BoTax-- Politicians Get Bored, So Make Creative Tax Names

BoTax.

Yep. Pretty soon, there may be a 5% tax on plastic surgery (that is not due to congenital abnormalities, injuries from trauma, or disfiguring disease). The senate is proposing it in the latest Health Care bill.

But seriously. Plastic surgeons and their patients are outraged. From the NYT, "'A lot of people think of this as a tax on rich Republican housewives; rich nonworking Republican housewives,' said Dr. Phile Haeck, 'This is not the case.'" According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 60% of plastic surgery patients earn less than $90,000.

This might just mean outsourcing of plastic surgery (say hello to India and Mexico! Invest in expedia.com! in Kingfisher Airlines! in Air Mexico! haha)

Yet how much is 5% on plastic surgery? Its expensive enough as it is, why not take on another 5%?

While that seems *ahem* "logical," WHY THE HELL DO WE NEED TO TAX EVERYTHING?

Take Mayor Luke Ravenstahl of my own hometown, Pittsburgh. He wants to impose a 1% tax on students (Think University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon, Carlow, Chatham, Robert Morris, the list goes on). He claims they aren't paying a dime for the services they receive and they should pitch in. According to USA today, only 6% of Carlow students can pay the full $20,000 tuition. What makes Lukie think they can afford more? 100,000 students make up a significant portion of the city. They are the reason Pittsburgh is one of the top ten tech cities in America. Why scare them away?

Perhaps if he came up with a more creative name for the tax, like "Stud-tax" I would be persuaded.

END IT: in 21 Years.

First of all, thanks for bearing with me as I battled swine flu (maybe?) and just general sickness those weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Thanks for waiting for me too as I got back to this blog!

So before break, Deb Margolin (my acting 210 professor) brings in a pamphlet from Washington and Lee University, where she had been giving a talk that weekend. It was from a group "END IT" at WLU, dedicated to ending rape and sexual assault at WLU by the year 2030.

2030.

Wait. Seriously?

Yes. Here is a transcript below:

If you wouldn't want your sister (or brother) to come to W & L, would you send your children?

END IT is a movement that seeks to end sexual assault at W & L no later than 2030.

Let's make W & L a safe place.

(Phone numbers)

Coming soon, endit.wlu.edu.

END IT.

So the website does not work. There is no way to contact this group. I am just left with a bunch of questions and Deb is left with the impression that W & L is "RAPE CITY!"on the weekends. (Apparently getting drunk is an excuse for raping someone?--so I'm told, I have no verifiable fact on this).

All I have is this pamphlet and 2030. No contact. No Website. What does this mean? Does this mean that the rape situation is so bad that its going to take until 2030 to rid of it? Is that an "ambitious goal" or can we be a little more ambitious here??? Or maybe I completely mistake the pamphlet. We all know sexual assaiult happens everywhere. Maybe they are trying to be lenient and solve the problem by slowly phasing in on it.

BUT COME ON. Rape is a federal offense! I don't quite get why you don't say END IT TODAY because its been illegal. You can demand more from your school than 2030, I should hope.

Here is the catch, my oscillation. My catch 22. Whatever. I don't know the situation. All I have a card. 2030. Deb's "Rape City" reaction. I have no facts. I do not know. Maybe this group is somehow right in approaching the problem as they are. But 2030??? I want to judge those raping boys. I want to persuade those victims and activists to demand more. Yet I am clueless. This is the activist's/philanthropist's dilemma: you know something is wrong, you just don't know what.

What would you think?

My Brain Feels like a Magnetic Zero....

When you have a fever, your brain somehow clings to every image, memory, TV show, or the back of your eyelids---definitely not anything you "should" be doing.

So I found my brain floating in its nostalgia today and came across a 10 person band, Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. Basically, its a band that is the brain child of a down and out Alex Ebert. After AA and sleeping on inflatable couches, he came up with the notion of a prophetic hero "Edward Sharpe" who travels around the West, preaching, though constantly distracted by the beautiful Jade, and other women, pleasures, and ideas.

In an age where everyone is looking for a hero or maybe just some comfort from a bygone era where we had faith, we were just distracted. Are we still distracted, or do we even have faith?

Anyways, enough with those pointless blurbs. Buy the CD, check it on Myspace. Here is an article that inspired me. Look 'em up on youtube or myspace or whatever. Listen to their song, "HOME." Basically... something about it reaffirms my sense of comfort, home, and love.

http://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2009/09/edward-sharpe-and-the-magnetic-zeros-cmon-get-happ.html

I'm going to go nurse this fickle fever.

Flu, and all I can comprehend right now is 3M Tempa(dot) Strips

When you have the flu, your mind does not work. Like mine right now. At the clinic where I went for them to tell me that I have a flu and maybe bronchitis, they took my temperature not with an electronic stick, but rather a strip! Cool stuff, y'know! (This is my mind right now).

http://solutions.3m.com/wps/portal/3M/en_US/SH/SkinHealth/products/catalog/?PC_7_RJH9U5230GE3E02LECFTDQG2O7_nid=GS7MJ47R7QbeQJ7KQ995P3gl

Check it. 3M Tempa(dot) Thermometer strips. They just stick 'em in your mouth and they tell your temperature. Great innovation, especially when dealing with what is clean and what is not these days is a problem.

And because I have the flu, the clinic gave me ten of them. MWAH HA HA!

God bless the mind with a fever.

Rest in Peace Yale

I wish I could write a valediction or something to comfort myself or others, and maybe I can later. In the mean time, all I can do is employ John Donne.

Valediction Forbidding Mourning:

AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
"Now his breath goes," and some say, "No."

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
'Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th' earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers' love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, 'cause it doth remove
The thing which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix'd foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th' other do.

And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam,
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th' other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

Rest in Peace Andre. Rest Peacefully Yale.