The MRAP freakout

Various conspiracy type sites such as Firebagger Waterbody have broke the "news" that the Department of Homeland Security is buying thousands of armored MRAP vehicles. At which point I say... "huh?!"

So I head over to the Navistar site referenced by the Firebaggers, where Navistar helpfully notes that an upgrade of the current MRAP chassis leaves them with 2,717 rolling chassis already paid for by the Federal government. And Navistar would love, love I say, to sell bodies to put on those things to do any number of things from dump trucks to armored SWAT team carriers.

Still, no Department of Homeland Security there. So next thing I do is head over to Federal Procurement Data System and download their data set for the Department of Homeland Security. The latest data as of April 3 is available (they release data quarterly), and given how Federal procurement works, DHS certainly would not be getting anything with less than three months notice, so ... 425 megabytes of XML later, I have a database with contracts indexed by DUNS number. So I grab every Navistar DUNS number and search the database for *any* occurrence of *ANY* Navistar DUNS number in Department of Homeland Security contracts issued for the first quarter of 2012 and... nada.

Now, granted, a contract might have been issued since April 4. But you certainly wouldn't see vehicles rolling off the line with DHS markings on them yet, because these were rolling chassis -- i.e., nothing but a frame and drivetrain -- and it would take Navistar *time* to build bodies to put on them and put markings on those bodies. If a contract was issued on April 5, just how likely do you think it'd be that Navistar managed to work with *their* subcontractors to get everything needed to assemble bodies for these frames and managed to assemble even a *single* body for *one* of these frames in *SIX WORKING DAYS* since the contract was let? Yet the conspiracy sites have a PHOTO of one of these supposed DHS MRAP vehicles! Or, should I say, a PHOTOSHOP?

So anyhow: On a scale of zero to 100, I put the likelihood of DHS buying thousands of MRAP's at somewhere between zero to 1. The reason why I rate it above zero is that things on the Mexican border are not looking good right now -- and in case you didn't know, the Border Patrol *is* under the Department of Homeland Security now, and has been under fire multiple times from the Mexican drug gangs. It may be that the DHS has decided that armored trucks are necessary for the safety of Border Patrol patrols along the Mexican border and is procuring some. But if so, there has been no contract let yet, unless that happened in the past week -- and certainly no vehicles have rolled off the lines yet, despite any photoshops supposedly proving otherwise.

-- Badtux the Un-paranoid Penguin

Firing customers

Some customers are just more trouble than they're worth. They're always complaining, they're always threatening to sue you, they demand far more of your time than they're willing to pay for, and they think they know your business better than you do and demand that you act in ways that violate your professional ethics. In the end, you're better off firing them, because not only are they time-wasters, they're also much more likely to sue you -- and defending against even the most frivolous lawsuit in Federal court will cost you at least $100,000.

So now I hear that pediatricians are telling parents who refuse to vaccinate their children to find another doctor, and I understand completely. We now know that the only study to ever show a connection between autism and vaccines was a complete and utter fraud, and that removing mercury from vaccines had no effect on autism rates -- that is, there not only isn't a connection between vaccines and autism (other than the fact that vaccines tend to be given at the same time that symptoms of autism become evident), but the only theories about how vaccines might cause autism turned out to be either balderdash or outright fraud, while vaccines have saved millions of lives over the past fifty years.

So basically, if you have a parent today insisting that you don't vaccinate her child, what you're facing is basically a kook who believes she knows better than the entire medical profession, a kook who, because she thinks she knows more medicine than you do, will sue you in a heartbeat if you don't treat her little darling in ways that violate your professional ethics. This is the same sort of patient who would insist on treating her child's cancer with herbal remedies that have been proven to be ineffective and become extremely upset and sue you when you reported her instead to Child Protection for endangering her child's health via neglect by refusing to allow a pediatric oncologist to treat her child.

Given that, it's amazing that *only* 30% of pediatricians will fire customers who refuse to vaccinate their children. Those customers are lawsuits waiting to happen, and the fact that 70% of pediatricians will gulp and do their best to care for the child despite a parent who is an utter abusive loon pretty much is proof that the majority of pediatricians are saints. Because they're certainly not in it for the money (I make more money than the typical pediatrician and work nowhere near as hard)...

-- Badtux the Healthcare Penguin

Caterpillar, EMD, unions, and nonsense

Caterpillar bought EMD, the former General Motors subsidiary that is one of the world's foremost manufacturers of diesel-electric locomotives, back in July 2010. They immediately started construction on a locomotive plant in Muncie, Indiana, on the site of a former Westinghouse transformer plant that had a gigantic building with a rail spur already running through it (with doors big enough for the biggest of locomotives to go through it) and enough open land behind it to build sheds and tracks for testing of the locomotives. They had multiple reasons to do this:

1. Buy American mandates on the part of U.S. transit authorities, the same reason why Bombardier is forced to maintain a facility in Plattsburg, NY.
2. The fact that GM had sold off the LaGrange IL locomotive assembly facility (EMD's original U.S. assembly facility ) many years before to a trucking firm that had demolished the original buildings, so there was no ability to produce locomotives there,
3. The availability of this huge assembly plant for cheap -- it had been shuttered since 1998, and Westinghouse was eager to quit paying taxes on it.
4. The proximity of Muncie to existing Caterpillar and EMD parts suppliers
5. The extensive rail network coming in and out of Muncie from all directions, making it easy to get parts into Muncie and get assembled locomotives out to customers.
6. The availability of workers -- Muncie had long been a railroad center, and there were a large number of railroad workers in Muncie with experience in repair of EMD equipment who could easily be turned into assembly line workers
7. The obsolete nature of the London, Ontario plant, which could not be renovated to modern standards because it was EMD's only facility and was operating at capacity, due to its age and configuration it was very expensive to operate and could not be fixed short of shutting it down and rebuilding it entirely. Which could only be done by building a new facility capable of building as many locomotives per month as the London plant built.

