MILITARY SPENDING IN PERSPECTIVE:

I favor cuts in defense spending—I favor cuts in spending almost everywhere—but thinking about President Eisenhower earlier today (I do that a lot) made me want to put contemporary military spending into perspective. In 1957, the nation was more or less at peace, the budget ran a small surplus, and we spent 9.8 percent of GDP on national defense. That was down sharply from the years immediately before (winding down of Korean War expenses, I guess) but quite a bit higher than it was in 1950 and 1951. In 1950, we spent only 4.9 percent of GDP on national defense, half that 1957 number. This year, we’re going to spend about 3.3 percent of GDP on national defense. That’s less than we spent during the first Clinton administration, a fairly peaceable time. It’s less than we’ve spent since before the budgetary beginning of the post-9/11 era, by which I mean, since 2002. Looking at 1957 from the other side of the ledger, tax receipts were 17.2 percent of GDP. This year, taxes are expected to come in at 17.7 percent of GDP, a little bit more. . . .

The real lesson of 1957 is that you could—if you were so inclined—spend three times what we spend on the military in GDP terms, produce a small budget surplus, and reduce total taxes. You could do that if you were willing to do the work on the rest of the budget. I wasn’t around at the time, but I’ve heard that 1957 was not a time of stateless Mad Max anarchy and wanton savagery in the United States.

Politicians found better ways to buy votes, so money spent on, you know, actually doing things the Constitution assigns to the national government is squeezed.

WOLF BLITZER SKEPTICAL IN BEN CARSON INTERVIEW THAT ARMED JEWS WOULD’VE FARED BETTER THAN UNARMED JEWS AGAINST NAZIS (VIDEO): “Blitzer is so invested in liberal talking points about guns that he can’t grasp the value of an armed populace in the face of evil tyranny.”

But of course – considering the network’s history of coddling up to every dictator willing to smile in front of a minicam with a CNN sticker on it, why would any of their employees view tyranny as evil? (If Carson had really wanted to make Blitzer sympathetic, he might have compared European Jews in WWII to the protestors in Ferguson, considering how much CNN invested in setting that uprising alight.)

Related: Racism straight up, courtesy of Condé Nast.

THE NEXT BIG THING THE LEFT WANTS TO BAN: HUMAN DRIVERS. At NRO, James Lileks writes:

What do the acolytes of the State want to ban this week? Which bootlace eyelet will they lubricate with eager spittle? Oh, the usual stuff. Fun. Your fun. Vox writer Dylan Matthews twittered his demands, and they’re quite ordinary — except for one new requirement. See if you can spot it.

Accompanying that fascistic cri de cœur to Ban All The Things is a sneak peak of one of their future replacements — the photos illustrating Lileks’ article featuring Google’s chairman Eric Schmidt and Anthony Foxx, Mr. Obama’s transportation secretary, and a self-driving car that looks like a Weeblemobile.

Lileks ponders how that concept will play in Peoria:

Would the ban be for cities only, or for everyone? Would rural North Dakotans have to trade in their pick-ups for dinky bugs, or be required to retrofit their old trusty Chevys for self-driving units? Oh, what a madcap movie someone could make about the gubmint man who has to go to Elk Groin, Mont., and tell the lads down at the garage that they can’t drive their trucks anymore. Let me give you a web address with information about the new laws, fellas, and you can see how it’s just win-win for everybody. Amused at first, the locals decide to humor the fellow, and show him all the quirky joys of small-town life, and he becomes enchanted by a free-spirited woman who raises horses and drives big trucks, and takes him for a wild midnight ride where speeds exceed the legal limit. He goes back to the regional office, a changed man, his heart full of newfound admiration for the ways of these independent people and their curious, outmoded, backwards attachment to “shifting” and “steering” and all those old folkways. He starts to write a report about how the ban shouldn’t be applied to these people, but then shrugs and realizes he has a job review coming up, so he sends the IRS a memo: “You might want to audit all these people.”

You might think that’s a lot to get out of a tweet, but it reminded me of something I saw in a BuzzFeed article about self-driving cars, and why they’re awesome. The author, Mat Honan, made a good case, and I was right with him until the end, when the mask slipped and the Angry Man — whose excess of certainties is balanced by his deficit of wisdom — came snarling out.

Cars are giant, inefficient, planet-and-people-killing death machines. Self-driving cars — especially if they are operated as fleets and you only use one when you need it, summoning it Uber-style — would mean we could have fewer vehicles per person, less traffic congestion, less pollution, far fewer vehicles produced per year (thus lowering the environmental impact of production), and, best of all, safer streets. The blind, people with epilepsy, quadriplegics, and all manner of others who today have difficulty ferrying themselves around as they go through the mundanities of an average day will be liberated. Eliminating the automobile’s need for a human pilot will be a positive thing for society.

So go f*** a tailpipe if you love cars so much. Your love for cars doesn’t supersede the lives of 1.2 million people who die in automobile accidents every year. It’s not more important than the energy savings we’ll get from not manufacturing 60 million or so vehicles every year that spend most of their time idle. Turned off. Parked.

Well, at least he waited until the end of piece before dropping the mask. That puts him one up on the author of the notorious 2007 Time magazine article on “The 50 Worst Cars in America,” who began by railing against Henry Ford’s original sin of perfecting the notion of the mass-produced automobile in the first place, leading inexorably to every woe of the past 100 years, including the Iraq War and worse.

IT’S AS IF THEY JUST DOWNLOADED THE PLANS FROM OUR COMPUTERS OR SOMETHING: The Uncanny Resemblance Between Chinese and American Weapons.

