I oppose this legislation:

There are signs that the “concealed carry” group was making headway even before the tragedy at Northern Illinois. Earlier this month the South Dakota House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly to force state universities to allow students to carry weapons on campus, according to GOP state Rep. Tom Brunner. The bill, which Brunner sponsored, recently died in the state senate, but Brunner said he intends to bring it back as soon as he can. “It’s not an issue that’s going to go away,” Brunner said. “We feel pretty passionate [that] students and teachers should have a right to defend themselves, and weapons on campus should be a part of the plan.”

The state has no business interfering with a private entities rules and regulations. I would be more amenable to the state saying that if you don’t follow this legislation then we will pull state funding from the school. You know, give Universities incentive to behave in a fashion the state deems appropriate.

Playing video games can increase violence.

Playing video games increases aggression in some children and young adults and normalizes killing, some doctors said.

Research suggests that violent video games can make children feel different. A brain scan of a teenager who has just played what was deemed a nonviolent video game was compared to the scan of a teen who had just spent 30 minutes playing a violent game. Indiana School of Medicine researchers said highlighted areas in the brains showed increased activity in the areas involved in emotional arousal.

“Exposure to violent video games, even E rated video games, increases aggressive thoughts, increases pro-social behavior and increases general arousal,” said Dr. Greg Snyder, a psychologist at Omaha’s Children’s Hospital.

Clearly their is a need for tougher regulation on video game playing. Its seems unwise to have our children being pushed into more violent modes of thinking because of video games.

Perhaps we could ban all video games that are evaluated to be to violent. Or maybe instead just make it illegal to sell these games to those under eighteen.

Over at Cato-at-Liberty there is a post about a study in netherlands.

A new study from the Netherlands may help lay that oft heard chestnut to rest. The study shows that there would be no cost savings for governments and taxpayers from preventing obesity or reducing illnesses caused by smoking.

The study found, quite to the contrary, that healthy people cost more.

The study, undertaken by the National Institute for Public Health and the Environment in Holland, found that ultimately healthy people, who live on average four years longer than obese people and seven years longer than smokers, cost the health system about $417,000 from the age of 20 compared to $371,000 for obese people and $326,000 for smokers.

Since this is science it has to be true. How are all the people that want to force their values down your throat going to get around the libertarian argument when smoking and over eating does less harm then being ‘healthy’?

Apparently congress is looking to regulate higher education by mandating that they spend at least 5% of their endowment each year on tuition.

And buried among the 61 amendments to the Higher Ed Act bill that lawmakers said they would seek to offer on the House floor Thursday was one, offered by Rep. Peter Welch (D-Vt.), that would require colleges, regardless of wealth, to spend at least 5 percent of their endowments each year in ways that would reduce what students pay to attend college.

Welch’s amendment had college officials in a full-fledged tizzy Tuesday. Unlikely amendments of all kinds get offered at this stage of the legislative process all the time, and most of them never see the light of day because the process for offering amendments can be tightly controlled. But several things give Welch’s amendment a solid shot of getting to a vote on the House floor. First, he’s a Democrat, and amendments offered by the party in power tend to get preference. Second, he is a member of the House Rules Committee, which has the power to decide the ground rules for debating each bill and for offering amendments on the floor.

I’m wondering how some of my readers feel about the state telling universities how to spend a portion of their money? Personally I’m vehemently opposed to this kind of state regulation. However some of you are much more happier with state control over other institutions so it should be interesting to see how you respond to university being placed under such control.

Via Instapundit, Mark Perry notes:

In other words, just one corporation (Exxon Mobil) pays as much in taxes ($27 billion) annually as the entire bottom 50% of individual taxpayers, which is 65,000,000 people! Further, the tax rate for the bottom 50% is only 3% of adjusted gross income ($27.4 billion / $922 billion), and the tax rate for Exxon was 41% in 2006 ($67.4 billion in taxable income, $27.9 billion in taxes).

Thats money being taken away from a company that has a proven ability to use money efficiently. I can only imagine how much of that money could have gone to development of innovation resulting in more wealth for everyone. Instead, its locked up by the state because some people honestly believe that 27 billion annually is better off in the hands of the likes to Ted Stevens, Tom Delay, and Nancy Pelosi.

Its astounding to think how stupid people who prefer public control over private control can be.

Apparently Microsoft is attempting to buy Yahoo.

Such an acquisition, which would be Microsoft’s largest by far — it bought Aquantive last year for $6 billion — would need approval by US and EU authorities. A European Commission spokesman declined to comment.

Thank god this will be reviewed by the state. Who better to determine whether such an acquisition will benefit the consumer than the consum…errr…I mean politicians? I really doubt google would try and influence the consum…errr…I mean politicians with lobbyists. Its always amusing to find liberals opposed to lobbyists while at the same time support legislation that practically insures their survival.