The net result of all this was that a) the Muncie plant was built, taking approximately one year to build and with the first locomotives rolling off the end of the line in October 2011, and b) it had more than sufficient capacity to build as many locomotives as EMD needed to build. At which point the London, Ontario plant becomes surplus, with the inevitable result -- the plant is now closed.

Please note the *timing* on all the above. The Indiana "Right to Work" union-busting law was passed last month. Construction on the Muncie plant started in September 2010. So, uhm, what is the relationship between the two? Hint: None. Nada. Zero. Zilch. It had absolutely nothing to do with Caterpillar's decision to build in Muncie, because it hadn't even been proposed then. So the CBC even mentioning that law in conjunction with EMD is nonsense, the sort of thing I'd expect from a Faux News story, not a supposedly reputable journalistic outlet.

Now, the way Caterpillar set about closing the Ontario plant -- by proffering a union contract that they knew wasn't going to be accepted, so that the contract would expire and thus they could shutter the plant without having to pay out the severance pay required by the contract -- was pretty shitty. They should have just bit the bullet and taken the one-time cost of paying everybody the severance pay they were owed under the union contract. But that plant was toast, period, from the moment Caterpillar started work on the Muncie plant. It was simply too small, too run-down, and too expensive.

-- Badtux the Business Penguin

What's the matter with a Moon base?

Right now we have a lot of unused resources here in the United States. We have bright scientists unable to find work, brilliant engineers idled because there are no massive engineering projects requiring their skills, thousands of skilled machinists idled, and so on and so forth. This is in addition to the millions of Americans whose skills are more rudimentary. If we did a WPA-type project, the Americans without skills could be put to work picking up trash by the roads, doing trail maintenance in the national parks, and otherwise doing things that haven't been done for decades as funding dried up for anything other than corporate welfare. But what about the smart people? It would seem to me to be an utter waste of talent to put someone with a degree in biochemistry in charge of digging outhouses at a WPA camp.

So Newt Gingrich, in my opinion, actually hit upon a viable economic stimulus project with his "to the moon!" rhetoric the other day. Remember, even the ugliest dirtiest pig can sometimes turn up a truffle. This wouldn't be astoundingly expensive like back in the Apollo days because we aren't developing the technology from scratch. Rockets are increasingly a mature technology -- we know how to build'em, they're not all that expensive to build anymore, though of course still not cheap. And the same applies to space capsules and the various environmental systems needed to keep them operational. There would still be a large amount of original science to do regarding how to utilize the Moon's resources to build an actual base (as vs crash a bunch of modules into one location like we did with the International Space Station), not to mention that we'd have to go ahead and man-rate some large rocket in the first place to get our guys into space (we have rockets bigger than Soyuz that could boost people into space but none of them are man-rated, they all have too much vibration and too much acceleration for squishy biologicals to tolerate, but that could be fixed at some expense to payload), but we have hundreds of thousands of unemployed scientists in this country right now. We don't lack for the talent to solve these kinds of problems.

Which is why I am baffled at why so many so-called "leftists" are laughing at Newt proposing a stimulus program that would dwarf Obama's. Granted, he did it in the context of *also* saying he was going to balance the budget -- i.e., it's simply mathematically impossible for him to do both, and we *should* point and laugh at *that* -- but the idea of a huge moon program? Dude. It's just an infrastructure project, just like the ones Obama touts and that leftists say should have been bigger. Well, Gingrich's program *would* be bigger. The only way to dismiss Gingrich's program as "silliness" is if you dismiss Obama's program as "silliness"... which is just plain silliness.

-- Badtux the Space Penguin

I am now "the old Left leadership"

It must be true, according to a somewhat-prominent lefty supporter of the Occupy Wall Street protests. It must be true, because I criticized the messaging and tactics of Occupy Wall Street, so thus I am a member of "the old Left leadership" and I'm just upset because the youngsters bypassed me and my ability to funnel fundraising funds into my own pocket (say WHA?! Given that I don't even run goddamned *advertisements* on my blog because I feel it'd be unethical to be paid for doing this, I certainly was surprised to find that one out!). And furthermore, I hate Wikileaks (despite developing some of the technology they use for exactly the purpose that Wikileaks is using it for), and I hate Anonymous (see previous).

Man, I'm glad to hear that my pointing out that, like, the same damned tactics have been re-invented by every new generation of youthful wanna-be revolutionaries every five years for the past forty years and they haven't damn well worked has nothing to do with the fact that those tactics haven't worked a single time during the past forty years of futility and everything to do with being a member of "the old Left leadership" despite, err, not being so. Alrighty, then!

