A Gilded Planet

F: Dear H, I don't care what happens as long as I get to kill shit. Sincerely, F H: Dear F, Typhoon Harridan! don't hawk out at me – H F: Dear H, I'm not. I'm with you on this one. Just tell me who to split. Sincerely, F H: Let's be real for a moment. I used to be just like you, full of apples and kanger. Then I learned how to cook stir-fry, sew backpacks and fix motorcycles. Have a good one. - H F: I need your sayso before I gogo on these cholos. I don't even know what that means, F. Take yourself down a peg, it'll do you a world of good. - H H - Maybe you forgot what you owe me and what it means to not even want anymore. Peg yourself down a take and throw out the rice cooker while you're add it. F - H, upgrade your attitude. You know how to make Powerpoints, that doesn't equip your for life in killing fields, trust me, okay. F. H. Con your way up the food chain all you like but sooner or later you're going to find the ...

Continued from Part I . The problems of the U.S. Tax Code are almost innumerable, but I will describe only the most inimical flaws that this proposed overhaul will address. These can be categorized broadly in three groups: problems of unfairness, problems of inefficiency and problems of complexity. The tax code is unfair when it derives revenue in a needlessly regressive manner as in the case of the funding source for Social Security and Medicare. The FICA Tax that raises revenue for those programs is flat and thus by definition regressive. An individual earning $20,000 annually is in the same income bracket as a person earning $90,000 in the same year as far as the FICA tax is concerned. To make matters worse, only the first $106,800 of wages is subject to Social Security portion of the tax while investment income is not subject to the tax at all. This means that for three fourths of Americans, the FICA tax represents a majority of their tax liability. But for the wealthiest peopl...

People tend to overestimate the level of control they have over events, understanding their contributions as important even when they are actually inconsequential. People stand by their belief that they can affect the results of random systems and even when a relationship exists between actions and outcomes, people still reliably overestimate the importance of that relationship. For wealthy people, this tendency is much stronger than among ordinary people.  This may explain the existence of such absurd social phenomena as aristocracies and hereditary monarchy. When you have so much money , this may distort your perception of the world in such a way that you could actually start to believe it makes sense for your children to inherit the extremely powerful position you hold simply by virtue of them being your children.

The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans 2009.  122 minutes. USA. Directed by Werner Herzog. Watchdate: 3/27/2011. An odd duck of a movie that novelly spoofs the police detective story by roiling up such an absurd concoction of unhinged wildness that it skewers conventions and upsets expectations seemingly without any effort expended whatsoever. This is exactly the kind of movie I love - contemptuous of genre, hilariously impulsive, aware of its self-indulgence but unwilling to apologize for it. In fact, it fulfilled my desires too much - at a certain point it was so enjoyable that it ceased being at all challenging. Therefore it can't quite rise to the top of the pile. Or can it? On first viewing it felt too good to be true, but in retrospect I can't stop loving its drunken audacity and hallucinatory liveliness. In any case, this is exactly the way Nicolas Cage can be utilized effectively for high entertainment - waving a huge gun around in order to threaten old ladies,...

Leaves of Grass 2009.  105 minutes. USA. Directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Watchdate: 3/24/2011. An odd duck of a movie that novelly attempts to use the delicately promising premise of Edward Norton playing mismatched twin brothers - one an Apollonian academic, the other a Dionysian drug dealer - to combine the utterly modern subgenre of a stoner action comedy (ala Pineapple Express ) with the most ancient of genres, the Greek Tragedy (ala Antigone ). The result, as one might expect, is very uneven. But it deserves some attention for the curiosity of its storytelling impulses. Oscillating between ruthlessly violent Jewish gangsters and loving tributes to Walt Whitman, satiring the pretensions of cloistered academia alongside the antics of troglodyte rednecks, the movie virtuously tries to arbitrate the idiosyncrasies of the diverse ways people choose to live their lives. It's a valiant effort, worthwhile as much for how it fails as how it succeeds.

This section is rambling and weird. Please fix this nonsense. (You cannot fix it through a purchase or a password, its just something that burns in your chest.) Miskimin is said to have been raised inside a globe of video glands. He fought the populace for points, which he would trade in for a toothbrush and other tools in order to acquire more points. I. Depending on who Miskimin really was, you may have different objectives. If you want to see the highlights of development, you can do that by building Banana Republic-type stores on a lake of lava in order to conquer or the world or blast off into space. This will be addictive fun, but you will find that you torture yourself with the allure of “just one more turn.” II. If Miskimin was an alchemist, the likelihood is that he does not live in this century. In that case, you will have to fight your way through each shared space. Along the way, you will kill enemies like Ghenghis Khan and Alexander the Great by laying railroad t...

The Tree of Life 2011.  138 minutes. USA. Directed by Terrence Malick. Watchdate: 8/15/2011. This movie is the most conspicuously arty movie I have watched since Wings of Desire . It left me feeling conflicted. I want to call it pretentious garbage, but I got too caught up in it and found it too emotionally and intellectually stimulating to really believe that it's that. No doubt it is pretentious, and finds itself more profound than it actually is, but as with Wings of Desire I admire rather than ridicule its soaring ambition. I found both the second section and the third section of the movie to be superb. The second section is a journey through space and time to discover the origin of life and rhythms of birth and death. This section is packed with great images. On that basis alone, I rate it highly but I also like that it connects human tragedy to the larger canvas of the cosmos. As portentous as it is, I wish more storytellers were daring enough to make that leap from the c...