There's a good article over at LewRockwell.com by Lila Rajiva about hurricane Katrina, with an excellent Nietzsche quote:

"Whatever the state saith is a lie; whatever it hath is a theft: all is counterfeit in it, the gnawing, sanguinary, insatiate monster."

On the other side of the world in Southeast Asia, Thomas L. Friedman writes about how Singapore is such an excellent country to live in, and that they would have handled the Katrina disaster very well. Nevermind, he says, the fact that in Singapore still uses barbaric forms of punishment like caning, and forget that their strict system of law makes it a crime to use a toilet and not flush afterwards. It is also illegal to possess chewing gum, not to mention spitting will most likely get you a hefty fine. Furthermore, Friedman praises Singapore for paying politicians millions of dollars in salary, saying that this is so they get the "best-qualified and least-corruptible people." Who does he think gave these politicians such absurdly huge paychecks? I would guess it was the politicians. Paying so much is not a way to avoid corruption, but a form of corruption itself. What would you call it if our Congress voted to raise their salaries to a couple million dollars a year? What kind of insane totalitarian state is this? And why in hell is Thomas Friedman defending this overbearing and evil government?

People are always insanely claiming that Singapore is a model to be emulated and praised, since there is such a low crime rate. Of course people attribute the low crime rate to the totalitarian system of police surveillance and harsh penalties. In fact, even if the complete annihilation of freedom in the name of security and a low crime rate was desirable, there is nothing to indicate that the situation in the small city-state of Singapore could be duplicated, especially in a huge country like America.

Of course I do not question that Singapore would have done a much better job of hurricane preparation and relief, partially because such a disaster is always a threat in the minds of government officials, and partially because the American federal government is vastly larger, more bureaucratic, wasteful, and incompetent than the relatively small national government of Singapore. Friedman, however, takes this rather unsurprising fact and extrapolates that Singapore is an excellent place to live. This is nonsense. The government of Singapore has very little if any respect for human rights or human freedom, and only acts as a means for politicians to get rich. It seems sometimes like Mr. Friedman only writes articles to say, "Hey, I'm in Singapore. How cool is that? I travel all over the world, and I'm definitely cooler than you." Just as in almost ever article he says something along the lines of, I was talking to so-and-so in Punjabi, who said that people are all the same, and are made out of clay. Mr. Friedman thinks that all kinds of sentimental nonsense sound profound, so long as the nonsense is coming out of the mouth of someone whose culture he doesn't understand.

Once again, Friedman shows himself to be an idiot, as has been abundantly clear since he published the book "The World is Flat". Oh really, Mr. Friedman? It is? Coming from him, I would bet the book somewhere claims that the world is literally flat. Like a tortilla. That would be no more absurd than most of the drivel this man spews all over the pages of the New York Times.

To be fair, the one good part of the article is where Friedman states:

We let the families of the victims of 9/11 redesign our intelligence organizations, and our president and Congress held a midnight session about the health care of one woman, Terri Schiavo, while ignoring the health crisis of 40 million uninsured. Our economy seems to be fueled lately by either suing each other or selling each other houses. Our government launched a war in Iraq without any real plan for the morning after, and it cut taxes in the middle of that war, ensuring that future generations would get the bill.

It is funny, though, that Friedman criticizes the war in Iraq, given that he was an ardent supporter of it before it was launched. He loved the idea of killing people halfway across the world, but then just didn't approve of how it was being done by our government. Sigh.