Oh yeah, my advice to youngsters re-inventing the same square wheel that hasn't rolled a single time when re-invented for the past forty years:

1. Tell Giant Puppet Man and the Red Brigade to go home. Inclusiveness only works when it's inclusive of people who aren't, well, batshit fucking crazy. The GOP is inclusive of Michelle Bachmann and David Duke. Yeah, like that helps their image.
2. Dress like grown-ups, not like children on a day trip to the city.
3. Can the cant. Talking bullshit about "class struggle", "empowerment", "collective", or "dialectic". Americans are a pragmatic people who are suspicious of anything that sounds like some sort of "ism", 'cause general experience is that "isms" are Bad News. Tell folks what they need to do, and why they need to do it ("Wall Street Stole Us Blind!" "Indict The Wall Street Thieves!" "Regulate Wall Street!"). Leave the ideology to the ideologues.
4. Pay attention to grownups who've been part of both successful and unsuccessful movements. One of the reason for the failure of every single protest movement of the past forty years has been because the kids haven't been willing to listen to the voice of experience. Daddy's movement failed, so Daddy isn't worth listening to. Well, not *everybody's* movement failed. In some cases, we won. Sometimes not big victories, but you take what you can. And even where we *did* fail, you can learn from us what didn't work, and avoid making that mistake, at least.
5. Furthermore, don't dismiss the experiences and values of adults just because they're adults. One reason why the anti-war protesters lost the support of most Americans and consequently elected Richard Nixon not once, but TWICE, despite most Americans being against the Vietnam War, was because of their clear disdain for the values, modes of dress, and experiences of the majority of Americans, who they dismissed as "squares" with nothing of value to contribute. Hint: You spit on your elders, they tend to spit back.

And of course I'm just flapping my beak in the wind here 'cause nobody who needs to listen is gonna listen, but so it goes. Ain't that what I usually do anyhow?

- Badtux the Liberal Elite Penguin (heh!).

Why are today's protests so lame?

Earlier I pointed out that the civil rights protests were done by dignified looking people waving signs expressing an agenda advocating specific actions (ending segregated schools, voting rights, equal job opportunities, etc.), backed up by model legislation introduced in Congress and by some of the best legal minds in the country playing the courts like a piano. Then I pointed out that most modern protests look like a friggin' zoo, a buncha slovenly young people dressed like schoolchildren on a daytrip out to the city with no connection to any agenda or strategy whether legislative or legal. Where’s the signs demanding their agenda? Where's their sample legislation? Why are they dressed like slovenly children on a day trip to the city, rather than like dignified grownups? As a dignified grownup, how can I take them seriously?

The question is: Why are modern protests so lame? Personally, I blame the anti-war protesters of the 1960′s who think they ended the Vietnam War with their circus and continue to influence tactics. They didn’t end the Vietnam War. That was Walter Cronkite and large numbers of “serious people” who figured out that the only way to “win” the war was to invade North Vietnam, which had a big chance of inviting both Chinese and Soviet intervention that likely would have escalated to nuclear war (indeed we now know that threats to use nuclear weapons were made by *both* sides, and that the Soviets threatened to invade West Germany if we invaded North Vietnam). All the hippies did was give the right wing a convenient scapegoat so that they wouldn’t have to admit that the U.S. got beat like a drum by a buncha pajama-wearin’ slopes — i.e., it allowed them to maintain their racism against Southeast Asians. Instead, Hanoi Jane and the hippies ended the war.

But y’know, I never seen a dead body come back from Vietnam that had been killed by Jane Fonda. They all got killed by NVA or VC guns or grenades or bombs or booby traps. Funny, that Hanoi Jane gets all the credit for winning the war for North Vietnam, despite the fact that, like, she didn’t kill a single soldier, while the people who did win the war don’t get credit at all from racist America, which *still* refuses to admit that a buncha pajama-wearin’ slopes beat’em like a drum. But the VC and NVA won. They did. But racist lefties and racist righties both refuse to admit that fact and insist that the lefties ended the Vietnam War, not the NVA and VC, because apparently brown people could *never* have, like, actually beat the good ole’ white folk of the U S of A. Funny, huh?

So anyhow, we aren't going to get anywhere with this protest stuff until we tell the boomers and their hippy bullshit to go take a hike and start behaving like Serious People with a clear political agenda and with the legal resources to back up that agenda. That's just the facts. That's how the world works, and no amount of slovenly young people getting beat up by fat middle-aged cops is gonna change that.

-- Badtux the Pragmatic Penguin

A game of thugs

You'll notice that I haven't posted anything this past week about the "Occupy Wall Street" protests. That's because, by and large, they've been meaningless street theater along the lines of, "provoke the cops and then get videos of the results to show the world how mean the cops are." A perfect example is the following video, which has flown around the world and appeared in the news media of both Western democracies and various dictatorships that are using it to say "see? The USA does the same things to protesters that we do!":

The problem is that this means nothing, nada, zero, zilch to the average American. They'll nod and say "Yep, NYPD is brutal", and move on to the next thing on their agenda, because the average American doesn't live in NYC and the brutality of the NYPD is not of personal importance to them. If that was the goal -- to get their fellow Americans to say "Yep, NYPD is brutal" -- mission accomplished. Thing is, that wasn't the goal. Or was it? What WAS the goal, anyhow?

And that's the problem. You look at the above video, and what is most striking about the protesters is that they're young, they're hip, they're dressed in cool clothes, they're completely unlike most Americans. The chances of a non-hip American looking at these protesters and identifying with them as ordinary Americans is pretty much nil. Compare to this photograph:

These civil rights protesters are clearly mature middle-aged men dressed in suits and ties. They're not aliens dropped from another planet. They don't do "drum circles" or spend hours holding "assemblies" to decide what color the ink on the posters is supposed to be. They wouldn't know a patchouli from a partridge, and they wouldn't be caught dead in a tie-dye t-shirt in public. And their signs make no secret about what their objectives are: They want equal opportunity, they want an end to government segregated schools, they want equal rights under the law.

