Collective punishment

100 soldiers under house arrest since January 4 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. Virtually all of them are innocent of any misdeed, but military investigators are trying to pressure them to "narc" on whoever stole around $600K in military gear. My suggestion to investigators: You'd have more luck looking for the gear on eBay rather than imposing collective punishment in contravention of the UCMJ.

UPDATE: The more I read on this thing, the more it stinks. The stuff was stolen from an unlocked room *outside* the locked alarmed area where it was supposed to be stored? Who gave the order to move the stuff there? It wasn't a grunt, that much is for sure! And the equipment stolen wasn't stuff that could be hawked on eBay, it is stuff that can only be hawked by someone with connections -- someone likely *not* a grunt. This is sounding more and more like the USS Iowa turret explosion incident where the officers involved covered up their own malfeasance by blaming it all on the (conveniently dead in the Iowa case) grunts.

UPDATE#2: According to Public Affairs, as of 5:45PM today the lockdown is now lifted. Hmm...

-- Badtux the WTF Penguin

The law is for the little people...

not for the cops of the NYPD.

Just following orders? Dude. The NYPD's union is fucking'a righteous. If cops were being ordered to do illegal shit that the cops didn't want to do, you better believe that the union would file grievances out the yinyang. Which they didn't. Why? 'Cause fixing tickets was just fine with the rank and file of the NYPD. Duh.

But let's not forget, the law is for us little people, not for the jackboots. Rule of law? In what country? You mean in Soviet America? Puh-LEEZE....

-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin

Dirty Fucking Hippies

The Catholic Church now has a new official explanation for why their priests keep fucking kiddies: the hippies made them do it.

Y'now, that excuse didn't wash when I was a kid, if I did something wrong or stupid and I said "my buddy Keith made me do it!" my mother would just shake her head and say "Go to your room, you're grounded for the next two days." It doesn't sound any more mature coming from an institution that's 2,000 years old and supposed to be more grown-up than that...

-- Badtux the Grown-up Penguin

Sex obsessed

As I've previously pointed out, there's only one kind of person who obsesses about gay sex all the time, and that's someone who's gayer than the gay mayor of gaytown. Scratch a rightie who spends all his time obsessing about gay sex, find a gay person in a closet the size of a fucking ocean liner.

Similarly, there's only one kind of person who's obsessed with sex all the time, who talks of sex incessantly, who constantly pesters people about sex. And that's a pervert. Da Fixer at Alternate Brain points out a couple of right-wing perverts recently caught -- Juan Carlos Amaya who raped a 12-year-old girl who was in the church youth fellowship that he led, and Rev. Grant Storms, the Christian fundamentalist known for his bullhorn protests of the Southern Decadence festival in the French Quarter, who was caught jacking off as he watched children play at the playground.

It's interesting that religious ministries attract this kind of person, but not surprising. Any place that puts you in a position of power over young people, and where supervision is rare or non-existent, would attract these kinds of perverts. Religious ministries just happen to be the easiest way for these people to gain access to their fetish objects, who happen to be children in many cases, who happen to be forever scarred by what was done to them in many cases, but these kinds of predators don't really see their fetish objects as people, they don't actually believe any of the shit they spew about Christian love and shit, they're just in it for the strokes of their pistols...

-- Badtux the Sickened Penguin

"I was just following orders"

That's what the guards at the Nazi death camps said. They didn't have anything against Jews, they said. They just had to do it or they'd be put into the death camps themselves.

So cry me a river about TSA screeners whining that they shouldn't be targeted for abuse because "we're just following orders". If they don't follow orders, all that happens is that they have to get a job reciting "will there be fries with that order?", they don't get shot like the guards at the Nazi death camps would have been -- guards who, remember, were hung for following illegal orders.

So color me unsympathetic about the poor, poor employees of the Department of Vaterland Security. They chose to serve a heartless bureaucracy and choose every day to obey orders that their very own superiors admit are probably illegal, and have nobody to blame but themselves if people get pissed about being subjected to illegal procedures.

-- Badtux the Sympathyless Penguin

Spy vs. Spy

Over at Why Now, a number of us wondered exactly why the U.S. rolled up a "spy" ring that, uhm, never did any actual spying. The folks arrested were at best unregistered agents of a foreign power -- a minor felony that carries a maximum of five years in prison and which more typically results in a fine and suspended sentence (see -- Billy Carter or Samir Vincent). The FBI had them all identified, and could have sat there watching them for years to find out who the real spies were.

So why roll them up? We speculated on a number of things -- Obama's need to distract people from his disastrous mismanagement of the Gulf oil gusher, the FBI wanting a bigger budget for their counterespionage branch, etc. But today I think we know the real reason: a spy swap, where we give them some of their spies back, and they give us some of our spies back. This is the sort of thing we haven't seen in decades, not since the fall of the Soviet Union, but used to happen all the time back then. I guess we're back to the future again... alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Goldman Sachs in a nutshell

They're crooks, and they're going down. Sadly, as a civil case, not a criminal case. Why a civil case? Because according to the above securities attorney, the civil case is a slam dunk -- in civil cases, you don't have to prove criminal intent to defraud, all you have to show is that they misrepresented the security, and knew they misrepresented the security. Going for the criminal charge, on the other hand, and you have to prove that the misrepresentation was intended to defraud the investors. Much harder to prove.

- Badtux the Law Penguin

Targeting the Church? Fuck yeah

So the Catholic cardinals and bishops are upset that the media is revealing the depth of their moral corruption when it comes to the pedophilia scandal? They whine that they're being targeted for protecting pedophiles? Oh wah, cry me a fucking river, why doncha?

Look: The Church for decades has treated pedophilia as a sin, the equivalent of breaking your Lenten promise or some shit like that, rather than a crime. A few Hail Marys and Our Fathers after a confessional, and all is forgiven. But it's not. It's a crime, and the people who do it are criminals.

In other words, the Church has been complicit in covering up crimes, yet appears to not Get It even now. Transferring a priest to a position where he has no contact with children is not an appropriate response to a pedophile. Handing him over to the civil authorities so he can be placed in jail for the rest of his life is the appropriate response. And until the Catholic Church gets this simple fact, fuck yeah we're going to target them as an organization of kiddy-diddling asshole protecting bastards. The Catholic Church has unclean hands, has participated willingly in a moral atrocity, and has no -- ZERO -- moral authority to criticize *ANYBODY* right now until they clean house and hand over every child-molesting bastard in their ranks to the civil authorities -- starting with this bastard they moved to India to keep him from being arrested in America. So they might as well shut their fucking traps in the meantime. 'Nuff said on that shit.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin