Saturday, June 22, 2013

IRS Sends $46 Million to 24,000 Unauthorized Aliens at Same Address

From Blaze TV

The IRS sent 46 million dollars in tax refunds, etc. to 24,000 Unauthorized Aliens at the same Atlanta, GA, address.

You'd think with all the investment in Big Data, that the IRS would have seen a correlation here and checked things out. 

I really hope that the IRS scandal results in more than handslaps for a few people. The IRS has already been used for political purposes and has become a power unto itself... if nothing happens, it will embolden them.

There's a parallel here in history.

Adolph Hitler started taking large bites out of countries bordering Germany in the late 1930's.  He initially used political means, as in the Austrian Anschluss, and the annexation of Moravia, Bohemia, etc. (the Sudetenland) from Czechoslovakia--aided and abetted by Neville Chamberlain, Great Britain's Prime Minister, who compromised to avoid war, and declared he had gained, "Peace in our Time"..

Hitler's next step was to invade Czechoslovakia itself in 1939... the biggest thing he worried about was the French Army--then the largest in the world. France had a defense treaty with Czechoslovakia and HItler didn't want the French Army attacking his rear while he was attacking the Czechs.

He gambled... and won.  France didn't respond, and another nation fell victim to Hitler's ambition to "fundamentally transform" Europe. He later declared that the lack of any significant action by France and Great Britain emboldened him to go further...thus the occupation of Poland, Norway, the Low Countries (Holland, Belgium and Luxembourg), Denmark, Greece and France itself. The rest, as they say, is history...

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2013/06/21/irs-sent-46-million-in-tax-refunds-to-23994-unauthorized-aliens-all-at-the-same-address-in-atlanta/

Smitty

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Interesting Facts

I haven't verified any of these, so if you find one that's in error, let me know...

Smitty

A cockroach will live nine days without its head, before it starves to death.

A crocodile cannot stick its tongue out.

A snail can sleep for three years.

All Polar bears are left-handed.

American Airlines saved $40,000 in 1987 by eliminating one olive from each salad served in first-class.

Americans on average eat 18 acres of pizza every day.

An ostrich's eye is bigger than its brain.

Babies are born without knee caps. They don't appear until the child reaches 2 to 6 years of age.

Banging your head against a wall uses 150 calories an hour.

Butterflies taste with their feet.

Cats have over one hundred vocal sounds, dogs only have about ten.

Cat's urine glows under a black light.

China has more English speakers than the United States.

Donald Duck comics were banned in Finland because he doesn't wear pants.

Dueling is legal in Paraguay as long as both parties are registered blood donors.

Elephants are the only animals that can't jump.

Every time you lick a stamp, you're consuming 1/10 of a calorie.

February 1865 is the only month in recorded history not to have a full moon.

I am. is the shortest complete sentence in the English language

If Barbie were life-size, her measurements would be 39-23-33. She would stand seven feet, two inches tall and have a neck twice the length of a normal human's neck.

If the population of China walked past you in single file, the line would never end because of the rate of reproduction.

If you keep a goldfish in a dark room, it will eventually turn white.

If you yelled for 8 years, 7 months and 6 days, you would have produced enough sound energy to heat one cup of coffee.

In ancient Egypt, priests plucked EVERY hair from their bodies, including their eyebrows and eyelashes.

In the last 4000 years, no new animals have been domesticated.

It's impossible to sneeze with your eyes open.

Leonardo Da Vinci invented the scissors.

Marilyn Monroe had six toes.

Michael Jordan makes more money from Nike annually than all of the Nike factory workers in Malaysia combined.

More people are killed by donkeys annually than are killed in plane crashes.

No word in the English language rhymes with month.

Nutmeg is extremely poisonous if injected intravenously.

On average, people fear spiders more than they do death.

One of the reasons marijuana is illegal today is because cotton growers in the '30s lobbied against hemp farmers--they saw it as competition.
 -- A fact I have verified is that on long cruises before the advent of synthetic rope, sailors who ran out of tobacco would shred and smoke pieces of large ropes called hawsers.  The hawsers were made from Manila Hemp-- and they would get a slight buzz from smoking it.
 -- Another verified fact is that when World War II disrupted the supply of hemp from Asia, the United States government had farmers grow it--primarily in the Midwest.  The shortage also spurred the development of alternatives--one of the first ones used was fiberglass, though it had some shortcomings as anyone who has rubbed against it knows...

Only one person in two billion will live to be 116 or older.

Our eyes are always the same size from birth, but our nose and ears never stop growing.

Right-handed people live, on average, nine years longer than left-handed people do.
(Whew!! That's encouraging...)

Shakespeare invented the word "assassination" and "bump."

Some lions mate over 50 times a day.

Starfish haven't got brains.

Stewardesses is the longest word typed with only the left hand.

An ant always falls over on its right side when intoxicated.

The average human eats eight spiders in their lifetime at night.

The catfish has over 27,000 taste buds.

The cruise liner, Queen Elizabeth 2, moves only six inches for each gallon of diesel that it burns.

