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Why not? Because no living veteran of any US foreign military incursion has done anything to protect a US citizen. "Gee, Joe, you're a heartless bastard. How can you say that?" Because no US?war since the Revolutionary War has been a just war. And an unjust war is nothing other than another government program because:
- It benefits a very few elites at the cost of the rest of us.
- It is?unnecessary.
- It is?obscenely expensive.
- The US goes to war specifically to plunder its citizens.
- The plunder goes to those how are well-connected as opposed to those who can get the job done.
- The government fabricates lies in order to institute a program of war.
- Like any other government program, it is unlikely to ever end completely.
I could go on forever. And that is before I even read Inside the world of war profiteers. Not that I or anyone else couldn't have guessed that this was happening.
One subcontractor, Public Warehousing Co., took Peleti and another top Army official to the Super Bowl, a defense investigator said in court Wednesday. The firm has denied wrongdoing. Khan also bribed Peleti to influence LOGCAP contracts with cash. Peleti was arrested in 2006 while re-entering the U.S. at Dover Air Force Base with a duffel bag stuffed with watches and jewelry as well as about $40,000 concealed in his clothing.
...
In the absence of oversight, some Middle Eastern businessmen would offer "Rolex watches, leather jackets, prostitutes, and the KBR guys weren't shy about bragging about the fact that they were being treated to all that stuff," said Paul Morrell, whose firm The Event Source ran several mess halls as a KBR subcontractor.
Gee, nice work if you can get it. Meanwhile, the best the hapless slob on the front line can hope for is to get a little photo op with the Bullshitter in Chief doing laps around the White House on his brand new prosthetic legs.
So when McCain or any other career military goof-off tries to tell you how proud he is of the common infantryman, kick him in his friggin' shins because he's lying to you. But then again, that asshole's been in government his entire life so he probably thinks all of this is just fine.
Ok, it's now the next day and the Navy has saved all of humanity from deadly rocket fuel. But did they? More frm our resident rocket scientist:
I read the reports this morning of the hit yesterday, and found some things interesting.
From AP report:
?Alluding to a video clip of the missile smashing into the satellite, which he showed at the news conference, Cartwright said, "We have a fireball, and given that there's no fuel (on the tip of the missile), that would indicate that that's a hydrazine fire."?
As there is no air in space, a hydrazine fire would be as realistic as the fireballs in ?Star Wars? (the real one, not Reagan?s dream). If the nitrogen-tetroxide tank and the hydrazine tank had been exploded (not just hit by an inert missile), there would be a fireball.
He also comments on the danger of the hydrazine falling to earth and posing a health hazard.
?Cartwright said the hydrazine alone was justification for undertaking the unprecedented effort to use a Navy missile interceptor to attempt to destroy the satellite in orbit.?
Hydrazine is essentially kerosene. Now, you wouldn?t want to have a cocktail party and serve it to your guests, but compared to the nitrogen-tetroxide, this stuff is pretty mild.
If there was danger involved to the public, it would be the nitrogen-tetroxide they need to worry about. Essentially, when it comes in contact with water, it becomes fuming nitric acid (this is why it is such a great oxidizer for hydrazine). So, think about the percentage of water which makes up your lungs, along with the air in your lungs. Combine this with n-tetroxide and your lungs become a jellied mess in about 1 breath. It would also do not favors for the rest of your body, but the lungs are most susceptible, and n-tetroxide is a gas at standard temperature and pressure.
If the general public knew that this was going up with every satellite launch, there would probably be some worry going around. Therefore, no mention of this by sat producers.
Joe: Seems to me, judging from what what I now know, a much bigger threat to humanity is the US Navy messing with missiles.
Just so happens I have a friend who is an actual rocket scientist. He had some interesting things to say about the proposed shoot-down of the oh-so-hazardous satellite by the Navy.
If there was a failed launch of a spy satellite, we would not know, nor ever know, anything about it.
The fear of the satellite remaining intact enough for the fuel storage tanks to survive to the ground is bogus. I think at most, around 200 gallons of nitrogen-tetroxide, and 200 gallons of hydrazine would be thrown into the upper atmosphere. When I worked with Hughes, this was the amount of fuel used on the larger satellites for a 15 year geo-stationary mission.
The chances that telemetry contact with the sat is completely lost, would be astronomical. When a satellite was being end-of-lifed at Hughes, a command is given to fire the main thruster to drive to a fiery death in the atmosphere. There are many times a launch fails to place a satellite in the proper location for geo-orbit, and if there is not enough fuel to boost the satellite to geo, and still have a useful life, the fuel is used to kill the bird.
The fact that the defense dept. would care enough for the safety of it?s citizens to spend more than 60 million dollars to protect them (and admit to a spy sat. failure), is BS
So, bottom line, it Star Wars beginning to come into fruition. Personally, I?m not sure how many spy sats Al-Qaeda has that we need to take care of, but I guess we?ll feel safer after this test. (Unless, of course, our government manages to ?accidentally? land the missile on a friendly).
