Who says liberals don’t have a sense of humor?

[From Huffington Post; links in the original.  Crude Language Warning, but some of the comments are priceless!]

It’s not everyday that a person gets to blog about how military contractors are developing terrifying, ironically named robots, which will roam around, feasting on dead flesh until the day comes that they will rise up and kill us all, but guess what?  Today is one of those days: 

A Maryland company under contract to the Pentagon is working on a steam-powered robot that would fuel itself by gobbling up whatever organic material it can find — grass, wood, old furniture, even dead bodies.

Robotic Technology Inc.’s Energetically Autonomous Tactical Robot — that’s right, “EATR” — “can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment (and other organically-based energy sources), as well as use conventional and alternative fuels (such as gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar) when suitable,” reads the company’s Web site.

That “biomass” and “other organically-based energy sources” wouldn’t necessarily be limited to plant material — animal and human corpses contain plenty of energy, and they’d be plentiful in a war zone.

You know, my editors frown on me for swearing, for good reason, but in this case:  SERIOUSLY, PENTAGON, WHAT THE FUCK?!?

I am having a really hard time trying to figure out what the military purpose of a robot that eats dead bodies is.  Maybe the idea is these robots will make it difficult for independent observers to quantify casualties?  Maybe President Sarah Palin will nominate one to the Supreme Court?  The article states that EATR is a “platform” that things could be “built upon” — like an “ambulance” or a “mobile gunship.”  But it seems to me that the ambulances and gunships we have now are perfectly okay, and, at any rate, DON’T MAKE MY SOUL HURT.

Speaking of:

The advantages to the military are that the robot would be extremely flexible in fuel sources and could roam on its own for months, even years, without having to be refueled or serviced.

So then:  some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.  But it looks like it’s going to end in a hail of white-hot terror at the hands of marauding, corpse-eating Roombas.

 

[Some of my fave comments (so far):

 

ROFLMAO:  I for one welcome our new flesh eating robot overlords...

Kremfresch:  You libs are at it again!!  God, Guns, and Flesh Eating Killer Robots made America GREAT, let's keep all three!

hypathia:  I don't see why we're wasting so much time developing flesh-eating robots when we *should* be channeling that creative energy into DNA and stem cell research programs to figure out how to make a zombie uprising a reality.  Flesh-eating robots are cool, sure, but flesh-eating undead are way *way* cooler, especially if they're someone you knew personally, like the local priest, an ex-boyfriend who always wears a letterman jacket, the girl who recently went to check out the attic all by herself, etc.  We need some rational priorities in our science programs, for god's sake!

tjdlr:  When will they change their name to Skynet?]

 

“The worst of the tax-and-spend liberals”

Who could possibly deserve that label?

President Obama?  No.

Charles Shumer (D-NY)?  Close, but no.

Al Franken (D-MN)?  Not yet, anyway.

According to Dallas-Fort Worth’s ABC affiliate WFAA and Public Citizen’s Tom Smith, it’s none other than the recently re-elected junior Republicrat Senator from Texas, John Cornyn:

He’s now known as the U.S. Senate’s biggest spender on domestic travel, according to official travel records found in The Report of the Secretary of the Senate.

That’s right—to the tune of $152,766.63.  In the first six months of the fiscal year.  Granted, the left-populist watchdog group Public Citizen isn’t exactly the most politically conservative or even neutral organization, but I think they pretty much nailed this one.  The numbers pretty well speak for themselves.

For comparison, über-parasite Chuck Shumer came in second at $144,014.22.  Texas’ real fiscal conservative is Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, who was only the eighth-biggest spender.

[Cornyn's] amount is more than any other senator. “His excuse is, ‘Well, it’s a big state,’” said Tom Smith, of the watchdog group Public Citizen. “I agree senator. It is a big state, and most big cities where he’s spending most of his time have real good airline service. He should be flying coach with the rest of us.”

But, Texas’ senior senator, fellow Republican Kay Bailey Hutchison, only spent $88,000 during the same time period. That’s a little more than half of Cornyn’s bill.

Plus, California’s two senators combined spent a little over $101,000 on travel, according to the same record.

Senators Patty Murray (D-Wash.), Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) and Kit Bond (R-Mo.) all spent more than $100,000 on domestic travel for the first half of the fiscal year.

The remaining 95 senators spent less.

But at least we know it’s all well-spent, and in the public interest, right?

