Donald Trump and taxes: did he do anything wrong?

September 30, 2016 • 8:20 am

I feel it essential to begin, as usual, with an asseveration that I despise Donald Trump and all that he stands for, that he appeals to the worst instincts in Americans, and that I will certainly vote for his opponent. But I also dislike the deification of Hillary Clinton—adulation that has gone so far that one is not allowed to criticize her lest, her adulators say, such criticism could help elect Trump. One friend of mine even wrote that she had a “storied career”! I respectfully disagree.

Does it become allowable to criticize a candidate we favor only after she’s elected? I don’t buy it. The same people who want to stifle criticism of Hillary Clinton also have said that it’s imperative that we criticize atheist “leaders” like Harris and Dawkins, for rationality demands that we hold those leaders as accountable as anyone else. If Clinton is elected (and I’ve put substantial money on the fact that she will be), we’ll just continue to hear the STFU trope about her, for she’ll in all probability be facing a Republican Congress. We can’t criticize her as it will just give fuel to those Republicans.

In fact, the Presidential campaign has become nasty on both sides (nastier on Trump’s), and this contributes to what I see as an irreversible polarization of American politics. Trump has no choice but to engage in negative politics, as he has no positive policies except for his execrable “wall” and the denigration of women, but it pains me to see Hillary Clinton engaging in those kind of politics. After all, she does have policies, and that is one thing that helped her during the last debate. But mud-slinging is the theme of the season, and it’s ugly.

Now we’ve heard that Donald Trump won’t release his tax returns, and that in fact he may have paid no taxes.  In his response during the debate, he said that paying no taxes made him “smart”.

The response, both from the public and the media, has been outrage. How could a multimillionaire pay no taxes, while the poor working stiff pays a big dollop of money to the government?

This criticism is misguided, and the outrage is faux outrage because it’s directed at the wrong target. So odious has Trump become that he now is the whipping boy for nearly everything, including the poor condition of America’s airports.

Everyone tries to minimize their tax burden, including me, using the legal provisions in the tax code. Seriously, how many of you refuse, for instance, to take your legal mortgage-interest or dependent deductions because you want to pay more than you have to to the government? If you do take legal deductions, you have no business criticizing Trump on this account. His taxes may reveal other malfeasance, and perhaps we’ll know eventually.

The fault lies not in Trump, but in a tax code that allows rich individuals and corporations to get away with paying almost nothing. And that is wrong, for of course all citizens have a duty to share in the burden of running the government, and of funding schools, roads, and other infrastructure.

But if you are outraged at Trump’s zero tax bill, then save your rancor for the government and its tax laws, not at him.

As for him not releasing his tax returns, I think that’s a mistake. Though it’s not mandated, it’s customary, and I suspect that he has something to hide beyond not paying any taxes. My suspicion is that his donations to charity are pitiful compared to what he should be giving, especially for someone who pays no taxes.

 

Readers’ wildlife photos (and a video)

September 30, 2016 • 7:30 am

If you’ve sent photos, I have them, so please be patient and I’ll let you know when yours are up.  Today we’re featuring more photos taken by Lou Jost on his recent visit to the Tambopata National Reserve in the Peruvian Amazon.

I’ve just come back from a visit to a remote part of the Peruvian Amazon, which humans have not yet messed up too badly (though they are trying hard). Big animals and birds that are rare and shy near humans are abundant and unafraid here.

One morning a Black-and-white Hawk-Eagle (Spizaetus melanoleucus) was soaring near the clay bank we were watching. It flushed all the macaws and parrots, and all three species of macaws then flew towards the eagle and seemed to try to drive it away from the area. But the eagle dived at one of the Red-and-green Macaws (Ara chloropterus), which briefly rolled upside-down to defend itself. The eagle continued to pursue this individual, but a Blue-and-yellow Macaw (Ara ararauna) went after the eagle, which looked backwards and screamed at it, while the potential victim escaped. I wished Stephen Barnard had been here with his big guns; these were just dots in the distance that sometimes accidentally came into focus in my little Lumix FZ300. I didn’t know what I was photographing until I reviewed the pictures. Sorry about the quality, but this kind of interaction is rarely photographed so I thought it was worth including.

Scarlet Macaws escort their enemy away

Black-and-white Hawk-eagle turns on the Red-and-green Macaws; on

Black-and-white Hawk-eagle banks onto Red-and-green Macaw, which

Blue-and-yellow Macaw distracts the hawk-eagle from its pursuit

Another morning we arrived early at a clay lick expecting to find parrots, but the entire clay bank was covered by a rambunctious herd of White-lipped Peccaries (Tayassu pecari). These are large, aggressive wild pigs that have been known to tear jaguars apart. Meanwhile a hungry jaguar was following these herds at the reserve, as we found fresh jaguar tracks on top of the peccary tracks.

