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Five Blood Boiling Facts About Taxes You Did Not Know

But first from the “How-Unbelievably-Stupid-Is-Harry-Reid?” files:




Now, then:

5. Among the bureaucrats who want to raise your taxes, only 5 percent think their own taxes are too low.

This poll conducted by Gallup shows that “57 percent of Republicans responded that their own taxes were too high. Fifty-eight percent of Independents agreed, while only 37 percent of Democrats said the amount they paid in taxes was too high. Shockingly, given the Democratic Party’s steadfast belief that tax rates should always be higher, only 5 percent of Democrats felt that their own taxes were too low.”

There’s nothing I like more than being lectured about “income equality” by a wealthy bureaucrat, whose income you and I help pay, who, in turn, does not himself want to pay more in taxes.

4. Here’s a breakdown of where each of your taxed dollar goes:

  • Social Security, Unemployment and Labor – 33.24 cents
  • Medicare and Health – 24.54 cents
  • Military – 17.1 cents
  • Interest on Debt – 6 cents
  • Transportation – 4.1 cents
  • Veterans Benefits – 3.7 cents
  • Food and Agriculture – 3.5 cents
  • Education – 1.8 cents
  • Government – 1.8 cents
  • Housing and Community – 1.5 cents
  • International Affairs – .9 cents
  • Energy and Environment – .9 cents
  • Science – .9 cents


3. About half of the cost of paying for Obamacare comes from new taxes.

2. The money that’s being forcibly taken from you isn’t even close to enough: Taxes are $2.3 trillion. Government spending is $3.6 trillion.

“You’re only seeing about two-thirds of the full cost of government services. Really. The rest is being put on the national credit card.

“The tax bill is a lie every year. We’ve only paid our bills in full on April 15 five times in the last fifty years. The last president to balance the books every year he was in office? Calvin Coolidge — back in the 1920s. How pathetic is that?

“Deficits are just future taxes. According to the non-partisan Tax Foundation, ‘Tax Freedom Day’ falls on April 17 this year — but ‘Deficit Day,’ which includes the full bill, won’t come for another month.

“Taxes — to steal from Albert Einstein — should be as low as possible, but no lower. Stop lying to me” (source).

1. The politicians and bureaucrats whose paychecks you finance through your labor — well, over 300,000 of them are tax cheaters.

From Senator Tom Coburn’s investigation:

In 2011, the IRS found nearly 312,000 federal employees and retirees were delinquent on their federal income taxes, owing a total of $3.5 billion in unpaid federal income taxes. This represented an 11.5 percent increase in the number of federal employees failing to pay their taxes, and a 2.9 percent increase in the total taxes owed the Treasury by these public servants.



Happy Tax Day.





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April Fool

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Have you ever wondered how to run a proper propaganda campaign?

Then don’t follow the example of the Obama administration, who, for six solid months, told us repeatedly that they didn’t have any good idea how many people had actually enrolled and paid for an ObamaCare exchange policy — or how many of these same paid enrollees were previously uninsured — but who, suddenly today, announce that “7.1 million Americans have now signed up for plans…”

Barack Obama’s press conference today may very well have made Barack Obama the greatest April Fool in American history. It was a joke of colossal proportions.

“Truth is,” Barack Obama said today, “even more folks want to sign up” — though in reality the overwhelming majority of Americans loathe ObamaCare, and for good reason.

“Making affordable coverage available for all Americans, including those with preexisting conditions, is now an important goal of this law,” Barack Obama also said — pretending he doesn’t know that years before ObamaCare came along insurance companies have been required by law to insure people with preexisting conditions.

“Seven point one million Americans have now signed up for private insurance plans through these marketplaces,” said Barack Obama.

Note, first of all, that in using the word “marketplaces” Barack Obama is simply and poorly propagandizing for his exchanges, which in fact are the diametric opposite of “marketplaces”:

Marketplaces do not force you to buy anything. His exchanges, however, do precisely that.

Note also that in order to really believe his figures, you must ignore the millions of Americans who, precisely because of ObamaCare, had their policies cancelled.

You must ignore as well all the delays, extensions, and waivers this administration has enacted or granted.

