Jan. 20, 2012 Begun, the Cyber Wars Have… Megaupload is shut down without SOPA, Anonymous strikes back against government and entertainment industry websites, and more mayhem. Cartoon: Reelected Captain Obama wants another chance to captain the Ship of State. Are we over the edge? Is the Republic lost? Charles Manson energy Wind energy kills unconscionable numbers of bats, raptors and other birds.
Begun, the Cyber Wars Have…
By Robert Romano
In an unexpected move, on Jan. 19, the U.S. Department of Justice, along with New Zealand law enforcement officials, have taken down Hong Kong-based Megaupload.com, a popular file sharing site that had been promoted by pop culture icons Alicia Keys, Kim Kardashian, and Puff Daddy. In response, the Anonymous hackers group has waged denial of service attacks on the Department of Justice, the U.S. Copyright Office, the White House, the FBI, MPAA, RIAA, BMI, and Universal Music. Megaupload's founders have been arrested, and charged with a criminal conspiracy to violate federal copyright laws, even though the company was based overseas. More than anything, the move shows that new laws, such as SOPA and PIPA, to take out foreign infringing sites are completely unnecessary. Which is what Americans for Limited Government Bill Wilson has been saying all along. In a statement before the indictments were announced, he said, "Existing law already provides for the removal of copyrighted material from the Internet domestically, and dealing with foreign infringement requires diplomacy with relevant nations overseas, not a regime of censorship here at home." Surely enough, with the cooperation of New Zealand, authorities had little trouble rounding up members of the company and handing down a multi-count indictment. The company had been claiming to be a "file storage" company, but is accused of facilitating copyright infringement by refusing to process Digital Millennium Copyright Act takedown requests, and by falsely telling copyright owners materials had been removed when members of the company were replacing the url's of pirated material. Get full story here.
Reelected Captain
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Are we over the edge? 
By Rick Manning I wonder if we have lost our nation. I don't come to the conclusion lightly. But, If those Americans who take more in benefits from the government than they produce have not already overwhelmed the system to form an effective majority, they are perilously close. As early as elementary school, I wondered how the Roman Empire fell and could not understand it. I learned something of the dole system that was established to help make the poor dependent upon the Imperial government, but did not fully understand the correlations. Now, America is on the verge of putting itself on auto-pilot to insignificance, crushed under the weight of debt to support those who have the political numbers to protect themselves from the necessary spending cuts that would save our country. The government itself has grown so large that too many Americans look at it as the founder of their feast rather than a necessary evil. So, while the people will rise up on issues that affect their entertainment like the Wikipedia led outrage over the Internet piracy bill, they are sanguine on real issues that cut to the heart of our nation's survival. Since October 1, 2008, our nation has spent $5.2 trillion more than we have taken in, and the size and scope of government continues to expand. To put the total national debt into perspective, 15.2 trillion dollars is the equivalent of 15,251 billion dollars or one million dollars multiplied 15.251 million times. And we keep adding more than one million dollars multiplied by a million to it every year. To make matters worse, the U.S. Congress' Joint Committee on Taxation found that in 2009, 51 percent of all households, which includes filers and non-filers, paid no income tax for tax year 2009. In the same year, the Committee also found that 30 percent of households that filed taxes received more money back from the government than they paid into it throughout the year. Get full story here.
Charles Manson energy By Paul Driessen "[G]leaming white wind turbines generating carbon-free electricity carpet chaparral-covered ridges and march down into valleys of Joshua trees." This is "the future" of American energy — not "the oil rigs planted helter-skelter in [nearby] citrus groves," nor the "smoggy San Joaquin Valley" a few miles away. The Forbes article's poetic paean to Aeolian energy nevertheless voiced consternation that a 300-megawatt "green" turbine project might kill some of the magnificent California condors that are just coming back from the edge of extinction — and the project might be cancelled as a result. Indeed, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) has asked Kern County to "exercise extreme caution" in approving projects in the Tehapachi area, because of potential threats to condors. The "conundrum will force some hard choices about the balance we are willing to strike between obtaining clean energy and preserving wild things," the article suggested. Hopefully, it concluded, new "avian radar units" will be able to detect condors and automatically shut down turbines when one approaches. All Americans hope condors will not be sliced and diced by giant Cuisinarts. But most of us are puzzled that so few "environmentalists" and FWS "caretakers" express concern about the countless bald and golden eagles, hawks, falcons, vultures, ducks, geese, bats and other rare, threatened, endangered and common flying creatures imperiled by turbine blades. And many of us get downright angry at the selective, indeed hypocritical ways in which endangered species and other wildlife laws are applied — leaving wind turbine operators free to exact their carnage, while harassing and punishing oil companies and citizens. Get full story here.
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