White-lipped Peccary herd at Rio Tambopata clay lick

White-lipped Peccaries at Rio Tambopata Clay Lick

And a video:

Friday: Hili dialogue

September 30, 2016 • 6:58 am

If you’re reading this, you made it through the week alive, though you’re 7 days closer to death. That’s the bad news; the good news (?) is that it’s National Mulled Cider day, so celebrate your sentience with a mug. I prefer a good hard cider, particularly an English cask cider served in a big mug or glass and having about 7% alcohol. It’s also the last day of September, so tomorrow I’ll be able to post Thomas Wolfe’s “ode to October.”

On this day in history, Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run of the 1927 season, a record not surpassed until Roger Maris hit 61 in 1961 (I saw him play that season). On this day in 1941, the Baba Yar massacre of Jews was completed in Kiev, and, in 1955, James Dean died in a road accident, crashing his sports car. He was only 24.  On this day in 2005, the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published the “Muhammad cartoons” that brought so much rancor; it was, perhaps, the beginning of Regressive Leftism in the form of those Leftists who said the cartoons shouldn’t have been printed.

Notables born on this day include Hans Geiger (1882), Buddy Rich (1917), Deborah Kerr (1921; her performance in From Here to Eternity was superb), and Elie Wiesel (1928; he died this year), Johnny Mathis (1935). Those who died on this day include James Dean (see above), Patrick White (1990), and Barry Commoner (2012). Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is doing some of her awkward philosophizing. I wonder if she thinks love of cats isn’t reasonable?

Hili: What is philosophy?
A: Love of wisdom.
Hili: This is highly suspect because love is not reasonable.
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In Polish:
Hili: Co to jest filozofia?
Ja: Miłość mądrości.
Hili: Podejrzane, miłość nie jest rozsądna.
And out in Winnipeg, where shoeshoes are de rigueur these days, we have two pictures of everyone’s favorite earless white cat. Gus’s staff writes:
The angle of the sun is getting lower as we head into the fall, it seemed like it was almost horizontal yesterday. The first picture strikes me as a polar bear pose. In the second picture, I like the way the sun lights up the individual bits of fur sticking out his side.
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HuffPo stupidity of the day

September 29, 2016 • 1:30 pm

I can’t really find anything to admire about Donald Trump (except, perhaps, how he keeps his hair on), but it does bother me that many Democrats and organs like the HuffPo are obsessed with finding fault in his every statement. It’s an obsession, and an unhealthy one, for it’s turning our political system into a mutual hate-fest. And here’s one from HuffPo (click on the screenshot to go to the post). It’s followed by a quote from Trump:

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“Our airports are like from a Third World country,” Trump ranted. “You land at LaGuardia, you land at Kennedy, you land at LAX, you land at Newark, and you come in from Dubai and Qatar and you see these incredible ― you come in from China, you see these incredible airports, and you land ― we’ve become a Third World country.”

Now it is true that many U.S. airports (and I’m thinking of LaGuardia and Logan) are unpleasant, crowded, and don’t even have decent noms; other countries, like the Netherlands and Germany, do much better. So some U.S. airports do bespeak a third-world atmosphere. As far as our becoming a Third World country, well, that’s true hyperbole, and yet in many ways: child mortality, lack of public medical care, income inequality and so on, we are. But HuffPo, instead of trying to turn Trump into a Satan by attacking his every word, might concentrate more on stuff related to the campaign, particularly his stands (or, rather, non-stands) on the issues.

And I’ve discovered that HuffPo now puts this at the end of every article about Donald Trump. I guess it can’t allow readers to think for themselves:

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Nick Cohen on the flaws of the “cultural appropriation” warriors

September 29, 2016 • 11:00 am

I keep saying that Nick Cohen is an Anglophonic treasure. In terms of his straightforwardness and adherence to classical rather than Regressive Leftism, he’s the closest thing we have to the late Christopher Hitchens. And everyone should read his two books You Can’t Read this Book: Censorship in an Age of Freedom and What’s Left?: How Liberals Lost Their Way.

In his column at Standpoint this week, Cohen has finally written about the Cultural Appropriation Wars, using as his springboard the fracas involving Lionel Shriver, a white woman who gave a talk at the Brisbane Writer’s Festival defending a writer’s prerogative to write about the lives of marginalized and oppressed people—indeed, about anybody. In response, the black Australian Muslim writer Yassmin Abdel-Maglied, mortally offended at what was not that provocative a talk, stalked out of Shriver’s talk in tears, and wrote a petulant screed in the Guardian about the dangers of culturally appropriating minority characters. I was strongly on Shriver’s side (see here, here and here for my posts on the story).

And so I’m pleased that Cohen agrees with me, and on several issues, including the right to try such writing, even if it fails, and on the notion that no group is homogeneous, and that there’s no culturally approved way to write about marginalized characters except to make them flawless heroes. And that would be a disaster for fiction, since everyone’s flawed and flaws, in fact, are what makes good fiction.

