Hey guess what? If you hire yourself out as a trained goon for the State, the only place you should look for sympathy is in a dictionary. It'll be in there, somewhere between 'shit' and 'syphilis'.

If you get to be a full-grown adult and you're not aware that your overlords are a bunch of scheming parasites, then there's something awry in your cabesa. That said - if your IQ is above 'educable' you have NO EXCUSE for volunteering to kill on demand, so if you take that paycheck you also take whatever disbenefits you weren't told about at the recruiting station.

I was a green-clad trained killer for the State in my youth; I was lucky to only wind up with two barely-visible scars as a result (oddly, caused by a guy in a nightclub with a .22 pistol - go figure). If I had got something worse, it would have been my own dumbass fault and I would not have whined about it like a girl.

And US society won't now what hit it when these guys starting going nuts. TBI has a long tail, yo.

KARMA, bitchez.

Dummies abound - hedges is no dummy, but on this issue he's obviously been standing next to a big vat of radioactive moronium and has been exposed to a burst of idiotopes (aka ε-rays, for they make you think like an Epsilon.

Let's say you're the guy from the pigs, whose job is to infiltrate and undermine Occupy. You know - like the UK pigs who infiltrated Green movements, and (while married to other people IRL) fathered children with activists.

OK, so you're that guy - the leader of the local Gestapo. You know that someone at any protest will be wearing black and covering their faces, what do you do? How do you get YOUR agents provocateurs to be seen by the media to be part of the protest?

OK... since some of you are Americans, I'll give you half an hour to think about that.

Finished? How 'bout... "Dress them in black and have them wear face masks".

And there's nothing more that an undercover narc loves more than wreaking wanton destruction - whether it's sending a one-joint-a-week teen to prison (thus ****ing up his life) or kicking in a window.

The hilarious thing about the Army Times piece is the breathless indignation that follows the exchange where the locals tell this idiot that the anti-invasion irregulars are routinely putting direct and intense psychological pressure on Quislings and collaborators (that's what you call someone who takes the side of the invader).

Does he seriously think that if the US was invaded tomorrow by China, an anti-invasion force of irregulars would not do precisely the same thing? The FIRST thing that any anti-invasion force has to do, is to ensure a 'chilling effect' that reduces the willingness of people to collaborate with the invaders.

It happened in Vichy France, it happened in South Viet Nam (under both the French and the US occupations), it happens in Palestine. It happened when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the 1980s, and when the British invaded Afghanistan in the 1840s.

It's perfectly understandable - if you are seeking to drive out a would-be conqueror, there is no creature more despicable than the man who bends his knee to an invader: betrayal of your own kind in service to the invader is unforgivable.

Whatever happens to them - and to the invaders themselves - is significantly less than they deserve.

That's what most people think - that 'capitalism' in its original usage meant the same thing as 'free markets' or 'laissez faire'. In the same way, many folks have the misguided idea that 'anarchy' means 'chaos', simply because that has become the dominant usage in common parlance.

The 'capitalism'=='free-markets' is what I thought until a very interesting course I did as an undergrad ('Capitalism: Contrasting Views'), which showed by reference to the literature of economic history that the non-pejorative usage is recent and not what was intended by the originators of the word. (That's why I know the Thackeray reference - these days it's hard to even imagine a genuinely rigorous Economics course where you have to read English literature instead of doing relatively-trivial algebraic gymnastics).

'Capitalist' certainly meant 'owner of capital' when it was first coined (in the 17th century in Holland), and little more than that. It's a relatively 'judgment free' word.

The word 'capitalism', however, sought to focus the mind on the idea that the owner of capital would, past some point, begin to use his resources to 'tilt the field' in his own favour (nothing controversial there - it's basic optimising behaviour).

Taken further, it implies a system whereby owners of capital as a class would combine and suborn the political process - by dint of the extreme overlap between owners-of-capital and aspirants-to-political-office, and also the fact that politicians are inherently corrupt and parasitic.

Again - this is hardly controversial, given the abundance of observable data that validate the idea: large corporations routinely get law passed that advances their interests at the expense of the broader economy (as opposed to Rand's absurd cartoon railway run by cartoon philanthropic owners who simply want to make the best damn railway there ever was... could there be a more clear example of idiotic bourgeois salon-intellectualism written by someone who had no understanding whatsoever of actual production or business?).

