When your car is more than 5 metres long, armour-plated and weighs around 3 tonnes, it's not often you feel overshadowed on the road. But this week Gordon Brown's Daimler Super V8 limousine faces the awe-inspiring might of the vehicle occupied by Barack Obama. The US president's 4.5-tonne Cadillac limousine has already prompted a degree of over-excitable prose about its eight-inch armour plating, built in tear-gas cannon and oxygen supply and claimed ability to emerge unscathed from a direct missile strike. The 6.3-metre Beast, as it is popularly known, also features an interior that turns into an impregnable "panic room" and is followed close behind by another vehicle carrying a medical team and several litres of the president's AB blood type. But the Beast may have closer competition from elsewhere. Reports in Russia claim the Zil limousine which President Dmitry Medvedev is bringing to London is so tough it can survive a small nuclear attack "if the wind is blowing in a certain direction".
Peter Walker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/apr/02/g20-obama-brown
Is there a correlation between a regime's propensity to use violent means (both towards its own people and external threats) and the tonnage/armament of the presidential car?
What would a graph of say, per capita carceral population and number of military interventions over tonnage/armament of presidential car look like?
Are authoritarian regimes more violent than democratic ones? Or do democracies just use more subtle forms of violence (with nicer justifications) in order to assert their control (eg incarceration>assassination, "spreading freedom/regime change">land/resource grab)?
The best NZ can do is Helen's helter-skelter to the rugby
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