Hello,
The referenced forum topic was closed because there was so much downtime in December I didn't reply in time before it was automatically closed. In short, my fault. But I didn't want to be the guy that let things fall off to nothing.
Thank you @Brandon_Kobel for your reply.
In regards to the closed topic https://discuss.elastic.co/t/following-sample-data-example-fails-to-show-points-on-map/110740: it fixed itself because I completely uninstalled and re-installed logstash, elasticsearch, and kibana.
ubuntu 16.04 lts server parlance:
apt-get purge logstash elasticsearch kibana
apt-get install logstash elasticsearch kibana