Silly reporter thinks 1st Amendment means something

"This is America", the reporter told the police officers. "I have the right to talk to anybody I want to talk to."

He found out different.

The Constitution and the freedom of association written into the 1st Amendment, after all, is just a piece of paper. As Chairman Mao put it, power flows from the barrel of a gun. And we have almost a million registered "peace officers" working for governments here in the United States -- or 1 out of every 200 adult Americans carries a badge and a gun and is authorized by the State to use it as required to maintain "public order", Constitution be damned. As a reporter for the New York Times just found out the hard way, though at least they didn't tase him. If he'd gotten one bit more uppity, though, I'm sure they would have.

Welcome to Soviet America, sheep.

-- Badtux the Soviet Penguin

Why does racial bigotry continue in America?

Friday I was walking with an office-mate from India, and she asked me a question that I could not answer. She says that in parts of the country she can walk into a store or restaurant and they ignore her or say that the store or restaurant is closed or otherwise make it clear that people of her color (about the same color as the typical Mexican) are not welcome there. Sometimes when she talks to them and they realize that she's not Mexican they'll serve her, but her question is, given that the state religion of the United States is commerce and the God worshipped by people in the United States is the Almighty Dollar, why would anybody turn down the chance to make money off of her just because of her skin color?

I threw out some speculations -- maybe they're scared of brown people (I pointed out that our television shows, which are what tells most Americans what they're supposed to think and feel, invariably demonize dark-skinned people as criminals or evil people), for example -- but by and by, I just had to throw up my hands and say, "I don't know!". I mean, it's not as if she's asking to marry their sons or anything. She just wants to buy a soda or get a meal. Why would they turn down her money just because of her skin color?

Discuss.

-- Badtux the Puzzled Penguin
[Cross-posted at the Medley]

RomneyHillaryCare vs. Medicare For All: A comparison

(Note: Bumped to top of blog for the rest of this month).

	RomneyHillaryCare	Medicare For All
Enrollment method	Requires individuals to purchase health insurance either from current insurance programs or from a new government-run insurance program	Automatic -- all individuals residing in America are automatically covered by Medicare For All.
Method of Funding	Billing of individuals by insurance companies, combined the existing Medicaid tax for subsidizing lower-income insurance purchasers	Already-existing Medicare payroll deduction, increased to cover full cost of program and with employer matching of the employee portion, combined with a deduction from Social Security recipients' Social Security checks
Enforcement costs	Requires significant enforcement costs, up to and including imprisonment, in order to obtain compliance with the mandatory insurance purchase requirement. Enforcement is against 120,000,000 households, rather than 10,000,000 businesses.	No additional enforcement costs -- current already-existing Medicare tax enforcement against the 10,000,000 businesses in America suffices, which is much less expensive than enforcing a new mandate against 120,000,000 individual households.
Additional government bureaucracies created	5 - a new government-provided health plan distinct from Medicare with its own bureaucracies for enrollments, billing, and payments, a new government bureaucracy to handle computing and distributing health insurance subsidies to lower-income Americans, and a new enforcement bureaucracy to enforce the purchase of insurance	-2 - eliminates current Medicare enrollment and billing bureaucracies (everybody is automatically enrolled thus no need for a new enrollment bureaucracy, and the funding method eliminates the need to bill anybody unlike Medicare which is required to bill people who are receiving Medicare but not Social Security because they're still working)
Savings in insurance marketing costs	Increases marketing costs, since now marketing must be directed at 120,000,000 households rather than 10,000,000 businesses	100 percent savings. No marketing costs -- everybody is automatically enrolled
Savings in billing costs	Increases billing costs, since now 120,000,000 individuals must be billed rather than 10,000,000 businesses.	Over 100% savings -- total cost of plan piggy-backs on already-existing Medicare payroll tax already taken out of your paycheck and eliminates the current Medicare billing bureaucracy (for working Medicare recipients not yet receiving Social Security)
Savings in insurance claims processing costs	slight increase, due to new government bureaucracy	Drastic decrease -- dealing with only one program (Medicare For All) rather than with thousands of plans provided by hundreds of insurance companies will result in at least 15% average reduction in costs for the typical physician practice, and probably more.
Savings to businesses	100 percent -- now individuals, not businesses, pay for health insurance.	Increases costs for businesses that currently do not provide health insurance because the amount taken out of paycheck as Medicare tax is matched by the employer in the same way as the current Social Security tax. Decreases by at least 50% costs for employers who currently provide health insurance.
Savings in individual insurance premiums	Most people will see higher premiums than under their old employer-provided plans, due to higher billing and marketing costs. Inability to enforce the insurance mandate means little savings due to no longer having to bear cost of care for uninsured.	Dependent on income, if you count the Medicare payroll tax as a premium. Lower income people will see a drastic savings, upper income people will see a drastic increase, most will pay less than today because total cost of the program is less.
Coverage for pre-existing conditions	Mandated	Everybody in America is automatically covered
Percentage of individuals uninsured	Roughly 10%, consisting of people who do not file income tax statements (and thus are not tracked by RomneyHillaryCare), are here illegally and thus do not qualify for subsidies for low-income households, or simply cannot afford health insurance even with the subsidies provided under RomneyHillaryCare for low-income households.	None -- everybody in America will be automatically covered, regardless of income status or immigration status.
Overall savings	Increases overall costs of health care in America, due to the cost of the additional federal bureaucracies and cost of billing and enforcement	Decreases overall costs of health care in America by at least 25% due to elimination of all billing, marketing, and sales costs and drastic reduction of claims processing costs due to economies of scale.
Consumer choice of physician	Limited As is currently the case, you will be required to "choose" a physician who is part of your particular PPO or HMO.	Drastically improved. With Medicare for All, you can go to any physician, anywhere, and receive care.
Consumer choice of health care coverage	Moderate increase in consumer choice. Right now you are limited to what your employer provides. You will be able to choose any plan you can afford under RomneyHillaryCare.	Moderate increase in consumer choice. While everybody's base level of health care coverage will be the same, you can choose to purchase MediGap insurance from private providers at extra cost to provide additional coverages beyond those provided by Medicare under Medicare For All.
Ability of states to create their own health plans different and distinct from the national plan	Eliminated.	Eliminated

