The NBA playoffs, which involved 16 teams playing a total of 89 games, have ended. So have the NHL playoffs, which involved another 16 teams and another 83 games.
World Cup games end by 5 p.m. every day. NFL games won't be on television for another two months.
I can only hope that this sudden lack of prime-time sports content means there will soon be an explosion of Pittsburgh Pirates games on television in Northern Virginia.
We are allowing a mine-shaft gap.
It sounds like something from a science fiction film — a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island ready to serve as a Noah’s Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe.
But Norway’s ambitious project is on its way to becoming reality. Construction began Monday on the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, designed to house as many as 3 million of the world’s crop seeds.
Not quite as exciting as the prospect of ten women for each man in nuclear-safe mineshafts, maybe, but I suppose it’s about time the rest of the world took seriously our unabating effort to destroy it.
The best way to defend the symbol of American liberties is not to take away one of them.
Proponents of a constitutional amendment to ban flag burning are either woefully ignorant or shamefully disdainful of the principle of free speech. Burning a flag is the clearest form of political protest, and the democratic government of a civilized nation has no moral right to ban such expression.
Important legal question: will they prosecute people for eating these when flag desecration is illegal?
With the games getting underway today, here are my loyalties:
Brazil might have made the list, but for my hesitation to cheer for favorites. I was in Brazil in 1998 to watch them lose the championship match to France, and the national mourning was memorable.
At the often-unintentionally-hilarious Club for Growth blog, Andrew Roth links to this, which he calls "a very interesting theory" about the effect of the estate tax:
Once we lived in an America with a bewildering array of corner lunch counters, interesting bookstores, individualistic neighborhood clothiers, tailors, dressmakers, appliance shops each with its own unique spin on what the owner thought you wanted — lots of small individualistic enterprises that, like family farms, got passed down through the family from one generation to the next.
The estate tax replaced all these with McDonalds, Borders, The Gap, the ubiquitous extended warrantee, and ADM.
So the theory is simple: the basic method of passing business expertise from one generation to the next — the family business enterprise — has been replaced by the franchise operation, all thanks to your friendly neighborhood death tax.
And the next time some smart social reformer demands you watch his heart bleed for all the small local businesses Wal-Mart is killing, just ask him — "so what do you think the interitance tax [sic] is doing?"
Where to begin?
Fortunately, 41 United States senators exercised some sanity today by voting to uphold a filibuster and prevent a complete estate tax repeal. A "compromise" bill, which would cut the tax on unearned, inherited income for spoiled billionaire kids by a mere 80-90 percent, is expected shortly.
Addendum: Franklin Roosevelt said this in 1935: "The transmission from generation to generation of vast fortunes by will, inheritance, or gift is not consistent with the ideals and sentiments of the American people."
An economist in my family points out that this rationale was enough to justify the estate tax for the better part of two generations, but is no longer politically palatable.