The reason the protests led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. succeeded is because the protesters looked like dignified adults, not like slovenly children on a day trip to the city, and because their demands were serious, focused, and well articulated, not an incoherent chanting of anarchist rant alongside anti-capitalist rant alongside progressive rant. And it took place day after day, year after year, for literally a decade without stop. That is why we remember the success of the Civil Rights movement -- and why we will not remember this "Occupy Wall Street" thing a month from now.

-- Badtux the Protest Penguin

Life in prison for a miscarriage?

Whenever someone says "there's no difference between Republicans and Democrats", I want to rub their nose in things like this. Yes, the Democrats suck. But at least they're not trying to put 15 year old girls into prison for murder because the girl miscarried (well, she's 21 now, but she was 15 when she miscarried). As sucky as the Democrats are, they're right now the only thing that stands between us and the Republic of Gilead, where women are chattel useful only for their vaginas.

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Hysterical ninnies

Birthers, deathers, sufferers of Obama Derangement Syndrom, screeching ninnies of the right and left... people. Get a grip. Just get a grip. Whether you're the gang of left-wing lunatics at Corrente or a teabagger, reality simply *is*.

Look. I understand the disappointment that you folks at Corrente have with Obama. You forgot to look at the label on the back that said "Eisenhower Republican". Well, folks, Obama is the candidate you guys chose, he's doing exactly what he said he'd do in all his policy papers on his web site prior to his election, so you have no one to blame but yourself. In the meantime he's the Democratic President we have -- basically Eisenhower Jr. -- and not the Democratic President we need -- FDR reincarnated. But there's no way to get from point A to point B in 2012. There isn't. Attempting to primary Obama will simply end up electing some right wing lunatic as President. Every single one of the Republican candidates I've seen so far makes George W. Bush look like a socialist. Is that really what you want to do to America?! So quit with the deather conspiracy theories (Osama bin Laden is dead, alright, already), and the rest of the weird Obama conspiracy theories you keep messing around with, and live in the world we have, not some alternate universe where primarying a sitting president results in victory for your party.

As for folks on the right... people. Get a grip. All this after-birther stuff doubting the authenticity of Obama's long-form birth certificate makes you look like raving lunatics to the 90% of America who's satisfied that Obama is American. We have a way of handling these situations where you don't like a President. It's called a VOTE. Find yourself a good candidate for 2012, and get the most votes. It's called DEMOCRACY. I know it's a dirty, ugly business, but what's your alternative? Tyranny of the minority over the majority? Yeah, like that ever turns out well...

-- Badtux the PO'ed Penguin

Joe Bageant and the death of dreams

One of the things that infuriated Joe Bageant was liberals. Specifically, urban liberals. He considered them a bunch of wusses who talked the talk, but when time came to walk the walk and actually get out there and make a difference, instead settled for shallow PR stunts like Jon Stewart's farcical march on Washington, which sent him into guffaws of absolute astonishment. Because see, the great-great grandpappies of folks like Jon Stewart were out there on picket lines busting knuckles with the strike breakers of the American Legion (which started out as a right-wing paramilitary made up of WW1 veterans financed by right-wing industrialists) and risking getting their head busted. While today's liberals... oh my. Can't do anything like that. That's for the vulgar common folk, not for white middle class professionals. Why, getting arrested would look so bad on the criminal background check for job applications to Megacorp Inc. and I might not get the job! Go on strike? Do without a paycheck for several months shutting down the country to protest the fact that 30% of income taxes paid by corporations in 1950. 7% today, and you and I now pay that other 23%? Why, think what that'd look like on my credit report! Horror!

Wusses. Useless as tits on a bull. As I mentioned in 2006, Democrats haven't done jack shit for poor white trash since at least 1960, instead focusing upon the urban (black) poor if they talk about poverty at all. And unions haven't been a damn bit better. Ever since Truman busted the unions' chops in the 1946-1952 timeframe, the unions have been by and large content to feed like pigs on slop at the corporate trough, instead of standing up for workers whose jobs are being exported or standing up against unfairness such as trillions in bailouts for Wall Street and nothing for Main Street. When Reagan busted the PATCO ATC union in 1981, that was the end of unions as a real force for labor in America -- the unions could have done just that, *united*, and shut down the entire federal government with a general strike where the Teamsters refused to deliver anything to any federal unit, all Federal workers walked off, mail didn't get delivered, yada yada until the federal government was *forced* to give in and re-certify PATCO, crap, the unions could have shut down the entire fucking *country* the way the French unions often do. Instead they went whimpering off into the sunset like whipped dogs, tail stuck between their legs, useless, irrelevant, and futile.

So you want to know why unions are irrelevant today and why things get worse for ordinary Americans every year as things get better and better for the rich... well, look in the mirror. Joe Bageant held it up for you. Joe and I disagreed on economics -- he was an outright socialist rabble-rouser, I'm a capitalist (albeit not one who worships it but, rather, someone who believes it is the best way to handle matching supply and demand for things with complex inputs and/or where choice matters, i.e., it's a tool, not a religion). But one thing we did agree on was that the whole problem with liberalism in America today is that today's liberals have lost their way and in their haste to condemn Red State America, have forgotten why the so-called Red States are that -- i.e., that liberals haven't done a goddamned thing for them since at least 1960, so why the fuck *should* they vote liberal?!

