Free kibbles

FREEDOM OF SPEECH:

Copyright being used to block progress in textbooks.

"Three major textbook publishers have sued a startup company making free and open textbooks, citing 'copyright infringement,' as the company is making similar textbooks using open material. From the article: 'The publishers' complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material "alignment" — a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers' copyrights.'"

This is a really cool idea. Blocking progress is what copyright and government are all about.

The government continues to try and force internet companies to police copyright violations.

SOCIALISM:

If unions were good for workers, they wouldn't need to coerce them to join.

ECONOMY:

The saddest fact of the Obama-Bernanke economy:

"The number of Americans not in the labor force has now hit a record high of 87,897,000. That’s Obama’s legacy – a nation of people who have given up, many of whom have turned to the government as their source of survival."

That's an incredible number. Too bad they aren't all millionaires who had retired, but they're not. They're people trapped on welfare.

TAX AND SPEND:

The ruling junta in Detroit wants state money to stave off bankruptcy, but they don't want to give up any power or change anything. Imagine that.

Forty straight months of federal deficits. It's a record.

Unfunded state pensions in Illinois top $54 billion. Illinois is a basket case.

REGULATION:

California politicians won't be happy until nobody lives there.

"California has declared war on the most popular housing choice, the single family, detached home—all in the name of saving the planet.

Metropolitan area governments are adopting plans that would require most new housing to be built at 20 or more to the acre, which is at least five times the traditional quarter acre per house. State and regional planners also seek to radically restructure urban areas, forcing much of the new hyperdensity development into narrowly confined corridors."

Why hasn't the California bond market collapsed? Who is propping it up? I wonder how many California bonds are on the Fed's balance sheet. Here's the California debt clock. The California debt clock shows the debt going down. I'm skeptical. This article reports California is still running a huge deficit, on the order of $30 billion, so the debt clock is wrong.

FEDERAL RESERVE:

The Chinese are experiencing inflation. Every day inflation as opposed to the empty cities of nowhere.

GLOBAL WARMING AND ENERGY:

Half a dozen or more green companies that received tax dollars from Obama went bankrupt, Obama plans to hand out more. One might think Obama failed to learn his lesson, but Obama learned the lesson perfectly. This is a great way to bankrupt the US and collapse our government and economy and the kind of chaos he hopes will spawn a Marxist revolution.

Of course people were more upset the first time gas hit $4 than they are the second. That's human nature.

The US had the warmest March in recorded history. This despite:

"While March was warm east of the Rockies, the West Coast and Alaska shivered through a cold, raw month: March was cooler-than-average in Washington, Oregon and California, while Alaska had its 10th-coolest March on record."

"Also, the first quarter of the year was the warmest on record, NOAA announced."

March was ridiculously warm here. We considered turning on the AC. April has been more normal.

Don't trust the so-called smart meter.

"A series of hacks perpetrated against so-called 'smart meter' installations over the past several years may have cost a single U.S. electric utility hundreds of millions of dollars annually, the FBI said in cyber intelligence bulletin first revealed today. The law enforcement agency said this is the first known report of criminals compromising the hi-tech meters, and that it expects this type of fraud to spread across the country as more utilities deploy smart grid technology."

The smart meter is about government control and nothing else. It benefits politicians and hackers, not consumers.

Most people who bought hybrids in the past are unlikely to do so again. In translation to colloquial terms, hybrids suck.

The original peak oil theory is debunked.

"US oil production has reversed its forty-year long decline. By the year 2020, it is anticipated that the US will be the world's top oil producer."

That's not so say that people may one day suck dry all the oil reserves in our crust, but that won't happen for at least a couple hundred years, and by then, new processes will have been created to produce much more if a cheaper alternative hasn't been created. Peak oil has become a meaningless propaganda phrase.

"Sustainability is a chimera. No energy source has been, or ever will be, sustainable."

Exactly. Energy usage will continue to grow as long as humans advance. But human advancement is the real target of the environmentalists.

POLICE STATE:

The media reporting of the Zimmerman case continues to be atrocious. Original stories said a grand jury was investigating Zimmerman. Now this reports says the prosecutor won't use a grand jury. It also says the grand jury wasn't to convene until April 10. It also says that the police didn't arrest Zimmerman but we've seen video of Zimmerman marched in handcuffs through the police station, so he clearly had been arrested then released. The article also uses Trayvon Martin's first name only, as if attempting to manipulate the reader into feeling a biasing familiarity with Martin. It's hard to imagine how Zimmerman was released after being taken into custody. That pretty much never happens. But it should happen much more often. Because Americans are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty, claims of self-defense should be taken seriously until a thorough investigation can prove otherwise. Hopefully that's what's going on in this case.

When you see these headlines all in one article, you'd be a fool not to be scared of what our government is doing.

"The Department Of Homeland Security Is Buying 450 Million New Bullets

Supreme Court OKs Strip Searches for Minor Offenses

Police Are Using Phone Tracking as a Routine Tool

The NSA Is Building the Country's Biggest Spy Center (Watch What You Say)"

And I noticed a couple of other synchronous events recently.

1. DHS to check British travelers to Canada, Mexico and Cuba
2. Creation of a joint North American military command
3. Meeting between Obama and Canadian and Mexican presidents.

Throw in Bernanke's destruction of the dollar, and this looks like our rulers are near to creating the North American Union and the amero. We're suffering the old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times.

WAR:

New technology enables significantly better detection of nuclear tests.

POLITICS:

Ron Paul Revere cartoon.

Excellent.

Around 200 Paul supporters running for office. As promising as this sounds, if they manage to elected, they'll probably get corrupted.

French President Sarkozy ginning up anti-muslim hysteria in hopes of winning re-election.

Is there a relationship between the Ron Paul revolution and the Hunger Games audience?

MISC:

A plurality of government workers, 46 percent, believe that government workers are lazier than private sector workers.

I've often said the US is stupider than an empire because empires of old stole resources from the countries they conquered in order to placate their own citizens, but the US conquers countries then steals resources from its own citizens to placate the conquered foreigners. Finally somebody else is pointing this out.

"Great empires, such as the Roman and British, were extractive. The empires succeeded, because the value of the resources and wealth extracted from conquered lands exceeded the value of conquest and governance. The reason Rome did not extend its empire east into Germany was not the military prowess of Germanic tribes but Rome’s calculation that the cost of conquest exceeded the value of extractable resources."

That's what history tells us. But the US is different, and by being different, it fools the American people into believing it is not an empire.

"Parsons does not examine the American empire, but in his introduction to the book he wonders whether America’s empire is really an empire as the Americans don’t seem to get any extractive benefits from it. After eight years of war and attempted occupation of Iraq, all Washington has for its efforts is several trillion dollars of additional debt and no Iraqi oil. After ten years of trillion dollar struggle against the Taliban in Afghanistan, Washington has nothing to show for it except possibly some part of the drug trade that can be used to fund covert CIA operations.

America’s wars are very expensive. Bush and Obama have doubled the national debt, and the American people have no benefits from it. No riches, no bread and circuses flow to Americans from Washington’s wars. So what is it all about?"

As I've often explained, it's about benefiting a few, ruling class powers like the military industrial complex and the bankers at the expense of the American people like every other government program. According to the article:

"The answer is that Washington’s empire extracts resources from the American people for the benefit of the few powerful interest groups that rule America. The military-security complex, Wall Street, agri-business and the Israel Lobby use the government to extract resources from Americans to serve their profits and power."

Maybe I don't read enough, but this is the first time I've seen this in print as I've explained it for years. Thanks to Paul Craig Roberts for this article.