A THIRD OF VEGETARIANS OWN UP TO EATING MEAT ON NIGHTS OUT, claims the London Independent:

Two in five of 1,789 vegetarians questioned owned up to treating themselves to a sneaky kebab after a few drinks.

And one in three said they indulged in meat every time they went out drinking.

Twenty-seven per cent of the lapsing veggies said they ate bacon, while 19 per cent opted for fried chicken and 14 per cent confessed to munching on sausages.

George Orwell, who railed against his fellow socialists’ obsession with vegetarianism in 1937’s The Road to Wigan Pier, noting with anger that “One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” wouldn’t be much surprised by their hypocrisy after knocking back a few.  Plus ça change.

ANDREW MCCARTHY ON OREGON AND OUR POST-CONSTITUTIONAL REPUBLIC:

And while leftists don’t have much sense of humor about themselves, they fully understand the power of ridicule. When they hear a vigorous claim that, “You can’t take away my guns because the Constitution guarantees my right to them,” they are apt to snicker, “Yeah, because you just might have to shoot at the invading U.S. army when the government declares a police state, right?”

Few people are willing to answer that mocking question with, “Well, yes, that’s right.” People who frame government as the perilous threat rather than the admirable “public servant” are lampooned as nutters by the media and many of their fellow citizens.*

Whether they should or shouldn’t be is beside the point. What matters is that you cannot make a compelling constitutional claim about gun rights unless you believe in the Constitution’s rationale for those rights. By and large, the public lacks that conviction … and that is why our debate is about struggling to limit the Left’s antigun agenda rather than asserting our own gun rights.

Read the whole thing.

* At least a third of whom believe that government murdered 3000 people on 9/11.

TEXAS TAQIYYA: Clock-Boy’s Father Pushes 9/11 Conspiracy Theories on Facebook:

Ahmed Mohamed, the Texas ninth-grader who was arrested and briefly detained for bringing what looked like a bomb to school, is in the news again thanks to his father.

Fox News has reported that Mohamed Elhassan Mohamed runs two Facebook pages – a pro-American Facebook page that is designed for the American public’s consumption, and an Arabic-language Facebook page that has a very different tone.*

The latter page is Mohamed’s National Reform Party page, and according to Fox News’ Trace Gallagher, it is much more active, and recently shared a disturbing 9/11 conspiracy video:

That account has shared a 14-minute conspiracy theory video on the 9/11 attacks and a post that shows the smoking Twin Towers, describing it as a U.S.-sponsored hoax to launch a worldwide war against Islam.

* * * * * * *

The president has invited Ahmed to the White House for Astronomy Night on Oct. 19.

* Yassir Arafat could not be reached for his stereo comments.

CHRIS PETERSON ON the future of the human lifespan.

AT AMAZON, deals galore in Training & Fitness.

And shop the Amazon Emergency Prep Store. Plus, Emergency & Long-Term Storage Food Deals. When bad things happen, it’s good to have food.

Plus, Generators and Portable Power for Storm Season.

BBC ADMITS FAKING DRAMATIC VOLCANO ERUPTION SCENE ON NATURAL HISTORY SHOW: Footage of a ‘dirty thunderstorm’ in Chile on the BBC’s Patagonia programme was faked by splicing together two different volcano eruptions four years apart.

Michael Crichton, call your office.

(Via SDA.)

THE TWILIGHT OF FRENCH JEWRY, THE TWILIGHT OF FRANCE: French Jews are emigrating to Israel by the tens of thousands. Their departure isn’t just about them; it’s about the end of the French idea.

Earlier, Glenn noted that the London Times’ front page headline was “Millions of migrants in new flight to Europe,” as Europe continues to rearrange the deck chairs.

SPACE: The Google Lunar XPrize Race Is Officially On. Faster, please.

I’VE SEEN SOMETHING SIMILAR FROM A DIFFERENT COMPANY DEMOED: A High-End Camera in a Small Package: Startup Light says its L16 will replace a fancy camera and lenses for a third the cost and fit easily into your bag, too.

REMINDER: Amazon carries shooting supplies.

BECAUSE IT WORKS: Why Does DNC Media Keep Endlessly Repeating Already Debunked Talking Points? They’ll keep it up until it stops working, or at least becomes painful.

BOY, THERE REALLY ARE A LOT OF constitutionally illiterate pieces on the Second Amendment from academics lately. Here’s a hint: There’s a huge literature on this stuff. The Second Amendment wasn’t badly drafted or unclear, it was drafted by smart men who knew exactly what they were trying to say; you just don’t want to hear that. Your cocktail-party “insights” on the Second Amendment are neither interesting nor correct. This is Dunning-Krueger scholarship at its worst.

NOBEL PEACE PRIZE UPDATE: “Maybe World War III has started already.”

OUCH: “All right then, with respect, what’s your plan?”

UPDATE: “Explain why @charlescwcooke didn’t mic drop, slap on sunglasses, & saunter out to ‘Thug Life’ at end of this video.”

WHY DID CNN CUT THE LENGTH OF THE DEMOCRATIC DEBATE FROM THREE HOURS TO TWO? “Bernie and Hillary are too old to stand for 3 hours.”

TAXPROF ROUNDUP: The IRS Scandal, Day 882.

DEMS’ CLAIMS THAT THERE’S NO THERE THERE GET WEAKER WITH EACH NEW REVELATION: Clinton e-mails were vulnerable to hackers, tech firm warned.

ED MORRISSEY: The Coming Danger of a ‘Throw the Bums Out’ Election.

LONDON TIMES FRONT PAGE: “Millions of migrants in new flight to Europe.”

UNEXPECTEDLY! Bern Notice: Socialist Venezuela Has World’s Worst Economic Forecast.