• The fight over SOPA and PIPA is not an unfair fight unduly influenced by billions of dollars in dirty money.  While it is true that a billion dollar lobbying industry headed by Capitol Hill insiders helped piece together the bills, the primary opposition to them is also a multibillion dollar industry.  Corporate entities like Google make lots of money off of content, most of which is legal and some of which is illegal.

• SOPA and PIPA do not legally place an undue burden on businesses in the sense that it simply requires them to do their due diligence to fight the crime facilitated by their service.  This is standard practice.  Bars don’t serve drunks, pawn shops can’t buy stolen goods, photo labs won’t reprint copyrighted pictures, and pharmacies have to verify narcotic prescriptions.  It’s not silly to suggest that YouTube, which makes money off of each video view, should have to reasonably ensure their content is legal.

• It’s offensive to suggest that SOPA would place the US on par with China, Syria, or Iran in terms of repression and censorship.  Being tracked down and imprisoned, beaten, or executed for your internet activity is not the same as losing blog access.  Ask the protestors in Tahrir Square.

• There really is a lot of pirated content online.*  Any ideas on how to actually reduce that?  SOPA is bad, but we all have a compelling interest in reducing the theft of other people’s property, so let’s have alternatives from the anti-SOPA crowd.

*Pet Peeve: It rings a bit hollow for some of my friends to be protesting SOPA while they continue to download movies, music, and games illegally from torrents online.

Perhaps more significantly, the global economy now has an exploding group of countries contributing to poverty relief.  Emerging market countries contribute 100 times the funds to global development that they contributed in 2000, meaning that a second channel of funding for development now exists.

Such gains mean real increases in length and quality of life for billions of people around the world, something we can all be thankful for.

For those no longer living under the tyranny of Mubarak, Qaddafi, Kim Jong Il, or any of the other leaders whose stranglehold on their people has been released, 2011 is a spectacular year. The challenges brought by the future are great, but the helplessness of oppression is gone.

By contrast, the passing of Vaclav Havel reminds us to be thankful for the best of us – those unafraid to stand against evil in all its forms. Havel was such a man, and Europe will surely miss him.

The probability that any given American will have a White Christmas is 27 percent.

The probability that any given American will have a “white Christmas” in any given year, selected at random, is approximately 27 percent.

A “white Christmas,” for our purposes, is one in which 1 inch or more of snow is on the ground.  I compiled data from the National Weather Service and NOAA for the past 50 years on the probability of having at least 1 inch of snow on the ground on December 25 for every micropolitan and metropolitan statistical area in the United States.  I combined this data with data from the US Census over the time spans concerned, made my computer do some magical mathematics, and, voila! - you have your probability.

Apparently, for 3/4ths of the US, dreaming is as close as we’ll get to a white Christmas.

Blessing 1 – A Decline in Child Abuse

In theory, economic hardship is bad for families and bad for crime.  As money and jobs run short, tempers rise, and the added head results in more robberies, more spousal abuse, and more divorces.

It is a blessing, then, that this holiday season, the Department of Health and Human Services can report a continuation in the steady decline of child abuse in the US.  Tomorrow, DHHS is set to announce that between 2008 and 2010, abuse and neglect of children fell by more than 14 percent, while child fatalities declined by 8.5 percent.  Rates of abuse, including cases where children were abused multiple times in the course of a year, fell from 10.3 incidences per 1,000 children to 10 per 1,000, representing the lowest level on record.

Any child abuse is too much, but thank God for the welcome decline in neglect, assault, and harassment of children.

Read more.

Systemic unemployment is one reason Europe can’t seem to find solutions to its crisis.  With labor markets that make it hard to hire, fire, or change jobs, and economies contracting in the name of  ”austerity” or “fiscal consolidation,” the Europeans (save Germany) have rising employment crises on their hands that will make it hard to jump start recovery from their serious crisis.

Moody’s has justifiably articulated what the markets already knew: the Eurozone is doomed.

In the 1950s, one in 20 workers needed a license from the government to earn a living.  Today, that number is one in 3.

Welcome to the world of free enterprise.