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The Glorious Imbecility of War
The Glorious Imbecility of War
Napoleon Returns
Today, on the eve of the bicentennial of the Battle of Waterloo, we do not celebrate war. Only a fool would celebrate something so horrible. But we pay our respects to the glorious imbecility of it.
War may be dreadful, little more than a racket in many ways, but it is also a magnificent undertaking. It engages the heart and the brain at once and exposes both the genius of our race and its incredible stupidity.
But we are talking about real war. Not phony wars against enemies who pose no real threat. Phony wars earn real profits for the war industry, but only an ersatz glory for the warriors. Real soldiers take no pride in them. Instead, to a real hero, they are a source of shame and embarrassment.
Wars are not conducted to “Free the Holy Land.” Or “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” Or “Rid the World of Tyrants.” Or “Fight Terrorism.” Those are only the cover stories used by the jingoists to get the public to surrender its treasure… and its sons. Wars are fought to release the fighting spirit – that ghost of many millennia – in the scrap for survival.
And so it was that, 200 years ago tomorrow, one of the greatest military geniuses of all time, Napoleon Bonaparte, faced the armies of the Seventh Coalition – principally, the British, under the Duke of Wellington, and the Prussians, under Gebhard von Blücher.
Napoleon Bonaparte, born in Ajaccio, Corsica, later emperor of France and famous (and usually victorious) general, and later still, pensioner on the island of St. Helena
Painting by Paul De La Roche, 1814
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Orwellian Language – the Slide toward “Velvet Glove” Fascism Continues
Orwellian Language – the Slide toward “Velvet Glove” Fascism Continues
Sometimes we get the feeling the ruling elites are investing the laws they enact with a kind of impertinent, slap-in-your-face black humor. How else to explain the Orwellian names given to the liberty-crushing laws that have been put in place since the “war on terror” started?
The latest example is the misnamed “Freedom Act”, the purpose of which appears to be to make legal what was hitherto plainly illegal – inter alia whole-sale spying by the government on the citizenry. The legislation has been sold to the serfs as absolutely necessary to “prevent terror attacks”. As we have previously pointed out, the average US citizen is statistically far more likely to die from drowning in a bathtub or simply by falling from a chair rather than from a terror attack. No special laws have been proposed yet to save us from the evil of bathtubs and chairs, in spite of the danger evidently emanating from these deadly household furnishings.
Many people indeed begin to watch what they are saying once they are aware of being under constant surveillance. As we have previously argued, this undermines an important pillar of civilization.
Cartoon via Terrence Nowicki
Apart from the vanishingly small statistical likelihood of actually being harmed by terrorists, it is noteworthy that such laws – the true purpose of which is highly unlikely to be congruent with their stated purpose – are enacted even while the government engages in activities that are bound to worsen these statistics in the future. The so-called “war on terror” so far actually seems to be similarly successful as the “war on poverty” and the “war on drugs”. In fact, it appears to be ranking quite high on the list of the biggest government boondoggles.
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RFID-Chipped Banknotes Fit For “Remote Cancellation”
RFID-Chipped Banknotes Fit For “Remote Cancellation”
RFID Technology fur Use in Currency Becomes More Sophisticated
The 500 euro banknote barely circulates in Europe – this is to say, it is rarely seen in everyday commerce. However, it does exist, and makes the handling of large amounts of cash easier. Not surprisingly, it is said to be highly popular with various criminal organizations, although as far as we are aware, there is no hard evidence of this. Rather, it seems to be an assumption, if a sensible one.
Hitherto, the ECB was mainly interested in the possibility of employing RFID tags in banknotes for security reasons (to make forging them more difficult), and as passive tracking devices, ostensibly in order to be able to track money used by organized crime so as to prevent money laundering.
10 euro bill after 10 secs of microwave treatment
Image via dvd-svcd-forum.de
Work on this ‘feature’ started in 2001 already:
“In 2001, the European Central Bank started working with technology partners on a hush-hush project to embed radio frequency identification tags into the very fibers of euro banknotes by 2005.The ECB was deeply concerned about counterfeiting and money laundering. Counterfeiting of euro notes has been a problem in Greece and there have been cases in the new member countries too. In 2003, Greek authorities were confronted with of 2,411 counterfeiting cases and seized 4,776 counterfeit banknotes while authorities in Poland nabbed a gang suspected of making and putting over a million fake euros into circulation. Money laundering was also an issue of increasing concern, and that was probably one of the reasons that the higher denominations were considered for tagging (€200 and €500 notes).
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