To the extent that the outcomes of the nexus between capital (qua class) and politics are deleterious to the welfare of other classes (and to 'society' as a whole, to the extent that such a thing exists), the core question becomes how to ameliorate those deleterious consequences.

Envious parasites (like Marx) and soft-headed inbred idiots (Engels) claimed that the appropriate place for the constraint was on capital - that the State could be trusted because State actors abrogated their individual maximisation strategies and adopted instead a strategy that sought to maximise social utility (how Marx etc arrived at that nonsense is anyone's guess... perhaps they believed in angels).

When Proudhon wrote his excoriations of "capitalism", it was not an attack on private property or voluntary exchange per se (after all, he wanted artisans to be owners of their tools and the recipients of the value of their own output). Proudhon's attack was an attack on concentrated wealth and its ability to influence politics to the detriment of the worker. In that, Proudhon reveals a childish belief in some Rousseau-eqsue idyll where everyone toils nobly... but guys like him would shit bricks if they had to work that hard.

Like Marx, Proudhon failed to acknowledge that capital accumulation can be the result of things other than political corruption. (Proudhon's stuff is far less idiotic than Marx, but it's still pretty stupid).

Lastly, I would not ever quote Ayn Rand in support of a pro-market argument - her work is more cartoonish than Marx (and Marx is garbage): furthermore, her personal values were those of a 'correct line' despot who was desperate to construct a cult of personality around herself. Rand is to political and economic philosophy, what L Ron Hubbard is to theology.

I'm a voluntaryist - which means private property, voluntary exchange, unfettered freedom of association, the non-aggression principle... and (for me) a deep and abiding hatred of charlatans like Ayn Rand.

The interesting thing for me, is the idea that the anarcho-voluntaryist cohort (in which I include myself) seems to want to retain the word 'capitalist' - even though since Marx & Engels it was clearly meant to be used as a pejorative, reading in much the same way as we would deploy 'crony-capitalist' (the Cheney/GoldmanSachs/Hailliburton/Raytheon model) today.

Even the original use of the term 'capitalism' - in Thackeray's "The Newcomes" - is in a passage that discsses at length, the machinations of a bunch of parvenus who use their resources to gain influence within the POLITICAL system; the notion that 'capital' enables entree into, and subversion of, political life redounds throughout the preceding paragraphs.

Lastly, but not leastly: should we really be surprised that The Economist - little more than a cartoon, these days - is simply an echo chamber for 'received wisdom' as furnished by court intellectuals? If this was 1616 and the matter at issue was heliocentrism, you can bet The Economist would run feature that endorsed the opinions of Cardinal Bellarmine and Pope Urban.

"The Economist" failed to forecast every event of economic significance in the last 20 years, and as each fan-splat happened, was adamant in its fawning re-broadcast of the assertions of the political class that matters were now firmly in hand. The Economist was amongst those who fawned over Greenspan, as they fawn now over Bernanke.

And it goes without saying that the Economist does not just have a blind spot when it comes to cronyism and a corporate-political nexus in the US; it extends the same 'professional courtesy' to other Western governments. It knows on which side its bread is buttered, in the same way as Bill Keller and the NYTimes do.

The 'Iraq style harassment' you speak of is predicated on being able to get large numbers of boots on the ground to harass; any invasion of Switzerland would not even get that far.

Switzerland is not very flat (in fact it is very NOT flat) - the terrain is much worse than Afghanistan. Resupp would be unpossible.

If you ask anyone who was in Operation Rock Avalanche (in the Korengal Valley) they would tell you it's impossible to find more-hostile terrain - but trust me, Switzerland is it. In fact compared even with the Kush, the Pech region is relatively flat... Korengal is no worse than the Massif Central in France (another region that would be impossible to invade - by 'invade' I mean "take and HOLD").

The Germans drew up plan after plan to take Switzerland - for no reason other than to fill what would otherwise have been unconquered territory bordering Occupied France, and Italy. But the key determinant of the decision not to invade was that armour - a key element in German "blitzkreig' 3rd-Generation manoeuvre-warfare - was rendered useless by the terrain.

This is the same problem that the US faces in the 'hard' bits of Afghanistan: the moment you get into what LOOK like foothills on a terrain map, you can't reliably run even something as relatively lightweight as an up-armoured Humvee. And in Switzerland your problem srtarts less than 20km from the lake.

So you go to the air, maybe - drones, CAP, helos, C130 gunships, warthogs. Makes the guys behind the HESCO yell 'get some!' as the gunships fly over. Everyone feels big.

