Well…the site has been down this aft but my son got it running again so I want to just do a short one on a little statistic that I read the other day…you know how I and many others in this country think that the police are out of control and can kill anyone with impunity since they are never held accountable for it….but the scope of the problem really jumped out at me when I read this statistic…in the past month, police in this country killed 113 people….whether they were innocent or not, I don’t know…but to get some perspective…in the entire UK, police have not killed 113 people if you include all of the years since 1900…yep, it took them 115 YEARS to kill the same amount of people that our police kill in a month…now, I do understand that we are a much larger country but there is no way to explain the difference other than the difference in philosophy…where the cops in the UK don’t even carry guns and our cops are so scared that they need tanks and M-16′s…I’m not sure what the solution is…but the stats should shock the hell out of anyone…geez…
Tag Archives: US
We’re through!
Well…one of the most remarkable things I have seen in quite a while just happened…the US is through to the round of 16 in the World Cup! This is something that no one in the world thought could even happen with the US being in the “group of death” that had Germany and Portugal in it…and also included our nemesis, Ghana, who have put us out in the last two cups….I am so relieved but more than that…I’ve been a soccer geek for the past 20 years and have endured the ridicule that the US has gotten around the world and it makes me feel good that we can compete with the best of the world…even England and Spain went home in the group stage…now, it is going to be a long wait until the 5th when we play Belgium in the knockout round…but, I can bask a little for the gritty performances I’ve seen from our team…good job!
World cup part two….
Well…it has been a fun world cup so far and most of the matches have been good ones, no real blow outs but a bunch of surprises with Spain not going to make the round of 16 and the US having the possibility of getting through with today’s game. I am starting to get pretty excited about it but with Portugal losing it’s first match, I think they will come out much harder than they did against Germany. if they do that, we could be in trouble….but, there are a couple of ways we can get in…tie today’s match and then tie Germany Friday…or, if we lose, we need to beat Germany and I just don’t see that happening. So, today’s match is going to be a nail biter but if we play like we can, we’ll have a chance…not sure if I can take the stress….
As I said, austerity doesn’t work…
Well…I have had a few posts here that dealt with the severe austerity that has been imposed by the IMF on Europe (not the personal austerity that prompted me to try to use coffee grounds twice with no success), and have been adamant that trying to grow any economy with austerity just doesn’t work. I have even been supported by a Nobel prize winner, Paul Krugman, but anyone that has had Econ 101 would recognize that going against Keynes is a bad bet. Now, the IMF has come up with a report on the imposed austerity that has sent Europe back into recession saying that the negative multiplier effect (yeah, I know kind of an arcane term) is much larger for budget cuts than they thought it was. What this report said was that the estimate of .6 Euro in lower growth was wildly wrong when the data was in….the negative multiplier actually was closer to 1.5 Euros per dollar of cuts….which means that the planners in Greece, Spain, and Portugal were misled by the IMF and the austerity hawks into tanking their economies just to protect the banks and the rich…how many more times are we going to allow the rich to rig the game and steal more and more from the middle class across the world? The real problem here is that the IMF is not even reading their own reports since they are still pushing the austerity nonsense here in the US when they know that it will result in making the economy worse…right now, with the pushback on austerity by the dems, our economy is still growing which should be the model across the world instead of the crushing of middle classes to keep the banks happy…geez…
Obesity here in the US…
Well…watched an interesting documentary yesterday about the obesity epidemic here in the US and, while I’m sympathetic with those of us who daily struggle with our weight, I think I fall on the side of the personal responsibility folks who counter attack when the blame is placed on the fast food industry. I was thinking about this the other day when I realized that I have not had fast food in over a year and it is a conscious decision to not eat that kind of stuff….I do understand the people who say that they don’t have time to cook healthy, and I had that same problem when I was working long hours. Then there is the cost….when you can get fast food for a few dollars for a meal, some people just can’t afford to eat healthy foods. I can admit that I have battled my weight my entire life and there was a time a few years ago that I weighed 210 pounds on this 5 foot 10 inch frame….but, through hard work and the weird ability to keep track of all the calories I consume every day, I’ve hit around 170 now and I’m shooting for 160 as my final weight. I guess I’m lucky that I can resist the urge to eat when I need to and I have the time to get in a couple of hours to exercise every day. One of the funny things about this is that I have three sons that have gone through exactly the same thing over the last couple of years, each of them going from over 250 lbs to about 160….and they did it the way that many obese people say just doesn’t work….eating better and less along with ramping up their activity….
So, what’s the answer…I don’t know but I do know what worked for me and my family…less than 2,000 cals a day and lots of exercise….okay, this one was supposed to have a point but I wandered around for a while and it never came…so you can consider this one a throwaway…and I do owe you one that makes a point later…but I’m not sure what that will be yet…