Just two excerpts of Cohen’s piece to whet your appetite. In the first, he shows how you just can’t win when trying to placate the social justice warriors. (I used to use that term but then stopped because I thought it was offensive to people who really were concerned about social justice instead of just promulgating purity tests and flaunting their own virtue and purity; but now I think I may adopt it again):

Jonathan Franzen said recently that, because he had few black friends, he would not dream of creating a black character. Notions of identity politics and cultural purity lead to segregation. Yet when Franzen acknowledged it, the same type of social justice warrior who criticised Shriver criticised him. None quite demanded that he must create black characters, but, as one said, his reprehensible admission had weakened the fight for “diversity and inclusion” — as if the two were synonymous.

And that is how the Left eats its own, a theme of Cohen’s book What’s Left. And in the final bit of his article, Cohen makes an argument for the right of cultural appropriation that I see as unassailable (I’ve put the telling bit in bold):

Given the passion behind the assaults on cultural appropriation, can we expect the appearance of culturally sensitive novels and dramas whose frightened writers confine themselves to their tribal homelands or apply for visas if they wish to stray beyond its borders. It’s possible, but unlikely.

Shriver asked who a writer should go to for permission to publish her story of a trans woman or Nigerian man, when no one had the authority to issue permission on behalf of others. When I wrote about freedom of speech, for instance, an editor wanted “a Muslim scholar” to assure him that a passage about the life of Muhammad was not “offensive” (by which he meant “not likely to get my office bombed”). A liberal Muslim activist said it was fine. If an Islamist or Salafist had read the book, he would have said the opposite.

The great failing of identity politics and arguments against cultural appropriation is they assume identities and cultures are islands with warships patrolling their coasts. Cultures mix. None exists that is not a hybrid except possibly in the Amazon rainforest. Not everyone in an ethnicity shares the same identity, and it is a rank prejudice to treat them as if they do. Freedom of the individual is the freedom not to have your autonomy denied by collectives who claim to speak on your behalf. In other words, there is no legitimate cultural authority to stamp a writer’s passport. [JAC: I’ve noted before that while some black writers criticized white author William Styron’s book The Confessions of Nat Turner, about a slave, other black writers praised the book.]

The logical conclusion of cultural appropriation is solipsism. For why stop at saying a person of one culture cannot appropriate the experience of another? By what right can I write about you, or you me? If no one can imagine or inquire about life in another culture, how can they do so about the life of another person? The self will then be the only subject. Solipsism may power the social justice warriors, who weep about how grievously their feelings have been offended. But it is unlikely to produce fiction even they will want to read.

We’re now past the time when blatant and invidious stereotypes can be counted as good fiction, and even if they are published, everyone has a right to criticize them. But nobody has the right to dictate what subjects—or what people—can and cannot be written about.

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Nick Cohen

Google honors inventor of the ballpoint pen

September 29, 2016 • 8:15 am

Today’s Google Doodle honors the 117th birthday of the Hungarian inventor László József Bíró (1899-1995). From either his name or the Doodle you can guess that he invented the ballpoint pen.

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Biró’s story from Wikipedia:

Bíró was born in Budapest, Hungary,[2] in 1899 into a Jewish family. He presented the first production of the ballpoint pen at the Budapest International Fair in 1931.[2] While working as a journalist in Hungary, he noticed that the ink used in newspaper printing dried quickly, leaving the paper dry and smudge-free. He tried using the same ink in a fountain pen but found that it would not flow into the tip, as it was too viscous. Working with his brother György,[1] a chemist, he developed a new tip consisting of a ball that was free to turn in a socket, and as it turned it would pick up ink from a cartridge and then roll to deposit it on the paper. Bíró patented the invention in Paris in 1938.

In 1943 the brothers moved to Argentina. On 10 June they filed another patent, issued in the US as US Patent 2,390,636,[3] and formed Biro Pens of Argentina (in Argentina the ballpoint pen is known as birome). This new design was licensed for production in the United Kingdom for supply to Royal Air Force aircrew, who found they worked much better than fountain pens at high altitude.[4][5]

In 1945 Marcel Bich bought the patent from Bíró for the pen, which soon became the main product of his Bic company.

And from the Torygraph:

The first major buyer of the newly created pen was the Royal Air Force. During the Second World War the organisation ordered 30,000 of the tools, which would work at high altitudes unlike traditional fountain pens. After the war it entered commercial production.

Today, the Bic Cristal biro is the world’s most popular pen. In the US, the price has remarkably stayed the same since 1959 – retailing at 19 cents despite inflation.

In Europe you can still hear these pens called “biros,” but that word is virtually unknown in the U.S., where they’re called ballpoint pens. Here’s an early ad:

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And here’s Biró himself:

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Now I’ve never liked writing with ballpoint pens. Earlier in my life I loved fountain pens, which made the act of writing a sensuous pleasure, and I eventually worked my way up to the King of Fountain Pens, the Montblanc Meisterstück. (I still have it, but it needs to be repaired.) I also had a Parker 75 in sterling silver. Over the past few years, though, I’ve graduated to the Uni-Ball micropoint pen, a sort of hybrid between ballpoints and fountain pen. The ink dries quickly and it has a very fine point, good for drawing cats in books. I also find that I write almost nothing by hand any more, and so my handwriting has degenerated a bit.

What do you write with?