Far East Cynic

Strasbourg and New Years Eve

Well it has begun. My own personal hell known as the "new years eve cleaning to welcome the new year". The cleaning is called Susuharai, or soot-sweeping. Both inside and outside the house, the stains, physical and spiritual, of the past year are rubbed out in order to purify the home

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Cry me a f*cking river.

One of the most frustrating things about this whole silly “Fiscal Cliff” nonsense is that the people supporting our Galtian overlords never tell you the whole story. They just point out the things that they want you to hear- and hope that you are not smart enough, or knowledgeable enough

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Misleading Conclusions

I normally do not post about contentious issues during the holiday break, preferring instead to have innocuous fun with Beer and Babes, or comics, or life in the promised land of Japan. However I came across and article that is simply so egregiously wrong-that fisking it just cannot wait until

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Christmas 2012

Santa-san  came! Well not really, Santa Claus doesn't really stop at our house anymore-and the S.O. and I could barely muster up any energy to shop for each other, either. What she wants-I cannot afford anymore. What I want-she's simply disinclined to give. Ah symmetry! But did you ever, in

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Talk about karma.

Got in the car this morning, as I do every workday morning and prepared to head out to work. The car has an I-pod jack to connect up the I-Pod. The I-Pod is set to random so it plays anything in a random order. Guess which song it picked to

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Will anything change?

The events in Connecticut are so horrific-it is just painful still to think about. 20 children-CHILDREN-and six adults all of whom got up and went to the Sandy Hook school thinking it was just another day. Now if the world were just, we as a nation would come together and

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No comments required or desired.

I submit to you two quotes that help express my outrage at what happened in Connecticut today.   "Guns don't attack children; psychopaths and sadists do. But guns uniquely allow a psychopath to wreak death and devastation on such a large scale so quickly and easily. America is the only

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So how was my day at work?

Oh you know, the usual delights. What was the number of that truck driving school again? There are some days I really envy truck drivers. When I was back in the US in DC-I met a lot of people who have jobs just like mine. They have the extra down

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The cycle of mistakes

I have been keeping in touch with friends in Japan, listening to them tell all about the complete stupidity of VADM Swift:   While the specific recommendations that were developed as part of the summit are reviewed, additional, temporary measures will remain in place in addition to the U.S. Forces

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Return trip

The S.O. and I had to take separate flights home. She was on Lufthansa and I was on United.   I figured the S.O. would have had the better deal on Lufthansa-but as is typical for her, she found a way to fuck it up. She came into Frankfurt complaining

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