Finally, you must ignore that the target number was not what this catastrophic bill was ever about:

It was about insuring the uninsured and reducing costs, neither of which it does or can ever do.

“This law is working… All of which makes the lengths to which critics have gone to scare people, or undermine the law, or try to repeal the law without offering any plausible alternative, so hard to understand. I’ve got to admit—I don’t get it.”

No, you don’t get it, and never have.

And that is why your April Fool’s speech sounded so much like a man whistling through the graveyard.








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How Minimum Wage Laws Fly in the Face of the Irrefutable Law of Supply-And-Demand

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A few weeks ago, I posted an article entitled Eleven Facts About the Minimum Wage Barack Obama Forgot to Mention, which I found on a website called The Federalist, and which was written by a man named Sean Davis, about whom I know next to nothing.

I liked his article, however, and I was surprised at some of the responses I got from readers who are also customers at my work.

The whole idea of a minimum wage is dangerously flawed, and here’s the essence of why:

There’s really no question that the only thing which can ultimately raise wages for workers is improvements in technology, which in turn increase productivity, which in turn increases capital.

As the great Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explained it:

The technological improvement in the production of A makes it possible to realize certain projects which could not be executed before because the workers required were employed for the production of A for which consumers’ demand was more urgent. The reduction of the number of workers in the A industry is caused by the increased demand of these other branches to which the opportunity to expand is offered. Incidentally, this insight explodes all talk about “technological unemployment.”

Tools and machinery are primarily not labor-saving devices, but means to increase output per unit of input. They appear as laborsaving devices if looked upon exclusively from the point of view of the individual branch of business concerned. Seen from the point of view of the consumers and the whole of society, they appear as instruments that raise the productivity of human effort. They increase supply and make it possible to consume more material goods and to enjoy more leisure. Which goods will be consumed in greater quantity and to what extent people will prefer to enjoy more leisure depends on people’s value judgments.

All that minimum wage rates can accomplish with regard to the employment of machinery is to shift additional investment from one branch into another. Let us assume that in an economically backward country, Ruritania, the stevedores’ union succeeds in forcing the entrepreneurs to pay wage rates which are comparatively much higher than those paid in the rest of the country’s industries. Then it may result that the most profitable employment for additional capital is to utilize mechanical devices in the loading and unloading of ships. But the capital thus employed is withheld from other branches of Ruritania’s business in which, in the absence of the union’s policy, it would have been employed in a more profitable way. The effect of the high wages of the stevedores is not an increase, but a drop in Ruritania’s total production.

Real wage rates can rise only to the extent that, other things being equal, capital becomes more plentiful. If the government or the unions succeed in enforcing wage rates which are higher than those the unhampered labor market would have determined, the supply of labor exceeds the demand for labor. Institutional unemployment emerges (Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, Chapter 30).

(If you don’t want to read all that, just read the last paragraph.)

A few days ago, more than 500 economists, three Nobel laureates among them (Vernon Smith, Eugene Fama and Ed Prescott) signed this letter arguing that “artificially raising the minimum wage to $10.10 per hour through a government mandate would have adverse effects on the employment opportunities for unskilled and low-skilled workers. The tragedy of this well-intentioned, but misguided legislation is that it would harm and disadvantage the very workers it is intended to help.”

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In voicing their collective objection to a government price control for entry-level workers, the 500+ economists asserted the Law of Demand and the Law of Supply, two fundamental and time-tested components of basic economy price theory, summarized graphically above. Following a 40% increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour, we would expect two incontrovertible effects: a) the number of unskilled, low-skilled and entry-level workers hired by employers would decrease (a movement upward to the left from $7.25 per hour along the blue demand curve above), and b) the number of unskilled and low-skilled workers looking for entry-level jobs would increase (a movement upward to the right from $7.25 per hour) along the green supply curve above). In combination, those two perfectly predictable and unavoidable effects inevitably leads to an “excess supply of unskilled workers” in the graph above, which is just another term for “more unemployed unskilled workers,” and a higher jobless rate for those workers.

Bottom Line: No amount of wishful thinking or well-intentioned legislation will change the unavoidable outcome of reduced employment opportunities for entry-level workers in America illustrated graphically above. The 500+ economists who have signed the letter are in general agreement that economic reality and the laws of supply and demand are not optional, despite the arrogant attempts of economically-challenged politicians and progressives to circumvent or disregard the most basic economic theory, economic laws and economic logic.

(Link)





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Paul Krugman: Finally Wrong About Something?

Krugtron
Krugtron

In June of 2012, left-wing economist and former Enron advisor Paul Krugman — who calls himself (and I quote) “Krugtron the Invincible” — wrote the following in his New York Times blog:

“I (and those of like mind) have been right about everything.”

Well, unfortunately, his streak of infallibility has just come to an end.

Two days ago, on March 17th (2014), Krugman wrote this:

Or we’re told that conservatives, the Tea Party in particular, oppose handouts because they believe in personal responsibility, in a society in which people must bear the consequences of their actions.Yet it’s hard to find angry Tea Party denunciations of huge Wall Street bailouts, of huge bonuses paid to executives who were saved from disaster by government backing and guarantees.

The boldface is mine. I bolded it not just because his statement is wrong. I bolded it, rather, because it’s so wildly wrong.

As it happens, I was one of the people who began the initial tea party in my town — this, mind you, was in the early days of the tea party, when it was predominantly about laissez-faire, before it was commandeered by the religious, the socially conservative, the philosophically wayward, before it lost its teeth and became a movement with which I was no longer comfortable being associated — and I can tell you and Paul Krugman, without any doubt whatsoever, that the bailouts (both by George Bush and by Barack Obama), as well as all the other forms of crony capitalism, were the predominant reason I was moved to organize the tea party where I live.

And every other tea party organizer I know felt the same way. Don’t believe me?

Here’s a little proof:

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Sorry, Paul. You may be “right about everything,” but you are incontrovertibly wrong about this.

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Ron Paul Is Supporting Putin’s Illegal Occupation of Crimea?

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“In the Crimea crisis, it seems Ron Paul thinks that libertarianism stops at water’s edge,” writes James Kirchick at The Daily Beast.

He continues:

“Paul bases his support of the Crimean referendum on libertarian grounds, as if what’s happening half a world away under the watchful eyes of the Russian military is akin to a Tea Party protest demanding less federal control over education policy.”

In 2008, when Ron Paul was running for the first time against Barack Obama (et al), and his popularity was surging, I myself wrote an article critical of Ron Paul — an article entitled The Apotheosis of Ron Paul — which was published in a local newspaper, and which, somewhat to my surprise, generated a great deal of anger from people nominally on my side.

Now, just over five years later, I often find myself equally surprised at how frequently people still ask me about that article — mostly when I’m working.

My answer: I stand by everything I wrote in the initial article, and Ron Paul’s recent remarks anent the Crimean crisis illustrate nicely why.

Read James Kirchick’s full article at The Daily Beast: Ron Paul is Supporting Russia’s Illegal Occupation of the Crimea





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Don’t Believe In Free-Market Medicine? Have You Ever Seen the Inside of a Venezuelan Supermarket?

Venezuelan supermarket:

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It was in early autumn of 1989 that the drunkard Boris Yeltsin, soon-to-be president of the Soviet Union, visited, for the first time in his life, a supermarket in Houston, Texas.

Not long afterward, in his autobiography Against the Grain, Yeltsin wrote about this watershed moment:

“When I saw those shelves crammed with hundreds, thousands of cans, cartons and goods of every possible sort, I felt quite frankly sick with despair for the Soviet people.”

Michael Dobbs, describing that same moment in his book Down With Big Brother: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, said this:

A turning point in Yeltsin’s intellectual development occurred during his first visit to the United States in September 1989, more specifically his first visit to an American supermarket, in Houston, Texas. The sight of aisle after aisle of shelves neatly stacked with every conceivable type of foodstuff and household item, each in a dozen varieties, both amazed and depressed him. For Yeltsin, like many other first-time Russian visitors to America, this was infinitely more impressive than tourist attractions like the Statue of Liberty and the Lincoln Memorial. It was impressive precisely because of its ordinariness. A cornucopia of consumer goods beyond the imagination of most Soviets was within the reach of ordinary citizens without standing in line for hours. And it was all so attractively displayed. For someone brought up in the drab conditions of communism, even a member of the relatively privileged elite, a visit to a Western supermarket involved a full-scale assault on the senses.

