Great article on setting up a legal music dling business. Basic premise is to purchase all available CDs and then sell stock to facilitate the dling of music in a legal fashion. Thus if you want to dl music, you must own stock in the company there by being an owner of the music. Would this idea stand up to legal challenges? Perhaps according to the other, but if nothing else is a very interesting idea.

Congress debates ephedra! Hopefully this will "save the children" from this evil supplement that is also one of the few fat loss products that actually work. It is a sham that because someone miss uses something, the rest of the population must suffer. They can debate it all they want, but all the products I would have used that contained ephedra are no longer produced because the insurance costs were too high. Next they will ban cars because if people drive them too fast they can lose control and kill themselves.

"How many Steve Bechlers or Sean Rigginses have to die to prove that these are not safe?" Pat Bechler said, sitting behind a framed picture of her son in his Orioles uniform, her voice cracking. "We need to get this off the market. We need to help our children."

Well Ms. Belcher, it didn't help that your son was fat, out of shape and cutting his calories to ridiculous levels when taking this supplement. Do you think that your families history or heart problems along with your son being a lazy during the off season to his death. In fact Ms. Belcher, it says pretty clearly on every bottle of ephedra I've ever seen (and the one your son was using) that you shouldn't USE THE PRODUCT IF YOU HAVE A HISTORY OF HEART PROBLEMS IN YOUR FAMILY. Perhaps your son couldn't read, or he should have trained in the off seaon and not mixed a ridiculously unhealthy diet with a supplement that warned people not to use with his family history. Common sense sometimes goes a long way.

Ron Paul article. Can we please get this guy to run for president? The first quote is classic material.

He is acutely aware, however, of some of the tension between libertarianism and his social conservatism. He approaches it thus: “I believe in the federalist system, which means when you have difficult problems to sort out, they should do that at the local level. The one thing that is hard for a lot of conservatives to accept is that if you legalize freedom … you also legalize the right of people to do dumb things and to offend people. And as long as those dumb things only hurt oneself, the constitutionalist doesn’t object.”

While he’s voted for all of President Bush’s tax cuts, he says the bills “weren’t necessarily bad, but they weren’t good either, because they weren’t soon enough and they weren’t enough” dollar-wise. (Already this year he’s introduced 15 bills that would amend the Internal Revenue Act of 1986, along with a constitutional amendment to scrap the income tax.)

Yet Paul, a member of the House Financial Services Committee, still questions some of the supply-side assumptions underlying the tax cuts. Supply siders say, “just lower tax rates and that will generate enough revenue to continue financing government,” he says. “I don’t accept that philosophy. You can’t predict what individuals do with their money. There’s no computer that can predict if I give you $500 back on your taxes if you’re going to spend it or save it or squander it or send it overseas or put it under your pillow. That’s why the projections are inevitably wrong.”

He also remains stridently anti-deficit. How to square that with tax cuts? “Cut spending. That’s the only way you can add it up. I consider all spending a tax, no matter whether you tax the people to pay for it, borrow the money or print the money.”

Must read intro to Austrian Economics by a Wake Forest prof none the less (Dr. Taylor). Check it out...

Props to the King of Pop for making some sense about downloading music(via drudge)

"I am speechless about the idea of putting music fans -- mostly teenagers -- in jail for downloading music," he said in a statement from his Neverland Ranch in the western state of California.

"It is wrong to illegally download, but the answer cannot be jail. Here in America we create new opportunities out of adversity, not punitive laws, and we should look to new technologies ... for solutions.

"This way, innovation continues to be the hallmark of America. It is the fans that drive the success of the music business," the "Gloved One" said.

Great piece on the blogger revolution.

"If you want to reach millions you book an ad on TV," said Stefan Glanzer, one of the founders of blogging system 20six. "If you want to reach one person you use e-mail or the telephone.

"But if you want to reach between 5 and 500 people a blog is the ideal tool to communicate," he said.