Important: Corporadoes trying to steal your ownership rights in the stuff you buy

Yikes. Anyone who has an opportunity to boycott AutoCAD should grab it with both hands.

Something actually worth worrying about while you forget about dark-skinned photographers

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Salem is right in the cross-hairs on this -- the bursting of the commercial real-estate bubble that is going to make our residential real-estate bubble collapse seem like a day in the park.

Racist nonsense from the home of the formerly brave

Salem's water supply -- obviously this photographer should be waterboarded. Image by Jason McHuff via Flickr

Or, why the FBI is too busy to pay attention to a call from the Christmas (Would-Be) Bomber's own Dad to warn us that he was up to no good.

The FBI said Saturday that agents are trying to learn the identities of nine men who were photographed taking pictures photographs of Detroit Dam on Feb. 14.

FBI spokeswoman Beth Anne Steele said the Portland office received photographs that were taken by a worker at the dam.

The worker thought that men photographing the dam appeared suspicious, and the worker's photographs of the men were turned over to local authorities before they were handed over to the FBI, according to a story originally published in the Albany Democrat-Herald.

The Democrat-Herald described the men as being of "Middle Eastern" descent.

Here's a news flash the Democrat-Herald and the Stateman-Journal might want to consider:

Taking photos of dams, power lines, airports, schools, bridges, tall buildings, courthouses, tall buildings, sewer plants, or government buildings is NOT ILLEGAL! Even if you "look" Middle Eastern!

In fact, in America, if it's visible from a public place where you have a right to be
YOU CAN TAKE ALL THE PICTURES YOU WANT.

And you don't have to give your camera to some rent-a-cop or delete them because a cop tells you to. Newspapers, in fact, back when they were more than mouthpieces for government officials, often used to rely on this important idea to fight back against the occasional small-time fascist who snagged a government job and liked to pretend that doing so gave him the power to tell the rest of us what to do, never mind that annoying "constitution" thing.

UPDATE: Where photophobia + the usual hysterias lead:

Father stopped from taking picture of his son, 4, on children's train ride 'in case he was a paedophile

To all Salemites with children or grandchildren

Read and heed. Or be damned by your progeny.