Hmmm, a little more skeptical than the taxpayer-funded Bad Astronomer.
Wow, this is pretty freaky but entirely predictable (read Why We Banned Legos). In an effort to teach fairness, equity and communal values, teachers had their students build Legoland, a town made of Legos. The teachers unwittingly taught them about the evils of Marxism and the Tragedy of the Commons.
Occasionally, Legotown leaders explicitly rebuffed children, telling them that they couldn't play. Typically the exclusion was more subtle, growing from a climate in which Legotown was seen as the turf of particular kids. The other children didn't complain much about this; when asked about Legos, they'd often comment vaguely that they just weren't interested in playing with Legos anymore. As they closed doors to other children, the Legotown builders turned their attention to complex negotiations among themselves about what sorts of structures to build, whether these ought to be primarily privately owned or collectively used, and how "cool pieces" would be distributed and protected. These negotiations gave rise to heated conflict and to insightful conversation. Into their coffee shops and houses, the children were building their assumptions about ownership and the social power it conveys ? assumptions that mirrored those of a class-based, capitalist society ? a society that we teachers believe to be unjust and oppressive. As we watched the children build, we became increasingly concerned.
Sounds like the Open Spaces debacle going on in my own township where our "leaders" take my money to buy ground to be preserved as open space when in reality it allows The Many to pay for property controlled (and in essence owned) by The Few. Anyway, the story initially shocked me but later I felt that it may not be a bad exercise to do with kids when they are young. You see, the teachers did not fail. It was the communal system that hindered private property ownership and competition that was the failure. And it's amazing how quickly things degenerated. I tend to think this would be an excellent teaching tool for kids too young to get their heads around Mises and would be a great way to prep them for it in high school. Maybe they'd understand that the Obamanomics they're begging for is simply a Soviet-style redistribution system.
On an unrelated but no less freaky note, this story reminded me of another social experiment involving school students gone awry over three decades earlier.
I frequent Neatorama.com because it's usually good for a chuckle. But this particular entry makes me wonder about the integrity of their research.
Is It Possible to Own Property on the Moon?
That depends on what your definition of is, is. According to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, countries can?t own lunar real state. However, the Treaty doesn?t say anything about the rights of individuals to claim land.
Enter Dennis Hope, a California entrepreneur / ventriloquist who?d exploited the loophole to its fullest. In 1980, Hope announced his ownership to the moon (and, incidentally, the rest of the solar system) and promptly started selling off plots through his company, Lunar Embassy.
Space-faring nations vehemently denied the legality of Hope?s business, pointing to the 1979 Moon Treaty, which forbids individual interstellar land investment. Finding yet another loophole, Hope countered by nothing that none of the space nations ever actually signed that treaty after the U.S. and Russia both refused.
But Moon Treaty or not, an individual can still only own land through the jurisdiction of his or her home country, and if nations can?t own it, then people can?t own land through them.
Tenuous as his argument is, Hope has still managed to inspire some serious investors. To date, the Lunar Embassy has made more than $1.6 million. If you?re interested, plots go for as little as $30, but don?t spend all your money on moon land: mental_floss has some contacts with beautiful oceanfront lots in Arizona and we?d love to get you in on the ground floor.
Bzzzzt! Wrong! In a state of nature, whoever homesteads the land (improves it through labor and investment) owns it. Murray Rothbard put it best.
Land in its original state is unused and unowned. Georgists and other land communalists may claim that the whole world population really "owns" it, but if no one has yet used it, it is in the real sense owned and controlled by no one. The pioneer, the homesteader, the first user and transformer of this land, is the man who first brings this simple valueless thing into production and social use. It is difficult to see the morality of depriving him of ownership in favor of people who have never gotten within a thousand miles of the land, and who may not even know of the existence of the property over which they are supposed to have a claim.
Ya see, it is not available for sale by anyone who does not already own it let alone anyone who has never set foot on it. Nor is it legitimate for a government who does not own it to deny ownership to anyone else. No government necessary. We The People institute government to protect the rights we already enjoy.?After all, a government doesn't legitimately own it until it kills a few thousand Indians first, right?
Andrew Jackson rarely makes anyone's list of great presidents due to the fact that he may have actually made the government smaller while in office...most notably by crushing the central bank and every Hamiltonian within a ten-mile radius of it.
So it was refreshing to see him listed in The 5 Most Badass President's of All-Time by the unscholarly Cracked.com. But even though, we could sure use another badass president right about now.
In The Social Welfare State, beyond Ideology, faux economist Jeffrey D. Sachs at Scientific American tries to explain away economic freedom as a criteria of success in a society.