But after every sortie the grunts are STILL... behind the ****ing HESCO.

If you can't take and hold ground, you can't ****ing win, yo. Alexander the Great was the first guy who got skooled in Afghanistan - and Hitler may have been a prick, but one thing he did (until the invasion of Russia) was listen to his Generals, who were genuinely good at what they did - which included a deeper study of military history than the "We are so awesome" **** driven down the gullets of the Faithful at West Point and Anapolis.

The "Oh, the Germans had better things to do" trope is bull**** that is only believed by Americans - because the Americans would have been stupid enough to try to take it, had it been (for example) a part of the land they stole from Mexico.

The Yanks - with their idiotic "Exceptionalism" trope - have to believe that there could not be a genuine STRATEGIC reason that prevented taking something that looks so small on a map. (VietNam also looks small - and the topography there is ALSO hostile. Generals have no idea how hard it is to traverse hilly terrain and stay supplied - particularly with WATER).

I think it was back before WWI when the Kaiser - visiting Switzerland - made some vague threat about invading with a million men. It was made clear to him that throwing a million men into Swiss terrain would be self-genocide - because all it would take is for the half-million Swiss mountain-ready sharpshooters to fire twice, then go home.

But people repeat historical mistakes all the time - Auckland's Folly (1839) was the British repeating the error of Alexander and Genghis Khan... the Soviets did the same error 150 years later ("It will be easier than for the Angleski, tovaritsch General: we have AIRCRAFT, after all - what tribesman can stand up to our mighty Hind?".

The Yanks only took 20 years before deciding to **** up in the same way as the Soviets.

Nobody ever learns about not invading Afghanistan.

Oddly enough, the Kraut Generals DID learn about Switzerland, and they also cautioned not to repeat Napoleon's stupidity in invading Russia. (Napoleon started with 400,000 men, and finished with 2000 - a failure so spectacular it resulted in the first EVER infographic - see http://bit.ly/wehTvE )

Hitler over-ruled, and that is what made the Germans lose WWII: had Hitler waited until after he had disposed of the Allied annoyances on his Western front (including pummelling Dunkirk and forcing terms, instead of letting everyone escape unmolested), he could have entered a detente with the Soviets.

It would have been bad times to be a Red Sea Pedestrian in Europe then, but in utilitarian terms... most of the 50 million WWII dead would not be dead.

Kia Ora!

World champs, bro!

I'm not into 'survivalist' mode just yet - but some of the best analysts out there (e.g., Kyle Bass from Hayman Capital) certainly are. Bass has made it clear: he has a bunch of guns, a bunch of ammo, a secure location and so on: he's not a nutcase - he manages hundreds of millions of dollars, takes his fiduciary obligations very seriously, and knows full well that the political parasites have run the global economy into a ditch (but they've made themselves and their cronies rich in the process).

aLSO - Planetary Aroha is ABSOLUTELY my goal. No question of it.

As with all things though, it's a question of the best way to get there. My belief is that we'll get there by becoming way more efficient (through technology) and freer (all the way to anarchism, eventually)... we will spend scarce resources on things that make individuals better off, rather than giving it to some bunch of psycopaths who then spend it building aircraft carriers and palaces for themselves.

The aim, as always, is to make people better off: that has secondary effects that help reduce demand for resources. For example, richer folks have fewer kids, which places less pressure on the global taonga.

There are very well-understood economic principles behind that idea (that making people better off makes them have fewer kids).

Economics is also the main force behind the idea that government fails more often than it succeeds (unless your company can profit from war, in which case government will be your best mate).

We're not going to get to a genuine global Aroha by handing power to a bunch of corrupt scheming pakehas - look at what has happened to NZ since they arrived to see how despicably untrustworthy the pakeha politicians are (note: only the politicians. Pakehas can be OK: my Dad's a pakeha!).

Folks like me want our relationship with the State to be the same as our relationship with the Church - totally voluntary. Churches still get along fine - although they're nowhere NEAR as powerful as they used to be, and that's a good thing.

When government stops just TAKING from people by force, and starts facing the test of the market, we will get government that fills a non-parasitic social role.

That's what people don't understand. THEY might care about their fellow man, and want things to be nicer, and fairer, and more just... and then along comes someone who tells them "Oh, yeah - I believe that too. Let me take half your wages, and the wages of everyone else, and run up some debt that your kids pay off - and we'll do all this great stuff."

And the guy who says that ends up living in a palace, while the taxpayer goes nowhere.

