If you search your favorite news aggregate for “US housing market”,  you’ll find a whole mess of headlines guaranteed to make you feel good about that crappy McTractHome you might have bought at the height of the real estate orgy. Turns out that you’ll start making money on your investment sometime very soon. Just look at the stuff I skimmed off the top of Yahoo and Google News (more…)

This article was first published on Vice’s blog.

California’s State Assembly dipshits should congratulate themselves for a job well done. They finally managed to pass a bill that will reduce the state’s prison population by 17,000. All it took was a riot that tore a prison in Chino apart from the inside. That, and a federal court ruling handed down in early August that said the state had to clear 25 percent of its 150,000 prisoner inventory.
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Today we are going to study a little sea feller known as the Sacculina carcini, a flea-like shapeshifter that enslaves crabs.

The Sacculina really is a perfect example of Intelligent Design. If man was made in the Lord’s image, then the Sacculina was made in the image of the Holy Ghost. It can literally shed its corporeal form, and inject its parasitic spirit into a crab to feast on its host’s soul.

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Yesterday, the New York Times reported on the arrest of one Jamal Yousef of the Syrian military, who tried to trade a buttload of machine guns and high grade explosives in exchange for 2,000 lbs. of high grade cocaína. (more…)

I just went through the stack of mail which had been piling up over the past week… Everything addressed to me was a bill. One of them demanded $194.16 for July’s electricity usage. Two hundred dollars—1,096 kilowatt hours—that’s how much it took to cool a crappily insulated, two-story house in the desert to a constant temperature of 74°F, thirty degrees below the ambient daytime inferno outside. (more…)

I’ve been thinking about sleaze and corruption lately. It’s hard not to. Out here in windy, sun-baked Victorville, underhanded swindles are about as common a sight as the tumbleweeds blowing around the Mojave Desert.

The biggest scam now is the revelation that the city of Victorville is probably going to end up paying $9 million to Goldman Sachs, and as much as $175 million to GE, after reneging on a crappily planned power plant project pushed on it by a huckster real estate development/energy company called Inland Group. (more…)