Well that fuggin' sucks

How long does it take the fuggin' cops to search one stupid apartment complex?!. (Sorry for crappy photo, that's all my cell phone will do in these conditions).

Yeah, that's the scene I've been staring at for the last three hours. Other folks tell me the apartment complex was blocked off at about 4:20. It is 9:50 right now (i.e. almost 6 hours later). Meanwhile, I saw a black dude with a very fancy afro walking down the street about half a mile from said apartment complex. Huh. Seems to me the dude done got away.

Oh, BTW, they lie. They say they told us to go to the elementary school? Nobody told us jack fucking shit. We all just stood around and watched the cops, then used our Internet-enabled cell phones (which is what this is coming via) to find out what the fuck was going on. Those of us with spouses in the complex called to see whether they'd been told to stay indoors, and... uhm, no. The only reason they know to stay indoors is because it was on the news, and a couple of folks have had cops draw down on them when they didn't know and they walked out their front door into the middle of this shit.

Oh, the funniest part -- the Santa Clara PD has their police helicopter out. Do you know how fuggin' much that goddamn thing costs per hour to keep in the air? Do you know how fuggin' *USELESS* that goddamn thing is at night? About the only use it could possibly be would be if the guys on the ground needed something spotlighted from the air, because otherwise you aren't seeing jack shit in the dark. But hey, their pilot gets to play fly boy and use this expensive piece of equipment that otherwise just sits in a hangar at the airport sucking up money (it's not as if Santa fuckin' Clara is the goddamn crime capital of the world, after all!), so I guess that's all right...

Sigh. Elementary school, or office. Fuggit, if I'm going to sleep somewhere besides my own bed, I'm going to the office. At least I have high speed internet there, unlike this cell phone shit. And the couch in the engineering conference room is soft, soft, soft...

-- Badtux the "Singin' Alice's Restaurant" Penguin

Aftermath: It's 10:40 and the cops are gone now and I'm safely esconced upon my iceberg. They didn't get the dude. Duh.

A modest proposal on Iraq

The U.S. Senate has voted to recommend splitting up Iraq into three nations. No word yet on whether the three nations will be called "Regular", "Premium", and "Diesel".

This recommendation builds upon success after success insofar as American plans for Iraq go. Why, with such a spectacular record of success at brilliantly imposing Western thoughts upon Arab minds, there's nothing that could go wrong with this plan. Except, well, that 96% of Sunnis and 56% of Shiites in Iraq want a single unified country. But hey, they're just Iraqis. We know better, as is exemplified by the fact that Iraq is such a peaceful, democratic nation today where our troops are showered with rose petals wherever they go and our politicians can walk the streets of Baghdad freely with no armed escorts with no fear except maybe suffocating under the showers of rose petals.

No word, yet, on whether the Senate will now take up the issue of dividing Canada (where tensions between French-speaking Quebec and the English-speaking remainder of the country continue to cause frictions) or Belgium (where the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish have thus far been unable to form a government to rule the nation). As for the notion that these countries should decide for themselves whether to split up, rather than have it imposed at gunpoint by a foreign power... heresy! Traitor! Why do you believe that people who, like, actually live there know more about their own nation than Americans? Why do you demean the sacrifices of brave Americans everywhere? Why do you hate America? U S A! U S A! U S A! Fuck yeah!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Bath Time

"You want to give me a bath? HAHAHAHA Good luck!"

- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Fear factor

Well, the nation survived Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s visit to the United States. He didn't set off a nuclear bomb in downtown Manhattan, he didn't release a toxin into the air that, like, KILLED US ALL, he didn't do anything, really, except blather, blather, blather. Duh. That's all the power he has, under the Iranian Constitution, which reserves all real power in Iran to Ayatollah Khamenei. What, Ahmadinejad is going to kill us with his breath or somethin'?

Now, some folks have questioned the manners of Columbia University President Lou Bollinger, whose 15 minute introduction of Ahmadinejad was, well pretty harsh. There's some folks who say that saying bad things about your guest to his face is, well, rude. But those people simply don't get the point. The emotion I saw most on Lou Bollinger's face was not hatred, or disgust, or anything like that. What I saw most was fear. He feared that, if he did not demonize Ahmedinejad in exactly the same way as the media-spread orthodoxy, he would be hounded from his position as doctrinally unsound, and relegated to some ghetto of American existence wherein lie the "kooks" and "cranks", eventually to be found shuffling the streets in a shabby bathrobe occasionally muttering, "brother, spare some change?" to their imaginary friends. Soviet America enforces doctrinal orthodoxy via a variety of ways, the most common of which is to destroy those who dare ask questions that threaten the doctrinal orthodoxy. Just ask Juan Cole if he's ever going to get another university teaching position or ever get a promotion at his current one. Ain't happening, because he refuses to spout the Party line as enforced via our media, talk show hosts, etc.

Reminds me of a day 50 years ago, when if you said hello to one of the black students who were just forcibly integrated into your all-white school, you were shunned as a "nigger-lover" and treated the same as the black students (i.e. like shit). It's the same sociological principle at work, except at a far, far larger scale. Free speech, it appears, is something that happens elsewhere. This is America. If you are in a position of importance or speaking to one of importance (as vs. a random penguin blathering to fellow odd fowl) and speak freely here in Soviet America, you will be demonized, ostracized, or tasered. Compliance with the Party orthodoxy is required, not optional, in Soviet America once you get past the point of being a random penguin on the street blathering to fellow odd fowl.

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

Progress!

In September 1957, Little Rock High School was a racially segregated all-white high school that received more funding than the racially-segregated all-black high school in the community. In response to Supreme Court rulings requiring desegregation and requests by the School Board, soldiers were dispatched to allow the Little Rock Nine to enroll.

In September 2007, fifty years later, Little Rock High School is a racially-segregated all-black high school that receives less funding than the racially-segregated all-white high schools in the surrounding area. There are currently no plans to desegregate either Little Rock High School or the racially-segregated all-white high schools in the surrounding area.

Progress! No more white kids throwing glass at black kids! It is clear that racism is dead in America! Woot!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Meth heads and shotgun shells

So my property manager calls me this evening and tells me that some meth head stole the copper wiring out of one of my properties. He started at the disconnect from the power company and just ripped out the main feed all the way back to the breaker box.

He said he called the cops, but nothing would happen. Yeah, I know the feeling. Personally, I don't even bother calling the cops anymore unless I need a report for the insurance company. As far as I can figure, all that cops are good for nowdays is catching the occasional drunk driver and writing up reports for the insurance company. It's not as if they actually solve crimes or anything like that. That would be, like, work. The only time a crime ever gets solved is if the victim puts out a reward and someone calls and narcs out the perp. Otherwise, well, the donut munchers get paid the same whether the crook gets caught or not, so why do they care?

So anyhow, I'm out several hundred bucks to get my main feed put back in so that he can move my next tenant in (previous tenant is in the hospital and, alas, doesn't seem like she's going to get out except in a coffin). At least they didn't rip out the conduit or anything, that's all still there. Folks wonder why I have such a piss-poor attitude about cops. It's mostly because they haven't done shit for me except take reports. The only time a crime was ever solved was when I solved it myself -- by noting that the thief had cut his hand on the glass when he smashed in the patio door, then following the blood spots to the door of another apartment in the complex, and gosh darn it wouldn't you know that the cord of the stolen stereo was poking out from under the door? Even there I had to practically cattle-prod the donut-muncher to actually follow that blood trail. Anything else... nada.

So anyhow, Hugo Zoom wonders why folks in rural areas are getting pissed and talking about shooting the meth-heads themselves. Of course they're getting pissed. Of course they're talking about administering justice via the barrel of a gun. That's what happens when the normal machinery of civilization just doesn't work anymore. Folks fall back on an earlier model, where justice is what you render out yourself via the barrel of a gun. Problem is, the final result of that is the situation in failed states like Iraq and Somalia. Something that our Bushevik leaders ought to take heed of, because they aren't going to be any better off than Sheik Abdul-Sattar Abu Risha if things get that bad here in the USA.