The electric chair was invented by a dentist.

The human heart creates enough pressure when it pumps out to the body to squirt blood 30 feet.

The male praying mantis cannot copulate while its head is attached to its body. The female initiates sex by ripping the male's head off.

The most common name in the world is Mohammed.

The name of all the continents end with the same letter that they start with.

The name Wendy was made up for the book "Peter Pan."

The Pentagon, in Arlington, Virginia, has twice as many bathrooms as is necessary. When it was built in the 1940s, the state of Virginia still had segregation laws requiring separate toilet facilities for blacks and whites.

The sentence, "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" uses every letter in the English language.

The shortest war in history was between Zanzibar and England in 1896. Zanzibar surrendered after 38 minutes.

The strongest muscle in the body is the tongue.

The word "lethologica" describes the state of not being able to remember the word you want.

The word racecar and kayak are the same whether they are read left to right or right to left.

There are two credit cards for every person in the United States.

TYPEWRITER is the longest word that can be made using the letters on only one row of the keyboard.

Women blink nearly twice as much as men.

You are more likely to be killed by a Champagne cork than by a poisonous spider.

You can't kill yourself by holding your breath.

You share your birthday with at least nine million other people in the world.

Humor: If You Hate Puns, Don't Read This

I got these from a garden tractor site... some are pretty clever...

1. The fattest knight at King Arthur's round table was Sir Cumference. He acquired his size from too much pi.

2. I thought I saw an eye doctor on an Alaskan island, but it turned out to be an optical Aleutian .

3. She was only a whiskey maker, but he loved her still.

4. A rubber band pistol was confiscated from algebra class, because it was a weapon of math disruption.

5. No matter how much you push the envelope, it'll still be stationery.

6. A dog gave birth to puppies near the road and was cited for littering.

7. A grenade thrown into a kitchen in France would result in Linoleum Blownapart.

8. Two silk worms had a race. They ended up in a tie.

9. A hole has been found in the nudist camp wall. The police are looking into it.

10. Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.

11. Atheism is a non-prophet organization.

12. Two hats were hanging on a hat rack in the hallway. One hat said to the other: 'You stay here; I'll go on a head.'

13. I wondered why the baseball kept getting bigger. Then it hit me.

14. A sign on the lawn at a drug rehab center said: 'Keep off the Grass.'

15. The midget fortune-teller who escaped from prison was a small medium at large.

16. The soldier who survived mustard gas and pepper spray is now a seasoned veteran.

17. A backward poet writes inverse.

18. In a democracy it's your vote that counts. In feudalism it's your count that votes.

19. When cannibals ate a missionary, they got a taste of religion.

20. If you jumped off the bridge in Paris, you'd be in Seine.

21. A vulture boards an airplane, carrying two dead raccoons. The stewardess looks at him and says, 'I'm sorry, sir, only one carrion allowed per passenger.'

22. Two fish swim into a concrete wall. One turns to the other and says 'Dam!'

23. Two Eskimos sitting in a kayak were chilly, so they lit a fire in the craft. Unsurprisingly it sank, proving once again that you can't have your kayak and heat it too.

24. Two hydrogen atoms meet. One says, 'I've lost my electron.' The other says 'Are you sure?' The first replies, 'Yes, I'm positive.'

25. Did you hear about the Buddhist who refused Novocain during a root canal? His goal: transcend dental medication.

26. There was the person who sent ten puns to friends, with the hope that at least one of the puns would make them laugh. No pun in ten did.

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Don't Ever Give Up!!

A Russian driving a large articulated tractor with a long trailer gets stuck in a river... it seems impossible, but he doesn't give up.  Watch this incredible video here:

Don't Ever Give Up

A good lesson for all of us... (now go drain the water from those axles, tranny and hydraulics tank, Dmitry!!)

Smitty

Sunday, June 2, 2013

Yahoo News: What Mitt Romney's White House Would Have Looked Like if He Had Won the Election

This article spells out some of the details of how Mitt Romney planned to organize the White House.  The tone of the article is definitely anti-Romney, but I have to wonder what the author is thinking when they take issue with

 "A plan to restructure White House operations to suit Romney’s corporate management style, with clear deliverables"

In other words, Romney planned to hold people accountable for how they performed instead of rewarding political hacks by padding his cabinet with them.

Mitt Romney's White House

So many people have used Romney's actions, and supposed actions while at Bain Capital to vilify him.  I'm definitely opposed to the excesses of capitalism as practiced by some of the "robber baron" industrialists. However, I'm reminded of some important points:

- I don't know of any people that work for poor people--a person has to be financially smart to succeed and create jobs.

- If a patient has inoperable gangrene in his leg, is it best to remove the diseased leg, realizing that the patient still might die, or to ignore him while he suffers a painful, extended demise?

The things that the majority of the Liberals, socialists, etc. don't seem to grasp is that government can only create jobs using someone else's money--after taking a large cut of overhead from the revenue collected before redistributing it.

Anyway, my two cents, er..... two dollars worth (adjusted for inflation)--

Smitty