Nick Cotter // Wired, tired, and tedious to know.
Good presentation of the vast proportion of budget the US spends on defence - and a nice comparison with health care.
I don't like the remark "Who named us the unpaid cop of the planet?" however. An empire is neither a cop, nor unpaid.
The hope of the future does not rest, as commonly believed, in winning the people of the "buffer fringe" to one superpower or the other, but rather in the invention of new weapons and tactics that will be so cheap to obtain and so easy to use that they will increase the effectiveness of guerrilla warfare so greatly that the employment of our present weapons of mass destruction will become futile, and on this basis there can be a revival of democracy and of political decentralization in all three parts of our present world. This possible development in political and military matters, would, of course, require the development of decentralized economic techniques such as would arise if sunlight became the chief energy source for production and the advancement of science made it possible to manufacture any desired substance by molecular rearrangement....
