Pakistan police are locked in a standoff with students holed up inside a mosque in Islamabad.  The students are demanding “Taliban-style” sharia law.  Says Reuters,

“The clashes began when about 150 students attacked a security picket at a Pakistani government office near the mosque, snatched weapons and took four officials hostage, according to police.”

Which suggests one of the fallacies of traditional security thinking: Keep control of the weapons and they can’t rebel. These days, gun control fails as a means to keep an unruly populace in check. Pakistani students steal guns from the police. IEDs (improvised explosive devices) are the weapon of choice in Iraq– and, apparently, England as well. And even the LTTE in Sri Lanka has long said that their number one supplier of weapons is the Sri Lanka military. LTTE has acquired not only rifles and ammunition, but even artillery (which they used effectively against its former owners) by overrunning government positions.If weapons cannot be kept out of the hands of would-be militants, and if fighting the militants only makes them stronger, the answer (assuming a leader wants to prevent war) is to satisfy the needs of the populace. This, of course, is a politically risky move, since in an economy of scarce resources, giving to those who have little requires taking from those who have much (and who probably supported your election). 

 Combine this with the benefits a leader gains when war erupts, and it should be no surprise that differences of opinion (and resource allocation) so often flare into armed conflict: there is in some circumstances very little incentive for prevention.

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MSNBC just ran a piece saying how the recent attacks in the UK mean a higher chance of attacks here. They then trotted out a “terrorism expert” who provided no hard facts on this except to attempt to scare viewers by saying copy cat attacks could occur. “Could.” Not “would”. With no supporting evidence given, either.

This is irresponsible reporting, scaremongering based on no evidence, designed to boost ratings and little else.

As for airport security, currently TSA security for those flying by private jet does not exist. That’s right. if you fly by private jet there are no security checks. If the government is serious about stopping terrorist threats, then *everyone* needs to be searched, including private jet passengers. Otherwise it’s just more pointless ineffective scaremongering.

I once had a client in Nova Scotia who lived near the Maine border. He had a bank account in Maine for paying in dollars. I asked him what security was like driving across the national border. He laughed and said, it was a road, no stops, no security, no checkpoints. So apparently it’s easy enough to get across national borders into the US.

No, I haven’t the slightest desire for myself or anyone else to get maimed or killed by a terrorist bomb. But banning toothpaste tubes above a certain size or scaring people with bogus ‘analysis’ is not the way to do it. Old-fashioned police work remains the most effective method, even if it is useless for scaremongering and propaganda purposes.

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Allen Greenspan, former chair of the Federal Reserve, was a follower of the extreme right wing philosophy of Ayn Rand, and this certainly was major factor in how he ran the Fed. He was not just a follower from afar either, he was a member of the inner circle, as this Allen Greenspan / Any Rand timeline shows.

How right wing was Ayn Rand? She believed in the supremacy of self-interest and selfishness, thought altruism was evil and charitable giving despicable. Most of all, she wanted unfettered capitalism with absolutely no governmental oversight and twisted the ideas of Darwinism to mean that if the economically weak got crushed by the stronger, that this was for the good. That was her philosophy, and it’s been taken up by new generations of amoral greedheads to absolve them of any responsibility except to their net worth.

Allen Greenspan was and is a believer in this ultra conservative philosophy.

In 2001, Greenspan gave crucial support to Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, when virtually no one, except ultra-conservatives, endorsed the concept. Those tax cuts are responsible for today’s disastrous budget deficit.

In 2005, Greenspan is the lone economic voice urging Americans to adopt the program that George Bush desperately desires……Bush-style privatization of Social Security.

His “Irrational Exuberance” comment on the dot com stock market bubble came way too late in the game, and even with that the Fed did little if anything too slow it down. As for the current subprime mess, in 2000 a Fed governor approached Greenspan about investigating predatory mortgage lending and was flatly turned down.

“I would have liked the Fed to be a leader” in cracking down on predatory lending, Mr. Gramlich, now a scholar at the Urban Institute, said in an interview this past week. Knowing it would be controversial with Mr. Greenspan, whose deregulatory philosophy is well known, Mr. Gramlich broached it to him personally rather than take it to the full board.

“He was opposed to it, so I didn’t really pursue it,” says Mr. Gramlich, a Democrat who was one of seven Fed governors.

Greed is good, charity and altruism is bad. Let the strong prosper and let the weak die to enrich them. That is the philosophy of Allen Greenspan, and true to his guiding star, he did everything he could to funnel more money to the already wealthy at the expense of the rest of us. He presided over two speculative bubbles, dot com stocks, and real estate, bubbles which profited investment banks hugely while damaging the economy at large. Such selfish greed, benefiting a tiny few at the expense of everyone else, is consistent with a follower of Ayn Rand.

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The Smart Fortwo is made by Mercedes, with over 750,000 sold in 26 countries. Now it’s coming to the US. Check the Roadshow to see if they’ll be in your area.

• 8.8 feet long (you can usually fit two smart fortwos in an average parking space!)
• 5.1 feet tall (the smart still has as much headroom as most luxury vehicles!)
• 5.1 feet wide (two six foot, five inch plus people can sit side by side with plenty of shoulder room to spare!)

The top speed of the smart fortwo is approximately 90 mph.

This would make a great commuting car, and it’s guaranteed an aftermarket will quickly emerge, for souping up the engine and adding accessories.

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