allow schoolchildren go without free dental care. Same thing.
Lot’s more great stuff in the post. Go check it out!
Former, and once again, Democrat presidential hopeful John Edwards has a new and exciting idea to make your life easier:
Courtesy of the Herald-Sun; Edwards wants IRS to complete up to 50 million tax returns
Edwards says the U.S. tax code is unnecessarily complicated and full of loopholes that favor the wealthy over the working class.
Under his plan, the IRS would gather tax information for 50 million Americans with relatively simple returns, including those who don’t need to file itemized deductions to record charitable contributions or capital gains.
The IRS would calculate their tax bill or refund and mail a final report to the taxpayer. That person would be able to just sign and return the form.
So, rather than try to do something about the complexity of the tax code, Edwards wants you to put your financial fate in the hands of the IRS.
I wonder if Edwards has ever visited the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration web site? One of the reports you can read there tells us that:
Overall, the IRS had a successful 2006 Filing Season. TAC assistors answered 73 percent of tax law questions correctly, compared to 66 percent in the prior filing season. The IRS reported that its telephone assistors continued to answer over 90 percent of taxpayers’ tax law and tax account questions correctly.
So, John Edwards wants us to hand over responsibility for preparing our tax returns to people that can’t even answer tax questions right 10% of the time?
But of course, no leftist politician wants to make taxes easier to understand. That’s why they instituted Tax Witholding, so you wouldn’t have to write a check to the IRS every payday, and FEEL how much they are taking out of your behind. Now, Edwards wants to take the pain out of filing you taxes too, so you will become even more detached from the money the government is taking from you.
And the frogs are still swimming in the pot, as the temperature slowly rises…
Though typically being something of an early adopter, I have stayed away from HD video disks to date, due to the format war that is going on right now, between the two “standards”: HD-DVD and Blu-Ray.
For those of us old enough to remember the original format war of VHS vs. Betamax, this is deja-vu all over again. Like that conflict, one format has slightly better technical specifications, but the other is more industry friendly, and less expensive. In the first format war, VHS eventually won out, even though Betamax was a superior format, with better run times on smaller tape catridges, with superior resolution.
In essence, the technical differences in HD formats (like most things) boils down to size… or at least capacity: HD-DVD (dual layer) stores about 8 hours of HD video; Blu-Ray stores about 9. Now, there are various tweaks being looked at, like triple or quad layer, but these would end up being Data functions, not Media for entertainment purposes. Unless you wanted to put the entire Lord of the Rings movie trilogy (extended versions) on one Disk…
And, to date, HD-DVD players are less expensive, even though there are more manufacturers supporting Blu-Ray at this time.
But what is really going to tip the scales for HD-DVD is Porn (courtesy of Yahoo/Reuters):
James McQuivey, a principal analyst at technology research firm Forrester, said in the VHS-versus-Betamax war, porn provided a significant boost for the winning format.
He also noted the adult entertainment industry has often paved the way with new uses of technology — such as streaming video on the Internet — and said porn could help tip the scales in the current DVD format battle.
“If the porn industry wanted to break the logjam of HD-DVD and Blu-ray, it could,” McQuivey said. “If they said ‘We are going to go with HD-DVD’ you would see a few million homes immediately go out and buy HD-DVD players. They have that power.”
It is a potential weapon that one side, at least, has ignored. Instead, Blu-ray backer Sony Corp.(6758.T) blocked manufacturers from producing porn DVDs in that format — a move that some say has pushed adult film studios into the camp of HD-DVD camp led by Toshiba Corp. (6502.T)
So, for those of you still on the fence, start looking for HD-DVD players. Blue-Ray will end up being an oddity in entertainment, only found on the Playstation 3.