While he targets McCain I think what he says is applicable to many people that condemn greed.

I might as well chip in. I’m getting a bit tired of Senator McCain’s anti-business shtick. The line about serving “for patriotism, not for profit” is pathetic. America spends more on its military than the next 35-40 biggest military spenders on the planet combined: Where does he think the money for that comes from?

As for his line about “some greedy people on Wall Street who need to be punished”, aside from being almost entirely irrelevant to the subject under discussion (the subprime “crisis”), it reveals, I think, one of the most unpleasant aspects of McCain. For a so-called “maverick”, he’s very comfortable with the application of Big Government power, and the assumption of Big Government virtue. Undoubtedly there are “greedy people on Wall Street”. Why should he and his chums be the ones who decide whether they need to be “punished”? If greed is to be punishable, why doesn’t he start with a pilot program applied to, say, the United States Senate and report back to us in five years how that’s going?

The most important thing being said here is that even if greed is bad why should the state be in charge of regulating it. Those that want to control greed are no worse than those that want the state to control promiscuity.

Sony has recently announced that there will be making available music that is not DRM protected.

In a move that would mark the end of a digital music era, Sony BMG Music Entertainment is finalizing plans to sell songs without the copyright protection software that has long restricted the use of music downloaded from the Internet, BusinessWeek.com has learned. Sony BMG, a joint venture of Sony (SNE) and Bertelsmann, will make at least part of its collection available without so-called digital rights management, or DRM, software some time in the first quarter, according to people familiar with the matter.

Sony BMG would become the last of the top four music labels to drop DRM, following Warner Music Group (WMG), which in late December said it would sell DRM-free songs through Amazon.com’s (AMZN) digital music store. EMI and Vivendi’s Universal Music Group announced their plans for DRM-free downloads earlier in 2007.

The legislation that gave these corporations Digital Rights was very poorly written. As a consequence consumer largely ignored the legislation and found ways to get around the protection measures. This is notable for several reasons.

A common complaint from Darwin has been that lobbyists corrupt our legislative branch leading to the passage of laws that the majority the citizenry would disagree with. I have argued that when legislation does not enjoy the support of a large block of voters that legislation will die. Either the laws will be repealed and or the citizenry will largely ignore the laws. In both instances, the ‘corruptive’ effect of lobbyists is diminished by the fact that the bad law fails to have the desired effect. It’s not hard to see the fact that the four major music distribution companies have realized that the laws they were able to get passed have been ignored and therefore are willing to abandon the legal rights DRM grants them.

It’s also noteworthy because the failure of the recording companies to make consumers respect their rights underscores just how helpless corporations are at forcing their will on the consumer. All four recording companies at the start of this digital era attempted to force consumers to respect the digital rights given to them by law. Millions of consumers simply ignored these companies’ attempts at coercion. Consumers could easily ignore the company’s coercive attempts because not a single one of these corporations could directly force a consumer to respect digital rights. In cases where they did force someone to obey the company’s digital rights it’s was always mediated through the state via the courts.

One final thing to note. The recording companies turn around on this position started when one of the recording companies began using a non DRM rights model to sell songs through Apple. Once it was noted that success could be attained through that matter competitive force caused the other recording to begin flipping their models. Thus, we see its free market competition that brought about the change. A change that is more in line with what the citizenry wants, but also does not require any of the onerous regulatory laws someone like Darwin would demand. Regulatory law is simply unnecessary because the markets responded to the citizen before enough political will was marshaled for the passage of regulations.

Lobbyists are helpless to force citizen to do the will of their corporation. Securing the passage of laws that most citizen disagree with will not protect the company or industry’s interest since the citizenry will simply ignore those laws. I should like to point out that the Digital Rights Media Act of 1998 was no doubt passed because the vast majority of citizen did not understand what the law meant. It seems to me that lobbyists are most effective at influencing law when the majority of the citizenry is ignorant of the significance of the law. If true, it’s difficult for me to get to upset at the ‘corrupting’ influence of lobbyists. If anyone is to blame it’s the ignorant citizenry. Seems to me the lobbyists are clever by taking advantage of relatively neutral political climate to get their legislation passed.

And as this story shows, no matter how clever the corporations lobbyist are, companies are helpless to force the citizenry to do their bidding. As I have said before, and I’m sure I will say again, I can choose to trust a corporation. I have no choice but to trust the government.

Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It’s a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

Hell, competition even overcomes the moronic federal regulations of stem cells. To think some of you want to regulate the competitive force of free markets.

In the Spirit of the Holiday I thought I would provide you free market haters some treats. Don’t ever say I never did anything nice for you.