-- Badtux the Uncivilized Penguin

In the Deserts of The Heart - Chapter 2, Part 1

Chapter 2
---------

It had been ten years since Jerry Rawlings had prevailed over the Bureau of Land Management and they'd issued the deed for the Wishing Well Mine and Mill Site. It had been fifteen years of legal wrangling before then, over the fact that his granddad had patented the mining claim decades before yet the BLM refused to admit it and indeed had ordered him out of his home. A pair of BLM rangers had come out to his home to burn it down as "abandoned property", that being a time when BLM rangers were regularly spotted burning down backwoods cabins as "public nuisances". That had been shortly after the cell phone tower went up Roger's Peak, and luckily Jerry was line-of-sight. He'd called the judge, the judge had immediately written out a court order, and while the BLM rangers were stomping around outside threatening him, the Sheriff and two of his deputies came by and served the court order on them ordering them to cease and desist or be jailed immediately for contempt of court. It took the two BLM rangers a while of talking to their superior, but they finally left. Two years later, the BLM had finally issued the deed.

Since that time, Jerry had fixed the place up pretty nice. While he had a 30kw propane-powered generator out back, he rarely had to fire it up, thanks to a row of solar panels on his roof. The BLM had cut his water line, claiming he had no water rights to the Wishing Hole Spring, but all he had to do to foil them was drill down 40 feet to the granite shelf that the water from the spring ran along and suck the water out from there. He had a windmill pumping the water back up to a water tower on the hill above his house, and a backup electric pump that he ran once a month just to make sure it worked. It was a damn sight more complicated than a simple pipe to Wishing Hole Spring, but given that the BLM rangers kept coming in and vandalizing his pipe every time he fixed it, well...

His wife had run to Ridgecrest with the grandbabies to do some shopping and he was there by himself when someone smashed into his locked gate with a sound like a small explosion. Jerry grabbed his 30-30 and ran out onto his front porch. Some durnfool was driving a big Chevrolet pickup truck way too fast up the canyon towards his house. Jerry pondered a second, then decided anybody willing to smash through a locked gate was up to no good, and moved out to where he could get a down-the-throat shot at the front tire. Easy now... squeeze... yeah!

The truck veered wildly, almost flipping before it came to a stop sideways in the canyon. A wild-haired man jumped out and looked around wildly, then spotted Jerry sighting down on him with the rifle and jumped back in. The man started the truck back up, turned it around, and drove out the way he'd come, flat tire and all.

Jerry just stood there for a few minutes, listening to the sound of the truck's engine fade away around the bend of the canyon. It stopped for a few minutes. Changing the tire, Jerry figured. Then it started up again, and faded out.

Now that was interesting, Jerry thought. He walked back up to the house, and fished the bag phone out and gave a call to the Sheriff's office. "Is Ray in?" he asked Marlena, the red-headed dispatcher who was seriously hot in a curvy sort of way but way too young for Jerry, something that had crept up on him. How had he gotten old so fast, anyhow?

"Ray's holed up in his office," Marlena said. "Is that you, Jerry? I don't think he has time for fishing. He has a pretty blond thing to worry about."

"Oh yeah. The new woman up Copper King Canyon. I think she said her name was Clair, something like that? I went up there and introduced myself a few months back. Friendly enough li'l filly, but a bit distant. Got that whole thousand yard stare thing going, y'know?"

"Clarissa, I think. Anyhow, she's had someone poking around, and wants one of our deputies to come out and see if he can figure out who it is and what they want."

"Is that so? I was just wanting to talk to Ray about my own visitor. He smashed through my front gate and was driving hell-bent for my house. He mighta accidentally picked up a flat from some lead poisoning, if you get my drift, and decided to leave. Wonder if that has anything to do with Clarrisa's problem?"

"You ain't shootin' trespassers again, are you?"

"Well, sorta," Jerry said, embarrassed. There'd been a big stink when some of them Sierra Club types had cut the lock off his gate and traipsed right on in, and he'd fired a warning shot in their direction. One of them had gotten irate and huffily stormed at Jerry, and Jerry had promptly put a bullet through the man's shoulder. The man had survived. Filed a complaint with the Sheriff's office, of course. Jerry just told the Sheriff, "I'm sixty-five years old, he was a twenty-somethin' youngster with muscles threatening to beat me up for tellin' him to get off my land, I defended myself, ain't a jury in this county that would convict me." Which was true. Everybody knew Jerry, and knew if he shot someone, that someone needed shootin'. But still, it was a lot of fuss, especially the lawsuit.

"Is this guy going to be filing a complaint?"

