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Christ, I wish someone would hurry up and remake Logan’s Run. Damn those Wachowski brothers and their Speed Racer!

It occurred to me that Logan’s Run is perhaps little more than the dystopian imagining of the uber-welfare/warfare state gone slightly awry. After all, we may not have Sleepshop, the public sporting-extermination of those over 21, but we always seem to have a convenient war for them. Thou shalt be wary, very wary, of government intentions.

I really want to make a good joke about Deepwater or Blackwater, but it’s just eluding me. Let’s see…Deepwater…What do you get with loads of “free” taxpayer money, no oversight, and several colossal bureaucracies? Nah, just depresses me.

But you heard about Deepwater, right? Part of the program was to lengthen already existing Coast Guard boats to the tune of 10 million per boat. Yes, I said lengthen. Apparently, you can lengthen boats, just like you would, oh, trick out an El Camino. Of course, it didn’t work, and the government is blaming the contractor, and taking the project over, but something tells me only the government could get itself in such a stupid situation in the first place.

Now if we can only take some of this genius technology and widen the planet, we’ll have some more room for all the babies in China.

Check out infrequent MUS contributor Mogre’s piece on Porno Para Ricardo, a Cuban punk rock band. I can’t link directly to it because CNN is gay. So, (audible groan), you have to go to cnn.com/video, click “Browse/Search video,” then search for Cuba in the pop-up window. The piece should come up first and is called “Cuban band blasts government.” Hurry up because CNN only keeps stuff up for a few days, which is also gay. Good stuff about a place where punk rock is rare and truly revolutionary, not the emo fashion parade we are used to.

Here’s the video for PPR’s “Cake:”

Before I embraced Jesus, if by Jesus we mean that particular form of free market loving liberty, I too suffered from thinking the problems of the nation and of the world at large were because governments did too little, not too much. This is an understandable position for the political neophyte; when something has “gone wrong” who better to fix it than the federal government, whether it’s the economy, health care, or education. It never occurred to me that these problems may have been caused or greatly exacerbated by government in the first place.

Andrew Coulson in the Washington Post, on the folly of federal “standards” in education:

Standards advocates mistakenly assume that high external standards produce excellence, but in fact it is the competitive pursuit of excellence that produces high standards.

We understand this point implicitly in every field outside of education. We didn’t progress from four-inch black-and-white cathode ray tubes to four-foot flat panels because the federal government raised television standards. Apple did not increase the capacity of its iPod from 5 to 80 gigabytes in five years because of some bureaucratic mandate. And the Soviet Union did not collapse because the targets for its five-year plans were insufficiently ambitious.

Progress and innovation in these and almost all other human endeavors have been driven by market incentives: consumer choice, competition among providers, the profit motive. The absence of these incentives — as in the Soviet Union — has led to economic decline and collapse. Not surprisingly, the link between standards and performance in public schooling is noticeably weaker than it is in other areas, because government schooling is a monopoly, not a market.

It all seems too little too late, doesn’t it? Still, I think we’d all like to see those that belong in jail finally make it there. The case for impeaching Bush isn’t the wiretapping scandal, but that whole war under false pretenses thing, oh, remember that? According to Elizabeth Holzman:

That’s why the strongest political ground for impeachment isn’t Bush’s illegal wiretapping program, but the fact that the country was driven into war in Iraq—which most Americans now view as a disastrous mistake—under false pretenses. The framers deliberately gave Congress war-making powers because the momentous decision to go to war should be reached only after the fullest consideration. They believed Congress would curb the historical tendency of executives to make war needlessly. If a president lies or deceives Congress about going to war, he negates its critical constitutional role.

President Bush and his team falsely implied that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, reiterating this suggestion so often that by the time of the invasion, most Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and U.S. soldiers saw their deployment in Baghdad as “payback.” Yet shortly after 9/11 occurred, former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke told the president that Saddam had nothing to do with it. President Bush undoubtedly also knew that U.S. intelligence agencies gave little credence to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would provide weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.

Moreover, the president either lied or was aware that something was seriously wrong when he told Congress in his 2003 State of the Union address that the British government discovered that Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa, supposedly proof that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capacity. But U.S. intelligence knew that claim was bogus at the time, and months after the invasion, the president acknowledged this.

If the president had been briefed on U.S. intelligence before his address, then he deliberately deceived Congress and the United States about the war, “a great and dangerous offense that subverts the Constitution.” In the unlikely event he was not briefed, he still took us to war based on British intelligence, without consulting U.S. intelligence, violating his responsibility to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” A full investigation would determine to what extent he and Vice President Dick Cheney deliberately deceived Congress and Americans about the war.

The ethanol issue is a wonderful example of delusional and self-serving government, pipe dreaming about energy independence.

