It's just my opinion, I could be wrong

So, the IMF published a memo on the Greece debt situation (memo is here , link referencing story is here ). Basically, the memo outlines why the IMF will refuse to give Greece any more money, unless the other EU countries sign up to give Greece their money first. It is, by all appearances, a rational response to the most recent asinine bailout "agreement" reached over the weekend , which calls for (among other things) the IMF to dump another 50B euros into the bottomless monetary waste pit that is Greece. Yes, by refusing to participate in the latest round of handouts, the IMF might be writing off its loan to Greece. However, with the current economic and political realities in Greece, they probably should have written off that money at the point they "lent" it, and certainly should have penciled it in as "gone" at the point of the latest elections. Greece simply has no will to repay their national debts, even if they had the ability to do so (which they...

So Greece has been in the news a lot recently, as a predictable culmination of a sequence of intentional steps which have brought the world to this point. To recap, an abbreviated summary: Greece develops a culture of entitlement, with an economy heavily dependent on tourism and healthy government benefits for the people, such as government pensions and a retirement age of 50 Greece joins the EU to establish a common currency, which helps their tourism industry, but like other socialist-leaning countries ignores the nominal requirement to be nationally fiscally sound Greece runs up large deficits which they cannot pay, requiring initial bailouts, which are granted because the EU is afraid of collapse should a member state default (and due to pre-existing financial rescue efforts and organizations, such as the IMF) Greece doesn't change any of their policies, or enact any meaningful reform, and in a couple of years obviously needs further handouts to pay their ever-increasing...

This year, Tuesday November 4th marked the day I'd colloquially term the Idiot Masses Day in the US. This is the day, bi-annually, when the idiot masses get to go to the polling stations, and help steer the country inexorably forward toward its destined idiocracy . It's the day when, no matter how informed or educated you may be on any particular political issues or candidates, there are an order of magnitude more people going to the polls to vote purely based on idiotic partisan categorization, some partisan or paid-for endorsements, or worse, a combination of distilled and filtered sound bites randomly garnered from media exposure. The setup virtually ensures we'll get a mediocre outcome at best, and reinforces the monetarily corrupt native of the current voting process. Which begs the question: could we do better? Well, that's a more difficult question, with no easy answer. Conceptually, there are several ways we could hope to have a better overall outcome, but the...

I'm going to preface this blog post by noting that it's somewhat more technical than political, so if that is uninteresting, feel free to ignore. I've been thinking a bit recently about what the internet needs moving forward. Specifically, I see a few looming problems which threaten to harm, if not effectively destroy, the internet as we currently know it. First, there is the problem of pervasive government monitoring, which threatens free communication of ideas. Second, there is the attack on net neutrality, which threatens to make only the content which the telcom providers sell viable on the internet. Both of these are serious problems, and although it's conceptually possible that they would have legislative solutions, that presumes the laughable premise that the government works on behalf of the people (as opposed to itself and/or large corporations who bribe them), which is obviously false. Therefore, it's prudent to look for a technological solution for thes...

President Obama has done a number of objectionable things during the six years of his presidency so far. Some things have been mere continuations, or slight expansions, of pre-existing objectionable policies (eg: domestic spying by the NSA, unauthorized and unconstitutional foreign military interventions, etc.). Others have been more substantial escalations of previous bad policies (eg: more expansive power grabs through executive orders, formulation of a legal opinion to allow arbitrary assassination of Americans, increasing the national debt at a historically record rate, etc.). Still others have been new, more creative attacks on American systems and long-term prosperity (eg: Obamacare, designed to be so expensive, arduous, and crippling to the health care system as to necessitate the adoption of socialized medical care). Obama is now finally regarded by Americans as the worst president in American history, and there's still [at least] two years of additional disasters to endure...

It would be fair to say that at times, I have been somewhat critical of President Obama, as well as Democrats in general, on this blog and elsewhere. As it happens, I find myself in frequent disagreement with his/their policies, pushes, and general philosophies on how government should work. However, I like to think of myself as having [strong] opinions on issues, and sometimes on ideology, but not on partisan political groups per se, despite the frequent overlap. In that sense, I'd like to espouse the following opinion: I have no issue, whatsoever, with how Obama has handled our military interactions with Iraq since he took office, and I don't feel he should bare much, if any, blame for the ISIS uprising there. It has been opined that the US should have persisted in Iraq, establishing a long-term presence to deter aggressive forces, as we have in other regions of the world. It has been opined that the Iraqi military was not ready to stand on its own, and needed more traini...

So Mark Cuban is being criticized for some comments  he made recently, tangentially related to the Donald Sterling controversy. Essentially, what Cuban said is that he would be cautious around people he perceived as potentially dangerous, and that perception could be based on many factors: area, race, clothing, tattoos, general appearance, etc. Then he characterized those perceptions as based on stereotypes... which is true, in a certain sense. In another sense, though, we might call that behavior by another characterization: common sense. People (as well as animals in general) have evolved to be cautious of things they perceive as potentially dangerous, and for good reason. Dangerous things threaten us, and it would be foolish to ignore potential signs of danger, or wander through life intentionally ignorant of your perceptions of your environment, and the people and things in it. You wouldn't wander across a busy freeway, intentionally ignoring the cars whizzing by in some absu...