As I type this in one window, I’m skimming down the list of headlines and blurbs on Freedom’s Phoenix.com on a quiet Sunday evening, when I should be working on the books or projects or taking a nap so I can be rested up to go to bed in a few hours.

Here are some of the headlines (no links), which are, to say the least, alarming.  Some are also “duh, I knew that.”

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity:  Well, duh.  I knew that when I was IN school, and when my parents taught school, mummbly-mummbly years ago.  One reason I kept my two very creative (dangerously so) sons out of the public schools as much as we could afford to.  And it’s the reason they aren’t taking any “organized” college curriculum courses right now.

Marijuana’s top lobbyist tells us where there will be several viable legalization bills next year:  Of course, who defines “viable?”  Now that two states have legalized it, as well as several cities and counties, and now that the supposedly-drug-liberal White House’s minions have all but flat-out stated that they will continue to kick down doors and rip out car linings to find every last cannabis seed, will this be enough to get any more passed?  Or just one more excuse to cut off the privates of state and local governments?  While I don’t think MJ legalization will be enough to get people to rebel against the Feds, it may be part of the mix, unless it is just one more example of standing docilely in line as the executioners move down the line with their pistols. (Another story reports that bills for legalizing “recreational marijuana” will be introduced in Rhode Island and Maine.  I suspect that the people doing and promoting this are the kind that believe if they say the right magic words, laws and more will magically get right.)

Outdoor survival: Your better half: a force multiplier: Duh, why do you think I married her?  Why does both nature and the revealed Word indicate that matrimony, a pair, husband and wife, makes the most sense for humans, whether in a survival situation or not?

These next generation drones will do even more with no human input: Yeah, I guess this is scary.  But!  We are, after all, talking human technology and innovation: what did we expect?  But how many people are working on ways to hack and crash these things?  Or better yet, to disappear and “repurpose” (one of the current buzz words so popular today) to use the UAV against those who would make it a tool of tyranny?

Both Benghazi and the Petraeus Scandal suggest US Media is way too cozy with the State: Gee, whatEVER gave them THAT idea.  This is another Duh: we’ve seen that in this administration more than ever, but it has been the case all the way back to the first Progressive Era in T. Roosevelt’s time.  BUT the mainstream media is dying, and will continue to wither unless someone can take control of this porn-filled media you are on right now.  Did you know that one of the excuses for press censorship in the first century after Gutenberg invented printing was to prevent widespread distribution of porn?  Those statist excuses work well, time and time again.

Finally, a politician admits that winning the Drug War is “impossible.” President Calderon is hardly the first politician to admit that, but I agree that he is probably the highest ranking one to do it.  And how many dead Mexicans did it take him to admit that?  Will it take that many (relatively) for a US president to admit it?  I suspect that it will take a death toll far more than 5 times that of Mexico’s to get ANY politician with ANY significant chance of making it into the White House (legitimately or not) to agree with Calderon.

GE is so stoked about 3D printing, they’re using it to make parts for jet engines: Well, so am I – not that I’m making jet engines with it yet.  But seeing a new 3-D printer for the incredibly low price of $1,299 (and free shipping!) and reading about what everyone is producing using these is a big boost to my hopes that we can survive the coming collapse of Western Civilization.  That $1300 beastie probably cost $100,000 a year ago, and didn’t even exist two years ago.  And no, I don’t want it to make cute little Android figurines to sell to tourists or give as gifts, or even to make protective cases for my smartphone.  Weapons, surgical tools, crowns for teeth, dental implants, bone implants, replacement parts for pre-1985 vehicles (IE, pre-computer/fuel-injection) and thousands of other uses come to mind.

Top Republican senator ditching Norquist anti-tax pledge: And sure, and it didn’t come sooner: the man (and the other GOP scum) is a politician – betrayal of principle is right up there along with “greed” and “power” and “get laid” as major motivations.  “Stab in the back” is a product feature, not a defect in our political system.

4 young people in Africa design generator that runs on urine: More human ingenuity at work.  We better learn how to do that here, too. (Actually, the FP links are all broken and the story is almost 3 weeks old: you can find it here.  Four Nigerian teen girls have put together an simple system to break down urea to free and capture (and purify) hydrogen as a gas to run a genset.  One liter produces one hour of electricity: voltage and wattage unknown (the pictures show what could be a pretty standard 500-watt genset, so that would mean 1/2 a KWhr – about 15 cents worth of power in normal times but invaluable in times of crisis).  But you can also buy (on-line, where else!) at least two different versions of pots that you can either sit on a fire or burn virtually anything in, that will produce 5 watts of power for as long as you have stuff to burn to charge your cellphone or your pacemaker or any other USB-powered/charged device.  That with solar and wind and a few other gadgets helps even BEFORE the collapse.

That is my “this and that” for this weekend.  There is a lot more out there, and we are going to find that the closer we get to collapse, the more volume of news will be there to distract us and often, to terrorize us.