"Over a spare tire? After he destroyed my gate? I doubt it. Anybody who would smash a pickup truck through a locked gate ain't got no good in mind."

"Well, maybe your visitor has something to do with Clarrisa's problem. I'll tell Ray."

"'Preciate it." He hung up the phone, and went back inside and turned off the television. Satellite TV was ruinin' folks, he figured. When he was younger, the only entertainment was what you made for yourself with the piano or banjo or harmonica. Nowdays...

He strapped on his big .45 automatic and headed out the side door to the workshop. He seemed to recall having some chain there. Ah. Yes. A twenty-footer. He dug around until he found a spare lock that would fit through its links, declared it good enough, and found some yellow marker ribbon. He tossed it all into the back of his old Jeep Wagoneer 4x4, and drove down to his gate to see what had happened.

The gate was a bit dented, but he'd welded it up of some pretty hefty pipe, and it was still pretty much intact. The lock on the chain, on the other hand, had disintegrated. The chain itself still looked fine. Jerry got the other lock out of the Wagoneer, chained the gate back up, then stopped to think a bit. What if this fellow met his wife and grandchildren on the road, coming back from Ridgecrest?

He headed back up to the house and tried to raise his wife on the CB radio. A 20 foot mast got his signal out pretty far, but she either was out of range or otherwise occupied. It was the otherwise occupied thing that bothered him.

Jerry sighed, collected his wife's .38 and his grandchildren's .22 rifles, went back out to the Wagoneer, and headed back out, locking the gate behind him as he left. He figured he was going to go wait where the road hit pavement to make sure that the crazy man wasn't going to bushwhack her. And if the crazy man tried to bushwhack him instead...

Well, that was why the .45 ACP was on his hip, after all.

Hillary Clinton is a scheming bitch

And I have absolutely no problem with that.

I'd rather have a scheming bitch as President than a naive boy scout or an inexperienced orator who thus far is all fluff and no substance, or god forbid any of the Republican assholes. Actually, I'd like to see Bill Richardson, the most experienced guy in the race on either side, as president. But it ain't happenin'. He doesn't have the money to put together a credible organization and as a balding fat guy he's not telegenic enough for the Shallow Hals and Shallow Harriets out there.

Yeah, I know all the negatives about Hillary, like her lame-ass health care plan, her pandering to the Israel lobby, etc. But put Hillary up against, say, Julie Annie, and she'd rip his guts out. She's a scheming bitch. And that's just what's needed right now to feed some Republicans their entrails. She's slick, she can raise a ton of money, she has the best advisors money can buy, she campaigns like an animal and any attempt to swift boat her would get belly laughs from an American public that already knows who Hillary is and who aren't going to get distracted by any nonsense that the right wing comes up with (what, they're gonna say she assassinated Abraham Lincoln next? Nobody listens to that crap anymore). Sadly, we already know Edwards rolls over like a puppy when some Republican front group barks at him, and Obama is in the same position as Kerry was in 2004 -- a position where he's still ripe to get defined by the Republican media in some way. The Republican media can't do anything to Hillary. They've already tried it all, and it didn't work. So, in celebration of my new first lady, here's the song I'm going to use to commemorate my new first choice for Democratic nominee:

Yeah!

-- Badtux the Bitchy Penguin

Ahmadinejad is Hitler

All this week, the wingnuts have been whining about that mean President Ahmadinejad of Iran visiting America. "It's like inviting Hitler to visit!!" they exclaim in that cute hyperventilating manner that they all have, as if they're not getting enough oxygen to the brain and, like, have to use lots of exclamation marks!!! to make up for the fact that, like, they're blue in the face and speaking gibberish!!!!

Okay, so unlike Hitler, Ahmadinejad hasn't invaded anybody. Indeed, he *can't* invade anybody -- the Supreme Ruler (Ayatollah Khamanei) is head of the Iranian armed forces and has sole power to declare war, the President of Iran only has power over limited internal affairs. So unlike Hitler he doesn't have any armies under his control. Ahmadinejad hasn't exterminated any Jews either, indeed there are Jewish members of the Iranian parliament. And because he has no power to declare war under Iran's constitution, obviously he hasn't declared war against anybody. But... but...Ahmadinejad has SAID MEAN THINGS ABOUT ISRAEL! And saying bad things about Israel MAKES BABY JESUS CRY! WAHHH!!!! So *obviously* he's Hitler. Despite having no armies. Despite invading nobody. Despite exterminating nobody. Saying bad things about Israel is WORSE than all that, because saying bad things about Israel, like, HURTS THEIR FEELINGS! SOB!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Re-fighting the Vietnam war

So a bunch of South Vietnamese refugees, most of whom fled South Vietnam rather than pick up a rifle and go fight the North Vietnamese, wave South Vietnamese flags and chant anti-Communist slogans and want a shopping strip in San Jose to be renamed "Little Saigon".

