The death of decorum

Today’s sad chapter in the breakdown of our society comes to us from the state of Maryland. Dana Hanna was standing at the altar getting married to his fiancee when he reached into his pocket for his mobile phone to update his relationship status on Facebook and send a Tweet. The minister  – the only person other than Hanna who was in on the joke – paused until Hanna was finished, then pronounced the couple man and wife. Apparently the video of the wedding – posted on YouTube, of course – has become a viral hit.

As with anything on the Internet, Hanna’s stunt has drawn both praise and criticism. Responding to critics, Hanna said, “I was having fun at MY wedding!” In fact, this response only makes the point more clear: At this profound moment of his life, Hanna apparently was not thinking about his bride to be, or the friends and family in attendance to share in his special moment. He was thinking about HIMSELF and how many other random people he could get to PAY ATTENTION TO HIM.  In doing so, he displayed no regard for those close to him, including his bride, who later Tweeted, ”Can’t sleep, very anxious about this new fame. What will become of it?” Doesn’t bode well for a future of making important decisions together, does it?

Hanna typifies the lust for fame that has become one of our society’s strongest and most widely-held values, not to mention the narcissistic certainty that every little detail of our lives must be endlessly fascinating to everyone else. How did we get to the point where people would rather be widely known for being a jackass than not widely known at all?

Why the estate tax destroys businesses, farms, and families

One of the most insidious forms of federal taxation is the estate tax, which is assessed on the estate of a person who dies before their assets can be passed on to their heirs. It may surprise readers to learn that such an estate is currently taxed at a whopping 45% tax rate.

The reason many Americans are unaware of the tax is that it is limited to estates worth more than $3.5 million. That seems like a lot more money than most of us will ever see. So who cares if rich people can’t pass on all their wealth to their children?

Aside from the philosophical question of whether we should be punishing people for being successful and trying to provide for the future of their families, what a lot of people don’t realize is that you don’t have to be rich to be affected by the estate tax. Here’s how.

Let’s say that your father owns a farm or small business worth $4 million. You and your four siblings work full-time for this farm or business. Other than your modest wages, any profits are re-invested into the business. So you and your family do not live like rich people at all.

Now your father passes away. In his will he seeks to give you and your siblings equal shares in the business worth $800,000 each. But wait – before you can inherit, your father’s estate must pay estate tax on the full value of the business. Assessed at the 45% rate, the estate owes $1.8  million to the federal government.

The problem is, your family does not have $1.8 million in cash or liquid assets to pay this tax.  The only asset worth that much is the business itself. The only way to pay the tax is to sell the business to someone else for cash, pay off the tax bill, and then distribute the remaining cash to you and your siblings – amounting to $440,000 each. So you end up with about half of what you should have received, but worse, the family business is gone and along with it your job and possibly your home if you lived on a family farm.

There are ways of avoiding the estate tax. Your father could have sold you the business before he died and only paid a 15% capital gains tax – very convenient if you’re fortunate enough to predict when you’re likely to pass away.

The issue is coming to the fore again because the House recently passed a bill extending the tax for another year. While the House and Senate quibble about what the estate tax rate should be, instead they should be raising the exclusion level higher than $3.5 million or repealing this punitive and unfair tax altogether.

From your friends at Hezbollah: We’re changing to serve you better!

Little noticed amid the furor over vital matters such as White House party crashers – and the admittedly important decision by the White House on Afghanistan – it looks like the good folks over at Hezbollah have decided to make some small concessions to the 21st century. Their new manifesto is both laughable and deadly serious at the same time. (The previous version dates back to 1985 when the political and military situation in Lebanon was very different than today.)

Key among the changes is the removal of language that envisions Lebanon as an Islamic republic. That represents a practical nod to the fact that Shiite Muslim Hezbollah is in alliance with a Christian party in Lebanon’s complicated internal politics. Of course, nobody believes for a minute that Hezbollah would not happily force their brand of Islam down everyone’s throats if they had the power to do so. This is not a change of heart, but rather an acknowledgement that the movement has to pay some attention to PR at least within Lebanon itself. Stripped of the shield of Syrian occupation which long protected them, they now have to work within the Lebanese political system to maintain their status – which they’ve become fairly adept at doing.