Anyway... anarchism will happen - it is as predictable as the reduction in Church power that happened when people learned to read and discovered that Church leaders were lying to them and living in luxury at the expense of the people.

It won't happen overnight, but it will happen (sounds like a shampoo commercial).

Until then, I will be on the aroākapa, pulling faces at the politicians.

Ka kite ano!

lol... that would be your undoing - she would get you drunk and you would be at her mercy... and she has no mercy. (I'm kidding - she's petty nice, and her pocketknife is totally sweet).

Two things: I'm not 'right wing', and I'm not Australian. My nationality - which is irrelevant - is made clear on the identity page of my Uruwhenua (you pakehas call it a 'passport').

So far you're not doing well. That should not be surprising, given that you clearly don't read past a 7th grade level.

The stuff about smoking was to make QUITE CLEAR that I reject the second-hand smoking argument on the basis of the paucity and methodological incompetence shown in the EVIDENCE. And that I rejected it despite a strong, vehement and lifelong dislike of the habit itself.

That is to say: I came to the literature review, prepared to have my prejudices confirmed - and they were not. So I changed my mind (that's about the only sensible thing that pederast Keynes ever said that was worth repeating).

Your story seems a tad apocryphal - both times you were 'physically attacked', it was actually in SMOKING environments? REALLY?

So you would have us believe that these two Anipodeans SOUGHT OUT an environment that they knew they would dislike, and then harangued (and 'physically attacked') you for doing something you were specifically permitted to do.

Sorry, but the smell test meter is flicking around like a cut snake: people who have strong anti-smoking views aren't prone to deliberately put themselves in the path of the stuff.

Also, we should clarify: was it only you who was 'attacked', or were these two (I'm assuming it was two different people) just generally spreading anti-smoking vituperation?

Maybe you did something else to piss them off? Just being a dickhead often suffices - and anyone who goes to 'cigar bars' is usually halfway to that point already.

So let's get this straight - for True Believers of the Church of AlGore, some anecdote about the use of snowmakers in Switzerland exculpates the following statement:

"According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become "a very rare and exciting event".

"Children just aren't going to know what snow is," he said."

(source: http://ind.pn/eMznZ7 from 2000 )

CHILDREN AREN'T GOING TO KNOW WHAT SNOW IS.

That's not a statement regarding a diminished incidence of snow in some localised region of Northern Europe: that's a statement that the stuff will simply not be there to be seen, POINT. (Arguably it is a claim that it will not exist anywhere on the globe - otherwise kiddies will certainly be able to get a glimpse).

To give the CRU charlatan more credit than he deserves, let's just restrict the scope of the entire universe to Britain: well, winter of 2010/11 saw record low temperatures, and near record SNOW. See http://bit.ly/AvOppl .

The "kids won't know what snow is" is an "all swans are white" statement. It does not require a BLACK swan to refute it (although the 18-feet-in-a-week fall is certainly that).

The statement that "snow will be a thing of the past in a few years" is refuted by... the existence of snow, more than a decade after the statement was made.

So yes: Al Gore was wrong. But he didn't CARE whether he was right of wrong when he made his ludicrous cartoon - like ALL politicians he was indifferent as to the truth or otherwise of what he was saying... his sole consideration was whether what he was saying advanced his interests.

There is an excellent little pamphlet called "On Bullshit" by a Professor from Princeton - Harry Frankfurt. (A pdf is here -> http://bit.ly/ygKUyS )

Frankfurt makes clear - when bullshitting, the bullshitter does NOT CARE if what he says is true or not: in that sense, bullshitting is distinct from 'lying', since a liar knows what the truth is.

Now I don't know what experience you have in the analysis of academic work - I have quite a bit (to the extent that my team back in the day was invited by the government to assess THEIR work - see bit.ly/f9ei75 ).

And let me tell you - the literature on 'climate change' is as methodologically flawed as the literature on fluoride, the lipid hypothesis, and second-hand smoking, combined.

Furthermore: they might be trotting out the snowmakers in Gstaad or Zermatt, but there's no need for them in Ischgl (Austria): see http://bit.ly/x99DqO - EIGHTEEN FEET of snow fell in a week.

So yeah... AlGore fed some bullshit to the True Believers, and the True Believers swallowed that shit and said "Please sir can I have more". There are plenty of gullible fools in the world who outsource their rationality to authority-figures - how else do you think the Pope and the Archbishop of Canterbury get to live in palaces?