“What we saw in that supermarket was no less amazing than America itself,” recalled Lev Sukhanov, who accompanied Yeltsin on his trip to the United States and shared his sense of shock and dismay at the gap in living standards between the two superpowers. “I think it is quite likely that the last prop of Yeltsin’s Bolshevik consciousness finally collapsed after Houston. His decision to leave theparty and join the struggle for supreme power in Russia may have ripened irrevocably at that moment of mental confusion.”

On the plane, traveling from Houston to Miami, Yeltsin seemed lost in his thoughts for a long time. He clutched his head in his hands. Eventually he broke his silence. “They had to fool the people,” he told Sukhanov. “It is now clear why they made it so difficult for the average Soviet citizen to go abroad. They were afraid that people’s eyes would open.”

Many years before, when Nikita Kruschev first visited the United States, he, too, was taken to a garden-variety supermarket. And what he saw there looked to him so beyond belief that he actually thought it was all set up to deceive him. Poverty and want had been so thoroughly inculcated into him that he simply couldn’t accept that Kapitalist America had such a rich variety of food and household goods readily available for everyone, twenty-four hours a day, everyday.

Venezuela, as you know, has been under socialist rule for decades, regime after regime militantly opposed to free-markets, and I’d like the stark contrast to serve as a reminder to those who support government control of healthcare, as against free-market medicine — free-market medicine, mind you, which I’ve always said will provide far greater goods and services, at higher quality and lower costs, than any government committee, no matter how ingenious, could ever in its wildest imagination conceive.

Here are five charts which show the very clear progression and correlation of rising healthcare costs and socialized medicine in America:








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Greatest Living American Poet?

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Richard Purdy Wilbur — American poet and literary translator, second Poet Laureate of the United States and Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1987), two-time recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1957 and again in 1989), New York City native who published his first poem when he was only eight-years-old — was born March 1st, 1921.

He is 93 years young today.

A good argument can be made that he is America’s greatest living poet.

I, for one, have been influenced by several of his poems.

He’s a formal (sometimes neo-formal) poet whose language is modern and almost always intelligible — a relative rarity in that bucal-fecal carnival called modern poetry.

Here’s a poem of his I first read many years ago, one that’s remained among my all-time favorites — a lesser-known poem, to be sure, every line of which rhymes — about a toad upon whom a freak accident falls. What’s always moved me most about this poem is the dignity that Richard Wilbur gives to his little guy:

Death of a Toad

A toad the power mower caught,
Chewed and clipped of a leg, with a hobbling hop has got
To the garden verge, and sanctuaried him
Under the cineraria leaves, in the shade
Of the ashen and heartshaped leaves, in a dim,
Low, and a final glade.

The rare original heartsblood goes,
Spends in the earthen hide, in the folds and wizenings, flows
In the gutters of the banked and staring eyes. He lies
As still as if he would return to stone,
And soundlessly attending, dies
Toward some deep monotone,

Toward misted and ebullient seas
And cooling shores, toward lost Amphibia’s emperies.
Day dwindles, drowning and at length is gone
In the wide and antique eyes, which still appear
To watch, across the castrate lawn,
The haggard daylight steer.


Happy Birthday, Richard Wilbur.Screen Shot 2014-03-01 at 2.30.20 PM






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11 Facts About the Minimum Wage Barack Obama Forgot to Mention

The following, which I thought was exceptionally insightful, was written by Sean Davis, over at The Federalist:

1) Only 1 Percent Of The U.S. Labor Force Earns The Minimum Wage

Despite the hoopla surrounding the issue, only a tiny percentage of American workers actually earn the federal hourly minimum wage: 1 percent, to be exact. In 2012, the most recent year for which nationwide minimum wage data is available from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), roughly 1.5 million hourly workers were paid the federal minimum wage of $7.25. To put that into perspective, the U.S. labor force consisted of nearly 155 million workers in 2012.

