Coffee and Provocation

They're bombing Guam with mice that have little parachutes. Killer mice on a mission from God.

Meanwhile on Guam, the Jack Russell terriers are still on patrol to make sure no one leaves alive.  Wet work like God intends it to be done.

The Nelson Mandella Stadium in South Africa is the only poison-free stadium in the world.  How do they do it?  They use hawks and falcons to keep the birds away. They use mechanical traps for the rats, and they use bats and bat boxes for the bugs as well as Cape Wagtails. Africa leads the way!

Yes, there are working English Bulldogs. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar.

Dog bite insurance paid out $497 million in the U.S. in 2011. 

Chimpanzees use spears to hunt other monkeys, but only because they cannot find the right sized ammo for their guns. A small note of prudent skepticism: "However, they did not photograph the behaviour, or capture it on film." 

Apparently Florida is too crowded for native wildife. Even the endangered ones. 

Facebook avoids $16 billion in taxes using the Double Irish and the Dutch Sandwich.  If you think that's the lumhc time menu at your local bar, then you know Reason One this country is going broke.  And this is legal tax avoidance.  As Congressman Bernie Sanders recently noted, "Congress does not regulate Wall Street, Wall Street regulates Congress."

Curt Schilling, the Red Sox player and right-wing defender of less taxes and smaller government ripped off Rhode Island taxpayers for $75 million in loan guarantees for a video game company that never hired the people that it said it would.  Now you know Reason Two this country is going broke.

The IRS does such a crappy job of collecting taxes that owed that the "tax gap" is over three trillion dollars a decade and rising.  Now you know Reason Three this country is going broke.

Where do your direct mail charity dollars go?  Mostly to pay for more direct mail as CNN notes.  I have said this before, and noted that the Humane Society of the U.S. is a paricularly slipperty fish with about 75 percent of every direct mail dollar going to fund more direct mail packages (i.e. forests cut down and then tossed into landfills as waste paper). 

Si Habla Pict?  Not yet, but maybe in a few years when the Rosetta Stone language course comes out.

Liars for hire and every trick in the book.

Coffee drinking is linked to a longer life.  Actually it only seems longer if you never sleep.

Pamphleteering that changed the world:  The name "Pakistan" comes from a 1933 pamphlet entitled "Now or Never" written by Choudhary Rahmat Ali, an activist who wanted to create a Muslim homeland in South Asia. It is an acronym for "the five Northern parts of India" which were primarily Muslim: Punjab, Afghan Province, Kashmir, Sind, and Baluchistan. The "i" was added to make a pronouncable name.

A lightbulb that lasts more than 20 years and uses very little energy already exists, and will go on sale later this year.

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