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