trigger warnings: feminists, germans, and the politically correct may be offended. don't care. christians too.

let's just start.

the brits are silly.  no doubt.  but if the scots leave, they are sillier still.  Paul Krugman is correct (even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes.)

honda is racing to catch up with general motors, not in a good way.  final score: two dead, 30 injured, and millions of vehicles recalled over faulty airbags that honda knew about for years, opting to just pay off the liability claims rather than tell anyone and recall them.  don't know what the loss payment was for the driver who bled to death in front of her three children (a result of the exploding airbag) - i hope the final cost was priceless.

Ian Paisley, who spent most of his life as an asshole, has died.  he moderated his stupidity in his later years to help settle the understated-ly named "Troubles" of northern ireland.  not everyone who contributed to the stupidity is dead.

Malala Yousafzai is proving to be more enduring than even her critics feared.  after being shot in the head by men who feared she might grow up to be a bright young woman, she appears to be a bright young woman.  clearly, their concern was justified.

in another ongoing  race, global health and the WHO appear to be losing badly to ebola. 

uruguay is still the coolest country in south America.  Ecuador is losing points quickly as its president seeks to keep power until death does him part.

pop quiz 1 – do women know how the whole cashier thing works in our western countries?  you bring your items to the register and you pay for them.  why do they have that “huh” look on their faces as they start to 1-open their purse; 2-take out their wallet; 3-find the money in the wallet, 3a-find the exact change; 4-pay the clerk, 5-re-locate the change purse; and 6-reverse the previous steps and go on their way. 

this always seems to come as a surprise to them.

in a stunning upset that could not possibly have been anticipated, arab countries are not really supporting whatever it is that we are doing about ISIS.  wow, nobody saw that coming.

and mr. president, this just in: ISIS is Islamic.  the reason they don’t call themselves a fundamentalist terror organization is because that would be redundant.  geez – you’re the president, read a paper or something.

pop quiz 2 – why do germans often act rudely?  they are not by and large, a courteous people.  not just because they have no sense of order in queues, but they seldom smile back, rarely respond to “excuse me” (as the politely, properly spoken, “Entschuldigung”), and generally will run you over with a shopping cart or car without hesitation.  and let’s not talk about red light and speed cameras.  really, let’s not.  lighten up people.

if you don’t know what ag-gag laws are, you should.

Peter Thiel is an even bigger idiot that I thought.  not simply because the dis-connected-from-reality pay-pal founder is friends with Ann Coulter’s (cause enough), or because his mission is "to establish permanent, autonomous ocean communities to enable experimentation and innovation with diverse social, political, and legal systems" (translation – far from the homeless, unemployed, slothful human populace), but because in his latest literary contribution (see the wsjournal) he states, “competition bad; monopoly good”  seriously?  he is so the Ewan Mcgregor character from, The Island – and not the good half.

finding your first job is now like getting your first loan—“we’ll be happy to offer you a job as soon as we see that you’ve had one.”  this is because no one wants to teach their employees any of the skills they mostly failed to learn in high school.

let’s be clear, this is a failure of the schools and the workplace.  first the schools have failed dramatically to provide any useful knowledge or skillbase to our graduates.  (this is not limited to high schools, this is why many college grads are just as unemployed/unemployable).  second, companies have failed just as dramatically to invest in their future – why bother when we can outsource/hire cheap immigrant labor our way to prosperity.  only we can’t.  their successes are short-term and will be short-lived.

finally, cheerful news.  the end of cheap energy is much closer that nearly everyone thinks (rather, they don’t think, that’s the problem).  to that end, i will offer helpful suggestions.

1-   buy a copy of the Foxfire books, (Eliot Wigginton) – lots of useful information for a low tech world.

2-   just for fun, watch Robert Redford in the film, Jeremiah Johnson.

3-   then watch American Blackout 2013 by Nat’l Geo, at no charge on youtube.

4-   buy a bike

5-   have a nice day

Is Everybody Happy?

The Greeks defined happiness as, "The exercise of vital powers along lines of excellence, in a life affording them scope."

Is everybody happy?!

200,000 people, customers of bulgaria's 4^th largest bank can't get their money.  the government seized the bank in jume, after it was discovered that the leading investor has disappeared (along with $140 million of not-his-money).  individuals and businesses have been told to wait while the government (such as it is) decides who will take the fall for this.  "come back in december, the wizard will see no one!"

update on the rotherham scandal--

for more than a decade, muslim men (with the complicity of the authorities) carried out the abuse and asualt of 1400 young girls.

in case you were wondering, here's how that was possible:

police officers attended a derelict house and found an intoxicated girl with several adult men. They arrested the girl for being drunk and disorderly but detained none of the men.