Predictably, the manifesto maintains that Israel “represents a constant threat and an impending danger to Lebanon.” I had a good chuckle over that one. Everybody in Lebanon knows that the only danger from Israel arises from the possibility of Israeli retaliation for Hezbollah attacks – as happened in 2006. Beyond that, Israel and Lebanon have no remaining issues other than the general Palestinian question which affects Israeli relations with all Arab states. It’s important to remember that Hezbollah was founded by the Iranians to combat the Israeli occupation of Lebanon which began in 1982. After the Israeli withdrawal from Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah had to justify their continued existence by bizarrely claiming a small part of the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights as belonging to Lebanon rather than Syria.)

It goes on to state that an armed Hezbollah “is a permanent national necessity that should last as long as the Israeli threat, and in the absence of a strong, stable state in Lebanon.” This is priceless humor because Hezbollah itself is the biggest threat to a “strong, stable” Lebanon. Can you imagine if the states along the southern US border were controlled by an armed militia with representation in Congress? In the Shiite cities and villages of southern Lebanon, the central government’s authority goes only about as far as Hezbollah permits. The Lebanese Army pretends to control the Lebanon-Israel border, but in fact Hezbollah controls it – hence the Lebanese government is powerless to stop Hezbollah rocket attacks against Israel. In essence, Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 2006  helped to preserve the freedom and independence of Lebanon itself – though admittedly it would be hard for most Lebanese to see it that way especially if it’s their village being bombed.

Finally, Hezbollah’s leader, Sayyed Hassan Nasrallah, in another nod to modernity, took pains to explain that Hezbollah is not anti-Semitic: “Our problem with them (the Israelis) is not that they are Jews, but that they are occupiers who are raping our land and holy places.” We’ve already discussed that no Lebanese land remains under Israeli occupation. As for the suggestion that Israel has been a poor guardian of the Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem, that is completely counterfactual. The sites continue to be administered by Arab Muslims, and Israeli security forces take threats against them by Jewish or Christian extremists just as seriously as they take  mobs of Muslims who routinely throw stones at Jews trying to worship at the Western Wall.

Hezbollah’s attempts to put a modern face on their decidedly medieval organization are amusing. I’m eagerly awaiting what comes next – an appearance by Nasrallah on Dancing With The Stars, perhaps?

PC police suspend LA sports announcers

Two sports broadcasters who cover the terminally awful Los Angeles Clippers basketball team were recently suspended for comments they made about a member of the visiting Memphis Grizzlies team who is from Iran.

I started reading the story and was waiting to find out exactly what offensive thing they had said about Grizzlies’ center Hamed Haddadi. I was expecting to read that they had joked about him being a terrorist or made some derogatory remark about Islam. Imagine my astonishment, then, when I got to the end of the story and found out that what had earned the duo a one-game suspension and the opportunity to profusely apologize to Haddadi (through a translator, since Haddadi speaks little English) was precisely this:

• They mispronounced the word “Iranian.”
• They expressed surprise that any Iranian nationals play in the NBA.
• They jokingly compared Haddadi’s looks to the character “Borat”.
• They complimented Haddadi’s basketball moves.

Seriously? That’s offensive and discriminatory? The only thing that could possibly be offensive is the Borat reference, and that’s pretty much par for the course as far as jokes made at the expense of visiting players. The “Borat” character isn’t Iranian or even Muslim.

Apparently all it took was one person with too much time on their hands who complained to the network to shift the PC police into hyperdrive and send these two announcers into full hand-wringing mode. To his credit, Haddadi, when thoroughly informed as to what had been said about him, didn’t see it as a big deal at all. (In his country, ethnic/religious discrimination generally involves beatings and torture, so you’ll forgive him for his failure to be outraged by a couple of dumb TV comments.) Nor did the Grizzlies organization find the matter worthy of a formal complaint. But hey, it’s Los Angeles, the third most enlightened city in California, so naturally the horse must be beaten to death.

I would have thought this matter would have been eclipsed  by the shocking revelation that somebody actually watches Clippers games on TV all the way until the end, and by the further importance of seeking mental health counseling for that individual rather than taking seriously any complaints from that quarter.

On hiatus

SanityInjection will be on hiatus for the rest of the month and will be back the first week in December.

Quotes of the Week

“[Former President George W. Bush] couldn’t speak with flowery language and even made grammatical mistakes but spoke as plainly as an American farmer. [ President Barack Obama speaks] “with sweet but empty words.”

- Chinese blogger Zhao “Hecaitou” Dezhu

“Learn English from Obama: Instead of saying ‘I want to eat,’ say ‘I am a big supporter of non-hunger.’” – Chinese writer Wang Pei

Despite all the hype from both governments about President Obama’s glorious visit to China and the heavily censored media coverage of the visit in China, it would appear that some folks in China were able to size up the Nobel Peace Prize winner pretty quickly:

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory?id=9117321

The question is whether Americans can say the same.

