Innocent Bystanders

Good Luck With That July 25, 2016

When one ruminates on the worst startup ideas of all time, one surely would be remiss if they didn’t add this to the list:

In Toronto, a city crammed full of fine restaurants, famous chefs and innovative dining ventures, it would be difficult for anyone to create a new fad.
But one George Brown College graduate is hoping her “Poop Café Dessert Bar” will cause the next big stink.

Opening mid-August in Koreatown, Lien Nguyen’s cafe will offer an all-brown menu, in the shape of human stools.

“I’m trying to make poop cute,” Ms Nguyen explained to the Toronto Star.

No pics because I love you.

Frickin’ IB Nostradamus, Baby July 22, 2016

Y’all may require the period back in 2006 – 2008 where I kept posting long, heavily documented posts on the military and economic ascendance of Russia and China. I stopped posting about it because it seemed to get old, and because it wasn’t like the current administration was going to do anything about it. And, of course, there were many skeptics who thought both Russia and China were too technologically and economically backwards to pose a threat in the next couple of decades, and I got tired of trying to educate them.

But today we have this:

The Russian Air Force Is Back: Stealth, Su-35s and Syria

*stretches lazily*

I don’t think I need to say another word.

From the “WTF Headlines” Department July 21, 2016

To protect yourself from malaria sleep with a chicken next to your bed

Unproductive Federal Spending July 20, 2016

Ironman over at Political Calculations points out that federal spending has never contributed less to US productivity than it does today:

Head over to his site for bigger graphics and better explanations.

Congrats, Tushar July 13, 2016

He did it the right way:

Important announcement: after 17 years, a lot of hassle and tons of money, I finally got my US citizenship today.
Very Proud!

How About Some Debt To Go With That Debt? July 13, 2016

Not much to like in the latest CBO Long-Term Budget Outlook report. Debt, debt, and more debt. Here’s the projection compared to historical debt levels (all charts taken from the CBO report):

Depressing, but at least it’s a pretty chart. You might ask yourself, “Hey winsome IB reader, does that debt come from too much spending or not enough revenues?” So here’s that chart:

Yup, spending is the culprit, rising from its historical (post-WWII) level of 19-20% to 28.3% by 2046 (30 years from now). Inexorably rising, I should have said.

The debt projection has gotten much worse in only one year, so you can look forward to next year’s projection:

How to fix it? Here are some scenarios:

Yup, you’d have to cut more than $2 trillion out of the budget to keep the debt level the same as it is today, and $4 trillion to get it back to pre-Obama levels.

If you compare the likelihood of Congress making those cuts to the likelihood of Congress increasing spending over current levels (via, say, more entitlement programs), I think you’ll agree that the CBO’s most pessimistic curve (the top one) should be the baseline.

Chinese Light Novel Panic July 11, 2016

I have juvenile and odd tastes, so I have recently been spending too much time reading translations of Chinese light novels, focusing, of course, on the wuxia (chivalrous swordsmen flying through the air and stuff) and xanxia (dao-based magic + plenty of fighting) stories. I was reading a story called The Nine Cauldrons, when I came across this pair of lines (“Internal Arts” means martial arts, of course):

The Internal Arts were so diverse!

China’s Internal Arts was magical because the first purpose of this kind of Art was caring for health, not murdering.

WTH? sez I. I stopped dead, unable to continue for a moment. I mean, after all, what’s the point of this genre if not to kill 50, maybe 60 people?

Shaken, I continued to the next line…

After health, there was killing.

All was right with the world after all.

“What do you want?” July 11, 2016

She cannot answer the question.

This video is great because it exposes the lie at the heart of this BLM ‘movement’- it is not a civil rights movement at all, but an attempt to refresh a historic blood feud, and repurpose it. Anyone with a truly pressing claim would have answered this question directly and swiftly.

I feel sorry for these kids, who are being cynically used by truly awful people and they don’t even know it.

Thanks to longtime Moron dri, who originally posted the link on the sidebar at Mothership.