Wrong:

[Cornyn]’s biggest, and perhaps most questionable travel expense, was a retreat he took his staff on in February. For three days, the staff stayed in St. Michaels, Maryland, which is just outside D.C. It cost taxpayers more than $55,000.

That’s correct:  fully one-third of his exorbitant travel expenditures went to a retreat for his over-worked, under-paid “poor widdle staff.”

“He claims to be a fiscal conservative,” Smith said. “This to me is the worst of the tax-and-spend liberals in Congress. He’s spending more money than New York senators are on travel. If that doesn’t put a ring of shame on John Cornyn’s face, I don’t know what does[.]“

Apparently, the cretinous parasite knows no shame.  Still, though,

Cornyn can spend his travel budget however he wants and let voters decide if his trips are worth the price.

And please, Texas, let’s do weigh his expenses (not to mention his votes for government bailouts, illegal alien amnesty, and imperial warfare) and find him wanting.  And while we’re waiting to kick Cornyn out, let’s get rid of the rest of the bums, too.

Hail to the King

Another Independence Day has come and gone.  I’m struck by how often the celebration becomes not one of freedom, but of love for the government and its use of force:  dusting off and rolling out of the increasingly rare World War II veterans, the vintage rolling stock, droves of firemen and police strolling down a thousand versions of Main Street.   These blatant displays of state power during what should be a celebration of the triumph of Providence and liberty are growing increasingly more disturbing.

[Conveniently Unfortunately, an exceedingly pregnant wife and a sick child conspired to exempt me from the obligatory parade attendence this year.  The wife is still pregnant—for now—but the child is well.]

Equally as disturbing is the extent to which the Church seems to have bought into the militarism.  From flags under the cross, to campaign speeches from the altar, to “honoring our veterans” in the service, the State and its machinations are increasingly a visible part of the Church.  William Norman Grigg recently wrote, in part [links in original]:

As Richard Gambale documents in his indispensable study The War for Righteousness: Progressive Christianity, the Great War, and the Rise of the Messianic Nation, the militarist heresy is of relatively recent vintage. It was an outgrowth of the WWI-era “Progressive” conceit that the Christian Church had to justify its existence by playing a “positive” role in the expansion of the meliorist state.

Rather than playing the biblically mandated role of peacemakers, the progressive clergy eagerly supported World War I “as transforming event in the life of the church,” observes Gambale. Many of them applauded the Wilson administration’s war aims as a form of Christian “altruism,” one that promised temporal redemption “at the sacrifice, if need be, of five millions of men and billions of wealth,” as an effusive Literary Digest editorial put it.

Nor would this righteous campaign to re-make the world through state coercion cease once altrusitic mass murder ceased. Writes Gambale: “The progressives longed for, and expected, the war for righteousness to continue after the guns in Europe fell silent.” They would not be disappointed.

Again, one collides with an arresting irony: The most outspoken “conservative celebrations of militarism during what used to be called Independence Day a promoting a view devised by the leftist Progressives of the early 1900s, what Gambale aptly calls “the rhetorical sacralization of the nation-state.”

The more pronounced our ruling elite’s apostasy from America’s republican origins, the more insistent became their invocations of our sacred national “mission” in the world. As Gambale notes, one particularly notable example was provided on September 11, 2002 by Bush the Lesser as he “appropriated the words of John 1:5 as if they described not just the Incarnation of Christ but the mission of the United States: `And the light shines in the darkness; and the darkness will not overcome it.’”

To the extent that any radiance attends the labors of the Regime ruling us, it is the demonic nimbus of shock-and-awe, not the divine radiance of the Shekinah. The true tragedy of our time is that so many American Christians are blind to that critical distinction.

 I grew nauseous as I read this today.

In all honesty, I vaguely remember cheering Bush II as he spoke these words almost seven years ago, still beholden to the American “mandate from God” fallacy.  I had read and re-read Romans 13 at that point, and heartily supported following my secular leadership.

That worldview—incidentally, the prevailing American [evangelical] Christian worldview—discounts the thousands of years of recorded history chronicling the depravity of all human authority.

Dunamis, dunamai, didomi, arche, ischus, ischuros, kratos and energes are all translated in the New Testament as “power”, but have decidedly different meanings than the word that appears in Romans 13.