Give it up, people. You lost. You and your fellow rich Frenchified Catholic South Vietnamese failed to build a national identity for your country, failed to fight for your country yourselves instead relying on the "little people" that you looked down your noses at to fight for you (the fact that you're here is proof of that -- the North Vietnamese could not have taken South Vietnam if every South Vietnamese had been willing to fight to the death, you ran instead of fighting) and you lost. Get over it. This is 2007, 32 years after your beloved Saigon was overrun because you were too busy looting the government coffers to, like, actually buy rifles and bullets and go out there and kill some NVA. It's time to move on.

These South Vietnamese "patriots" remind me of the Confederate "patriots" after the American Civil War and their mythology of the "Lost Cause". The fact of the matter is that if everybody who'd been drafted by the CSA had actually answered the call to arms, the Confederate armies would have been larger than the Union armies. On paper, Joe Johnston's Army of North Carolina outnumbered General Sherman's army by a factor of 3 to 1. Reality, though, is that the majority of Confederate draftees never showed up and Joe Johnston barely had 18,000 men to deal with Sherman's 65,000 men. They didn't care enough about their country to fight for it, and indeed President Jefferson Davis was the most hated man in the Confederacy at the time that Joe Johnston surrendered to Sherman. It was not until well after the war that statues of Jefferson Davis were put up all over the South and he became a "hero of the Lost Cause". At the time of the final Confederate surrender, Jefferson Davis was widely detested as a haughty dictator who'd managed to lose the war for the South via a pattern of micro-management and consistently bad decision making.

But "Lost Cause" mythologies always seem to follow the same pattern, so I suppose I shouldn't be surprised that one has arisen around the South Vietnamese aristocracy-in-exile. But there's one big difference between the Confederate "Lost Cause" aristocracy and the South Vietnamese one. The Confederate aristocracy actually fought, and died in large numbers, for their cause. The South Vietnamese aristocracy never did. They had people for that.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

A moment of noise

... for Marcel Marceau, who died Saturday in France at age 84. A moment of silence for a mime would be so... ordinary.

-- Badtux the Obituary Penguin

The Guns of November

Over at Balloon Juice, TimF wonders why Republicans appear to want a) a totalitarian police state, but b) also want people to be able to anonymously purchase assault weapons.

Actually, it makes a lot of sense if you think about it. Any totalitarian state depends upon a plentiful supply of anonymous “brownshirts” to enforce their rule. Furthermore, any totalitarian state relies on the fact that people with moral qualms are less efficient and effective at using things like assault weapons and less likely to purchase them than amoral people who enjoy killing. The net result is that any “successful” totalitarianism relies on the support of anonymous amoral murderers for its “success” in keeping the remainder of the populace under control, and by and large does not mind that the majority of the population is heavily armed, because the minority of amoral murderers has far greater combat effectiveness due to their willingness to use their weapons and the fact that there is no list of who is one of the “brownshirts” thus you can’t know whether any particular person you encounter is a “brownshirt” or not. See: Sadaam’s Iraq, where everybody had an AK-47 in the bedroom and an RPG launcher and extra ammo buried in the garden, but Sadaam generally had no problem staying in power as long as he paid off the amoral murderer minority by giving them special privileges and goodies.

In short, there is no contradiction between a nation flooded with firearms and dictatorship. As long as the dictatorship provides special privileges and such to the minority of people who are amoral murderers, the amoral murderers will then keep the rest of the populace in check no matter how many weapons the rest of the populace possesses. It’s much like the reason why despite owning firearms I do not carry a firearm in public, even back when I lived in a state where they handed out concealed weapon permits like candy. The reality is that in a face-off between me and an amoral murderer, I would still be trying to figure out whether the situation called for deadly force at the same time that the amoral murderer was plugging my plump penguin ass. Those “moral qualms” things just don’t make for effective use of firearms, which is why one of the first things that the military does with new recruits is make sure that any moral qualms about use of firearms to kill people get quite thoroughly squashed under layers of training.

-- Badtux the Gun Penguin

In the Deserts of The Heart - Obligatory notes

This is fiction, and it's currently being written. It's only up to 13,000 words at the moment (or roughly 1/10th of the way to the 100k words that make a nice-sized novel nowdays), but is going smoothly and I know how it ends (note: not a happy ending). I'm mostly posting it here to keep me focused on cranking out prose. Some notes:

1. Don't think that you know any of the geographic locations that I talk about. I deliberately fictionalized some of the geography in order to protect the privacy of real people who live in the real locations. You'll notice me occasionally talk about real locations that seem to give you a geographic bearing, such as Roger's Peak, or real towns, such as Ridgecrest or Independence, but the actual geography I present is not the real one. While it roughly occupies the same territory as Inyo County, it isn't.