2) Teenagers Comprise The Single Largest Age Group Of Minimum Wage Workers

Teenagers between the ages of 16 and 19 years comprise 31 percent of all minimum wage workers in the U.S. according to the BLS. Workers between 20 and 24 years of age comprise 24 percent of all minimum wage workers, those between 25 and 34 years comprise 15.5 percent, workers between 35 and 44 years comprise less than 10 percent, and those 45 years and up comprise roughly 20 percent of all minimum wage workers in the U.S.

3) Most Minimum Wage Workers Are Under The Age Of 25

According to federal data, over 55 percent of all federal minimum wage workers are under the age of 25. Unsurprisingly, young workers are also the most likely to be unemployed. As of last month, the unemployment rate for 16-to-19-year-olds was 20.2 percent, and the unemployment rate for 20-to-24-year-olds was 11.1 percent. The overall U.S. unemployment rate currently sits at 6.7 percent.

4) A Majority Of Those Who Earn The Minimum Wage Work In Food Preparation Or Sales

In addition to classifying minimum wage workers by age, BLS also categorizes them according to their industry and occupation. Data for 2012 indicate that most minimum wage workers work in “food preparation and serving related occupations” (26.1 percent of all minimum wage workers) or in “sales and related occupations” (25.5 percent of all minimum wage workers), an occupation that often pays commissions and bonuses in addition to fixed hourly rates.

5) Less Than 5 Percent Of People Who Earn The Minimum Wage Work In Construction Or Manufacturing

While there seems to be a persistent belief that a large number of minimum wage workers are salt-of-the-earth construction manufacturing types, that’s just not the case. In fact, less than 5 percent of all minimum wage workers are employed in the construction (0.8 percent) or manufacturing industries (3.3 percent) according to federal wage data. [Correction: exactly 5 percent of those earning the minimum wage work in construction (1 percent) or manufacturing (4 percent). I incorrectly used the “at or below minimum wage” column in the original version. Thanks to @aemathisphd for the correction.]

6) A Majority Of Them Also Worked Less Than 30 Hours Per Week

It is true that it is difficult to make a living when you earn only $7.25 an hour. It’s even harder to make a living when you don’t work full-time. BLS says that in 2012, 51.5 percent of U.S. workers earning the federal minimum wage – roughly 800,000 out of 1.5 million — worked an average of 29 hours or less each week.

7) Less Than One-Third Worked Full-Time

You read that correctly. Only 32 percent of the country’s minimum wage workers work full-time — 501,000 out of more than 1.5 million, to be exact. And of those 501,000 minimum wage workers who regularly put in a full work week, only 39 percent are men. Now, it can be argued that it’s not these workers fault that they’re unable to find full-time hourly work. However, Obama administration laws and regulations haven’t made it easier to find full-time work. Recently enacted laws like Obamacare have made the quest even more difficult by creating enormous incentives for employers to shift workers to part-time roles to avoid the health law’s onerous mandates and regulations.

8) A Full-Time Minimum Wage Worker In 2014 Will Make 24 Percent More Than The Federal Poverty Limit

A White House tweet and accompanying infographic from last August said, “It’s time to raise the minimum wage because nobody who works full-time should love in poverty.” But a little math and a quick look at the 2014 federal poverty guidelines show that a single individual who earns the current federal minimum wage and works full-time will earn $14,500 in a year (50 weeks per year x 40 hours per week x $7.25 per hour). By way of comparison, the federal poverty limit for 2014 for a one-person household is $11,670.

Wage income from a two-earner family with two kids where both adults earned the minimum wage would exceed the federal poverty limit by 22 percent: $29,000 in income compared to a four-member household federal poverty limit of $23,850. And that’s before federal benefits like Medicaid and food stamps are included.

9) One-Third Of Minimum Wage Workers Either Dropped Out Of Or Never Attended High School

Educational attainment is clearly a significant factor in determining a worker’s hourly wage. According to BLS, over 36 percent of minimum wage earners — 568,000 out of more than 1.5 million — lack a high school diploma. Only 4 percent of minimum wage workers have a bachelor’s degree or higher. That doesn’t mean a college education is best for everyone, but it does suggest that lacking one can make it more difficult to move up the pay ladder.

