Big Lizards:Blog:Entry “Qwik Hitz”

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September 14, 2006

Qwik Hitz

Hatched by Dafydd

Just some musings that don't seem large enough to warrant separate posts apiece. These are the nagging questions that sometimes jolt me awake in the middle of the day.

You're either with us...

In the international arena, we are fighting a battle that ultimately reduces to civilization versus barbarity.

But in the national arena, the real battle is between courage and cowardice: every man and woman in the county is either acting courageously... or he is playing the coward.

May I cut in?

Since this phase of the war against jihadi terrorism began five years ago, the British have been our most stalwart allies, while the French our weakest and most untrustworthy -- so much so that many of us consider Crock Jacques Chirac to have at least one doddering foot in the training camps of our enemies.

But now it appears that over the next two years, the British will drift away from the United States as Tony Blair leaves -- but the French will likely become much closer to us, if, as expected, Nicholas Sarkozy is the next president of France.

When the music changes, are our minds flexible enough to change partners?

Hair of the dog

Scientists have devised a fascinating scheme to repopulate the world with wooly mammoths by recovering mammoth semen (no jokes) from the creatures' frozen mammoth generative organs (all right, so I couldn't help myself).

Perhaps they'll come in handy when the global-warming crowd flip-flops again and begans warning, in dire, sepulchral tones, of the pending catastrophe of global cooling. You wouldn't want your mammoth to get cold, would you?

The premature-death tax

The current estate tax -- or "death tax," as anyone without pennies on his eyes calls it -- is currently slated to drop and drop until it finally reaches 0% in 2010; but then, the next year, if nothing it done in Congress to permanize the cuts, it's scheduled to leap right back up to where it began: 47%.

So if the Democrats continue to block meaningful permanent reform of the death tax... how many additional premature deaths will occur in late 2010 -- either voluntarily or with a little help from heirs -- as rational people act rationally, if not morally, to save an inheritance?

Call this figure the Democrats' "premature-death" tax.

Hatched by Dafydd on this day, September 14, 2006, at the time of 7:00 PM