On average, the Nordic countries outperform the Anglo-Saxon ones on most measures of economic performance. Poverty rates are much lower there, and national income per working-age population is on average higher. Unemployment rates are roughly the same in both groups, just slightly higher in the Nordic countries. The budget situation is stronger in the Nordic group, with larger surpluses as a share of GDP.
Not sure what criteria they used or what study they read but according to the 2008 Index of Economic Freedom, no Nordic country (as mentioned in the article, "Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden")?scores higher than 11 (even the evil US is above that). Indeed, their poster child, Sweden, ranks 27 behind The Bahamas which by my own reckoning is dirt poor. Meanwhile, Norway ranks 34 behind El Salvador. By reading the Sci-Am article, you'd think that nationalized R&D spending was a more important criteria than the freedom to not be murdered by roving death squads. Indeed, a benevolent dictatorship is what they suggest to be the best possible scenario.
The Nordic countries maintain their dynamism despite high taxation in several ways. Most important, they spend lavishly on research and development and higher education. All of them, but especially Sweden and Finland, have taken to the sweeping revolution in information and communications technology and leveraged it to gain global competitiveness. Sweden now spends nearly 4 percent of GDP on R&D, the highest ratio in the world today. On average, the Nordic nations spend 3 percent of GDP on R&D, compared with around 2 percent in the English-speaking nations.
What I'm seeing here is a government that picks winners and losers and politicians have a poor track record there no matter which country they hail from.
The chart above illustrates Joe's First Law of Economics: "If you give stuff away, don't be surprised when people line up for it." Presumably, the 6.3% unemployment rate doesn't bother anyone at Sci-Am. However, I'd bet an ever-shrinking Swedish Krona that number will continue to rise. But even at that, Sci-Am may conclude that paying citizens not not work is a sign of an enlightened society.
In a nutshell, I think the advantage of which they speak might lie in being small. After all, the countries at the top of the list, Hong Kong, Singapore and Ireland, along with the aforementioned Nordic countries, are too small to support an obscenely expensive, militaristic foreign policy and there's something to be said for that.
Note: I know the article in question is from Nov 2006 and has been appropriately ripped many times since then but I'm bored and couldn't find anything better to do.
Make a Potemkin Village out of Gitmo.
GUANTANAMO BAY?For Lt.-Col. Ed Bush and his team of public-affairs officers, their role in the so-called war on terror is a war on words.
Each week, they escort journalists, dignitaries and international observers through the world's most famous American naval base here on Cuba's southeast coast. It's not an easy job. There really aren't many "good news" stories that come from Gitmo, as the base is most often called.
But their mission, six years after the first terrorism suspects arrived here ? handcuffed, shackled and hooded ? is to try to improve the negative public image of Guantanamo and correct what they say is inaccurate reporting.
The Star.com
Fans of alternative fuels at any cost and cheerleaders of US military intervetionism have one thing in common: they both have an answer to a single problem and that is "What if oil-producing nations cut us off?" For those who don't think that oil will find its way here one way or another, I'd like to you read this short tale of Herbert Dow.
Dow refused to succumb to German pressure to increase the price of his bromine. Rather, Dow began to sell his bromine for a cheaper price in Europe, hurting the profits of the Germans. The Germans retaliated by selling bromine to American business owners for only fifteen cents per pound. Undaunted, Dow purchased large quantities of the Germans' fifteen cent bromine and then resold it in Europe at twenty-seven cents, undercutting the German price on this continent by twenty-two cents! The Germans did not realize that Dow was behind the cheaper price in Europe. Even worse for the Germans, they repeatedly cut the price of bromine in the United States. Before long, bromine was selling for 10.5 cents in the United States, and Dow was continuing to repackage and sell this bromine in Europe for twenty-seven cents.
So have no fear. A market as large as the US will not go unfilled. Even if a third-party must buy oil and resell it to us, it will happen. And knowing that this failsafe market?mechanism?is in place, do they really think the original oil producers would allow themselves to be cut out of the loop like that?
Much to CNN's credit, in pondering why so many young people are voting this time around, they actually asked young people. Gee, imagine that. Anyway, their voting doesn't seem to be a function of what's on their minds.
CNN: Why are young people so interested in the 2008 election?
K. writes: 100 years in Iraq = DRAFT.
Sandy writes: For the same reason I was interested in the election of John F. Kennedy. These kids see a light at the end of the tunnel when they see Barak Obama, and well they should see that light. He is a bright light in this dark world and I hope the people of this country see that light before it?s too late. I just hope the ?Washington elite? don?t screw him over.
K seems to be a man of few words but he's got a good point. However, I'm not sure where Sandy heard Obama say that he has any interest in ending our perpetual war for perpetual peace in the Middle East. Although I did hear him imply many times that he'll spend Sandy's generation, as well as many to come, into perpetual debt for perpetual bread and circuses.