Month: October 2004

Bureaucrats = Fish Food. Pete Canning pointed me to this story: Police kill India’s ‘Robin Hood’, about India’s most wanted criminal, Veerappan, who was recently “shot dead in an hour-long gunbattle with police in a jungle in southern India,” after having “eluded authorities for… By Stephan Kinsella. [LewRockwell.com Blog]

It’s interesting that the article only describes one crime that wasn’t either a victimless non-crime or an attack on the government, that being kidnapping a movie star and releasing him four months later. The original article being from CNN, it’s not surprising that they give a passing mention to the kidnapping and make it clear that (to the author) the serious crimes were engaging in free trade and opposing his government–things which I’m inclined to applaud him for. I wonder if he ever committed any other real crimes at all?

John Kerry killed a poor defenseless goose today to show that he likes guns. I’ll vote for him anyway. And I like the way it routes around the NRA which has shown its colors. It’s not about protecting the 2nd Amendment, because Kerry supports it. They’re using their members for something else. Good for Kerry for calling their bluff. If Bush can run as a compassionate conservative, no reason Kerry can’t run as a gun-totin liberal. It’s about time the liberals started kicking some butt. Or shooting it. “;->” [Scripting News]

Of course it’s ridiculous to claim that Kerry supports the 2nd Amendment–or any other part of the Constitution, for that matter. The same is true of most of the candidates; if you are a single-issue voter on the 2nd Amendment, your only choices are Michael Badnarik and Michael Peroutka.

Delusions of Empire. Conceit, as I have pointed out before, has always been the defining characteristic of the imperialistic personality, but the sort of hubris exhibited above — “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality” — goes beyond anything the world has yet seen. The maddest of Roman emperors took care to propitiate the gods, even as they accorded themselves divine status. But none dared venture their own creation myth. This is not just a new kind of American, as Professor Ryn would have it, but a new species of madmen.

The epistemology of modern-day imperialism gives us a glimpse into minds afflicted with a novel form of mental illness, one made possible not only by the concentration of centralized power in the American metropolis, but also by advanced technology and the evolution of the military arts. The savage thug who believes he can control reality by the use of his club — Ayn Rand called this archetype “Attila,” after the infamous Hun — has been supplanted by the Gucci-suited technocrat who believes he can create reality by simply pushing a button or issuing an order. By commanding black-winged jet fighters to blast his enemies out of existence, the modern Attila believes he is constructing a new reality, one where his whims, his prejudices, his prissy little orthodoxies have the force of natural law.

In short, the neocons are just plain crazy, albeit in a historically unique fashion. This explains a lot. It explains the peculiar stubbornness that refuses to acknowledge error, even as Iraq implodes. It explains our rulers’ utter indifference to being caught in so many lies — the disappearing “weapons of mass destruction,” the illusory “links” between Saddam and 9/11, the brazen “cherry-picking” of sexed-up intelligence, and the outright forgeries. [Antiwar.com]

American Passports to Get Chipped. The United States plans to issue passports with personal data stored on radio frequency identification chips. The documents would be harder to forge, but might leave holders vulnerable to identity theft. By Ryan Singel. [Wired News]

If I get a new passport that has such a chip in it, the first place my passport will go is the office microwave.

“Get Some, F–KERS!”. Some combat footage from Mosul, as shot by a soldier and given to me. Looks bad up there. [Back to Iraq 3.0]

Interesting, but you can’t really tell from the video what they’re shooting at.

Interesting factoid.  Due to recent budget increases, including expenditures on the wars in Iraq/Afghanistan, the US now spends more on the military than all the other nations of the world combined.  Question:  is this sustainable?  Or more importantly, is it being spent in the right way? [John Robb’s Weblog]

My answers:

No, it’s not sustainable. The Feds can’t afford everything they spend money on just from what they steal from us directly. They also depend on other major nations such China, Japan, and various European countries to loan them the money for their deficit spending, and on the place of the Dollar as the international reserve and trade currency, which allows them to spread inflation out over a population of 6 billion instead of only 250 million, making it much less noticable to Americans.

The other nations of the world could, at any time, simply refuse to subsidize the US Federal government any more. All they’d have to do is stop buying US bonds and switch to something else for trade and banking reserves–Euros, Yuan, Yen, gold, it doesn’t matter. Mind you, the chances of them actually doing that are not very high–doing so would be a serious upset to the status quo, and politicians just don’t do that sort of thing. Another reason is that if any one country went first, the Feds would attack that country. Many countries would have to coordinate their actions without the Feds catching on, and I doubt anyone could pull it off.

The other reason it’s not sustainable is somewhat simpler: the entire world economy is build on a house of card. All fiat money systems eventually collapse, taking the economy of whatever country was stupid enough to set them up down as well. For the first time in history there is not a single country anywhere in the world still using real money, which means that when the current fiat money system collapses (and it’s getting very creaky) there will be a total global economic collapse–which will naturally destroy the Feds’ (and everyone else’s) ability to pay for their military adventures.

As to the second question, my answer is no, it’s not being spent the right way. The right way to spend money on the military is don’t. The Feds’ huge standing army is useless for protecting the United States (in fairness, it’s not intended to), all it’s good for is giving vicious thugs the power to blow people up anywhere in the world, while holding it like a club over the heads of their subjects. We should just sell off all that hardware to the highest bidder, and revert to the Swiss model of defense, as our Founding Fathers intended.

But How Do You Shake The Machine If It Gets Stuck?. An offshoot of Mercedes, Smart GMBH is developing what might be the anti-Mercedes: a tiny, plastic-bodied car designed (mostly) for urban commutes. Wired has an article describing the company, the vehicle, and their designs on the US market.

bq.
Abigail’s Smart Fortwo, which she has been tooling around Washington, DC, as part of a focus group, is engineered by Mercedes; an early model already sits in the permanent collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. But behind Smart’s quirky design hides a radically sensible car. The Fortwo can park practically anywhere, even sideways in a compact garage spot. A diesel model, like Abigail’s, gets nearly 70 miles to the gallon, making supergreen hybrids such as the 55-mpg Toyota Prius look like gas-guzzlers. And this year, a major study ranked the Fortwo’s tailpipe the least polluting in the world, ahead of more than 1,200 cars.

Other features include snap-on replacement body panels (like cellphone faceplates), braking and traction control borrowed from Mercedes, and a miniscule price tag. Apparently, these are hot items in Europe, and are being sold out of giant glass ‘vending machines’; You can just buy one and drive off.

They’re getting ready for a US release, but it will (of course) be an SUV model to compete with the CRV and the Rav4. After years of progressively bigger gas-guzzlers, could the US be ready for the opposite end of the spectrum?

(I dig the little roadster.)
[Gadgetopia]

Here’s one for the “it’s amazing what people will pay for” category. According to the Wired article, this thing “starts” at $13,000, which is more than the most expensive racing motorcycles offered by companies like Honda and Suzuki. A racing bike would be able to carry about as much, and would be just as dangerous in an accident, but you’d stand a better chance of not getting into an accident in the first place on a bike that could actually get out of the way.