10) There Are Nearly Six Times More Minimum Wage Workers Today Than In 2007

In 1980, the number of minimum wage workers in the U.S. reached a peak of 4.7 million workers. At that time, the prevailing federal minimum wage was $3.10 an hour. In 2007, following more than two decades of economic prosperity, the number of Americans earning the minimum wage bottomed out at 267,000 workers. Since then, the number has risen dramatically, exceeding 1.5 million workers as of 2012, the most recent year for which data are available.

11) A Change In The Minimum Wage Often Triggers Union Wage Hikes And Benefit Renegotiations

The famous investment banker J.P. Morgan said something along the lines of, “Every man has two reasons for everything he does: a good reason and the real reason.” Giving minimum wage workers a little extra cash is the White House’s “good” reason for supporting a hike in the minimum wage. But what’s the real reason? Richard Berman, a union analyst, studied numerous union contracts and published his findings on their terms in the Wall Street Journal in 2013:

The labor contracts that we examined used a variety of methods to trigger the [wage] increases. The two most popular formulas were setting baseline union wages as a percentage above the state or federal minimum wage or mandating a ?at wage premium above the minimum wage.
Other union contracts stipulate that, following a minimum-wage increase, the union and the employer reopen wage talks.

[…]

Minimum-wage hikes are beneficial to unions in other ways. The increases restrict the ability of businesses to hire low-skill workers who might gladly work for lower wages in order to gain experience. Union members thus face less competition from workers who might threaten union jobs.

And there you have it. The “real” reason behind the minimum wage push is to pay back the labor unions who helped re-elect the president in the form of higher wages, increased negotiating leverage, and less competition for jobs. The president’s decision to unilaterally hike the minimum wage for federal contract workers to $10.10 an hour doesn’t really make sense until you view it through that lens (is there a critical mass of federal contractors who make only the minimum wage?).

Unfortunately, when it comes to politics, the good reason is rarely, if ever, the real reason.

(Link)





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Seven Facts About Christmas You Did Not Know

Christmas-Village

Although not particularly religious — unless, of course, by “religious” you mean one who religiously likes fast cars and fast women — I nonetheless enjoy Christmastime, and the reason for this is that Christmastime represents something more fundamental than the Pagan celebration of Saturnalia and the solstice, or the Christian celebration of Christ’s birth, or the Jewish re-dedication of the holy Temple in Jerusalem, or any of the others.

Christmas represents peace on earth and goodwill toward women and men. That’s an idea I can get behind.

Here, in no particular order, are seven facts about Christmas that you perhaps did not know:

7.) It wasn’t until approximately five centuries after the death of Jesus Christ that the Roman Catholic Church officially mandated Christmas be observed by Christians throughout the world “as a festival honoring the birth of Jesus Christ.”

6.) Christmas used to be illegal in Boston — and it was until 1856 that the Boston people stopped working on Christmas. “Not all Christians have agreed with this official Christmas mandate: in 1659, for instance, the Puritans of New England banned Christmas by law throughout the Massachusetts Bay Colony, calling it ‘heathen, papist idolatry,’ and even went so far as to deem its observance a crime punishable by imprisonment” (source).

5.) Yeshua-bar-Joseph, also known as Jesus Christ, was not born in winter but most likely early autumn, when it was Jewish custom to bring their sheep home from the deserts (where they took them in early spring for Passover) at “first rain.” First rain usually began in the month of Marchesvan, which is Hebrew for October-November.

4.) The first Christmas trees (so-called) appeared in Strasbourg, Germany, in the 17th century, long before any real arrival of Christianity. The Germans used to decorate and light their trees with candles, to help brighten the long dark days of December. This excellent tradition moved to Pennsylvania in the 1820s, with the arrival of German immigrants.

3.) The Roman festival of Saturnalia, December 17-24, also moved people decorate their homes with the lights and the color green, and to give gifts to children and the poor. “The December 25th festival of natalis solis invicti, ‘the birth of the unconquered sun,’ was decreed by the emperor Aurelian in A.D. 274 as a Winter Solstice celebration, and sometime [later] was Christianized as a date to celebrate the birth of the Son of Light” (source).

