Weekly Reading List

  • Photo of a Ram 2500 rolling coal.Ram 2500 Drivers Have the Most DUIs, More Than Twice the National Average: Report – Statistically, drivers of certain vehicles are more often cited for driving under the influence than others, and the list is mostly made up of trucks and vehicles in the premium or luxury segments. With all that said, Ram 2500 drivers are by far the worst offenders.
  • Image by Carolyn Wells. Photo from Getty Images. The Heart Wing – The muscle that never stops, until the very end. Is your heart a hardworking pump or a mystic miracle?
  • A storefront along Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills reflects a battery of surveillance equipment keeping an eye on the popular high-end shopping street. Photographer: Eric Thayer/Bloomberg In (and Above) Beverly Hills, Police Are Watching – The affluent LA suburb has pioneered an integrated system of cameras, drones and surveillance tech that could soon be coming to a city near you.
  • Illustrations by Rey Velasquez Sagcal The Cult of Bike Helmets – “The question is whether a helmet law that is enforced by police, on balance, produces results that outweigh the harms the law creates.” For lawmakers, the answer was clear: The potential benefits of a helmet mandate were not worth the harms it did to marginalized Seattle residents.
  • Victim cowering, seen between a bully's legs' One Little Verbal Trick to Save Your A** in Self-Defense – This surprisingly effective trick comes from Derren Brown, a British illusionist, mentalist, trickster and writer, who once documented the effectiveness of using verbal confusion as a weapon of self-defense in his book ‘Tricks Of The Mind’.

“America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves. To quote the American humorist Kin Hubbard, ‘It ain’t no disgrace to be poor, but it might as well be.’ It is in fact a crime for an American to be poor, even though America is a nation of poor. Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told by the American poor. They mock themselves and glorify their betters. The meanest eating or drinking establishment, owned by a man who is himself poor, is very likely to have a sign on its wall asking this cruel question: ‘if you’re so smart, why ain’t you rich?’ There will also be an American flag no larger than a child’s hand – glued to a lollipop stick and flying from the cash register.

Americans, like human beings everywhere, believe many things that are obviously untrue. Their most destructive untruth is that it is very easy for any American to make money. They will not acknowledge how in fact hard money is to come by, and, therefore, those who have no money blame and blame and blame themselves. This inward blame has been a treasure for the rich and powerful, who have had to do less for their poor, publicly and privately, than any other ruling class since, say Napoleonic times. Many novelties have come from America. The most startling of these, a thing without precedent, is a mass of undignified poor. They do not love one another because they do not love themselves.”

― Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five

https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/158414-america-is-the-wealthiest-nation-on-earth-but-its-people