McCain and the scams of the week, thoughts on death and taxes

By scams of the week, I don’t mean anything McCain did, but the opposite. The  budget deal and negotiations this past week evolved in such a crazy way, demonstrating decay on such a huge scale, that I wondered: “If I had a time machine, should I go back and support McCain for election when he ran?” That kind of thought becomes more serious as those kinds of possibilities grow a bit less hypothetical, but obviously one would have to be EXTREMELY careful about actually using them. But I will say more about that after the issues of the week are covered – first what I was doing (taxes) and then my understanding of what I saw on CNN and CNN International (and a little of France 24) in the background as I did them.

It was one hell of a week,  with a second government shutdown, but I was almost entirely detached from it, because I spent all my serious energy budget of the week on just one task – taxes. A week already. I found myself laughing as I read the bottom of one form, which said roughly “This should only take half an hour. If you disagree, you can write to IRS…” The small family LLC (mainly for honorarium income lately) mainly required tracking down and tabulating receipts (much harder because of a computer crash last year), about two days worth  -- but the personal taxes were harder. This year, we broke down and bought TurboTax Premier, just for the personal taxes, and I am glad we did, but there are two things I wish I had known in advance: (1) This year we crossed the threshold of NOT filing schedule A, for the first time ever (well, since I bought my first house in 1976 or so), even though lots of the IRS instructions strongly encouraged us to do; and (2) schedule 1116, for an honorarium in Korea which came net of tax withholding. If I knew both of those things, and just used TurboTax, it was good enough to replicate what took me days by hand, and ALSO figure an additional schedule I did not even know about of huge importance to us. We won’t file until we get two extra pieces of paper, but the main pain is done, and we can sit back and let the computer redo all the work when those last pieces arrive (or we give up on them). It only took a few hours – but if I didn’t know how 1116 works, I might have screwed up even with TurboTax.

But as I did these taxes, mainly on the modest table in our traditional-sized kitchen, I was horrified by what I saw on the background on CNN and CNN International, streaming from the television on the wall which Luda reconfigured as a second monitor linked to the laptop I am typing on now. (Much easier to change channels by clicking on a tab in Microsoft Edge, while I use Chrome for my real work on the laptop, than to use the old decaying FioS box which we plan to send back fairly soon.)

To be honest, my first horror was with how badly the Democrats treated the Trump/Kelly immigration proposal at the start of the budget process. Sometimes Trump listens to … evil people who want to bring him down along with maybe the whole country.  But sometimes he really tries to take the moral highground as best he can. This was the second case. If you tried to train a dog the way the US treated Trump, the dog would go nuts, and what is it that causes “civilized” people in the US to treat someone worse than they would treat a dog? He promised a middle of the road compromise position specifically on immigration, to allow us to get back to moderate compromises on budget and avoid shutdowns. Kelly rightly stressed that his bill would help many times more “dreamers” than the earlier DACA proposal; Schumer had previously made a commitment to offer some money for a “wall” as part of a deal; and Trump’s idea of copying merit-based immigration as in the system of many credible liberal nations was not a travesty either. So why not just accept it and move on?

One reason I started streaming instead of FIOS was that my choices of news channels became narrower and narrower, in practice, and CNN US – for all its good points – seemed to become an almost endless study of Trump’s bathroom, punctuated by obnoxious commercials. France24 helped, but its technical problems even on Verizon FIOS required active attention at best. When Bloomberg disappeared, that was the last straw for me. But the failure to compromise was highlighted (and explained?) by what I saw on CNN, where Kelly’s rough way of speaking (actually, just citing different points of view, for God’s sake!) got 100% of the attention and the actual content of the compromise got almost none. (No discussion, only a sentence or two from him.) It conjures up a (WARNING! NOT REAL!) cartoon of Hillary Clinton announcing she will launch a missile attack on Russia because Putin wore an unfashionable tie on the day he visited her… Sadly, these are very real problems.

At that point, I emphasized with Trump, because trying to work out a really honorable compromise, a Pareto optimal resolution of conflicting concerns, is something I have tried to do, which really ought to have a place in our world. I too have gotten into trouble for just delivering solutions on the table, without going through the process of asking questions, developing very broad first drafts, calming those who want to move faster than the system allows, and so on. (Indeed, I have discussed the issue of IT antidotes to fake news this week; one theme is the need not just for a system to provide “answers” but to provide questions in a highly intelligent way.)

And then in the Senate came the real horror: half the essence of the “swamp,” the operation of legalized corruption focused on ways to disassemble what was left of America. “Let’s just spend more money, to hell with tomorrow, to hell with efficiency and effectiveness in how we use the money, let’s divvy up the loot of the day…” I was freaked out by how dishonest Rand Paul’s presentation on NSF was,  but except for that it was perhaps the first deliberate shutdown I actually respected.

I wasn’t able to track down purges at the FBI this week so much as I might in a regular week (maybe, always seem busy lately)… but it was scary not to know whether they were the purges we need badly (folks too compliant with those off-site meetings Trump really ought to have noticed, folks too willing to use deceptive kangaroo court tactics on ALL folks who don’t obey their masters) or the exact opposite, making the problem even worse. Given that Trump often listens to … certain interested parties… and seemed to have no awareness of the hard realities, I fear the latter. Is he becoming like Teddy Roosevelt or like that clown Augustus who stadium in Cartagena I will never forget… less of a disaster only because of Jesus at that time… ?

I also wondered this week: is FSB any better than FBI lately? Putin’s support for the new would-be great Caliph of Turkey, expanding his territory, was not encouraging. Putin the scourge of Christianity? Is he any more in control of his folks than Putin of his? I am grateful that a State Department guy sent me pointer to their latest analysis of what’s happening in Russia, but it simply assumed that Putin was an all-knowing devil… flattery he might preen to, in a way, but not really so informative about complexities in Russia as serious as those in US and China.

But who knows? Not yet time to pull a few plugs… or even to efile…

Death and taxes. As I struggled to warm up and focus on taxes, one morning I did a post to Vedanta list: “Since death is more pleasant than taxes, let me warm up by discussing death first…”  But actually, this hard week was a learning experience. We are called to pay real attention to anything which gets our emotions going, one way or another, and use it as a learning experience afterwards, in all ways we can.

This morning, I even see an analogy. The first really big challenge in doing taxes is preparation. We really need to get all the information together which exists in places like files cabinets down in the dark basement, to prepare for the time when in the bright kitchen we  bring it together and actually do what is needed. 

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It was really good later yesterday to hear on CNN that McCain is doing better for now medically.... 

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Added later: having said positive things about Kelly... some would ask "Why the omission of talk about WH staff beating their wives?"

Certainly that subject deserves some attention, but it is no excuse for failure to fix the immigration problems when we could have, before any mass raid on the Treasury!!

But yes, I saw all that too when CNN was playing in the background. My first reaction was:  "This is ONE problem I could not empathize with AT ALL! At least, some of us are not even close to that kind of temptation." But then I remembered that there were some times, when I was growing up, when my father had too much to drink as part of his business, came home testy, and was too nasty to my mother. I don't recall black eyes (repressed memory?), but the feeling was intense enough that I simply swore  to myself I would never let myself come even  close to such behavior. I never did. What's more, I value strength... so that neither Luda nor my ex-wife are the kind of shrinking violet who would somehow encourage that kind of violence.

For a moment I felt smug about how superior I am to those guys... but then a voice said "It's not as if you had any choice here, what with Luda regularly sparing with a red belt international judo master (until he died)." 

It also reminds that these guys need help... but we all knew that long ago.