Well, there goes the "respect mah authoritah" rule.

Los Angeles Unified has become the first school district in the state to ban defiance as grounds for suspension.

It's to cut down the number of suspensions on "minority" students. Right. Because the rule was the problem.

And people wonder why the Vatican thinks American nuns have lost their sense of mission.

I don't think breaking into a nuclear research facility and whacking off a piece of a uranium containment bunker counts as "social justice."

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — An 83-year-old nun and two fellow protesters were convicted Wednesday of interfering with national security when they broke into a nuclear weapons facility in Tennessee and defaced a uranium processing plant.

These Germans seem to think that people actually don't own the money they put in banks.

Saving money in a bank is now just another revenue stream for central banks: German opposition wants big savers hit harder in Cyprus deal

The Greens and Social Democrats are only arguing about how much money they should be taking, not whether should be taking the money at all.

All the Chavistas seem to drink the same paranoid water.

Venezuela's Maduro urges Obama to halt "plot" against rival reut.rs/WwWlZC
— Reuters Top News (@Reuters) March 17, 2013

Oh, just randomly saying that Obama wants to kill his political opposition leader to spark a coup. Sounds like someone else has some coup plans before the election.

Cyprus just took 6.7% of everyone's cash in Cypriot banks.

European banks have begun to melt down: A stupid idea whose time had come

And if you have over 100K euros deposited in a Cypriot bank, they took 9.9%. And to make sure nobody had time to take their money out before the levy happened, they did it over a bank holiday. But at least you get shares in the bank that robbed you. Good luck trying to sell those shares for a profit anytime soon, though.

Tour de Farce, Redux

ASO, the organizer of the Tour de France, released its roster of invited professional teams. Left off the roster, Team Astana, which just happens to have last year's winner, Alberto Contador, and third place finisher, Levi Leipheimer. Astana abandoned the tour when its leader, Alexandre Vinokourov, was caught blood doping. Meanwhile, Cofidis, which also had to quit mid-race because of a doping violation by a single team member, has been asked back. Rabobank, which had to fire its team captain mid-race while wearing the yellow jersey, Michael Rasmussen, but was allowed to continue as a team, has been asked back. The consistency in not allowing Astana back to the Tour, even though it has new management and new team members, is just not there. There is still a wild card slot open, so the door is not totally closed, but not allowing the Tour champion to defend his title, while allowing these other teams caught up in doping scandals, smacks of political retribution against Johan Bruyneel, the current director of Astana, who has coached his teams to winning 8 of the last 9 Tours.

Made In China = Infected

Remind me again, why we are buying anything manufactured in China? From poisoned pet food and toothpaste, now we have poisoned electronic gadgets. The AP story posits a very plausible explanation for why iPods and other plug-and-play devices become infected: sloppy IT practices allowing a testing computer to become infected with malware. Sloppy oversight seems to be the norm in China, as it was in the case of the toothpaste sold in South America, which had a similar sounding chemical mixed in, instead of the industry standard. Unfortunately, that similar sounding chemical only happened to kill people by the dozens. Oopsy!

Sloppy oversight in China also means bribery and corruption, where illegal liquor distilleries can pop up "overnight" and pollute the river water which is used in making the national brand. Sure, it's cheaper to send manufacturing overseas, and, for awhile, the quality liability was well worth the profit. But when liability begins to creep in to your profit margin, maybe those higher manufacturing costs in the West will look a little more attractive. Hey, come back to America! Our currency is dirt cheap too!

CSC Won't Renew Pro-Team Sponsorship

Another big sponsor has decided to abandon professional cycling: CSC. Unlike Discovery Channel, whose team organization, Tailwind Sports, disbanded, or T-Mobile, which continued on without a sponsor under the name Team High Road, CSC has promised to help the Dutch-based team find a new sponsor. I still have to applaud Tailwind Sports' foresight in quitting international cycling, where the power plays between the race organizers and the sport's governing bodies continue, sacrificing the athletes' rights and protections, and ultimately making sponsorship a bad bet. Team Astana definitely felt the brunt of this new cloud hanging over cycling, when even rebuilding the team with new management and new riders, still had them excluded from all French races at the whim of the organizer. Well, when the Tour de France turns into a regional race with only French teams participating, and the rest of the world tunes out, at least ASO can be happy with their first French winner since 1985.

China Banned Martini Lunch

Just how much were Chinese government officials drinking during lunch, that one year after they banned civil servants and party officials from imbibing alcohol during the work week, liquor manufacturers and restaurants have to sue to reinstate lost revenue? Either these people are huge drinkers, or it shows just how many people work for the government in some fashion, or claim communist party titles. If it's the latter, I can see why the revenue fall might be significant.

