As IF Times

link Dubai Wife Sues Husband For $12M For Depriving Her Of Conjugal Rights.

You can’t put a price on love they say, but apparently you can on love-making.  $12 million bucks for lack of satisfaction is a pretty healthy number.  Let’s  break down the logic of the claim.  A graphical display of the correlation between amount of sex on the Y axis and time of marriage on the X axis will look like a concave parabola sloping down from left to right.  At best.  This of course will suppose you are not Sting or the Beckhams, in which case the line may be 45 degrees.   If you are married to Joy Behar or Whoopi Goldberg on the othe hand, the slope will approach vertical.

On this assumption, we’ll peg a number of twice a day for the first 6 months, pretty generous, but we’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.  Once a day for the next 6 months, with no time off for holidays.  In the next 6 months following, we’ll assume once every 2 days and then only once a week for the following 6 months after that.  We can make no assumptions of any sex after this period.   We come up with a rough statistic of 712 over a 2 year period.  So if the woman was married to this non performer for 2 years, she could legitimately lay claim to missing out on 712 eligible sessions based on scrupulous scientific calculation.

This would imply a value of $16,853.93 per session.  To provide even more perspective, this could be interpreted as $16,853.93 per minute, again using average statistics….from other friends of course.  Clearly these are preposterous numbers.  Only professional baseball players can make that kind of money.  There is no revelation as to how long this woman was married before she finally said, not enough is enough and pulled the plug on the whole thing and decided on financial restitution.  From reading the article, playing lady in waiting lasted only 4 months for this insatiable gal.  Interestingly, the article states that the man in question was married 12 times previously.  I guess 13 really is an unlucky number.

link Obama floats plan to tax cars by the mile – The Hills Floor Action.

I don’t know the veracity of this story, but if true, it would open up vast new horizons of revenue for governments.    Many eco-nazis would be pleased to see this new method of taxation implemented because in their minds, this saves the planet.    Never able to project the consequences of their actions beyond their juvenile ideals, if this plan is implemented, these greenies would in fact preside over the total downtick of civilization.   

This statement is hardly hyperbole since if people stopped to think of it, the entire foundation of civilization rests on the ability for man to transport goods over far distances.   The world would be reduced to unconnected villages of tribal influence if the ability of transportation of goods and movement of people were curtailed by prohibitive costs.   Proponents of the ‘less cars is more’ viewpoint would rather society revert back to greener modes of transportation.  Horses and donkeys perhaps. 

As is the case with most taxes, the supposed beneficiaries, the poor, will suffer the most.  People with means will be able to pay the tax and businesses will simply pass on the tax to the consumer.  Imagine the circumstance of a laborer who has to commute long distances to his job.  More of a tax on the miles he drives will either disqualify him from taking the job, or else wages will have to go up to offset the additional transportation cost.  If the wages go up, the cost of goods produced by his employer goes up, which is subsequently passed on the consumer.  The consumer either reduces his consumption, or shops elsewhere.   Very simplistically, this is how Wal Mart and other big box stores came into existence.  They were able to exploit both cheap sourcing and manageable transportation costs.  If a per mile tax were imposed, the impact will not only be on the consumer, but also on Wal Mart’s ability to offer inexpensive goods.  Net result, prices go up.

For some reason, government mindsets over the past few generations have focused on milking the populace rather than encourage their productivity.  The momentum of innovation and progress, hallmarks of an advancing civilization have been attacked and perhaps even stopped by the combinations of frivolous lawsuits, unreasonable regulation and red tape and of course by short sighted taxation.  This is analogous to cutting off parts of a steamboat to fuel the engines as the vessel slows down.  Onerous taxation is cannibalizing western society in the same way.

I suggest a far more efficient tax be levied instead.  How about a tax on politicians by the words they utter?  If they are caught uttering outright fibs, then the tax triples.  Al Gore could be the national benefactor, finally doing something useful for the nation.   In fact, with the kind of non sensical rhetoric being spewed daily by the present administration,  any budget deficits could be paid off within a generation.