2.) The pagan Saturnalia and Brumalia were too deeply entrenched in popular custom to be set aside by Christian influence…The pagan festival with its riot and merry-making was so popular that Christians were glad of an excuse to continue its celebration with little change in spirit and in manner. Christian preachers of the West and the Near East protested against the unseemly frivolity with which Christ’s birthday was celebrated, while Christians of Mesopotamia accused their Western brethren of idolatry and sun worship for adopting as Christian this pagan festival.

1.) The excellent (if slightly antiquated) author Washington Irving, of Rip Van Winkle and The Headless Horseman fame, is really who’s responsible for the unforgettable figure of old Saint Nick soaring breakneck across the sky in a weightless sleigh. His short stories — The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon — became so popular that none other than Charles Dickens is reputed to have credited Irving’s work for inspiring the even more famous A Christmas Carol.

Merry Christmas!






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Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch

I am, as many of you know, a writer by day and a bartender by night — and yet, as many of you may not know, I’m not merely a bartender by night: I’m also a very passionate man.

As such, the creative spirit I strive to pour into my literature occasionally spills over into my work as a cocktologist, so that every once in a while, when I’m lucky, one of those cocktails will, if I may say so, transcend the quotidian and fall squarely within the precincts of the eternal. The Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch (2 parts Tito’s vodka, 3 parts Tang) is, I believe, just such a cocktail — and evidently I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The following photo was recently emailed to me:

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In case you can’t quite make it out, that’s a T-shirt I had made which says:

ACE GILLETT’S: CHANGING LIVES, ONE BLEACH-HAIRED HONKEY BITCH AT A TIME

To whoever you are out there, staring philosophically across the eternal surf and the beautiful San Francisco Bay, thank you. You’ve touched my heart.

Thank you for wearing my Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch shirt, and thank you even more for enjoying the Bleach-Haired Honkey Bitch cocktail. You are very clearly a woman of a rare and sophisticated palate.





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Gothic Fiction: A Halloween Post

The Goths, as recounted by a Gothic historian named Jordanes (mid 6th Century AD), were a Teutonic-Germanic people whose original homeland was, according to this same Jordanes, in southern Sweden. At that time, this half-barbaric band was ruled by a king called Berig. It was King Berig who led his people south to the shores of the Baltic Sea, where they split up into two groups: the Ostrogoths (or Eastern Goths), and the Visigoths (Western Goths).

Also according to Jordanes, the Goths reached the pinnacle of their power around the 5th Century AD, when they conquered Rome and most of Spain.

The original Goths — and this is important — have no real connection with what that word eventually came to mean.

It was many centuries later, you see, that a certain non-classical style of architecture emerged. Because this style of architecture wasn’t classical, it was pejoratively termed Gothic, which meant “barbaric.”

Gothic literature came about centuries after this and is so called because a great number of these novels are set in Gothic monasteries and Gothic abbeys.

That is how the genre of Gothic literature came to be.

Setting is the crucial component to Gothic fiction. As Ann Blaisde Tracy wrote in her 1981 book The Gothic Novel, this literature depicts “a fallen world,” a world of ruin and desuetude, dilapidation and disrepair, death, decay — a vital and thriving world no more.

The English author Horace Walpole is generally credited with writing the first Gothic novel, and that novel, written in 1764, is called The Castle of Otranto.

Though she didn’t originate Gothic literate, the enigmatic Anne Radcliffe (1764 – 1823) is undoubtedly that genre’s greatest early popularizer, and her Gothic novel The Mysteries of Udolopho was immediately parodied by the likes of Jane Austin and Thomas Love Peacock, among others.

The early Gothic novels are, however, diffuse and stylistically difficult to our modern-day eyes and ears, the pace often bogging down in its baroque prose. Among the best of the early Gothic novels is Melmoth The Wanderer, by Charles Robert Maturin (whom Honoré de Balzac, Charles Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo and Lord Byron all admired for his rather Byronic book).

Yet for all its difficulty now, Gothic literature employed wildly intriguing plot devices which at the time were quite new — secret closets, mysterious manuscripts, ghostly abbeys, unspeakable deeds — so that at its best, there is an undeniable sense of strangeness and fascination that pervades Gothic literature. That is the reason some of the world’s greatest writers have used Gothic literature as a model for their own non-Gothic novels.

Happy Halloween.