CYN.ICAL Links

"The staggered phase out of energy-wasting light bulbs begins on Sept. 1 in Germany. The unpopularity of the energy-saving compact fluorescent bulbs that will replace them is leading consumers and retailers to start hoarding the traditional bulbs."

Are you watching this, California? Your turn is up next.

Is it just me, or does such heavy-handed tyranny, especially for enforcing arbitrary laws primarily for revenue collection, seem like it must eventually result in a blowback, a reaction, that results in police attracting real bullets wherever they go? Of course, on the other hand, the sheep will simply cower more, and jump faster when the officer says "jump".

"WASHINGTON—In a slight shift from his campaign trail promise, President Obama announced Monday that his administration's message of "Change" has been modified to the somewhat more restrained slogan "Relatively Minor Readjustments in Certain Favorable Policy Areas.""

Indeed.

"On Friday, we saw the letter ATF sent to FFL dealers in Tennessee telling them the Bureau was overriding the state's Firearms Freedom Act, and would continue to impose federal requirements in disregard of state law. They've done the same thing to Montanans."

It'll be interesting to see if this continues to be an issue. It seems like an opportunity for some brave citizens to defy and challenge the ATF and their 'interpretation' of the Constitution.

"This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned. But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price."

Will people never learn? This is completely why I will never buy a Kindle, or a Sony Reader, or any other similarly DRM-crippled ebook reader. Unless someone clever figures out how they can be hacked, with open firmware or similar, in which case I'll consider buying a used one if it's cheap enough.

Politicians hanging from lampposts, and banker's heads on pikes. Those will be common sights in the near future. A future that keeps getting a lot closer, a lot faster.

"[Waxman-Markey] represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life."