The word is exousia and it is from two Greek words. Ex means “of” or “from”, while orousia is “what one has, i.e. property, possessions, estate.” The word is defined: “power of choice, liberty of doing as one pleases.”  Is Paul simply telling you that you should remain subject to the right to choose under the perfect law of liberty?

From the beginning, God has endowed man with freewill, which is the power to choose. This inalienable right to choose is man’s responsibility to govern himself under the providence of God. The Bible also clearly tells us that man goes out of the presence of God, sins against God, and even rejects God when he goes under the authority of other men like Cain, Nimrod, Pharaoh, even Saul and Caesar.

God desires that every man should be a free soul under Him directly, having that divinely endowed right of choice unimpaired. He, like Paul, does not desire that we go under the power of any.

The foundational misconception upon which Christian statists of every stripe build their defense of government power is that the State is ordained by God.  But again—and I cannot stress this enough—this outlook ignores the words of YHWH to Samuel:

⁷And the LORD said to Samuel, “Obey the voice of the people in all that they say to you, for they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them. ⁸According to all the deeds that they have done, from the day I brought them up out of Egypt even to this day, forsaking me and serving other gods, so they are also doing to you. ⁹Now then, obey their voice; only you shall solemnly warn them and show them the ways of the king who shall reign over them.” [my emphasis]

Fealty to Caesar is rejection of God.

I imagine that in their heart of hearts, most American evangelicals believe they do God’s work when they call on their “leaders” for the slaughter of innocents abroad, when they debase themselves in deference to the Almighty State (even the American State), or when they surrender their own freedoms in trade for ephemeral and often-absent “protection.”

But these actions echo the Pharisees’ declaration to Pilate:

 We have no king but Caesar.

Return of the Jedi

I think it’s very interesting that the cattle at Faux News—who engineered Dr. Ron Paul’s exclusion from key primary debates and general marginalization in presidential primary reporting, conspiring with other MSM to virtually hand Obama victory by handing McCain victory first—now can’t get enough Paul.  Since the bailout of AIG and the collapse of Lehman last fall, and certainly since the November election, Faux news in particular and the MSM in general have been giving Paul more uninterrupted on-screen time in a given week than he got during his entire presidential campaign (which lasted nearly a year and a half, if you’re not keeping score).  Now that the good Doctor has been vindicated by unfolding events, his wisdom is seen for its merit, rather than being dismissed, Cassandra-like, as lunatic raving.

Nor is he still a lone voice, crying in the wilderness.  His cohort of congresscritters have begun collectively pulling their heads out of their (presumably) proverbial asses.  They begin, in this age of blatant fascism, to see the wisdom—or at least the political expediency—of auditing the Fed.

From FAUXNews.com:

All of a sudden, Congress is paying close attention to Ron Paul.

The feisty congressman from Texas, whose insurgent “Ron Paul Revolution” presidential campaign rankled Republican leaders last year, now has the GOP House leadership on his side — backing a measure that generated paltry support when he first introduced it 26 years ago.

Paul, as of Tuesday, has won 245 co-sponsors to a bill that would require a full-fledged audit of the Federal Reserve by the end of 2010.

Paul attracted just 18 co-sponsors when he authored a similar bill, which died, in 1983. While the impact Fed policies have on inflation is once again a concern, fears about loose monetary policy and excessive federal spending appear even more widespread in 2009.

“In the past, I never got much support, but I think it’s the financial crisis obviously that’s drawing so much attention to it, and people want to know more about the Federal Reserve,” Paul told FOXNews.com.

With the Federal Reserve holding interest rates at rock-bottom levels, pumping trillions into the economy and now poised to have new powers to oversee the financial system under President Obama’s proposed regulatory overhaul, Paul said lawmakers want transparency.

“If they give them a lot more power and there’s no more transparency, that’ll be a disaster,” he said.

The bill would call for the comptroller general in the Government Accountability Office to audit the Fed and report those findings to Congress. The GAO’s ability to conduct such audits now is severely restricted.

A slew of top Republicans are backing the bill, as are many Democrats.

It seems much more like they’re giving him credit because they can’t find a way not to.  I’m sure that if they could pin this on their own neocon Sean Hannity or pseudo-libertarian Glenn (“I’m a libertarian, but…”) Beck, they certainly would.  Despite the final line in the above excerpt, the article leaves one with the impression that this is actually a spontaneous and solely GOP-backed initiative [it's actually (as of this writing) about 30% bipartisan; 72 of the current 245 cosponsors are Demoblican], instead of the most recent battle in a nearly three-decade-long struggle on Paul’s part.

