Free kibbles

EDUCATION:

I predicted not too long ago that government school tyrants would steal children's home-made lunches and force them to eat government approved junk instead. That's exactly what happened to a pre-schooler in North Carolina. This is about waging war on families. Children are being taught their parents don't care for them. Only the state can and does care for them.

HEALTH CARE:

Small, organic farmers, long individual targets of Monsanto, join forces and sue the government-backed giant.

WAR:

Detailed analysis of the number of foreign bases and troops managed by the US military.

FOREIGN POLICY:

The embattled Iranian government makes western government's look inept, no doubt winning over the hearts and minds of many Iranians. This aggression from western governments is making the Iranian government stronger.

POLITICS:

Republicans turning on Maine Republican establishment for trying to steal the caucuses for Mitt Romney. It looks like the Maine vote might be the most corrupt so far.

"Plus, in Portland, votes involving the second part of the caucus process, the choice of delegates to the state GOP convention, somehow got messed up. Officials have declared that vote void.
“Mistakes were made. Something tells me it’s going to take some time to sort this out,” wrote University of Maine political scientist Amy Fried on her Pollways blog."

Mistakes. The Republican party is imploding. If Republicans lose this election to the worst president of our lifetimes, it's hard to see how the party survives. Paul won't press for a recount because...

"the Paul campaign believes the Texas congressman will end up with a "strong majority" of Maine's 24 delegates when the dust settles over the caucus votes."

He wins anyway. Paul looks like a statesman while the Republican masses challenge their corrupt establishment.

MISC:

Throttling is an easily predictable consequence of so-called unlimited data plans. Bandwidth is a limited resource. If you don't charge for it, you get shortages. Economics isn't that hard to understand.

I read lots of articles about primitive man developing trade and the state, but none of those articles references that chimps and bonobos are male philopatric, which means that females leave the group of their birth when they reach puberty and join other nearby groups. This keeps groups from becoming inbred and strengthens the genetic diversity of the species. This is common in social species. Wolves do the same with their offspring. So it's very likely that primitive humans clans also traded females so there was likely cooperative social interaction before our ancestors began making tools. It also seems likely that as humans advanced, trade would piggy-back on this instinct.

Here's an interesting reference to the earliest trade:

"Lippert, however, believes that the peaceful exchange of fire antedates this barter. Conceding that this custom is very ancient, he can nevertheless trace it only from rudiments of observances and of law; and since proof is no longer accessible, we shall not pursue the question further in this place."

Chimps and bonobos don't control fire, but they do exchange young females, so I bet our ancestors traded young women before they had tamed fire or anything else. The tradition of dowry might stem from this instinct. That might be the oldest form of human trade. The essay finally does address this point though not to the primitive level I'm talking about:

"On the other hand, the exchange of women is observed universally, and doubtless exerts an extraordinarily strong influence in the development of peaceable intercourse between neighboring tribes, and in the preparation for barter of merchandise. The story of the Sabine women, who threw themselves between their brothers and their husbands, as these were about to engage in battle, must have been an actuality in a thousand instances in the course of the development of the human race. All over the world, the marriage of near relatives is considered an outrage, as "incest," for reasons not within the scope of this book. This directs the sexual longing toward the women of neighboring tribes, and thus makes the loot of women a part of the primary intertribal relations; and in nearly all cases, unless strong feelings of race counteract it, the violent carrying off of women is gradually commuted to barter and purchase, the custom resulting from the relative undesirability of the women of one's own blood in comparison to the wives to be had from other tribes."

Once people became rational, I'm sure they rationalized why they would trade women, but this is more likely an instinct that came from our more primitive ancestors. Remember, people didn't know how babies were made until relatively recently in history. I'm sure chimpanzees and bonobos have no idea how babies are made, yet they instinctually send their young females to other communities.