China Scared of Spooks

And I'm not talking about the espionage kind. It's always a little hard to predict just what Red China will censor next. Obviously, any kind of dissident opinion against the central government is on that list, but sometimes complaints against corrupt locals are not. Besides, we know that communism loves re-education camps, so we should not be surprised at the Chinese shaping their culture in Beijing not to spit and piss on sidewalks, how to smile in public, and also how to stand in line. It's not known whether they'll let their citizens go back to "normal" after the Olympic Games. However, we got a hint of the scaredy-cat communist party when they got Blizzard to change the graphics for dead bodies and the walking undead. So perhaps this video ban on ghost stories is more in line with their attack on the afterlife and religious thought in general.

Deregulation Raised Phone Prices in California

You would have thought that Californians, at least, would have been wary of deregulating utilities, especially after the electricity mess that got Gray Davis booted out of office. But no, we haven't learned. Phone service prices have actually gone up, after the state government voted to deregulate that business sector. Again, this comes from the misunderstanding and misapplication of free market forces. And it always comes down to the illusion of choice. Sure, you can go with AT&T because they have lower-priced bundles of broadband internet and land-line phone access, but then their caller ID, call-waiting, and other extra services went up. But surely, the other guys' prices would go down to lure more customers, right? No, they also went up, and they will continue to go up to the amount that the market will bear. Why? It's not a free market. You can't choose Verizon for local phone service, AT&T for call-waiting, and Sprint for caller ID. You have to get all those things from the same guy. So, surprise! They jacked those prices up because they have you trapped, and will find just the right rate to keep you annoyed, but still paying, but not annoyed enough to switch to someone else. Maybe these elected officials should take some elementary macro economics classes so they won't make these kinds of mistakes.

Pentagon Trying To Save Money...

...but Congress won't let it. That's a switch, isn't it? It seems that certain politicians have fallen for the old "illusion of choice" canard that huge companies like to trot out to confuse and evoke those free market passions. But, in this case, the tax payers are still shelling out all the development money for the second engine trying to "compete" with the original choice. Um, there's no savings there, especially when you only have one customer, and he's already paying you, to develop a "cheaper" product. Yeah, competition in the free market will bring savings! Usually, that's the case, but only when you have lots of customers and lots of competitors. Here's how an economist would explain the "competition" between Pratt & Whitney and GE:

Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, a research group known for close ties to the Pentagon and industry, said in a report to be released this week that the benefits of competition on a second engine had been overstated by some in Congress.

"When workloads shrink, the potential for economies of scale are reduced," wrote Thompson in a closely argued piece.

Like I said, a misapplication and misunderstanding of free market practices.

Malaysian Telecom Considers Wireless Switch

Telekom Malaysia is considering whether to turn itself into a fully wireless company. The reason? Rampant cable theft. They just got so sick of replacing cable, and then having those replacement lines immediately stolen as well. Do you think the power companies are pushing hard for development of wireless power transmission as well?

T-Mobile Drops Sponsorship

Huge news: Deutsche Telekom AG has dropped its sponsorship of the T-Mobile cycling team. As I wrote earlier when Adidas dropped its sponsorship of T-Mobile, these are dark times for international cycling because the doping scandals offer too much of a liability for any sponsor. Not only would they lose air time from teams having to abandon races if someone gets caught, but they get tainted by implicitly condoning the cheating. As has been written elsewhere, all the governing bodies attacking doping in cycling would never work, since the sponsorship money would still be the big incentive to dope. Now, all the dirty doctors and soigneurs will have to give up their practices as the big money dries up. The governing bodies have only created witch hunts, not caring about their own procedures, and protecting themselves from mistakes, as all bloated bureaucracies end up doing.

This was definitely the case with Iban Mayo, whose B sample tests have come up negative, but the ADA's are lab-shopping to prove a positive. And we saw the mental gymnastics required by the two arbitrators to vote Floyd Landis guilty of doping, when they threw out the results of the first test, but accepted the results of the second test, which would not have been run without a positive in the first case, and had to ignore all the problems with the second test as well.

No, sponsors dropping out is the only way to clean up doping in cycling, and I still have to applaud Tailwind Sports for disbanding when they saw the in-fighting between the governing bodies, the draconian measures the bureaucracies had set up making it almost impossible for athletes to train and ride, and the knee-jerk reactions by race organizers to penalize entire teams (and sponsors) for one person's mistakes.

Quick Reaction to IPCC's SPM

The Nobel Peace Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released its Statement for Policy Makers, based on their 4th Assessment Report, late Friday night, making sure the news cycle wouldn't notice some of the items that seem contradictory to the AGW activism narrative.

