SAR #16124

Social progress begins in failure.

Remember the Maine! Before Cubans get too excited about the Yankee dollars coming ashore with the 4,000 passengers off the first American cruise ship to dock in Havana in over 40 years, maybe they should go visit Cancun and see what a blight cruise ships are. It's the pigs from the Bay of Pigs all over again, this time with a good chance of infecting the country with their disease.

Kidon: US Special Operations personnel have (killed, assassinated, murdered, executed – pick one) 40 ISIS jihadists purportedly responsible for plotting, planning, funding or facilitating various terrorist attacks from Paris to Egypt and places in-between. Sure hope they're getting the right guys.

Performance Play: Under Marissa Mayer's leadership, Yahoo shares have fallen over 30%, so naturally putting up with the stress this caused has made her efforts worth a 69% increase in pay. Go ahead, Google it.

Question: If it's done through expanded defense spending, is it still quantitative easing? Sure it is immensely wasteful, but better than directly propping up Wall Street. Building planes that don't fly and weapons we don't need will, at least, actually employ people to make things that can then be destroyed without flooding the economy with goods than have to be bought. This will increase demand for most things and probably put upward pressure on both goods and wages. Roads and mass transit and fixing the power grid would be better investments, but national defense sells.

Long Way Around: Oklahoma's governor has signed a bill that will permit the recovery of attorney fees by those who have been unjustly robbed by the cops under the guise of “civil asset forfeiture”. Wouldn't it be a lot better just to do away with this much abused exercise in theft under the color of authority?

Say No Evil: Dole Food Company knew it was selling listeria contaminated salad fixings for over a year before it told the FDA and stopped profiting on making its customers sick and, inadvertently, killing four of them.

That's What You Get For The Money: Only one of six F-35s could actually take off and fly during testing. At $1.5 trillion the F-35 program is the most expensive military adventure in history. WWII only cost us $341 billion, Vietnam about %770 billion and even the ridiculously wasteful Great Adventure in Iraq and environs has only run the bill up to $800 billion. Think how much these things would cost if they could only fly. Well, and shoot their guns and carry munitions and other war-like stuff they can't quite manage now.

Noted: Human Extinction isn't all that unlikely. Odds are that either nuclear war or a pandemic or the effects of global climate change will do us in – within the next hundred years. And that's without super volcanoes, asteroid impacts or elective politics.

A Parting Shot.