n a t b s

The National Priorities Project recently released their annual report on how American tax dollars were spent over the past year. Are you ready for this? 42.2% of every tax dollar went to military spending. Specifically, 28.7 cents went to current military operations, 10 cents went to interest on military debt, and 3.5 cents went to veterans benefits. By the way, 4.4 cents went to education, and 2.6 cents went to the environment and science. So yeah, military spending is almost half of all spending, and we spend almost ten times as much on our military as we do on education. I can’t imagine why we have so many problems in this country.

I find these figures to be not very surprising, but completely appalling. Our priorities are completely bass ackwards. I mean, if we had some sort of real enemy that required spending more on our military than all other countries combined, I guess I’d learn to accept it. Maybe this kind of spending made sense during the cold war, but in the “war against terror,” aka the war against disgruntled people with box-cutters, I just don’t see the need. To protect ourselves from terrorism we don’t need stealth bombers and fancy nukes, we need intelligence (in both senses of the word). I see it as a law enforcement battle, not a military one. I also see it as a pr battle; when people really fucking hate you it might be a good idea to try and figure out why, and then try to make them like you.

Anyway, isn’t it great to know where your taxes are going? And it’s almost tax time again, yay! Maybe we should all only pay 57.8% of what we owe as a form of protest. The scary thing is that it’s going to be so hard to get that number down because there are so many entrenched military-industrial-complex interests that will scream bloody murder if we try to cut military spending. Maybe our only hope is to stop increasing the military budget (lord knows we’ve increased it plenty in the past 8 years) and thus the amount we spend will go down, relatively speaking, as inflation increases.

On closing, can we just reflect on the fact that our country is putting a huge percent of it’s productivity and effort towards killing people? How did we get to this point? What kind of horrible aberration is this? Why is there money being deducted from our paychecks to kill innocent people halfway around the world? Doesn’t that just make you sick? I know I don’t want my efforts, my labor, perverted like that. You can check out the whole pdf here.

I’m sure by now you’ve all heard of passport-gate, but I just heard a clip of Condi Rice that raised a few questions for me. Here’s the quote:

I’m certain that by now you’ve all seen the reports of an unauthorized look into the passport file of Senator Obama. We are very concerned about this. It appears on the first examination that indeed the system worked in that there is a flag that goes up if there’s any unauthorized look into a file of that kind. [source]

Ok, what kind of system is it where the computer recognises that an unauthorized access is taking place, and then instead of denying that access it simply allows it and takes note of it? That’s like me leaving my door unlocked and then, when I get home to find my house robbed, I find a note saying “Andrew, your house was robbed today!” Great fucking system.

And in the broader sense, this is why you don’t trust the government to spy on you! Obviously the government is going to have passport files, but it’s still a good example of why you don’t want all your private information in some database. It’s too easy for it to be leaked. And then your identity can be stolen, or if you’re a person of even mild recognition it can be used for blackmail or other shameless things. The point is that the government is a collection of people, and, like most collections of people, the majority of them are idiots. And all of them are flawed. And I don’t need a bunch of flawed idiots listening to my every word. I don’t need them scrutinizing my words to see if I’m a terrorist because flawed idiots might decide I am a terrorist even if it’s obvious I’m not.