Don’t F*ck Me Up With Peace and Love?

Maybe this post by George Hawley, “Solving Non-Interventionism’s Tough-Guy Problem,” wasn’t directed at Antiwar.com, but I’ll address some excerpts from it anyway.
In the years since I abandoned my status as a typical neoconservative chicken hawk and adopted Old Right non-interventionism, I’ve been somewhat uneasy with much of the movement’s rhetoric. Specifically, I often find much [...]

Big surprise: money wasted

While an argument could be made that all money spent on defense (war) appropriations is a waste, a new report shows that 20% of the money set aside by Congress to rebuild Iraq was “wasted” on shoddy craftsmanship and “excessive payments to contractors.”
In other breaking news, $900 billion has been spent destroying offices, kiosks, stores, [...]

Isn’t war good for the economy?

Since the collapse of Lehman, how many times have both politicians and pundits suggested that wars act as economic stimuli? Aren’t we taught that it was World War II that ultimately got the US out of the Depression?
Worried that the US may not find any war(s) big enough to do the trick again? [...]

In these tough times at least people are still buying missiles

Does your portfolio continue to take a hit in this helter skelter market?
Have you thought about boosting it with some nitroglycerin-filled firepower?
Bloomberg is reporting that Raytheon not only turned a profit but beat analyst estimates.  This is great news for the defense industry which only received a nominal increase in new appropriations for FY 2009, [...]

Do as we say, not as we do: gasoline edition

Earlier today President Bush said “people should conserve and be wise about how they use gas and energy.”
This is ironic in part because the US military is a large player in the oil economy.  If the US military was a country it would be the worlds 38th largest consumer of oil.  Yet despite its large [...]

Behind the Firefox 3 numbers for Iraq

Yesterday was the official release of Firefox 3 and there was a large marketing push to get as many people world wide to download it.
For those interested in the 24-hour breakdown per country, the Mozilla team put together an interactive global map that allows you to see how many times FF was downloaded in each [...]

Other things you could have blown $6 trillion on

Scifi author Charlie Stross recently discussed other alternatives for the monies that funded the Iraq war. He noted that using current technology the bounty could have created and staffed a colony of 500 astronauts on Mars or enabled the construction of tens of gigawatts in nuclear energy throughout the US. Or even helped [...]

A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money

Senator Everett Dirksen, a hawk during the Vietnam era, is credited with coining the sarcastic phrase.
However, forty years later, it should be updated to read a trillion here and there. For instance, one of the articles highlighted in the Viewpoints section today details the ever expanding blackhole that is the accounting system(s) used by [...]