Veterans Day lessons from a degenerate moron

No, I’m not referring to myself I’m referring to Florida resident Joshua Basso, who celebrated Veterans Day by getting himself arrested for making obscene phone calls – to a 911 operator.

Rather than write the usual sort of Veterans Day essay you could find in virtually every newspaper yesterday – virtually identical from one to another – I thought I would use Mr. Basso’s case to see how many object lessons we can extract from it contrasting the values his actions express with the ones our veterans have fought, and continue to fight for.

Like all of us, Mr. Basso is a product of his genetics and environment. Let us assume charitably that his parents may be fairly normal and not chromosomally defective.  Yet they must bear some of the blame (and surely are dying of embarrassment as I write) for raising a son who chooses to spend what I assume was his day off – if he is employed – in this way. And yet – is Mr. Basso so very different from many of the people we encounter in our lives each day? I have to wonder.

Consider that Mr. Basso appears to have been motivated by a combination of boredom and sexual desire. It is ironic that in an age with more entertainment options available than our forefathers could ever have imagined, boredom still afflicts so many of us – typically when we are left to our own devices. The majority of today’s young adults, having never learned to read English properly as children, never developed the love of reading that can turn what would otherwise be a period of tedium into a precious chance to lose one’s self in a book – available to even the poorest from a local public library. As for sexual desire, any number of sociologists can tell you that the absolution saturation of our media with sex inevitably results in an overactive sex drive, especially among males of a certain age.  Contrast this with the self-discipline instilled in our military veterans.

Lacking a partner, Mr. Basso apparently decided to combine his self-gratification with what he no doubt felt was “harmless mischief” – a concept reinforced by adults when they tacitly approve of things like vandalism on Halloween. Never mind who is inconvenienced. In this case, the mischief took the form of coercing an unwilling participant – the 911 operator – into being the object of Mr. Basso’s sexual gratification. Philosophically, there is no difference between this and exposing yourself in public, or physically raping or molesting someone – only a difference of degree. Somewhere along the line, Mr. Basso failed to absorb the idea that other people’s rights and feelings matter at least as much as his own. Meanwhile, our veterans exemplify the opposite by putting their lives at risk over and over again to defend the rights and freedoms of others.

Next of course is the total obliviousness to the fact that Basso’s 911 calls might have slowed or prevented authorities from responding to a real emergency someplace, as our military does routinely. When asked why he chose 911 as his target, he explained that it was a free call. So our next count against Mr. Basso is his intention to achieve his goal and get someone else – specifically, you and me, the taxpayers, to pay for it, where a responsible person might have spent his own money on a 1-900 sex line. Contrast with our veterans, who know only too well that anything worth doing in life has a cost – a cost they have seen measured in the blood of their friends and comrades.

Finally, Mr. Basso admitted that he had made multiple calls like this in the past but never believed he would get caught. The philosophy thus espoused can best be expressed as, “Do unto others and then run.” For Mr. Basso, it was always up to some other authority to regulate his behavior, freeing him to act as he pleased bound only by his practical, not moral, ability to avoid getting caught. Our military men and women, on the other hand, are instilled with a moral code that teaches them to behave themselves even when no one is around to “catch” them.

I think what disturbed me most was Mr. Basso’s mug shot. Even allowing for the natural level of shock at being arrested and the usual 10 pounds added by the camera, what I see is a vapid, clueless individual whose double chin suggests he is not one of society’s deprived victims. Nor is he visibly a member of some persecuted minority lashing out against injustice. Look again. You probably know one or two people that look exactly like this guy. I swear one of the kids on my block will look exactly like this in about 15 years. You can almost hear the words issuing from his open mouth (their mouths are always open) -”What do you mean, my actions have consequences?”

The point I am trying to make is that Mr. Basso is not unique in our modern society, just perhaps a little dumber than most. The values and attitudes that motivated his actions – if subconsciously – are shared by a frighteningly large number of the fellow citizens we interact with every day. What is disturbing about Joshua Basso is not that he is a deviant. It is that he is the norm.

Nor am I unaware that there are always those military veterans who embarrass the rest by failing to carry forward the moral and philosophical lessons they learn while in service. In fact, I do not know for certain that Mr. Basso is not himself a military veteran. But I rather doubt it. Don’t you?

US – North Korea negotiations: What is really going on?

