Intuit Declares Itself As An Enemy

http://www.saysuncle.com/2013/01/25/stepping-intuit/

I've used Turbotax and Quicken for years.  No longer.  Unless an abject apology and reversal of policy is offered by Intuit, and I DO insist on the abject apology, there will be no further business from me, or my house.  Indeed I will advocate against them at any reasonable opportunity from now forward.

It seems strange---wonder if anyone could make a mint writing a business book with a central thesis of, avoid pissing off your core customers?  Nah...too Occam's Razor'ish, we must use Occam's butterknife.

Laws Are For The Little People

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2267888/Neighbor-shot-pit-bull-mauling-11-year-old-boy-face-charges.html

Notice that in DC, David Gregory won't get charged, but I bet this guy does.  In this case he defended the child of one of his neighbors, a true Good Samaritan.  For this he must be punished.  If you happen to be on a jury, make sure to remember who...whom.

Pope Benedict Needs to Get His Senior Minions In Line

http://www.examiner.com/article/apologia-for-church-vatican-radio-gun-rights-attack-rings-hollow

This is a serious unforced error.  Being perceived to have taken Obama's side in the gun rights war will alienate a LOT of people.  And it will do so on a manner largely orthogonal to the Gospel.  Get your minions in line Benedict. 

A Final Solution to the Copyright Problem?

There is no good reason---although plenty of bad ones---for copyright terms to be longer than those for patents.  In fact, if you go back in US history, those two term lengths started out a lot closer together.  Perhaps nearly everyone has the belief that they MIGHT be able to write, whereas they're under no such delusion as to making a useful invention.  Or more likely there's just more sympathy for authors and artists than for engineers and applied scientists.

But be that as it may, there is pretty strong support in the public for radically reining in copyright laws.  It's just that the support is diffuse mostly.  Diffuse interests nearly always lose in political contests, but they can do very well indeed in pogromical contests.

Here's what I suggest.  An acceptable final outcome would be a 20 year non-renewable copyright regime with very clear rules for fair use that correspond to the actual public mores.  I suspect that such a regime would have a serious supermajority of support in the general public.  But how do you get there?
One way to get there would be to encourage all those who oppose SOPA that it is time for the final solution for those who pushed SOPA.  Basically, until they surrender to reduced copyright terms, I say that in any civil or criminal jury proceeding, they automatically lose.  It doesn't make a damned bit of difference what the case is about.  It could be somebody who slips on a banana at Disneyland.  It could be a copyright infringement lawsuit.  It could be a zoning hearing for a company numbered among the transgressors.  Just commit to hammer them with who...whom every time you're in a jury room or similar instrument of power projection.  Ten to fifteen percent of the population commits to this and you've totally defeated trial by jury.  All you have to do is let go of the notion that the bourgeoisie follow the rules (hint, you're the petit bourgeoisie).  The elite are above them, cue David Gregory and Turbotax Tim, and anarcho-tyranny is the rule for the rest.  Time for you to start who...whom.  There's no prize for being the last group to follow the rules as intended, or even the rules as written.

Acronym Overloading For Fun and Taqiyya

One of the things I noticed when I was back in grad school and playing the political game was just how many organizations shared the same acronyms.  For instance, there's the National Rifle Association and the National Restaurant Association.  Rarely, I suspect, do they lobby on the same issues or in the same direction.  Both are pretty serious heavyweights though, and I suspect pretty strongly that a person looking at a resume or college application that listed an internship with the NRA would assume one or the other based on their priors---what they expected to see.

Now we know Epenshade et al that members and officers of organizations associated with Red State America, like, say the FFA, JROTC, 4H, and the like are discriminated against pretty heavily by elite institutions (read this as institutions that punch tickets for eligibility to become elites).  Similarly, I wager they discriminate very heavily in favor of applicants who have membership and especially officer positions in Cathedral auxiliary groups.

Do you see where I'm going?
Imagine the Southern Pornographer Liquidation Council.  SPLC right?  A reactionary teenager volunteers with this group, gets a fancy title, and he's got awesome taqiyya made to order.

or perhaps the National Association For the Advancement of Carlyean Prose?  How much more a reactionary NAACP do you want?  I suppose you could also just have Caucasian People for the CP.

Both of these organizations are almost always acronymized, never spelled out.  There are lots of other possibilities to exploit the target's priors.  I bet there's something you could come up with that is profoundly reactionary using the initials LGBT too. 

We Don't Serve Your Kind Here, Resistance to the TSA in Seattle

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=umLw-EPFJKU&feature=youtu.be

Apparently a cafe in Seattle has decided not to serve any TSA agents.  Note the comments too, most overwhelmingly support the cafe owner's 'discrimination' against the TSA.

My gut is that there is a truly enormous undercurrent of rage against the TSA and its demand for submission rituals to get on a plane.  Perhaps it'll get tapped, although Romney et al were too damned stupid to go there.  The NRA is showing a spine lately also, putting out the first real ads hammering Obama as a person.  Elitist hypocrite indeed, and that's one of his better qualities.

Germany Repatriates Barbarous Relics

http://finance.yahoo.com/news/germany-bring-home-gold-stored-us-france-205249881--finance.html

No satisfactory explanation has ever been provided by an official source as to why central banks hold gold, despite Ron Paul badgering them.  The most he could squeeze out of helicopter Ben was 'tradition'.

The real answer I suspect is that they recognize a reasonable probability that their house of cards---known as fiat currency---has a short historical shelf life.  Thus they want to make sure they have hedged their bets in a very literal sense.  They know that gold is the most likely Schelling point if their reserve currency game falls apart, so they want to make sure they'll still be on top if that happens.  Remonetized gold would probably be way more than 10k in current dollars per ounce.
There is also, I suspect another aspect to them holding gold.  By owning a large portion of it, especially a large portion of the portion of the total gold that actually circulates somewhat (an awful lot of the world's gold is tied up in jewelry that only liquidates under very extreme circumstances, e.g. that purchased by fathers in developing nations), they have profound ability to manipulate that market.  Since the price of gold is a pretty good proxy for how little the population trusts the banksters and their governmental minions, being able to fox that metric is pretty damned useful.  A very steeply rising price of gold, I'd wager, makes its remonetization (and the corresponding collapse of the old financial order) more likely.  I seem to vaguely recall Greenspan saying something similar to this back in the days before his reign at the Federal Reserve.