BREVITAS

WORD

I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments by those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations -- James Madison

POCKET PARADIGMS

People who complain about progressives are like the man from Virginia who went to college on the GI Bill and bought his first house with a VA loan. When a hurricane struck he got federal disaster aid. When he got sick he was treated at a veteran's hospital. When he was laid off he received unemployment insurance and then got a SBA loan to start his own business. His bank funds were protected under federal deposit insurance laws. Now he's retired and on social security and Medicare. The other day he got so mad that he climbed into his car, drove the federal interstate to the railroad station, took Amtrak to Washington and went to Capitol Hill to ask his congressman to get the government off his back. - Sam Smith

ECOCLIPS

GUARDIAN- New government figures show that populations of specialist farmland birds - birds that breed or feed mainly on farmland - have declined to a record low. The Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs said populations of specialist farmland birds have declined by an average of 60% since 1970. . . The 60% average decline masks the near collapse of some species. Between 1970 and 2005 the tree sparrow population declined 93%, the corn bunting by 89%, grey partridge by 88%, yellowhammer by 54% and the lapwing by 47%.

FREEDOM NOTES

WASH POST - The two owners of the nation's largest chain of alternative weekly newspapers were arrested and jailed late after publishing the contents of a grand jury subpoena seeking, among other information, details on each and every reader who logged on to a Phoenix newspaper Web site since 2004. This afternoon, after local residents and national First Amendment advocates voiced outrage over what they viewed as an effort to intimidate a newspaper critical of a local official, Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas announced that no charges would be filed against the executives or their reporters and that a special prosecutor hired to investigate the newspaper for possible criminal violations is being fired. The arrests of Michael Lacey, 59, executive editor of Village Voice Media, and Jim Larkin, 58, the chain's chief executive, followed an Oct. 18 article that appeared under their bylines in Phoenix New Times, the company's Phoenix newspaper. The article included a copy of the grand jury subpoena that had been issued in August seeking information about reports the newspaper had published concerning Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's real estate holdings.
Arpaio, sometimes called "the toughest sheriff in America," had long been the focus of Phoenix New Times articles, including revelations of unusual deaths in the sheriff's jails. The article on his real estate holdings included a notation of the sheriff's home address.

SAN FRANCISCO officials are moving towards creation of the first publicly sponsored safe injection room for drug addicts. A similar site in Vancouver serves 700 a day. Eight other countries have such centers. With 11-15 thousand intravenous drug users in San Francisco, overdoses are the cause of one out of every seven EMT calls there

AFP - One of Britain's intelligence agencies will embed advertisements into popular video games this month in a bid to attract new recruits, The Times reported . . . The advertisements will not be written into the games themselves, but will instead be fed into them while they were played on personal computers or Microsoft Xbox 360 consoles connected to the Internet. "We will monitor the results from this campaign and are ready to change our recruitment methods ... We know we can't stand still," the spokeswoman said, adding that GCHQ hoped to "plant the idea in the heads of younger players".

WATCHING THE COUNT

JOHN GIDEON, BRAD BLOG - Last week the Netherlands did away with e-voting and their DREs made by a company called NEDAP. These same machines were sold to Ireland under the brand name Liberty. Liberty is now being marketed in New York. Ireland paid 51.3m Euros to purchase their machines then they found out they were insecure and had many problems. The machines have been in storage since they were purchased. They have never been used. Instead of taking NEDAP to court for restitution, or scrapping the machines; the Irish have now decided to take out 25-year rental leases for storage facilities. The government has taken a lease for the 288 machines in storage in County Monaghan for over 27,000 Euros a year.

CITIES AND TRANSPORTATION

TREE HUGGER - The quaint college town of Uppsala, Sweden seems like the last type of place to test these funny-looking personal rapid transit electric pod cars from Korea-based Vectus. But the Swedish Rail Administration, which gave Vectus permission to both build a test track and let engineers drive the pods around, is not as staid as its name implies - SJ was the first in Europe to put in service a biogas train last year on the route between the towns of Vastervik and Linkoping . . . Vectus imagines about a three-second 'headway' between pods which would run at around 45 kilometers per hour in the inner city, making it possible to move large numbers of people during rush hour, the company said.