2. Everybody is fictional, of course. The real Inyo County Sheriff's Department bears absolutely no resemblance to the fictional un-named sheriff's department in the novel. That said, some of the background events, such as BLM rangers spotted burning down miners' cabins as "public nuisances" or cutting off the water supply to mining camps that they want to see go away, actually happened, and the tension between the locals and the various Federal agencies actually exist, to the point where the NPS has closed some roads and Inyo County has come right in and re-opened those roads by grading right over the "Road Closed" signs to create a nice smooth road again. Add in the LADWP (LA Department of Water and Power) which maintains a water monopoly in the Owens Valley and uses that as a weapon to punish the locals whenever they get uppity, and you have a nice little stew of tensions going.

3. Don't assume that any character is a character from my first two novels. I haven't made that decision yet. Besides, the second novel didn't go so well, I don't have the skill to do it right yet and pretty much abandoned it in place even though I know what happens and how it ends. Let's just say that if you thought the first one was dark, the second one was virtually infrared on the color scale, and while the second one might tie in to this one, it might not, either. I intend to be deliberately vague on that.

Disaster preparedness: A new approach

They're telling us out here in California that we need an "earthquake kit". Err, okay. I have three gallons of water in the Jeep as well as an axe, chain, and hi-lift (can be used as a poor man's winch), and a couple boxes of MRE's up here in the apartment. But wait. If there's an earth quake, I'm in a multi-floor apartment building and it's likely to at least collapse to the point where it's hard to get any supplies out of my apartment. And, uhm, my water probably has gotten stale. And I need to eat up these MRE's and get some fresher ones, they're getting old too. And while I have several well-stocked first aid kits ranging from the tiny one in my day pack to the mid-sized one in my Jeep to the big one in my linen closet, I have to keep going through them and discarding the expired medicines and replacing them with fresh ones.

While considering all this, I suddenly had a brilliant idea. How about we as a community get together, put a bunch of money into a kitty, and put together a collective set of trained disaster responders and resources in order to keep ourselves alive in the aftermath of a disaster? That way we don't all individually need to stockpile food and water and medical supplies and so forth, we would already have our community stockpiles maintained and available for use and rotated in a timely manner so that they're never stale, all for much less than we'd individually pay to do so because it's cheaper to buy in bulk. The only problem is what do we call this hypothetical organization that we get together and form in order to help us prepare for emergencies and disasters. I could propose the name "government", but that name is apparently already taken by some sort of alien imposition upon the populace that lives only to steal all our money at gunpoint and provide no services in return.

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In the Deserts of The Heart - Chapter 1, Part 2

From time to time Ray went to a bar. It was down a back road, where the tourists never went. He would go to the bar and drink beer and think about his daughter that he hadn't seen for ten years, think about all the things he'd seen over the years, all the people who he'd grown up with and all who were gone, and he'd listen. You learned a lot, listening. Folks talked in bars, and in a county with as few people as his, the grapevine worked fast.

He noticed the woman when he came in. Women did come to this bar. Hard-scrabble women, woman miners who'd gathered their share of scars, weathered women who drank as hard as the men and were almost as ornery. This woman wasn't like them. She was a small woman, blond, dressed in khaki pants and a dusty t-shirt with sweat stains under its armpits, sturdily built with her arms showing sleek muscle but she was too small and quiet to be one of the lady miners who sometimes swept in like a force of nature. This woman didn't talk loud or curse or join in any conversations. She simply sat there, and drank, and stared at nothing at all.

Ray had seen stares like that before. Plenty of young men and women from the county entered the military, the only real job left to young people other than catering to tourists now that the mines were worked out and the factories gone overseas. Some of them didn't come back. And some came back... changed. He wondered where she'd seen combat, which one of her comrades had died. But all his attempts to talk to her had always gotten nothing more than one-word answers, at best.

He'd asked around, and she was set up on an old mining stake up Copper Canyon. There was nothing back there. You needed a Jeep just to get there. But no one was quite sure what she was doing back there. Some folks had noticed that the mine seemed to be being worked again. But that didn't make any sense, because the copper ore left in that mine was so low grade that it wasn't worth carrying off to be milled, even if the woman re-built the road so that trucks could make it to the mine again.

He sat down beside her.

"Another," the woman said to the bartender, pointing to her glass. The bartender came around and filled up her glass out of a can of lemon-lime soda.

"Drinking the hard stuff I see," Ray commented.

The woman turned and stared at him. "Some of us don't want to forget," she said quietly.

Ray blinked, surprised. This was more words than she'd said the entire last time he'd tried talking to her. "Way I see it, if God hadn't wanted us to forget from time to time, He wouldn't have invented beer," Ray said.

