CHINA 2030: Building a Modern, Harmonious, and Creative High-Income Society. According to the World Bank: China's growth model, which has been so successful over the last 30 years, will not hold up for the next 30 years. What changes are needed?

Does anyone really believe the Chicago speeding cameras are about safety? The cameras will be turned off at 9 PM and can cover 2/3 of Chicago!

Unusual fact about Illinois, we are a very unique state and that also adds to the political mess we find ourselves in. When you are wandering around the country or world and ask a person where they are from, they will generally give you a state or sometimes a country. But, not so if the person you are asking is from Illinois. We are the only state in the union where a person from Illinois will always give the name of the city or the region they are from. I even find it true for people who move to Illinois. Illinois is the only state that contains 3 very specific regions; each region is unique in the sense of heritage and politics. This leads people to declare the city or region in which they live, not the state.

I have been doing this totally unscientific research for about 15 years and have found it totally reliable, of course when you ask the next person, just to test this theory you will probably get a “wrong” answer, but keep asking, because 49 out of 50 will give you their city or region. Now you ask how I ever got into this. I learned this valuable piece of information from a class I took at the University of Illinois at Springfield, Center for State Policy and Leadership, a group called “The Third House” actually run the class. So now you know we really are different!

Do you know where your car was built? A quick glance is available at The New York Times. The American car you drive may have been built elsewhere, while your foreign car may have been built in the good old USA. Now if you really want to get into it, you can find where your engine and transmission was built and where your car was assembled. For the number crunchers there are 255, 917, 664 passenger vehicles in the US, this is determined by a government agency the U.S. Bureau of Transit Statistics. Bottom line, the auto industry employs over 3.5 million people in manufacturing, sales & dealerships and retail auto sales. That's about 2.5% of the US labor market. More information is available at the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It just makes good sense to at least check out that car before you buy it. America needs the work.

Tired of paying for your word processing & spreadsheet programs. There is a great alternative called Open Office. I have been using Open Office for over 8 years and it’s free, really free.

Open Office.org is the leading open-source office software suite for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics, databases and more. It is available in many languages and works on all common computers. It stores all your data in an international open standard format and can also read and write files from other common office software packages. It can be downloaded and used completely free of charge for any purpose.

Open Office.org is free software. That means you are free to download it, free to install it on as many PCs as you like, free to pass copies to as many people as you like. You may use Open Office.org for any purpose without restriction: private, educational, public administration, commercial... Free, really free

Free Kindle Books

Free Kindle Books-free and legal, plus just about any other e reader is covered. manybooks.net is a site that offers over 29,000 e books for free. You can also select books and download directly to your kindle, or any e reader with an internet connection, using their mobile site mnybks.net. I have used this site for several years and have found the list of books quite interesting. My suggestion is to download the recommended books and cruise through them deleting the ones that you are not interested in. Happy reading! Posted 2-1-2012