Economists argue that making ethanol from corn wouldn’t make any sense without the government’s help. The mix of federal and state subsidies to corn ethanol amounted to a conservative estimate of $5 billion to $7 billion in 2006, says Koplow of Earth Track. A considerable chunk of that money comes from the 51¢ tax refund for each gallon of ethanol refiners blend with gasoline to make fuels that can power flexible-fuel cars.

At the same time, the government imposes a 54¢-per-gallon tariff on ethanol from Brazil, which is a cheaper and more energy-efficient product made from sugar cane. Some economists say American politicians are subordinating smart energy policy for political support in key states like Iowa.

I’m all for energy alternatives. If ethanol is worth it’s weight in corn, let it speak for itself. Let it compete with other technologies in a free market with no subsidies and the most efficient will prevail.

I’ve often thought there was a special bond between the animated and equally rhetorical dictators Chavez and Dubya. They have a Yin and Yang thing going on. While Bush has arguably fanned the fires of terrorism worldwide, weakening the international reputation of the US in the process, Chavez has rallied the troops with his anti-imperialist USA rhetoric to starting new heights in Latin America. And he rubs it in Dubya’s face whenever he can. Now Bush is hitting back. They make great caricatures of political leaders, the only problem is that it’s without the caricature.

Sheldon Richman with the lowdown on the Latin America, and the connection between these two goons:

If Bush were truly interested in seeing poverty diminished and freedom increased in Latin America, he wouldn’t be playing these games, which will only give Chavez more grist for his propaganda mill. Prosperity and freedom require that governments back off, respect individual rights, and not try to direct economic affairs. Latin America needs neither socialism nor American-style state capitalism. It needs radical decentralization and genuinely free markets. Come to think of it, so does the United States.

Here at manunderstress global media watchdog sports center, we object to all forms of cultural Nanny Statism, most especially trendy authoritarian legislation designed to keep us from getting fat, having too much fun, or just being as stupid as we want to be. We think nannies are better kept out of government.

In Georgia, our very own Governator, one of them deep-fried Southern “Conservative” types, wants less government, if less means more, and more means Jesus.

Two years later, some Georgians say the governor has done an about-face. Perdue recently signaled his opposition to a bill that would allow voters to decide whether to allow Sunday beer and wine sales in stores. He remarked that the Sunday prohibition teaches Georgians “time management” by forcing them to purchase alcohol earlier in the week.

Ah, I see…so it’s actually a government sponsored “time management” program. Clever, Big Government Sonny, clever indeed.

Statewide, 68 percent of Georgians polled in January wanted the chance to vote on the question. In middle Georgia, support dropped to 45 percent.

Hmm, 68%? So democracy is where then?

Watched a documentary on the Cuban missle crisis the other night, and then looked up the letters mentioned in it between Fidel Castro and Nikita Khrushchev. Here’s Castro in a loony and masochistic plea to practically end the world, if the US were to invade Cuba:

Letter to Nikita Khrushchev from Fidel Castro regarding defending Cuban air space

I would like to briefly express my own personal opinion.

If the second variant takes place and the imperialists invade Cuba with the aim of occupying it, the dangers of their aggressive policy are so great that after such an invasion the Soviet Union must never allow circumstances in which the imperialists could carry out a nuclear first strike against it.

I tell you this because I believe that the imperialists’ aggressiveness makes them extremely dangerous, and that if they manage to carry out an invasion of Cuba–a brutal act in violation of universal and moral law–then that would be the moment to eliminate this danger forever, in an act of the most legitimate self-defense. However harsh and terrible the solution, there would be no other.

It made me wonder how odd the world must have been back then communicating during emergencies via telegraph.

Hilarious satire on protectionism from Frédéric Bastiat, French economist, written in 1845. This is from back when “libertarianism” was known simply as “liberalism.”

A PETITION From the Manufacturers of Candles, Tapers, Lanterns, sticks, Street Lamps, Snuffers, and Extinguishers, and from Producers of Tallow, Oil, Resin, Alcohol, and Generally of Everything Connected with Lighting.

…

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price; for the moment he appears, our sales cease, all the consumers turn to him, and a branch of French industry whose ramifications are innumerable is all at once reduced to complete stagnation. This rival, which is none other than the sun, is waging war on us so mercilessly we suspect he is being stirred up against us by perfidious Albion (excellent diplomacy nowadays!), particularly because he has for that haughty island a respect that he does not show for us [1].

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights, and blinds — in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures through which the light of the sun is wont to enter houses, to the detriment of the fair industries with which, we are proud to say, we have endowed the country, a country that cannot, without betraying ingratitude, abandon us today to so unequal a combat.