Recently in rant Category

Last month I wrote about what a colossal waste variable speed limit signs are. As I was driving to work this morning, and saw someone in the opposite lanes flashing their headlights, it occurred to me that it might not matter anyway.

It is only a matter of time before cars have internet access. They will either be sold with this option, or it will be available as an after-market add-on. It is a certainty. Once this happens, and the vast majority of cars on the road have it, inevitably there will be a whole series of distributed software applications that act to tie all the cars together. Something like instant messenger for cars, only these messages will also contain useful information for the driver beyond the normal inane conversations. Traffic information like debris in the road, or emergency vehicles approaching from the rear, could be passed from car to car, traveling in both directions on any given stretch of road, giving the driver insight into driving conditions both in front of him and behind him.

Once this is well-established, it is not hard to see that the next logical step will be notifying motorists of speed traps. The information will be much more sophisticated than simply flashing one's headlights at oncoming traffic, however. These packets of data could include precise GPS coordinates, for instance, reconnaisance photos of the area (because no car with internet access will be without a hood-mounted or dashboard-mounted webcam), as well as brief notes describing the trap. With all of that information available to a driver, who needs radar detectors anymore? The effect will be, on a macro scale, that traffic will naturally slow around the location of a cop, and speed up again once the threat of a ticket has passed. Much the same way it works now, only infinitely more efficient. So efficient, in fact, that it is likely that no cop will ever write a speeding ticket again.

You heard it here first, folks. Tell your friends. The days of speeding tickets are numbered.

[This is the third article in a series.]

The timing of the Supreme Court's decision this week is fortuitous, because it serves to underscore the crucial point of Phase III, and that is that keeping and bearing arms is in individual right because personal safety is an individual responsibility. A person's unalienable right to self-defense (using whatever arms they should happen to choose), as acknowledged by the Second Amendment, may be voluntarily delegated to others, however, it is important that every citizen understand that the responsibility for their own safety and security is not automatically assumed by any other party.

If you want to be safe walking down the street, you must take the proper precautions. If you want your home to be safe from invasion you must take steps to ensure that security. If you want your family and loved ones to be safe from harm, you must be prepared to defend them in any situation. These points will be hammered home to everyone throughout Phases I and II, but they cannot be emphasized enough. Our population has become not only complacent, allowing the responsibility for their safety to be assumed by others (police), but taught to be afraid of the very means they must be use to defend themselves and their liberties (guns).

When Mel Gibson's movie The Patriot was released in 2000, there was some furor in the press over the scenes depicting Gibson's young children in the movie using their muskets to fight the British Army. The argument being that this is not the proper message to be sending to our children. That we, as a society, do not want our kids to be learning at an early age how to handle and use weaponry. Futhermore, it was hard for some to believe that these scenes were based on reality -- they cannot fathom a world in which 10-year-olds were capable marksmen, taught to not only accurately place a shot in the center of mass of their enemies, but also taught to safely handle their weapons to prevent the accidental injury or death of their kin. How could children be this responsible? Children are capable of many amazing things when we set our expectations of them sufficiently high. And, most importantly, responsible children grow into responsible adults.

It is this defect that education campaigns during Phases I and II will strive to correct -- multiple generations of people who were never taught to use or respect guns, so they've grown into adults who fear guns, or disrespect their destructive power. These hoplophobes have convinced everyone else that guns are dangerous and unnecessary, when the exact opposite is true, and once this brainwashing has been reversed in a large enough number of people, the task of dismantling the government's defense infrastructure will not seem as daunting.

During Phase III, all property of the Department of Defense and the Department of Homeland Security will be auctioned off to the highest bidder. Private protection agencies will have been gearing up for Phase III for forty years at this point. They will be in best position to bid on all of armaments and other hardware of the Armed Forces and other federal law enforcement agencies. All of it will be gradually sold and the responsibilities for security, both personal security and that of our borders, will be gradually transitioned to the private sector during this phase.

Revolution complete - 2076

Americans will, for the first time in centuries, celebrate their freedom from oppressive government during our nation's tricentennial. The federal government will no longer exist and the process can be expected to repeat for state and local governments, as needed.

I don't know which is more disturbing to me, the fact that the Supreme Court had to weigh in on the Second Amendment at all, or that it was only a 5-4 decision in favor of it. I was fully prepared for it to go the other way. I mean, the Court has not been shy about showing its disdain for fundamental rights, such as property rights, in their Kelo v. New London decision, for example. Since we no longer have a right to personal property, it would not have surprised me at all if they had moved to take away our individual right to self-defense as well.

So, now the residents of the District of Columbia can once again have an efficient means of protection in their homes again. It will be interesting to see if repealing the handgun ban in the District has any effect on crime statistics. One would expect home invasions, for instance, to drop considerably. The next step will be to remove any impediments to the citizens carrying their weapons with them, thereby reducing crime rates overall.

Thank you SCOTUS, for acknowledging a right that all of us already had!