Cain Manor

The Heroes Act of 2008 was passed in, well, 2008, to increase benefits for Veterans. Can’t argue with that, can you. However, there was a provision of the bill that taxes you on your property value if you change your citizenship, as capital gains, regardless of you sell it or not. To quote the Chicago Sun Times (link removed, as it no longer works)

But Richard Kohan of Price WaterhouseCoopers drew my attention to one section of the act — the portion that states anyone voluntarily giving up his or her citizenship will be taxed on ALL of his assets as if he or she had sold them — paying capital gains on assets that have increased in value, even though they have not been sold!

That’s right. While everyone in the media is focused on keeping aliens out of America, Congress has voted to lock its citizens — or at least a good portion of their assets — into — America! Maybe they’re thinking that patriotism won’t be enough to keep the smart money from recognizing the coming increases in the tax burden.

So our government doesn’t want immigrants coming in, nor do they people leaving.   I guess you have to pay for that debt somehow.    But Seriously, WTF?

Something you don’t see every day…

Ice worms fascinate me.  They are, as you guessed, worms that live in ice.  They burrow through ice, and, if warmed up, dissolve into a goo.   They are up to an inch long and inhabit glaciers and snowfields in the coastal ranges of Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon.  There isn’t much known about them, and they’ve never been found anywhere else.

Seattle Times Article

Wikipedia 

The Antikythera Mechanism is a 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck. Detailed imaging of the mechanism suggests it dates back to 150-100 BC and had 37 gear wheels enabling it to follow the movements of the moon and the sun through the zodiac, predict eclipses and even recreate the irregular orbit of the moon. No other civilization is believed to have created anything as complex for another 1,000 years

Continue reading ‘The Antikythera Mechanism’ »

If you’ve had first aid training, I’m sure you’ve come across this woman….
In 1900, the body of an unidentified young woman, an apparent suicide, was pulled from the river Seine in Paris. Enchanted by the mysterious corpse’s beauty, a morgue worker made a plaster cast of the woman’s face. Copies of this “drowned Mona Lisa,” as Camus would later describe her, soon proliferated across Paris, appearing first in the city’s salons and finally in its literature. Nabokov wrote a poem titled “L’Inconnue de la Seinne.” Rilke mentioned her in his only novel. Man Ray photographed her. A character in Louis Aragon’s novel Aurélien tries to resurrect her.

In the The Savage God: A Study of Suicide, Al Alvarez writes, “I am told that a whole generation of German girls modeled their looks on her… the Inconnue became the erotic ideal of the period, as Bardot was for the 1950s.”

In 1958, the Inconnue was used as the model for the face of Rescue Annie, a popular CPR training mannequin still in use today. Hers is perhaps the most kissed face of all time.

from www.kirchersociety.org via Neatorama

Wikipedia link