Tea Party Politeness

Comments like this:

Fresno had over 7,500 attend the most polite protest I have ever witnessed.

are both a blessing and a curse, really.
You see readers email Glenn Reynolds saying this all the time about protests all across the country: People are so nice, so polite, everyone was very cool, everyone was so calm, no one got violent, smiles were all over the place.
That's neat, and all, I really am glad people can behave like adults.

But this is a protest. This is a protest movement, or at least some would like it to be. Someone needs to get angry and show it. Someone needs to shout something at a cop and get the ball rolling. Politely asking Congress "if you please would you mind not raising taxes? And could you pretty please impeach Mr. Obama?" is kind of like standing in front of a beehive and saying "Bees, would you please let me have your honey? I won't stick my hand in there, honest, but I'd like that honey so I need you to bring the honey out to me."

Of course, I don't condone violence, or riots. But I do believe that a protest movement, if it wants to be effective, needs to have some bullhorns, and the occasional arrest. If you look at the length of American history you see radical change coming not from petitions and sit-ins, but from arrests, angry protesters, and from government taking action when the protest is on the verge of becoming an uprising.

Of course, you have to actually be focused on an issue in order to effectively protest it. People at the Tea Parties really don't have a unifying cause. They are all just sort of there with their own pet complain against liberal government.

I guess I'd really like to turn on CNN and see someone chain themselves to Obama's front steps in Chicago.


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Unmanned Aerial Helicopter

I can understand someone arguing that an unmanned helicopter with guns strapped to it could slip into urban areas and takeout insurgents with less collateral damage than human soldiers...

...but what I don't understand is why they call it the "Vigilante"? A vigilante is someone who gets tired of the actual police force not doing anything and goes on a violent killing spree against criminals. Maybe because DOD checkwriters are a lot more hynotized by the word vigilante than they are by the phrase "soldier saver".

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Iron Man Suits, the neverending thread

Another day, another Japanese robot maker releases some bionic device with the loud disclaimer that it doesn't imbue superhuman strength.

Here, you can read about the new Honda exoskeleton, designed to assist the elderly move around by relieving joint pressure.

Once again I ask myself "Why are scientists using servos?" Linear actuators are way more powerful. I think I have come around to the answer: batteries.

Servos use less power to produce less power. They are about the only feasible option for portable power assist suits, in which I have no interest. I am quite content to require my suit wearers to stay safely plugged (via a long cord) into the wall, for now. Let the chemical engineers invent batteries to accomodate my suit, not the other way around.

In any case, hopefully my suit, or the parts I am working on, will not break during press junkits, as the Honda unit does in the second video on the above link.

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A riddle

On the work bulletin board someone has posted the following riddle:

What is greater than God, more evil than the devil, the poor have it, the rich need it, and if you eat it you'll die?

Now the obvious answer is "nothing", and I am sure that is the intended answer to the riddle. But there are a few other answers I could suggest that might make this more entertaining. Does anyone else have any suggestions?


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Obama Agenda vs. Civil Liberties

This is not something that can be asked and answered in a single post, but in response to my post TPI asked me "in what way is Obama's agenda destructive of civil liberties?"

I'm not going to get into a huge argument about this, but here's my very rudimentary and basic answer: Bush massively reduced the right to privacy via the Patriot Act. He violated our right to be free by torturing suspected terrorists. He violated our right to fair trial by holding detainees for years without a hearing. He violated our right to success by promoting discrimination against arab-appearing Americans.

Obama has not had 8 years to violate our rights, so his list is obviously shorter and less heinous. But what I was getting at with my loaded "but no less invasive to civil liberty" is Obama's two-fold attack on our right to bear arms and our right to prosper. I am not defending the Bush Administration's bungling of the economy, and I did not support their spending spree. But Bush's econ policies seemed...I dunno...like a snowball to Obama's avalanche of money. I'm not one of those hypocrites who says "$300 billion is okay, but $1.2 trillion is too much." I ranted against bailouts from the beginning. Bailouts rob people of the right to fail, of the rights of other intrepid people to establish efficient businesses in the wake of a bad business' colossal failure. Bailouts rob people of the right to spend their money at places they wish to, by forcing it into the hands of businesses that do not necessarily deserve it. Bush, and then Obama, used (and continue to use) "bailout or else armageddon" fearmongering to push upon the American people debts that we will eventually have to pay.
And you have to be either completely in Obama's pocket or have no access to the internet to know that about 15 seconds after Obama was elected, his website dropped their pro-gun talk and took up the liberal, anti-gun mantle. I know, I know, TPI, you don't think Obama is anti-gun. But the problem is that Obama isn't going to stand in the way of the people who are vengefully trying to remove guns from the hands of those of us who have the Constitutionally established right to them.
Obama might not be the bad guy in the anti-gun surge that is building steam in the Democratic party, but I don't see him telling Nancy Pelosi to sit down and shut up.

Anyway, we are looking at the sum total of Bush's legacy...Katrina, Patriot Act, Guantanimo, Iraq, etc. and we get the opportunity to go "wow, what a jerk." But with Obama, we're looking at it the ski slope from the top, and we really don't know what the ride will be like. But so far, Obama hasn't really seemed like "the ultimate defender of liberty" but more like "the ultimate enactor of progressive agenda".


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The Difference

From XKCD.

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Dog The Pirate Hunter

Here, Ben Domenech argues that what the United States needs is to follow Ron Paul's advice from 2007: dispatch private mercenaries with letters of marque to dispense low-collateral-damage, low-cost justice on Somali pirates.

Deploying the New Privateers as a blunt instrument against the Somali pirates has some downsides. But I’m unconvinced that these enemies can be negotiated with or stopped without the deployment of an innovative solution — in this case, one that’s a throwback to the era these thieves come from. The cost, difficulty, and risk of a dozen more Maersk standoffs has to be weighed. We shouldn’t be satisfied with better protections for ships, hoping that the pirates will grow bored of their revenge streak, and reorienting our naval force in the region to combat this enemy will take time. Instead, President Obama and the Congress might consider encouraging those individuals who can to solve the problem in their own way — as messy as it may be — so that these seaborne brigands wake up on a morning soon to find their sands are run.

Most people have at least toyed with this idea in their minds. Most of us, deep down, have this idea that people we don't like just need some "Texas justice, Chuck Norris style" and they'll behave themselves.

But as I am sure avid fans are aware, Dog the Bounty Hunter continues to have plenty of work filling bounties. As much as I'd like to send a bunch of vengeful, well-armed American privateers to the Somali coast to take on the pirates, I don't really think that would be a long-term solution. If these pirates can be considered a different sort of land-based terrorist, then the use of force tends to not effectively squash their efforts. Instead they seem to just get wilier. Iraq (and especially Afghanistan) has shown that there is not a quick fix to the problems of terrorism. I suggest the same is true of pirates.

If you want to stop flies from getting in you shut the window, you don't let a bunch of spiders loose and expect the flies to stop coming in out of fear.

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