Deadlining, so nothing Deep and Profound at the moment (not even anything deep and profound without the capital letters). But lotsa, lotsa links ….

• Here’s some insider dope on the weird stuff you may have heard is going on at Cato.
• Mobile phone privacy tips.
• And when it comes to privacy, you just gotta love Mozilla.
• You know that stupid TSA rule against more than three ounces of liquid? Well see if you can figure this one.
• And speaking of milk, turns out you can get a bigger “price on your head” for selling the raw stuff than for oh … murder, rape, robbery.
• The thing to note here is that the utility worker who loaned his uniform to the cop was summarily fired. The cop who borrowed and wore it in hopes of making an illegal search is merely “under heavy scrutiny.” We’ll know we’re making progress when it’s the other way around.
• New! Improved! Coming soon! “Better” than a Taser! New gun shoots pepper spray 150 feet. Perfect for that new breed of scaredy-cop they’re hiring these days. (Per MtK via Twitter.)
• George Carlin. Very funny guy. But wrong about politicians.
• Hope for health care: decentralization following centralization.
• And courtesy of P from comments, here’s today’s awwwwww moment. More LOL than awwww, actually. But this would be my dog Ava’s idea of heaven.
• But wait! It gets even better. We can now combine two of our favorite things — politics and pets. (And of course, I’m on the side of Canines for a Feline-Free Future.)

Yeah, what Joel sez:

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In the last week, instead of posting miscellany here at the blog, I’ve been taking it to Twitter.

Matt suggested that in a comment and it’s definitely a good way to go. Contrary to some folks’ fears, you don’t have to join Twitter to read those tweets (100 and counting, including re-tweets). Just click the link in the stickied post up above.

I don’t think that gives you the full picture, as following me (gods forbid, they really need a better term — flocking; flying; singing; migrating) on Twitter would do. But it’s a good way to get your miscellany fix.

But for those who won’t so much as set eyeballs on Twitter, here’s a few links for you …

• Weird. The worse the economy gets the longer people live.
• For three golden retrievers, a happy ending to a sad story.
• IE users beware. (H/T MJR)
• Why Seamus continues to dog Romney.
• Oh, puhleeeeese. Get over it. Or is your case of political correctness terminal?
• This is for you guys (I know there aren’t exactly millions of you, but …) who live in Wyoming. Cheyenne primarily. A monthly publication, Liberty’s Torch, founded by freedomistas, aims to work its way toward competing with your dismal local daily fishwrap, the Tribune Eagle, then go statewide (and of course webwide). (Tip o’ hat to S.)
• The power of the people.
• LOL. Five attention-deficit drugs reviewed (by taking them). Some language NSFW.

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• Shy? Grieving? You sicko, you. (Tip o’ hat to P.)
• This came from D. with the disgruntled comment, “Most of the people I know who got medals got shot.” It’s so much tidier being in the elite.
• Too bad hackers had to do this. Should be standard procedure. (Tip o’ hat to M.)
• Remember the cop who got fired for hanging and kicking his K9 partner? Well, it seems that the firing was a problem; the hanging and pummeling were just as the trooper always claimed — yes, standard procedure. (H/T to Fred.)
• A 12-year-old boy saves his grandma’s house — using an online charity he established years earlier. How’s that for individual initiative?
• And speaking of initiative: Iran bans a filmmaker from creating a documentary. So he makes a film about his plight. On a smart phone.
• The media reports that Romney won the Maine caucuses 39% to Ron Paul’s 36%. Nothing to see here; just move on. That “win” hinges on a very fishy postponement of one caucus. As with Iowa, we may see a reversal. Even as things stand, RealClearPolitics reports the Maine delegate count: Romney, 8; Paul, 7. Not bad for a “fringoid nutjob,” eh?
• Ummm … Both?
• Dogs in the workplace? Well of course! (H/T PT.)
• Now, cats, on the other hand … (Stolen from Joel.)
• Sure sign the current depression is going to get waaaaaay deeper.
• But in the good news department, the revolt of the sheriffs continues to grow. (Thank you, JS, for the day-brightener.)

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• The strange birth of New York’s gun laws.
• Oooh, now this is cynical. And fraught with … well, just fraught. (Tip o’ hat to JB.)
• Darn. They’re ruining it for me! (Tip o’ hat to MJR.)
• At least Twitter is is trying to mitigate its consent to censorship.
• “Why Conservatives Should Be Libertarians.”
• The Barefoot Bandit will probably serve just under five years. Federal and state sentences to be concurrent. Seems a reasonable mercy — and with luck a chance for that bright but screwed-up boy to get his head together. (HT to PT.)
• A troop of gorillas visits a human camp. (First couple of minutes are boring; stay with it.)
• The halo effect. And its impact in politics. (HT Beth and Dave Gross.)
• A free privacy tool for you Windows users. And another. Both look useful and — better yet! — easy to use. (Courtesy of JB.)

