SAR #15251

Their destination: somewhere better.

Magnanimity: David Cameron's UK is willing to accept up to 5,000 carefully vetted Syrian refugees a year. That's a real drop in the bucket. Germany will spend $6.6 billion on 800,000 refugees this year, while acknowledging that the influx will change their society. The Greek island of Lesbos, with a population of 85,000 is now providing housing to 17,000 refugees in its capital alone.

Excellence: Ted Dawe – a career teacher in New Zealand – won the 2004 Best First Book Award with Thunder Road and the 2014 New Zealand Post Children's and Young Adults Book Award for Into The River. Into The River upset some Christian troglodytes called Family First (and you know how those groups turn out) and has been banned in New Zealand due to “ sexually explicit content, drug use and the use of a slang term for female genitalia.” The book is still available for purchase on Amazon, the Kindle edition is $9.99. Buy it.

Buyers Be Where? Half of the homes in New York are losing value because at least a third of prospective buyers cannot qualify for a mortgage.

Your Money Or Your Life: One in five Americans don’t fill a prescription because of its cost. Lives are lost because drugs are too expensive. Our costs were nearly five times per person greater than those in Denmark. Medicare projects that drug costs will continue to rise about 10 percent a year for the next decade. This isn’t because drugs are expensive. This is because we are getting robbed. And we’re getting robbed because our politics is utterly corrupted. Millions more Americans will simply be unable to afford the drugs they need. Maybe someone should do something.

Win Some, Lose Some: Since 2008, the US has lost 1.4 million jobs for manufacturing workers and has replaced them with opportunities for waiters and barkeeps.

T Leaves: “Market crashes do not happen at the peak. There is usually an initial 10% to 14% decline as the smart money exits stage left, then the lemming dip buyers pile in and drive the market back up, but fail in bringing it above the initial high. It’s only then that sentiment deteriorates, support levels are broken, and all hell breaks loose. That time is coming.”

Leadership: Following the precedent set by the US under Obama, the UK has begun using drones to kill its citizens. No trial needed.

Prescription: The spate of mergers now underway will leave us with three gigantic health insurance companies feeding mainly at the taxpayers' expense and diverting about 20% of your premiums to their pockets, not to health care. And they want to do this in order to deliver “economies of scale, greater efficiency and affordability... by continued investments in simplifying the health-care experience.” The health-care experience. Yeah, being denied needed service is a real experience.

Job Description: A Muslim flight attendant claims that refusing to do her job has resulted in her termination. Seems fair to me. She claims it was religious persecution. Bet her thirsty passengers felt the same way. Maybe she and Kim Davis can start a movement for those who only want to do part of their jobs.

Style Points: The Guardian asked every current candidate for president to take a position on the refugee flood. Democrat Martin O'Malley said the US should take in more assylum seekers – 65,000 in the next year. Sanders and Clinton did not respond. Among the Republicans, Scott Walker said “no more.” John Kasich said it was fundamentally a European problem, but the US “should provide logistical support” - whatever that means, MREs? Jindal claimed that the US was already so compassionate that there was no room for improvement. Donald Trump said he could solve the problem so fast your head would spin. Bush and Rubio did not respond. In general the GOP candidates blame Obama for starting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan which so many are fleeing. So far the US has accepted 1,500 Syrian refuges.

Perfection: The Financial Times reports that it is now official, money can buy happiness. It's behind a pay-wall.

Porn O'Graph: And the least shall be first.