And so it goes...

-- Badtux the Southern Penguin

If lefties want to be taken seriously about guns...

... they need to know what they're talking about. Case in point: Utah designating the Colt M1911 autopistol as their state handgun, due to the fact that it was designed by John Browning, a practicing Mormon and a native of Utah.

Read the comments at the above link. They're pathetic. Some people there apparently think John Browning is still alive and will somehow personally benefit from this endorsement (he's not -- he died in 1926). Some people there apparently think Browning Arms Company made the M1911 ACP (they didn't -- Browning Arms Company was formed in 1927 by Belgian arms manufacturer FN and Browning's survivors to finish the design of and manufacture the Browning Hi-Power 9mm handgun for the French and Belgian military, never sold 1911-pattern handguns, and has been owned outright by FN since 1977 when FN bought out the last of the Browning survivors).

Some people even think there's some "M1911 company" that is going to give kickbacks to the Utah legislature for designating the M1911 as their official state handgun. Uhm, who would this be? China's Norinco? Armscor, which makes them in the Philippines? PA, SA, STI, Taurus, Fusion, Caspian, Kimber, SAM? The thing was designed in *1911*, for cryin' out loud! It fell out of patent protection long ago, and can be made by anybody -- and is.

Come on, people. If you don't know what you're talking about, just keep your mouth shut when it comes to guns. It just makes you look ignorant and defeats any purpose you thought you had when you opened your mouth.

-- Badtux the Gun Penguin

Just like Hitler

One of the favorite games of the political extremes, most prevalent on the right but also often from the left, is to say that person X is "just like Hitler." Really? So George W. Bush or Barack Obama are short German dictators? Err... not exactly.

The usual technique used is to find some human attribute shared by many people, most of whom are *not* Hitler, and then say that having that attribute makes the target "just like Hitler." For example, Hitler loved Mickey Mouse, Britney Spears was a member of the Mickey Mouse Club, why, that makes Britney Spears *just like Hitler!*. Well, her, and about a billion other Mickey Mouse fans worldwide. Which is the problem with the whole "just like Hitler" thing. Hitler possessed a lot of traits. He was short -- like George W. Bush, or like Jimmy Carter. He was apparently a vegetarian, like approximately a billion other people on the planet. In other words, focusing on a trait that Hitler shares with a billion other people and saying that this makes someone "just like Hitler" is meaningless. Hell, Hitler was a member of Homo Sapiens, both you and I are members of Homo Sapiens, by that standard *we* are "just like Hitler"!

So clearly you have to focus on attributes that are shared between Hitler and only a few other people if you want to play the "just like Hitler" game, which is where the right wing usually falls down -- they usually take someone like Obama, take some trait he shares with a billion other people, and say that makes him "just like Hitler". Obama wants national healthcare! Hitler had national healthcare! (As does every other Western nation). That makes Obama "just like Hitler"! Well, and makes every *other* Western leader for the past 80 years other than U.S. Presidents "just like Hitler" too, which fails the "only a few people" test".

If, on the other hand, you point out that Hitler invaded Poland on a bogus premise of a Polish threat to Germany, and Bush II invaded Iraq on a bogus premise of an Iraqi threat to Germany... there aren't all that many leaders over the past 100 years that have invaded other nations based on a lie. So in that respect, Bush II really *was* just like Hitler. But now you get to the point where the whole game of "Just Like Hitler" shows itself to be utterly useless: In most other ways, Bush II was *not* "Just Like Hitler". For example, Bush II had/has no genocidal urgings, and does not appear to himself be a outright racist. Indeed, one of the few things I genuinely respected about Bush II was when he emphatically made the point, repeatedly, that Muslim-Americans were *Americans* and should not be discriminated against.

The reality, then, is that the game of "Just Like Hitler" simply isn't useful. It is useful to point out when our opponents use tactics commonly associated with the Nazis, such as the Big Lie tactic, or have beliefs commonly associated with the Nazis, such as a belief that white people are superior to brown people or that gays and ethnic minorities should be exterminated. But that doesn't make them "just like Hitler" -- it just makes them evil sons of bitches, yo.

-- Badtux the Brimstone-sniffin' Penguin

The revolution starts... err... not.

So in the aftermath of the Egyptian public driving out their President-for-life with protests and strikes in the aftermath of Mr. President-for-life Mubarak failing to take care of the fundamental business of the people -- that is, making sure that his people had jobs, food, housing, that kinda shit -- some of the folks of the lefty sort say, "uhm, say, we got those problems too, when are the Americans going to follow the Egyptian example and have a revolution of their own?"

What a *great* idea! And hey, we have one of these revolution thingies every two years, you betcha. Why, back in 2010 we actually had one of them there "revolution" thingies, called, "a vote". And, uhm... excuse me. You see the bozos that got elected? Republicans who hate government welfare except when they collect it themselves, teabaggers waving their sacks around while proclaiming "Keep your government hands off my Medicare!", the works.

So, as usual, the stupidest, most corrupt, most inept people got elected, while people with smarts were called "elitists" and had no more chance of being elected than The Mighty Fang has of flapping his ears and flying to the moon. At which point I gotta say... revolution? Dude. If Americans aren't going to even take the time out of their days to research the candidates and elect the best ones rather than the most corrupt ones (the ones who've taken the most bribes... err... "campaign contributions"... and thus have the slickest ads), what makes you think that they'd take even more time out of their day to, like, hold massive demonstrations and shut down cities and shit day after day? It is to laugh. If Americans are too lazy, stupid, and apathetic to even take the easy route to revolution, i.e., simply researching who's the best candidate and voting for him, they certainly aren't going to inconvenience themselves by marching in the streets.

