Terrorist searched @ Chicago airport

Well, in fairness, many three year olds are a terror, but not ones in a body cast with a broken leg. Because his wheelchair set off the beeper, the poor little tyke was taken aside -- parents not allowed to come with him -- and searched.

If seeing a child like this being patted down like a convicted criminal checking into a prison makes you feel safe, you don’t belong on board an aircraft, you belong in a psychiatric hospital. Really. Get some help.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

H/T

The Toe Sucking Assholes (TSA) Strike Again

British tourists deported for tweeting British slang for "party". Because they might dig up Marilyn Monroe. Or somethin'.

TSA calls the bomb squad to remove two 'pipe bombs' that they'd already determined were harmless -- six hours previously!

And that's just the past two days, that's not including the cupcakes of mass destruction, Star Wars light sabre of horror, butter knife confiscated from pilot (who, remember, is at the helm of a 100,000 pound weapon of mass destruction and can crash it by simply pushing the wheel forward while the copilot is out of the cockpit), a 4-inch plastic rifle from a GI Joe action doll (whoa, now *that* is a deadly terror weapon!), and a baby's baby rattle.

Let's face facts: The TSA is, by and large, an overglorified workfare program for people too stupid to work at a fast food restaurant. Can we just put the TSA on welfare and keep them out of the airports? It would be both cheaper and better for our country's reputation.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Idiot of the Week, War on Christmas edition

San Jose city manager Debra Figone, who said to city council members who wanted her to send a Holiday greeting to city workers thanking them for their hard work over the past year, "don't send an image of the City Hall Christmas tree, we try not to favor one religion over another."

Uhm, say what? The evergreen tree as a symbol of the rebirth of the year at winter solstice predates Christianity by centuries. WTF is with Figone having a problem with it? None of my Jewish friends have a problem with "holiday trees", harumph! The Holiday being celebrated is winter solstice, where the days start growing longer instead of growing shorter and the rebirth of the year is celebrated. The holiday long predates Christianity and is celebrated by most major religions on the planet in one form or another. Christianity decided to celebrate the birth of Christ (according to their scriptures actually born in summer while sheep were in the fields) on this holiday (birth of year = birth of Christ, dig?) but they're a johnny-come-lately on the scene.

-- Badtux the Baffled-by-ignorance Penguin

Tolerance of evil

"Don't you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought? In the end we shall make thoughtcrime literally impossible, because there will be no words in which to express it." -- George Orwell, 1984

We're told that we shouldn't use certain words to describe people who do bad things. We're told that using these words is "intolerant". So if I wish to describe the KKK members who killed four little girls for the crime of being black... if I want to describe the bland bureaucrat who devised the "Final Solution" for the "problem" of European Jews... if I want to describe the people who call for or cheer the prospect of the death of fellow Americans... if I want to describe people who want to impose a religious theocracy where only their religion is allowed and non-believers must be registered as a "thought offender" in order to be ostracized and starved to death... if I use the proper word to describe these people -- EVIL -- I'm "intolerant"?

I have one thing to say about that: Damn straight I'm intolerant of evil. Tolerance of evil is the same thing as condoning evil. If someone wants to harm me or mine (and I count my fellow Americans as "mine" for this purpose), you're damn straight I'm going to be "intolerant", because any other choice is the same as condoning evil. And I want no part of that.

-- Badtux the Do-no-evil Penguin

The difference

So the latest right-wing meme is, "there's no difference between what the Murdochs did and what Wikileaks did."

Uhm, excuse me? First, let's look at what the Morlocks did. They hacked into the voice mail of a child kidnapping victim so that they could create a more sensationalist story to use to scare people into accepting tyranny in order to "keep the children safe". They also hacked into the personal phones of the Royal Family, attempted to hack the phones of 9/11 victims, and otherwise hacked into the phones of ordinary people. Furthermore, all this was being done for profit. Profiting from the tragedies of others is what jackals, hyenas, and vultures do -- and you'll note that none of those critters have good PR.

Meanwhile, whoever leaked those cables to Wikileaks leaked information that already belonged to We The People, that was being kept from us by people who had no right to keep that information from us. Those cables were between government officials who were supposedly representing We The People. Furthermore, whoever divulged these cables did so not for profit, but because he believed that We The People deserved to know what our government was actually doing, as vs. what it said it was doing. Divulging information that we already own as a public service is a quite different thing entirely from invading the privacy of ordinary people for profit.

Why do right wingers continually bring up these false equivalencies? It's as if you're talking about cars, and suddenly they say "it's not true that a Jeep is the best offroad vehicle, because a burro will go places that a Jeep won't go." Uhm, yeah. But we were talking about cars, not critters. Just as, with the Morlock stuff, we're talking about spying on ordinary people, not about divulging information already owned by We The People. Apples. Bicycles. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Equivalencies Penguin

This is just mean

Texas judge refuses plea deal in Willie Nelson marijuana case. Judge Becky Dean-Walter of Hudspeth County, Texas says that Willie ought to get the electric chair for his crimes against the nation. Or something like that. Because, y'know, smokin' some weed on the ole' tour bus hurts so many people...

