The Poodle Chews It

Having failed to talk his BFF Kid 28% into any sort of real compromise on the global warming issue, Tony Blair returns to the area in which he's perhaps been the most effective -- turning Great Britain into the world's most-heavily surveilled police state.

An interior ministry spokeswoman confirmed the government was looking at including a "stop and question" power in the new legislation. "We are considering a range of powers for the bill and 'stop and question' is one of them," she said.

The "stop and question" power would enable police to interrogate people about who they are, where they have been and where they were going, The Sunday Times said. Police would not need to suspect a crime had taken place.

If suspects failed to stop or refused to answer questions, they could be charged with a crime and fined, The Sunday Times said. Police already have the power to stop and search people but have no right to ask them their identity and movements.

The Sunday Times said the powers already existed in Northern Ireland. Civil rights groups viewed the plan to extend them to the rest of Britain as an attack on civil liberties, it said.

It's hard to look at Blair's track record and not at least wonder if there hasn't been some sort of overriding goal to put a seemingly pleasant, friendly face on technologically-driven fascism. During his tenure, Britain has put surveillance cameras almost literally everywhere possible outside of individuals' homes. And now random checkpoints for interrogation at the police discretion, without cause.

Fine. I suggest they let these yahoos man the checkpoints then, see how everyone likes it.

Employees of Blackwater USA, a private security firm under contract to the State Department, opened fire on the streets of Baghdad twice in two days last week, and one of the incidents provoked a standoff between the security contractors and Iraqi forces, U.S. and Iraqi officials said.

A Blackwater guard shot and killed an Iraqi driver Thursday near the Interior Ministry, according to three U.S. officials and one Iraqi official who were briefed on the incident but spoke on condition of anonymity because of a pending investigation. On Wednesday, a Blackwater-protected convoy was ambushed in downtown Baghdad, triggering a furious battle in which the security contractors, U.S. and Iraqi troops and AH-64 Apache attack helicopters were firing in a congested area.

Blackwater confirmed that its employees were involved in two shootings but could neither confirm nor deny that there had been any casualties, according to a company official who declined to be identified because of the firm's policy of not addressing incidents publicly.

One thing I have always been in almost total agreement with hardcore libertarians and right-wingers on is the importance of the Second Amendment. I believe these serve as associative threads that can be tied together to provide reasons for its necessity. In the first example, a nation is disarmed and slowly turned into a carefully-observed Habitrail, where as long as the hamsters don't get any bright ideas, there will always be pellets and water in the appropriate dispensers. Until there isn't, and there's no recourse. But hey, there's always the tattle sheets and the royal family to keep them dull and distracted, unlike here.

And the creeping privatization of the military, with its attendant lack of transparency and accountability, is only going to increase. Bad enough to use them overseas in a time of war, when we are ostensibly trying to make progress by winning hearts 'n' minds; ask a Katrina survivor what they think of deputized private thugs "keeping the peace" by any means necessary.

Who knows. Maybe Blair and his pet policies are a petri dish for the prime movers, a smooth face with plenty of faux-neo-liberal homilies, making erudite arguments for profoundly authoritarian actions. Orwell needed the stern proto-Stalinist visage of Big Brother as the totem for his vision of a control system, but even he needed the hydrostatic tension between Inner Party and Outer Party members to preserve the dynamism of fear over the proles. Technology has leveraged such power into ever-smaller groups of administrative keepers, and enabled Big Brother to be replaced by Bigger Neighbor.

The thing that was so arresting about recent dystopic visions such as Children of Men and V for Vendetta is not the scenarios themselves, but how fundamentally they understood human nature, and what it always does when power provides opportunity. Watch how both of the above scenarios unfold -- and more importantly, who's making money from them.