So congratulations, America. You have your chance for revolution every 2 to 6 years (depending on the politician in question)... and you instead vote for Hosni Mubarak's clone brothers each and every time. It is to laugh. Or cry, depending upon whether you're one of those who've been thrown out of work by the oligarchs and corrupt puppet politicians or not.

-- Badtux the Cynical Penguin

Modern technological society and the idiot Greenies

For the first million years or so of mankind's existence, mankind lived like animals. Shelter was whatever could be improvised from local materials and was never windproof and rarely waterproof, the best shelter was caves, but the local critters had that same idea too plus caves are always damp and chilly. The invention of fire helped, but as those of you who've huddled around a campfire in cold weather know, your front roasts while your backside freezes, and when the wind blows the smoke in your direction then you suffocate and must make a choice of either moving away from the fire (and getting colder) or breathing. Food was whatever could be scavenged or killed, and hunger was omnipresent, leaving only on those rare instances when large meat animals could be run down or during the spring and fall harvests of berries and roots. Winters in particular were one long misery, where you hoped you had stored enough food in clay pots to last the winter, and if you didn't, you starved. Death was a constant specter, and happened all too often, generally from diseases related to starvation (if you are starving to death, even the common cold will suffocate you from pneumonia because your body isn't strong enough to fight it off). Most children did not make it through their first year -- disease, exposure, starvation, you name it, all happened. Death in childbirth was common, and after childbirth too due to lack of sanitation and clean water. Anytime there was a group of humans in one location for an extended period of time, water-borne diseases soon cut them down, because water sources became contaminated with human feces.

That's a million years of human history right there -- a history of misery. When I go out into the wilderness, I have all the modern conveniences -- a tent made of silicone-impregnated nylon, water purification equipment, a small camp stove capable of heating water and cooking food, a down sleeping bag, ridiculously warm clothing including waterproof outwear, the works. I have the best gear that modern technological society can provide me. But when the weather turns miserable, I'm miserable.

The difference is that this is a choice on my part. I can turn around and go home, and bask in the warmth of central heating, take a hot shower to sooth my aches away, sleep comfortably on a soft mattress. And while I'm miserable, I'm far less miserable than that poor sod even 1,000 years ago, who would have been soaked to the skin and sleeping "cowboy style" on his bedroll with a sheet of canvas over him. The chances of me dying of exposure during a typical backpacking trip are basically nil. My gear is too good, my preparations too extensive, my checking of the weather reports too comprehensive (thus why I was unable to take the long backpacking trip at Christmas that I'd hoped to take -- I'd check the weather report every day, and every day said no).

And all of that -- central heating, hot showers, soft mattresses, weatherproof homes -- is now dependent upon modern technological society with its extensive transportation network and energy-intensive factories. Contrary to popular belief, homes simply don't use that much energy -- less than 22% of the energy used in America is used by homes. THe majority by far is industry and transportation, which together account for almost 60% of energy use. Unless you've tried to put together a small fabrication shop, you simply have no idea of how much energy is required to actually build stuff. Even a small MIG welder needs a full 30 amps of 240 volt service to operate, add in a plasma cutter (ditto), grinders, cutters, large air compressor, and so forth, and you're using more energy than four average households just for the modern-day equivalent of an old-timey blacksmith's shop, one capable of welding together bicycles from tubing and welding the frame of an automobile back together. Actually *manufacturing* an automobile takes dozens of welders, a large assembly line, a fleet of trucks to haul the parts to the assembly plant, paints comprised of a variety of complex chemicals that themselves require significant energy to create, casting and forging plants for engine and transmission parts, and so forth. And there's not much that can be done to make this process significantly more efficient. The laws of physics state that melting steel to weld things together or cast things is *always* going to require a lot of energy, period. Modern engines may have significantly less metal in them than 40 years ago and correspondingly take less energy to manufacture, but it's always going to be a significant amount.

In other words, modern technological society is energy intensive. And without modern technological society, you end up with a mass die-off of virtually every species on Earth, because the Earth simply won't sustain billions of hunter-gatherers.

The problem with solar, wind, and other "green" energy sources is that they simply won't provide sufficient energy to sustain technological society. That apparently is a feature, not a flaw, to the Greenies who push those to the exclusion of the only other non-global-warming-causing energy source available to us, nuclear power. They want us to all go back to being primitives. The problem is that 99% of humanity dies if that happens. The Greenies smugly assume that they'll be part of the 1% that inherits the Earth at the end. Methinks they're deluding myself, personally... there are very, very few people who remember how to live in pre-industrial society, and none (zero) of them live in the United States today. The inheritors of the Earth if modern society collapses will be subsistence farmers in the equatorial jungles, not anybody you or I know.

But wait, I'm speaking sense here, and who cares about sense when there's an ideology to sell? Siiiighhhh... radical righties, radical lefties, about the only real difference is that the righties have power and the lefties largely don't. I do wish, however, that they did not insist upon living in some alternate universe of cotton candy trees and pink unicorns rather than in this universe, where reality simply, well, is, regardless of your ideology...

-- Badtux the Industrialized Penguin

Die quickly

Ezra Klein asks, "What is going to be done about the plight of those permanently unemployed because they're too young to retire but nobody will hire them because they're too old?".

Well, the Republicans have a plan for that too. Too young to retire but too old to work? It's the same basic plan as their retirement plan for the poor once Social Security is dismantled, as their health care plan for the bottom 98% of the population once health care reform and Medicaid are dismantled, and so forth. Don't get unemployed, and if you do, die quickly. Duh.

Not that Preznit Hopey Changey has any other plan, other than, well, hopey for changey. Or as Vice Preznit Pie-hole put it, "hang in there". Uhm, yeah. Hope is not a plan. Just sayin'.

So we have one party that's incompetently evil, and another party that's evilly incompetent. Sigh. WASF.

- Badtux the Snarkily Disgusted Penguin

Free speech and threats

There have been a number of laws proposed in the aftermath of the Arizona shooting that would punish speech that advocated acts of violence. The upside, say advocates of such a law, is that random crazies would have only their own voice inside their head to tell them to kill, and thus be less likely to kill. It would also dial down the heat of the rhetoric in the political environment and make it much more likely that we could figure out some way to get along rather than kill each other.

The other side, on the other hand, says it'd be a violation of the 1st Amendment to outlaw general threats. Note that specific threats of a specific act of violence against a specific person are already illegal, and nobody has ever honestly proposed that we legalize these. So what is the difference between saying, "Kill George Soros", and "Kill the Jews"? Either one is a threat. Just ask any Jew who has ever been the target of the latter what goes through his or her body when someone advocates "kill the Jews". It's a sick feeling at the pit of your stomach, a fluttering of the heart, a panic'ed feeling in your head... it's the exact same as a specific threat against a specific Jew, in other words. And, in my opinion, should be treated the same way -- just as it is in every other Western nation, and just as it was here in the United States before Brandenburg v. Ohio in 1969.

So here's my question to those who say that outlawing advocacy of violence is tyranny: Was the United States a tyranny before June 9, 1969? Is Canada a tyranny? Is Great Britain a tyranny? Is Australia -- a nation which doesn't even have a Bill of Rights in their Constitution because a Constitution is just a piece of paper and they rely on democracy, not a piece of paper, to defend their liberties -- a tyranny?

If outlawing advocacy of violence, as EVERY SINGLE WESTERN DEMOCRACY did after the events of 1939-1945 where some German dictator used violent speech to incite his people to exterminate most of the ethnic minorities of Europe, is "tyranny" -- does that mean that only the United States is free, and only since June 9, 1969? Or are you saying that, unlike every other citizen of a democracy on this planet, Americans simply can't handle such a ban on violent speech? If the latter, why do you hate America?

As for the argument, "but who decides what's violent speech?", we have a mechanism for that in a democracy. It's called a COURT OF LAW. The whole point of a jury is to listen to the facts of a case, then decide whether something is a violation of the law or not. Juries also have a bad habit of refusing to enforce laws that they feel step over the line, such as the recent case that I referenced here where a Montana court couldn't seat a jury because they couldn't find a juror who'd convict someone arrested for less than an ounce of marijuana. In short, we already have the mechanism in place to decide things like this in a way that respects our democratic processes and the rights of our people.

In short, I believe Brandenburg v. Ohio was wrong. Advocating violence has no place in political speech -- what the 1st Amendment was written to protect -- and we have examples all over the world that outlawing advocating violence does not result in tyranny and does *not* impact the ability of people to engage in the vigorous political discourse of a democracy. Go read the British press such as the Independent or the Guardian or the even rougher tabloids. They criticize their government in ways that would have the editors of the Washington Post and New York Times collapsing on their fainting couches with a case of the vapors. If that kind of vigorous political discourse is "tyranny", then I say we need more of it here in America, yo!

-- Badtux the International Penguin

Quit picking on her!

Quit picking on Britney Palin!

Well, no. It's just so much fun to pick on that vacuous bimbo (of whom one female banker says, "she's set back feminism by fifty years"). Palin's rhetoric is stupid and, intentionally or not, things like her now-famous "crosshairs" targeting liberals for defeat in the November elections hints at the violent rhetoric coming from the real eliminationist right, people like Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, and Glenn Beck who have suggested exterminating liberals (then claimed "it was a joke!" when called on it), but as far as I know she hasn't herself issued one of these:

So while I think Palin deserves the condemnation she is getting for the "blood libel" nonsense, I think she does have a point that she's being unfairly targeted in general as a source of the violent rhetoric that flourishes in the right wing. She's not the one who fantasized about a terrorist attack on San Francisco. That was Rush Limbaugh. She's not the one who said a suicide truck bomb targetting the New York Times would be a good idea. That was Ann Coulter. She's not the one who said the murder of Nancy Pelosi and Michael Moore would be a good thing. That was Glenn Beck. Palin is an idiot, and intentionally or not, her rhetoric certainly hints that she holds eliminationist views. But heaping special anger at Palin ignores the role of the real sources of these views -- which, as the embattled Sheriff Dupnik of Tucson AZ points out, emits especially from conservative "commentators" like Ann Coulter and the hosts of hate radio and Faux News. *NOT* from Sarah Palin, who may wink at such rhetoric, but not to the extent of issuing a liberal hunting permit like Ann Coulter regularly does.