Meanwhile, a child killer in Florida walks free... gotta have priorities, folks, everybody knows that getting mellow is a worse crime than killing your own child! Alrighty, then...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

An anniversary

On June 17, 1971 President Richard Nixon declared the War On (Some) Drugs. Now, I've repeatedly pointed out some of the side effects -- the militarization of our police forces, the enrichment of drug gangs in other countries, the disenfranchisement of large swathes of minority America either through placing them in jail or through removing their right to vote after they get out of jail, and so forth. I've also pointed out that the War on (Some) Drugs has not ended drug abuse, indeed, there's as much drug abuse as ever. But let's get to the bottom line: Is the War on Drugs a success?

Now, you might wonder why I'm asking that question. Well, that's probably because you're one of the suckers who believes that the War on Drugs is -- or ever has been -- about drugs. But of course it isn't. It's never been about drugs. When Nixon declared the War on Drugs, he wasn't actually declaring war on drugs. He didn't give a shit how much pot people smoked or how much acid they dropped. He was a lizard person, remember. Lizard people don't view humans as people. They view humans as prey. Nixon could no more have cared about the horrors of drug abuse than a newt could care about the feelings of the fly he just snagged with his tongue and is in the process of eating. As a sociopath, he simply was biologically incapable of feeling anything for human beings.

So if the War on Drugs was never about the horrors of drug abuse... why, then? Okay, let me count the ways...

1. A strike against the counterculture. The counterculture had our lizard overlords scared shitless. You had all these young people who'd tuned in, turned on, dropped out, who were going out onto the land and growing their own food and shit, not buying, not consuming... how were the lizard people going to continue their project of farming humans for profit if the humans left the plantation and went off on their own? But see, the "back to nature" counterculture had a fatal flaw: even early 20th century subsistence farmers needed a "cash crop" to buy those things that could not be grown or made on the farm, things like farm implements, cloth, jars for canning food, and so forth. And given their origins, pharmaceuticals were a primo cash crop for the counterculture. So basically, the War on Drugs allowed the lizard people to destroy the counterculture, which was a direct threat to their plantation economy where humans are farmed for profit.
2. Put those uppity Negros in their place. It's not an accident that drugs that are most popular with minorities are also the drugs whose use or possession or sale results in the largest penalties. By giving the most onerous punishments to drugs primarily used by minorities, the War on (Some) Drugs accomplishes two things simultaneously -- it gets some scary darkies off the street (and, sister, *all* darkies are scary to tighty whitey bigot-Americans), and it disenfranchises these darkies so they won't be voting (they won't be votin' for sure while in jail, and mostly will be disqualified from voting after they get out of jail too). Can't let the darkies vote, why, they might vote for someone who, like, isn't a bigot! The horror, the horror! So by putting 25% of all black men into the criminal justice system, you give a wink and nod to poor white trash upset that now black people are as good as them under the law. And by removing the ability of these minorities to vote, you do more to preserve white power than all KKK covens combined.
3. Expand the paramilitary forces available to the lizard people. The lizard people don't understand why, but they do understand that their programs that result in large numbers of "surplus" humans dying of starvation, exposure, or lack of medical care are unpopular with the majority of human beings and can only be imposed by force. By providing huge sums of money and motivation for militarizing the police forces, the lizard people now no longer need to hire Pinkertons to deal with uppity humans who dare resist their program of human farming with methods other than whining and wringing of hands. Instead, they have a huge number of paramilitary policemen trained to believe that all "civilians" are The Enemy and whose notion of "serve and protect" is to serve and protect their lizard overlords, not the human beings who pay their salaries.

So is the War on (Some) Drugs a success? Why... yes! It's a *SMASHING* success! Why do you ask?

-- Badtux the Cynical Penguin

I feel safer

Everybody knows that a six-year-old girl can be a terror. That's why I feel safer that the TSA has protected me from the horror of a six year old girl terrorist by carefully examining this young lass to make sure she wasn't carrying a bomb in her crotch. Because everybody knows that six year old blond girls are dangerous and that their crotches could hide any number of evil things, so as long as TSA agents follow proper procedure (which they did), why, it's just keeping us safe, right?

Thank you, TSA, for protecting me from six year old blond terrorist girls! Our nation praises you for your diligence in this matter!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Urban homesteading

My family had an urban homestead in the 1970's -- we owned an acre of land in the middle of a city, and put most of it to use growing fruit trees and vegetables (originally there were chickens too, but zoning shut that down... what do you do with a chicken coop once the chickens are gone? It just stood empty, that's all). Every year we sold hundreds of dollars of figs from our fig trees -- a not insignificant sum of money back in those days, when you could buy a decent running second-hand car for under $500 that still had a little bit of new-car smell to it.

Little did I know that I was violating a trademark filed in 2008 back in 1975!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin