The highlight of my day

In between brain-melting sessions of graduate-level physical science study, I found this. My life is now complete.

Jerry Neil Morgan, RIP

Story about a young man from Pikeville, KY:

Gaffe = when politicians tell the truth

Mitt now confirmed that he is not qualified for the presidency and that we don't want him as the candidate. How so, you ask?

I don't think using the Friday news dump will work to avoid his own words:

Romney only reached the 14.1 percent mark by limiting deductions taken from his considerable charitable giving. Had the Romneys taken all of the deductions made available by their $4.02 million in 2011 donations, his effective tax rate could have been as low as 10.4 percent.

By not using all the available deductions, he paid an additional $500,000 to the federal government. 

That decision contradicts a pledge Romney made during an interview in July, when he told ABC News he would not pay more in taxes "than are legally due. And, frankly, if I had paid more than are legally due I don't think I'd be qualified to become president. I'd think people would want me to follow the law and pay only what the tax code requires."

Romney made a similar remark in January during a GOP primary debate, when he said, "I pay all the taxes that are legally required and not a dollar more. I don't think you want someone as the candidate for president who pays more taxes than he owes." (emphasis mine) 

So the guy who used Swiss bank accounts and Cayman Island accounts to avoid paying taxes for years is now paying $500,000 more in taxes than he should have just because he didn't want people to see that he's paying 10% in taxes on over $10 million in income. But in so doing he both makes an obvious political play and contradicts his earlier quotes about how such an action would "disqualify him" from the presidency...

Lol.

See also for reference: NYT

The Ethics of David Foster Wallace

I found this old article by David Foster Wallace and wanted to repost it as a rich resource: here

Info post

I must have been putting this information together for some blog post, which has now escaped my memory and died due to neglect...but I hate to trash the info, since I may some day remember why I posted it.

Krugman and Wells on Inequality

Economy killers: Inequality and GOP ignorance
By failing Econ 101, Republican leaders failed the country and repeated the errors that caused the Great Depression
By Paul Krugman and Robin Wells
Sunday, Apr 15, 2012

America emerged from the Great Depression and the Second World War with a much more equal distribution of income than it had in the 1920s; our society became middle-class in a way it hadn’t been before. This new, more equal society persisted for 30 years. But then we began pulling apart, with huge income gains for those with already high incomes. As the Congressional Budget Office has documented, the 1 percent — the group implicitly singled out in the slogan “We are the 99 percent” — saw its real income nearly quadruple between 1979 and 2007, dwarfing the very modest gains of ordinary Americans. Other evidence shows that within the 1 percent, the richest 0.1 percent and the richest 0.01 percent saw even larger gains.

The next biggest thing

Will it be curing all viruses? Curing cancer? Finding a way to hook the brain up to a computer?

I think it will be this one thing: answering abiogenesis once and for all. Which is not to say that the recent news actually moves us closer to it.

I mean one of those first two things will probably happen after the third thing (if not before). And I can't agree more that those first two things are more morally important. I just think that the question of our origins -- how did life arise on Earth? -- will haunt us more from our past than our future can ever escape.