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• It just had to happen eventually, didn’t it? Ron Paul action figures. I like the man. But seriously, I agree with Joel. It’s getting a little nuts. Okay, maybe the superhero action figure is sorta funny. But since when do free people set up idols to worship?
• The dog: man’s best friend for more than 33,000 years.
• If this is a “minor infraction” I’d hate to see what serious violence is. But of course, if the cop loses his job over this, some other PD will consider him prime material for their wrong-house-puppykittyciding-drug-raiding SWAT team. (Tip o’ hat to C^2.)
• I am unacquainted with the art of Mr. Rhymes and know his name only because I love to read about celebrities, even if (and sometimes because) I’ve never heard of them. But he’s dead-bang right about the Megaupload bust.
• Why is it that they take our freedom in big gobbling gulps, then dole it back in such tiny, wimpy doses? Hey, Indiana: Free people have a right to resist the state and all its agents — particularly those who come storming in unannounced. Period. Without a lot of ifs, ands, and butts.
• Speaking of which …
• Oh yeah. Remember what was left of the Fifth Amendment once the NDAA got through with it? You can forget about that now.

Finally — marketing for the (very!) soon-to-be-released Hunger Games is getting fiendishly (and I mean that literally) clever. Lionsgate has now opened CapitalCouture.pn — a site that “celebrates” the style and fashion of the games.

If you don’t yet know The Hunger Games trilogy don’t be offput by the shallow, fashion-obsessed site. That’s the point of the thing. In the books (and the looks-to-be-fantastic movies being made from them), hapless teens from outlying districts are forced to fight to the death in an annual display of subjugation to the all-powerful state of Panem (thus the .pn in the URL, though in reality that belongs to Pitcairn Island). The games are orchestrated in Panem’s capital city, a vision of future decadence based on Rome of empire days.

Costumes are hugely important to the games (and become inadvertently vital to the success and survival of Our Heroine, Katniss Everdeen). So I think this is a darned clever way of showcasing them and hyping the movie. Even if it is shallow, ugly, and grotesque — just like Panem, the capital, and the games.

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…going on today. Just learned this via Dave Duffy’s blog.

This money bomb is specifically to give Paul a boost in South Carolina, where he’s not likely to make New Hampshire-like or Iowa-like v*te totals.

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• What happens when a corporation gets just a bit too uppity in its definition of IP.
• I suppose as times get harder, we can expect more of this sort of thing. Shudder.
• But if it can be made harder on the forces of tyranny … (Some notes on guerrilla warfare)
• “Complex Systems, Dysfunctional Industries, and Catastrophic Collapse.”
• Preparedness. Basic.
• Fascinating. They haven’t found the suspect, two decades later. But they’ve found his seventeenth century ancestor.
• Yeah. Right. According to this I’m supposed to go to either Switzerland … or the U.S. How about you?
• Good going. Excellent calm way to challenge a cop who thinks the law doesn’t apply to him.
• Have you ever seen — even once in your life — anybody in the media ask ask a question like this about any candidate other than Ron Paul? After spending months reporting around Paul (“Candidate Fatass came in first in the poll, while Candidate Bigmouth was third …”) it’s about time he’s getting “too much attention.”
• Just so you’ll know what your masters have in store for you. And how judiciously they’ll use it, of course.
• Snort. Chortle.
• Inhale.

(More thanks to The Usual Suspect(s). :-) )

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These days of course you couldn’t get me to v*te unless you stuck a gun in my ear. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy the show.

And I’ve always found it quite a show. Some of my fondest memories from childhood involve trying to keep my eyes open late-late at night as election returns trickled in. Sometimes when I couldn’t make it, Mom would wake me up around midnight to tell me who the new governor or president or senator would be.

When the TV networks perfected the art of calling elections seconds after the polls closed, they ruined that. But the Internet has brought a little of the excitement back. Never mind that the “experts” called the New Hampshire primary for Romney hours ago. The v*tes are still being counted and an interactive AP/Google map is letting us watch, precinct by precinct, district by district.

With 75 percent of the v*tes counted, it’s just as the experts said — Romney 38 percent, Paul (bless his heart) just under 24 percent.

Did you ever think you’d see Ron Paul polling at 24 percent, beating the cr*p out of candidates anointed by the mainstream?

But the map tells an even more interesting story. Look at all those green spots. Those are the areas Ron Paul won. A lot of green, snaking its way down the west side of the state. That’s encouraging.

I wait for results to come in from Keene, that bastion of Free Staters. (Nothing yet; the big suspense of the night.) (In the end, the big disappointment of the night.)

It’s true that most of those places Ron Paul took today are small ones. Take a look at Millsfield. Paul got 53.3 percent of the vote there. All eight votes worth. In his “big win” areas, he got so few votes — 125, 77, 133, 149, 164 — that it seems marvelously strange that such tiny totals are being reported to the entire globe. Still, in those polling places, he got way more than all those establishment hacks, more than New Englander Romney, the man the media has already crowned.

And we all know it’s true that none of this means anything. At least not in the big political picture. No doubt Candidate Standard-Brand R or Candidate Standard-Brand D will be elected president next November and things will keep rolling down the road to catastrophe.

But you look at those green lights shining out of the New Hampshire hinterlands … and doesn’t it give you at least a hint of hope? Doesn’t it tell you we’ve got more friends out there than we know? Doesn’t it confirm that “… Something’s happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?” That somewhere, in the backwoods and the small towns and the hearts and minds of Americans, a very healthy sort of independence is putting down deep roots?

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