-- Badtux the Eliminationists-r-GOP Penguin

If you don't learn technology, you *will* be a victim

At least two of the liberal bloggers that I follow have now been cursed with car troubles that would be cheaply repaired if they had the slightest clue about that box on wheels that they get into every morning to go to work. As in, the parts to repair their vehicle cost less than $100, and if they went to Wal-Mart and bought the necessary tools they'd have a hard time getting above $50, yet they ended up paying over $500 to a garage to fix it. Not necessarily because the garage ripped them off, but because by the time you put a car up on the lift, remove a part, and replace it, you've used a lot of time and infrastructure that the garage could use to repair real problems, and they're going to charge you for it.

Look: The automobile is not magic. It's technology -- late 19th century technology, even. There isn't a single thing in my Jeep that a time traveler from 1920 could not fix with a few references to the service manual. He would not understand how the black boxes sparked the spark plugs and adjusted the fuel mixture, but he would know what they were doing, because there isn't a single principle underlying today's automobiles that was not known in 1920. He couldn't fix the black boxes, but he'd know to replace the black box that is attached to the spark plugs if he pulled a spark plug and didn't see a spark, even if he had no idea how that black box worked. Because spark plugs today are the same damned things they were in 1920, yo. Ain't nothin' new here that the time traveler from 1920 wouldn't figure out quickly, unlike, say, the latest personal computer attached to the Internet.

Yet I continue to read liberal bloggers who apparently haven't a clue. It doesn't take a frackin' genius to understand how cars work. All it takes is a couple of books from your local public library and a good look at the insides of your own car. By the time I was 10 years old I knew how a car worked... because I could read. Yes, read. Not because of magic. Not because I was somehow endowed with mystical powers of Mek. I *studied* it, just like I study anything else I want to learn. Because that's all it is -- learned skill. Not one I'm particularly good at (otherwise I'd have gone into the business, but I'm too darned slow at wrenching to make a living that way), but look. When my pitman arm boot got bummed up and let grease out of the tie rod end and it developed slop, I didn't pay a garage $500 to fix it. I unbolted the end at the steering box with a big crescent wrench ($10 at Wal-Mart), grabbed a big hammer ($5 at Wal-Mart), and went *WHACK*. I then loosened the nuts on the clamps that keep the tie rod end from turning in its socket, unscrewed it from its socket, screwed the new one back in to the same number of threads showing that the old one had shown, bolted everything back together, and that was that. I paid $80 for the OEM tie rod end, already had the crescent wrench, and that was all she wrote.

It doesn't take a genius to do the above, just a willingness to study the service manual to figure out how your car steers. I wasn't born knowing how a car steers, I studied it. And so I paid $80, when a garage would have charged me a minimum of $200 to do the same thing ($120 for the full retail for the part, $80 labor for the hour to whack it out and whack it back in and center the steering wheel again). Yet again and again, I see people who refuse to learn about the things they rely on in their everyday life, who insist upon making everything magic. And then they're shocked, shocked I say, when they get ripped off... but look. If you refuse to learn about the world, you will be victimized. That's just how it works. Ignorance is not an option unless you're a Republican -- and you're not a Republican, are you? Are you?!

-- Badtux the Knowledge-seeking Penguin

Markos Moulitsas is the world's dumbest political operative

Just got an email from ole' Commodore Markos today where he comes out for doing away with the filibuster. WTF? Does he not recall the Bushevik years, where the filibuster was often the only thing between America and utter disaster at the hands of idiot Republican majorities? There's something to be said for making the filibuster harder (WTF is this modern stuff about simply saying "I filibuster!" and that's it? Even Strom Thurmond had to don a diaper and pontificate from the Senate floor for several days to filibuster civil rights legislation!), but doing away with the filibuster is not something that makes me feel good about the future of the United States -- especially since the composition of the Senate is profoundly undemocratic, giving small Republican-dominated states a larger voice than they should have. Way to guarantee Republican domination, Commodore Markos!

-- Badtux the PoliSci Penguin

In which I apologize to Michael Steele

And... hell freezing over here folks... agree with Ann Coulter.

The subject? Afghanistan as "Obama's war", which we're losing. The fact of the matter is that Obama ran on a platform of expanding U.S. involvement in Afghanistan, and has in fact done so. Steel is right -- Obama now owns Afghanistan, even if the Chimperor got us there. And we're losing, for the simple reason that we have no achievable objective in Afghanistan and thus nothing to win.

The fact of the matter is that invading Afghanistan makes sense only if your intent is to make it part of your own empire, with your own people in charge. The last man to successfully conquer Afghanistan was Tamerlane, who succeeded in 1370 via the simple expedient of genocide of any areas that resisted and then putting his own governor in place to rule it as part of his own Timur Empire. Tamerlane had two advantages: 1) He didn't give a shit about the locals and had no problems slaughtering them to the last man, and 2) He didn't have supply lines. None. His army fed itself by seizing the food from the conquered folks, after all they didn't need it anymore (since they were dead, mostly). Every attempt to invade Afghanistan since has been to put a more pliant local leader into power, and every one of them has been a disaster, up to and including the current one.

In other words, unless we want to make Afghanistan the 51st state, there's nothing to "win" there, and thus by definition we're losing. Michael Steele was right. And Ann Coulter is right when in today's World Nut Daily she points out that Michael Steele was right. Hope is not a plan, and change is not a strategy, but those are pretty much the only two things Obama has deployed in Afghanistan that the Soviets and British didn't deploy before him. Will they make a difference? Not bloody well likely...

-- Badtux the Tongue-biting Penguin