Flit(tm)

Letter to the Paper LXI

The international gun control movement keeps working on gun grabbing with an eye to eventually killing off the 2nd amendment. It's a King Canute enterprise because the technology for distributed manufacturing is coming and guns are inevitably going to be on the list of things to build right along every other tool. Once every man can be a gunsmith simply by hitting print on a computer, the foolishness of control efforts via law instead of via personal responsibility will have been fully exposed.

A culture of responsible use will never grow in a regime where weapons are unavailable. Upcoming technology (home replication machines) will make it technically feasible to make primitive and eventually quite sophisticated firearms with plans inevitably available for free over the Internet. This is going to make any sort of international treaty regime impossible to enforce as home replication machines are also obvious technology for poverty reduction in the 3rd world.

The first self-replication of a home replication machine in May 2008 was a warning shot that has so far not been heard widely. The rep-rap project is a worthy one but they aren't kidding when they say that it's a disruptive technology.

The only solutions left are to embrace poverty and deny access to replication as well as guns or to create a culture of responsibility that can handle this upcoming disruptive technology. Cultures of responsibility take a long time to take root without an opening blood bath. We might have enough time at this point if we start soon but it is pretty obvious that the same international gun controllers who want to end-run the US' 2nd amendment protections are not going to accept this idea with open arms.

The Mandarinate Strikes Out

The left is having minor orgasms over L.F. Eason III who retired rather than fly the flags at "his lab" at half staff in honor of recently deceased Senator Jesse Helms and in obedience to gubernatorial proclamation. Why did he do it? He repeatedly states in interviews that he felt "a strong sense of ownership" over the lab.

A government that is of the people, by the people, and for the people is not a government where the employees act as if they own the place. When you get this attitude, you end up with mandarins who slowly hollow out representative government by introducing and then nurturing the idea that the bureaucrats can do as they please, training their putative political masters to no longer insist on obedience and accept that they to have become supplicants to the bureaucrats.

We're nowhere near even halfway along in the process. Every once in awhile some gasbag like this Eason character steps out into the light and gets swatted down. But what's truly disturbing is that this is a problem that affects politicians of all stripes and nobody makes an issue of it. The DoD rebels against Clinton and the right quietly averts its gaze. State rebels against GWB and the left practically cheers them on.

It's gone on long enough that routine disobedience to political direction has become entrenched. People don't bat an eye when they talk about this or that political appointee being "captured" by their department and becoming the bureaucracies emissary to the President instead of the President's man directing the bureaucracy. It's a gathering storm, more serious than Iraq, though the slowness of the political disease's progression gives us a lot more time to ponder the problem.

In the meantime, two cheers for the governor of North Carolina who didn't put up with this. It could only have been better if they had not straight off offered early retirement.

Is the PRC, our future food savior? II

It isn't just the EU's frankenfoods phobia that makes African lives miserable by manipulating their agricultural practices. The EU's collective shudder that somebody somewhere, might be saving lives by spraying DDT does the same thing. Uganda's the latest to feel the EU's displeasure as their organic crops are blackballed for indoor malarial spraying away from the fields.

If the PRC is smart, they're already negotiating to secure Ugandan markets for agricultural exports to the PRC. The PRC will want high yields and be less interested in indoor spraying of DDT and other practices that don't actually affect the crop. As Europe continues to fuss, they will find africans less willing to listen and more willing to turn to alternate markets, reducing the damage european phobias do to the global agricultural market.

HT: Instapundit