I guess the “perfect storm” of a Democratic Congress, a Democratic President, and an unmitigated economic disaster finally goaded the Republicans into actually acting republican for a change.

Like the Tea Parties.  But who am I to criticize?

Years ago, Murray Rothbard laid rest to the idea that the perfect is the enemy of the good.  In “Why Be A Libertarian?,” Rothbard opined

Antilibertarians, and antiradicals generally, characteristically make the point that such “abolitionism” is “unrealistic;” by making such a charge they are hopelessly confusing the desired goal with a strategic estimate of the probable outcome.

In framing principle, it is of the utmost importance not to mix in strategic estimates with the forging of desired goals. First, goals must be formulated, which, in this case, would be the instant abolition of slavery or whatever other statist oppression we are considering. And we must first frame these goals without considering the probability of attaining them. The libertarian goals are “realistic” in the sense that they could be achieved if enough people agreed on their desirability, and that, if achieved, they would bring about a far better world. The “realism” of the goal can only be challenged by a critique of the goal itself, not in the problem of how to attain it. Then, after we have decided on the goal, we face the entirely separate strategic question of how to attain that goal as rapidly as possible, how to build a movement to attain it, etc.

Obviously, Paul’s ultimate goal remains unchanged:  End the Fed.  But an open audit is a logical first step, and ultimately serves the purpose of liberty — if the purse strings are first cut, it follows that all publicly funded abrogations of liberty will eventually have to end.  The Fed is the enabler of all of the graft the infects Capitol Hill.  It drives Americas foreign adventurism.  It makes the domestic welfare/police state possible.  Auditing the Fed will bring down the American Empire and return us to a manageably-sized, more constitutional republic.

Of course, no Empire means no killing the “little brown people” in other countries.  It also means no more handouts, whether personal, corporate, or international.

Far too many modern Americans are bound to their pet projects, their imperialism, their fascism, or their socialism.  I include these tea-partying, politically “born again” conservatives.  They trust their government far too much.

Making a “Specter-cle” of himself

So, by now, the news that Pennsylvania Senator Arlen Specter has jumped ship from the Republicrat to the Demoblican party is fairly fetid.  This never really surprised me, because Specter had a pretty strict Demoblican voting tendency, anyway.  All the “filibuster-proof” chatter aside, the Demoblican Party already had a super-majority in the Senate anyway, what with Specter and Snowe and Collins from Maine.

No, the big change here is that the media on both “sides” [sic] of the aisle have something inconsequential to squawk about to their somnambulent legions of faithful voters.

Waitaminit — that’s not really anything new, either; they always obfuscate the really important issues [namely, how they continuously screw all of us over, how they keep stealing our money by taxation or inflation, how they constantly abrogate our freedoms, and on and on...] in favor of something unimportant but “timely.”

What shocked me in the entire episode was this quote from Specter in the increasingly irrelevant NY Times on April 28:

“I am not prepared to have my 29-year record in the United States Senate decided by the Pennsylvania Republican primary electorate—not prepared to have that record decided by that jury.”

Wow.  Just, wow.

I am not so much shocked by the content of the quote — it’s obvious to any casual observer that Specter is a coward unwilling to face up to his constituency — but I am amazed that he would be so brazen about his aims: to avoid being held ot account for his actions by those Pennsylvanians who put him in office in the first place!

Of course, you can guess my question here:  Where has “that jury” been for the last 23 years?

If you’ve never voted for Specter, take heart:  Chances are you have been rubber-stamping all your elected officials’ nefarious actions as well.  I mean, Specter has been in the Senate for most of my life — for five (5) Senate terms.  That means he’s been re-elected four times.  (And really, his voting trends haven’t changed much in that time.  He’s always been a moderate—read that “liberal”—Republicrat.  A “bridge-builder.”  A “maverick,” you might say.  Wait… there can’t be two “maverick“ Republicrats, can there?)

How many times have you gone to the polls and punched the ticket for the guy who was in office because “what choice do I have,” or because “he’s a bastard, but he’s our bastard”?

Pardon me for being blunt, but anyone who thinks there’s a credible difference between the “two” [sic] parties is either fooling himself, or is himself a fool.

I’m just sayin’.

[H/T VDare.com]