Or perhaps better to ask, What is really *not* going on? Korea expert Andrei Lankov, writing in the Asia Times, argues that for once, the Obama Administration’s foot-dragging and dithering in the foreign policy arena is actually a good strategy when it comes to North Korea:

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KK12Dg01.html

Lankov’s essential point is that North Korea has been “playing” the US for many years, and the Administration, led by Secretaries Clinton and Gates, has decided to turn the tables on them. In the past, North Korea had an edge because the US wanted something from them – denuclearization – and needed at least the appearance of an agreement badly enough to make concessions without insisting on verification of the NK side of the agreement, which was never fulfilled.

Instead, the US is now giving lip service to negotiations but not actually pursuing them. This sends a message to North Korea: If you are not serious about reaching an agreement, we won’t take you seriously.

Of course, there is the possibility that North Korea may try to raise the stakes by committing further provocations. The recent naval skirmish between North and South Korea may be the first sign of this. The Administration will have to steel itself not to give ground no matter how many missile tests or belligerent announcements come from Pyongyang. If NK leader Kim Jong-Il becomes convinced that there is an iron fist inside the US’ velvet glove, he may decide that it’s better to shake hands than play ratslap.

Prophet Al Gore stands to profit from global warming hysteria

I have argued many times here that the media deliberately hides the profit motive of many in the global warming hysteria industry whose jobs, government grants, or investments are financially dependent on scaring people into going green. Thus, I view it as highly significant that the New York Times – of all publications, the most rigidly supportive of the global warming agenda – has run a piece detailing the ways in which global warming prophet Al Gore stands to profit from his efforts to panic the American people into drastic action on carbon emissions.

I won’t repeat all the details here, but suffice it to say, Gore has invested heavily in businesses that would benefit from the regulatory and legislative reforms he is pushing. When questioned on the matter, Gore usually responds with anger and annoyance that his motives should be called into question.

In fairness to Gore, I do believe he is telling the truth when he says that his advocacy for action on climate change is not primarily motivated by financial gain. Gore is a fanatic, and money is not what motivates fanatics. I believe that Gore sees this issue as the centerpiece of his legacy as a public figure – he wants to be remembered forever as the man who saved the world from global warming, and that means much more to him than money.

I also agree with Gore’s insistence that he has a right to invest in anything he wants just like anybody else. What I don’t agree with, though, is that Gore has never registered as a lobbyist despite the fact that he is arguably the most visible lobbyist in America. Nor does Gore believe that he has any obligation to disclose his financial interests before telling us all about our moral duty to save the planet. These things create the appearance of impropriety, and Gore as a longtime public servant should know that the appearance of impropriety is sometimes almost as bad as actual impropriety.

I commend the New York Times for its rare decision to train its magnifying glass on one of its own sacred cows for a change. Who knows, maybe someday they will even print an objective analysis of the Obamessiah?

Italy can’t make 2 plus 2 equal 5

I have often blogged in support of religious expression against what I perceive as excessive repression in the name of secularism. However, it does happen that sometimes the secularists are in the right. So it is with a recent case in the European Court in which the Italian government lost its attempt to defend the widespread practice of displaying a crucifix in public school classrooms.

Italy, of course is a traditionally Catholic nation, and the crucifix is a familiar symbol in every city and village there. But Italy is also a country that claims to adhere to the European Union’s standards of freedom of religion. So when a parent complained about the presence of a crucifix in her child’s public school classroom and sought unsuccessfully to have it removed, she appealed all the way to the European Court.

Italy argued unsuccessfully that the crucifix was a traditional symbol of Italian culture. In fact, there is nothing about crucifixes in Italy that makes them unique to Italy or any different than those found in Spain, France, or any other Catholic area. Italy also insisted – rather ridiculously – that the crucifix is a symbol of unity, tolerance, and secularism. Secularism??

This would certainly come as news to anyone familiar with the Inquisition or the Jewish ghettoes. Yes, modern Italy is a relatively secular and tolerant country, but the crucifix is hardly a symbol of that modernity.

Ironically, courtrooms in Italy also display crucifixes. The Euro court’s ruling would seem to open up the ability to challenge that practice as well.

The point is not that Italy is deliberately trying to foist Catholicism on its citizens. Rather, it’s that the prominent display of the symbol of a very specific religious domination is inherently discriminatory and exclusionary to those who practice a different faith or none at all.

There is a separate argument to be made here about whether an international court should have the right to tell a sovereign state such as Italy what it can and cannot do – but that is something Italy should have considered as part of its membership in the European Union.