Some fathers tracked down their daughters and tried to remove them from houses where they were being abused, only to be arrested themselves.

When a 12-year-old girl was found to have had sex with five adults (two of whom were let off with a caution) a CID officer claimed that it should not be categorised as sexual abuse because the girl had been “consensual in every incident”.

the affordable care act can't/won't/isn't going to work.  not just because the website failed or because the entire system was written to benefit the businesses that wrote the law, but because it fixes about five percent of the problems it was designed to address.  as Princeton economist Uwe Reinhardt put it, "The ACA is just a complex and somewhat ugly patch on a complex and somewhat ugly system." 

using the logic supplied by a recent wall st. journal article--

"Suppose that the U.S. completely eliminated carbon emissions from transportation over the next four years. The IEA data show that world emissions would still rise because the reduction from the U.S. would not cover the increase in carbon emitted by the rest of the world. Without world-wide changes, there is limited gain"

if i were a terrorist i would think, "i can keep killing as long as i don't drive the numbers too high.  cool!"

The average age of industrial equipment in the U.S. has risen above 10 years, the highest since 1938.  so it’s not just workers we don’t spend money on – remember – a profit’s a profit no matter how small (apologies to Dr. Suess)

lies, lies, lies.

to help you understand newspeak, i will translate--

"The U.S. Department of Transportation (DOT) took an important stand for fair competition today by denying Norwegian Air International's request for temporary authorization to fly."

(the president's friends who run the DOT screwed consumers by denying them any cheaper fares because our american carriers don't want competition.)

welcome to america - land of the free and (previously your) home of the brave:

For Christos and Markela Sourovelis, the civil seizure program is threatening to take their family home as punishment for a minor drug offense. In May 2014 the Sourovelis's 22-year-old son Yanni was arrested for selling $40 of illegal drugs. He pleaded guilty and was sent to a "diversion" program for first-time offenders, but because he was living at home police seized the house and evicted the family.

Under civil forfeiture laws, police can seize and sell private property whether or not the target is convicted of a crime. In the City of Brotherly Confiscation, police and prosecutors have run a forfeiture program that took in $64 million between 2002 and 2012, more than Brooklyn and Los Angeles combined.

and my personal favorite--

In late September 1983, an 11-year-old girl named Sabrina Buie was found murdered in a soybean field in Robeson County. She had been raped, beaten with sticks and suffocated with her own underwear.

Within days, police got confessions from two local teenagers, Henry Lee McCollum, 19 at the time, and his half brother, Leon Brown, who was 15. Both were convicted and sentenced to death.

In 1994, after Justice Harry Blackmun of the Supreme Court announced that he opposed capital punishment in all circumstances, Justice Antonin Scalia cited the Buie murder as a case where it was clearly warranted. “How enviable a quiet death by lethal injection compared with that!” he wrote.

except that, 

No physical evidence linked either man to the crime, so their false confessions, given under duress, were the heart of the case the prosecutors mounted against them. Both men’s confessions were handwritten by police after hours of intense questioning without a lawyer or parent present. Neither was recorded, and both men have maintained their innocence ever since.

Equally disturbing, Mr. Artis (the actual killer) was a suspect from the start. Three days before the murder trial began, police requested that a fingerprint from the crime scene be tested for a match with Mr. Artis, who had a long history of sexual assaults against women. The test was never done, and prosecutors never revealed the request to the defense.

None of these pieces mattered to the prosecution in 1984. The prosecutor on the case, Joe Freeman Britt, was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the “deadliest prosecutor” for the nearly 50 death sentences he won during his tenure.

On Tuesday, a state judge ordered both men freed after multiple pieces of evidence, some of which had never been turned over to defense lawyers, proved that neither Mr. McCollum nor Mr. Brown was responsible for the crime.

so justice Scalia was ready, willing, and able to condemn and execute an innocent man.  

"and i'm proud to be an american, where at least i know i'm free" Lee Greenwood

why

in days of old, cartographers had no knowledge of what lay beyond the known world. when they had demarcated the areas they knew, they would often label the areas of the unknown: "Here abide monsters." i thought it only fitting to journey into unexplored territory with that same spirit of adventure that moved the early explorers.