News Factoids for Second Quarter 2015

Republican Pigheadedness: Due to G.O.P. budget cuts in all areas, the bad guys are winning. The Treasury Department is now unable to curtail the production of counterfeit paper money such that merchants in my tiny town in the middle of New Mexico now require their employees to test each and every five-dollar bill with that pen thing and also to hold it up to the overhead light.

Later in 2015, gun deaths are expected to surpass car accidents as the leading cause of death of young people in the U.S.A. for the first time ever.

Six corporations - Time Warner, Disney-ABC, News Corporation-Fox, Viacom-MTV-Paramount, Comcast-NBC-Universal, and CBS - control roughly 90 percent of the media in the U.S.

Lego of Denmark plans to invest $1 billion over the next 15 years to replace its iconic plastic building blocks with blocks made of materials that are better for the environment; it will also make its packaging more sustainable.

The first six months of 2015 are, in aggregate, the hottest on record, i.e. since such measurements began in 1880. The second half of the year is expected to follow suit, per weather scientists.

The brouhaha about the Confederate flag has just begun. The most common actual flag of the Confederate States of America (there were four) had a white background. The 'Stars and Bars' battle flag was flown by Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia, and was the flag that he physically surrendered at Appomattox. The flag saw little use until resurrected by the Ku Klux Klan as a symbol of segregation and racism in the 1920s. The new meme of the Stars and Bars design as the 'Dixie Swastika' says a lot about its impact on non-whites and non-racists in the XXIst Century.
Copyright 2015 by G.E. Nordell, all rights reserved