Regime Change the Right Way
I was having coffee with Pieter Hintjens talking about a bunch of crazy ideas fueled by caffeine and lack of sleep when I decided I need to become a defense contractor and build weapons. If you know me you probably scoff at the idea that I actually have something to contribute in the field of defense but read on before you judge. Before I explain my idea for a weapon I need to discuss some characteristics of what we’ll call the enemies of freedom. Enemies of freedom would be countries like Iran, North Korea, and Taliban tribal chiefs in regions of Pakistan like East Whathefuckisstan that don’t like us westerners very much. Some would say we need to defend ourselves from these enemies of freedom. We customarily use the military for this sort of ‘defense’. In a way this makes sense because someone who is dead can’t really attack your freedom. An error in judgment made by the Bush administration was that if you use the military to get rid of the despots ruling a non-free country the population of that country will welcome Americans as liberators and naturally adopt freedom (and give us their oil). Of course experience has shown this isn’t quite true, you have to kill quite a large number of the non-freedom adopters before you manage to convince the survivors that being alive and free is better than being dead and not free. Some never do quite figure this out and so we have suicide bombers. Killing people is a really bad way of spreading freedom. The people being killed tend to get pissed off if you start killing them and so it becomes easier for their despotic leaders to point the finger of blame at the nasty westerners doing the killing which takes the focus off the despotic leaders and the killing and the torturing that they do to remain in power. This tends to perpetuate non-freedom. Anyway, the non-free people really don’t care about freedom. What they really want is enough to eat, a nice place to sleep and no worries that they will be arbitrarily hauled off in the middle of the night and tortured. They don’t know that in many countries people have enough to eat, have nice places to sleep and can pretty much say whatever they want to without fear of night torture and that these types of things follow from having a free society. This is because the leaders of non-free people try really hard to control the information interchange with the outside world.
This is where my weapon idea comes in. The philosophy behind my weapon is to inundate the non-free with information (and consumer goods) from the free world. My weapon consists of portable solar powered kiosks. Each kiosk contains internet enabled computers with browsers bookmarked to Amazon.com, Ebay, You Tube and a variety of popular porn sites. Each kiosk has a certain amount of store credit that can be used to purchase consumer goods and also dispense free espresso and other coffee drinks. Dozens of kiosks can be stacked inside a C-130 Hercules for rapid parachute deployment over a non-free country. The idea is that you seed a non-free area with hundreds of internet kiosks and the non-free people of the area will start using them, communicating with the outside world, buying stuff and browsing porn. The kiosks would also provide a place to sleep and the store credit could be used to buy food. If the despots leave the kiosks in place, the populous will naturally be assimilated into the consumer culture and people in these countries will soon be too dept ridden to stop working and go to war against the west. If the despots attempt to take the kiosks people will be outraged for being deprived of their porn and consumer goods and will overthrow them. In any of these cases the west comes out looking like the good guys. We’re not killing people, we are merely providing consumer goods, coffee, a nice place to sleep and some harmless diversions. Also, I’d have to think that one of my little kiosks would be cheaper than your basic smart bomb, currently a common tool used by the military to liberate people . The GBU-39 variant of the 250-pound class bomb equipped with an INS/GPS guidance system costs about $100,000 apiece. I think I could build one of these little kiosks for a lot less than that.