First, we've injected so much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, that even if we stop all industrial and commercial sources right now, as in zero emissions, the earth will keep warming. Second, with this current warming trend, the sea level will rise up to a maximum of 55 inches over the next thousand years. Not one hundred years, but one thousand years. This is assuming we will follow their estimate for increasing carbon dioxide emissions over the next 50 years. Third, they recommend emphasis on the mitigation plans for their predicted climate change: building sea walls, developing drought-resistant crops, and paving dirt roads in all the poorest nations.

Can we now stop with all the carbon-offset scams and carbon-credit trading? But those two schemes were a way for the poor nations to trade their unused carbon-banks (since they have no developed industries anyway), to con the rich countries out of their money to pay, supposedly, for the mitigation projects. Nevermind that those sea-wall projects were usually tied to huge seaside resort proposals. Plus, the anti-GM crop crowd won't like the IPCC's change in tactics either. And paving dirt roads will encourage vehicle use and spur industrial growth, not just keep roads from being washed away in the predicted super-floods, so the emergency response organizations can reach flattened villages. So, will we stop hearing about reducing carbon emissions? I won't be holding my carbon dioxide producing breath.

Comcast Class Action Suit Over Filesharing

After the AP proved that Comcast was actively delaying peer to peer file sharing, like using software clients such as BitTorrent, a group of consumers and legal experts asked the FCC to fine the broadband provider almost $200,000 for each subscriber affected. Now we have a class action suit filed today in San Francisco. The news just keeps getting worse for cable ISP's, after it was earlier shown that Comcast has cut off paying customers for being bandwidth hogs, and Cox has sent warning letters to these subscribers. And with regulator seeking to end cable's monopolostic practices in apartment buildings and condos, along with the customer service nightmare stories, this is just more bad news for the industry.

Update: More piling on Comcast - Vuze, an online video content provider, which distributes its media using bittorrent technology, has filed its own complaint with the FCC. The Vuze bittorrent client was formerly known as Azureus, which is a major competitor with BitTorrent and μTorrent. Presumably, BitTorrent will soon seek action or comment from the FCC as well.

"Moral Superiority" Leads To Rationalizing Bad Behavior

I think almost all of the UN's peacekeeping operations in Africa seem to prove the gist of this story. Not to mention any social, economic, or environmental movement which couches their motivations in "moral" terms. No surprises here.

Serbia Wants Chinese Cars

I guess that after being used to small, cheap, unsafe cars like the Yugo, it only makes sense for Serbians to ask for what they're used to. Recall that China's entry into the Russian market garnered only a 1.7 out of 16 according to the European safety standards. AvtoRevu, a Russian car magazine which was present at the testing, reported that, "the test dummy became so entwined with the wreckage of the car that it had to be removed piece by piece." This is not a good move for Serbian consumers.

Sponsorship Fallout Following Doping Scandals

After Tailwind Sports disbanded, the team that was sponsored by US Postal Service and Discovery Channel, which won an unprecedented 8 Tours de France, no one could believe their stated reasons that sponsoring an international cycling team was a bad investment, and they didn't want to cheat a company out of a dozen million dollars. As usual, Tailwind was way ahead of the game, as we now have news that Adidas is pulling its sponsorship of T-Mobile. Adidas cites all the doping scandals rocking the German team, and no longer wants to be associated with the negative press coverage. A question for the Tailwind execs: did you pull the plug before doping scandals rocked your own team? Not one rider during the American team's successful run through Europe has ever been convicted of doping while on the team. Several have been convicted or confessed to doping while riding for their new team, after they left Tailwind, such as Roberto Heras, Tyle Hamilton, and Floyd Landis, who is still appealing his conviction. Ivan Basso is a special case, where he confessed that he attempted to dope while he was on CSC, but before he joined Discovery Channel.

So, was it getting harder for Tailwind Sports to get around the doping controls, or did they really feel the anti-doping climate was making even the insinuation of doping difficult for a team to race? The insinuations of doping have definitely shelved Jan Ullrich's career, and he has never tested positive for a performance enhancing drug. He had to sit out for a few months because of ecstasy, but that had nothing to do with gaining an unfair advantage over the peloton. My feeling is that even if Tailwind instituted a much more intrusive doping control protocol, much like Slipstream does, an individual rider can still find a way to circumvent those controls, and end up hurting the entire team when he's caught during one of the big road races. That certainly happened with Cofodis and Astana, when one guy got caught cheating, and the entire team had to abandon the Tour de France. The liability is just too high, and I guess that opinion is bearing out with an action like Adidas abandoning T-Mobile.

Good News on Malware Front

The Russian Business Network, deemed responsible for hosting child porn and being the origin of several malicious software exploits, has suddenly gone offline. Even though this is probably a temporary situation, the internet is at least a little safer. Decentralizing malware sources makes fighting them harder, but it also makes propagation harder for the criminals. Hopefully more foreign governments can change their policies and laws to make it less profitable for their ISP's do business with malware developers.