Build an analog TV station
via Hack a Day by Zach Banks on 9/2/09
With the transition to digital TV, the FCC has abandoned the old analog format. Luckily, you can take advantage of this and set up your own analog TV station. The FCC has a tool on their site to see what channels are open in your area to broadcast in. To broadcast, you need a TV transmitter, but cheap short-range models can be found on eBay or made at home [pdf]. Once you have a transmitter, you can pump in a video source, either your own content or videos from youtube. One group, OMGimontv is showcasing popular youtube clips on channel 14 in New York. On their site, users can vote for what clips they want to see. Although this isn’t as simple as making a radio station, it still has a lot of potential.
[via BoingBoing]
One of the often heard arguments for government health care is that the U.S. spends twice as much as other rich countries on health care and gets worse results. Try this thought experiment: Right now government (federal and state) payments already account for nearly 50 percent of all health care expenditures in the U.S. So if the goal of health care reform is to cut in half what we’re currently spending, why not simply outlaw all private insurance and out of pocket expenditures? Problem solved, right?
Are you kidding me?
Note, some of this is not contained in the article, as I had to look through a few different sources. This article had some pretty diagrams to make the whole vomit-bucket look a little more desirable.
The investor in this new mortgage backed security faces only interest risk. The credit risk is absorbed by the MCGEs, who will replace Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The MCGEs can guarantee that they absorb the credit risk through—I kid you not—bond insurance and credit default swaps. They won’t get too big to fail because a competent regulator will make sure that never happens. What’s best is that somehow moral hazard will be avoided despite an explicit government guarantee. Also, despite the explicit government guarantee, this will somehow be accomplished “without putting taxpayer money at risk.”
Seriously, did someone put all of the keywords they could find on this economic crisis into a blender and then propose the result as the solution?
(I admit that I found it a little humorous that this article was written by a guy named McGee, given the proposed pronunciation of the agencies’ acronym)
Japanese Relocation - U.S. Gov’t Explanation 1942 (Japanese Internment Camps)
A short film distributed by the U.S. government during World War Two to explain why Japanese Americans and Japanese nationals living on the West Coast were relocated to internment camps away from the coast.
Interesting propaganda film. See any parallels today?
And BTW, another name for “Internment Camp” is “Concentration Camp”.
Here’s a quote…
Strictly enforced population control
Forced abortions in China are not a thing of the past. Under the one child policy, many women in late term pregnancy are still forced to abort their children. Chinese provincial authorities are responsible for mass forced sterilizations, and abortions are often performed by people with inadequate training in unsterile conditions.
[…]
China Daily, a state-controlled newspaper, recently published annual abortion figures of 13 million and a live birth rate of 20 million, as recorded by China’s National Family Planning Commission.
The recent China Daily article, echoed by a BBC report, attributes the high number of abortions to lack of education on contraception. However, experts say that most of the abortions are due to the one child policy.
“[We are] fairly certain most of [the 13 million] are forced abortions,” says Colin Mason, who conducted field work in Guangdong and Guangxi Provinces in March this year for the nonprofit Virginia-based Population Research Institute. The two provinces are “models” in China, where the one child policy is strictly enforced and all birth quotas are met. Based on his experience in China, he said most people would have more than one child if they could.
[…]
Under China’s one child policy, couples must apply for a birth permit before having a child. Single women are forbidden to bear children, married women with one child are given an Intra-Uterine Device (IUD), and women with two or more children or a single son are sometimes forcibly sterilized.
[…]
Punitive measures taken to enforce the one child policy include exorbitant fines, coerced abortions and sterilizations, arbitrary detention, torture, and sometimes child abduction. A social compensation fee is the most common method; those who have unplanned pregnancies can be fined from one half to ten times their annual salary, according to Littlejohn.
[…]
The one child policy is enforced at a local, province-by-province level. The policy at the national level extends to every level of government. Local officials in Gansu Province were reportedly promised promotions and monetary rewards for performing a target number of sterilizations in their area, according to the 2008 annual report by the U.S. State Department’s Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC).
[…]
If one person in a family is accused of an unplanned pregnancy, the rest of family is also liable—neighbors, parents, grandparents can all be caught and put in jail or pressured economically.
[…]
The number of abandoned children is also mounting. Parents who get divorced sometimes abandon their child because policy prevents parents from having another child in a new marriage. Abandoned children become destitute and illegal, with no access to health care or education. The same happens to children whose parents did not obtain a birth permit.
How do you have a critical political or economic discussion (with the non-educated) when so many people confuse the meanings of important words?
People really seem to confuse the words “Communism”, “Socialism”, and “Fascism”. What people are often calling “Communism” is actually “Socialism”. What people are often calling “Socialism” is actually “Fascism”. And people make it difficult to even use the word “Fascism” (even when it is correct to do so) because many people think it means racism and genocide, even though it has nothing to do with those things.
People think what we had prior to the economic collapse was a “free market”, and are damning “free markets” for the economic collapse. This is nonsense, because what we had prior to the economic collapse was NOT a free market. In fact, free markets fans have been complaining about the type of market we’ve had and were even warning that it would lead to an economic collapse!
And too many people think that entitlements are a type of freedom. Saying “freedom to” is as nonsensical as saying “entitled from”. It’s “freedom from” and “entitled to”; don’t conflate the two!
The whole situation is reminiscent of “Newspeak” from George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. That the language has been “modified” so that critical discussion becomes extremely difficult if not impossible.
I haven’t yet read the John P. Holdren’s book, “Human Ecology: Problems and Solutions”, that a number of people are talking about. (It’s the book that he co-authored with Paul Ralph Ehrlich and Paul’s wife Anne Howland Ehrlich (born Anne Fitzhugh Howland).) So I’m still reserving judgment, until I have more facts. But here’s someone’s opinion of it all.
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Ayn Rand (via kabo, @questmaker) |