"There is no God," the woman said, and turned back to her lemon-lime, and stared deep into its depths.

"Bleak philosophy," Ray observed.

"Reality usually is."

Ray ordered his beer from the bartender, thinking about that. "So why bother coming here?" he asked.

The woman stared at her lemon-lime for a few minutes. Ray waited. He was in no hurry. The bartender brought his beer, and Ray slurped the foam off the top. The place was a dive, but the beer was good. The owner was some yuppie from San Francisco who'd cashed out, dropped out, and decided to open a beer pub somewhere. Nobody quite knew how he ended up here though. But when he'd bought the dive, he'd installed his beer making gear in the back, and now... it was good beer. The best beer in the county, certainly. Not that this was saying much, when the only other beer in the county was Milwaukee horse piss.

"Weakness," the woman said. "I listen."

"Listening isn't weakness," Ray pointed out. "Listening is the only way to learn."

"I shouldn't need it. It's dangerous."

Ray perked up. "Dangerous?"

"Needing anything. If you need, they can hurt you."

"They?"

The woman waved her hand, looked disgusted, and took a sip from her drink.

There were a number of reasons why a woman might want to live alone in the desert. Ray had been out here all his life, and the usual stories blurred together after a while. Abusive boyfriends, abusive spouses, horrible abuses in the past that the woman was trying to forget, or just plain post-traumatic stress disorder where they wanted a quiet life that wouldn't set off an incident. Ray had read her as a combat veteran. The thousand yard stare and all that. But "they?" Perhaps domestic violence?

Ray tried again. "Anyone in particular that the Sheriff's department ought to notice poking around looking for your place?"

The woman shook her head. "All dead, or in prison."

"Sounds like a story you have there."

"Yeah," the woman said. That was all she said. She sipped her drink, then stared into it again. She had, apparently, said all she was going to say. Ray knew better than to press a desert rat further once a desert rat was ready to be alone again, even if said desert rat was a tiny blond woman staring into a lemon-lime rather than a whiskey. The desert was full of stories. Some of them, unfortunately, would never be told.

A few minutes later, the woman looked at him again. "You're the Sheriff?"

"That I am," Ray admitted.

"There's someone poking around outside my place. Just watching from the rocks."

"Want a deputy to come out there and check it out?"

The woman considered. "I don't know. I never got a good look. Just a glimpse. Don't think he or she means me any harm. At least, they could have shot me in the back a couple times and didn't. But skulking around like that doesn't sound good."

"Old boyfriend?"

The woman snorted. "Not bloody well likely. They'd be more prone to throwing themselves at my feet and begging me to come back to the city."

Ray smiled. "Sounds like you broke a lot of hearts in your day. So what happened? How'd you end up out here?"

The woman smiled back, and hopped off her bar stool. "You're cute when you do that cop thing," she said, and reached up and touched his cheek. "Just send someone over tomorrow, okay?" She stared up at his eyes for a few seconds that seemed like minutes, still smiling, then turned away and walked out of the bar.

Ray stared at the door for a minute or so. His heart was thumping.

"She's too young for you," the bartender said.

"Yeah." Ray turned back to his beer.

"Awe shit. She stiffed me again." The bartender stared forlornly at the near-empty glass of lemon-lime soda sitting on the counter.

"You want me to go arrest her or something?"

The bartender considered for a few seconds. "Naw. I'll just add it to her tab, and remember not to serve her next time until she pays up."

"She probably just forgot."

"I don't think she forgets," the bartender said. "Maybe that's the problem. Too much remembering. Clutters the mind."

"I wonder what she's remembering?"

"I don't think I want to know," the bartender said. "Damned shame, whatever it is. Purty thing like that, too."

"Yeah, a damned shame," Ray agreed. He decided he'd been amiss in not finding out more about his new taxpayer. He had her application for a concealed carry permit on file, he'd pretty much rubber-stamped it once the FBI check came back clean because a little lady like that needed some heat for protection, but that was all he knew about her. There was something strange about this whole affair, not the least the notion that someone was poking around her place. He wondered if that was so, or if she was simply imagining things, having flashbacks. Either way, he decided, he was going to run a couple of checks on her when he got back to the office in the morning, then run out there to see about her mystery guest.

That resolved, he drank his beer, and listened, and thought about a daughter he hadn't seen in ten years, and people he'd known, and people gone. And about a small blond woman who had smiled at him and touched him, touched him in more ways than one, and he wasn't quite sure what to think about that.

A tutorial for the Boston Police Department and Massachusetts State Police

This is a bomb: This is not a bomb: This is a bomb: This is not a bomb: This is a bomb: This is not a bomb. So, uhm, could you guys, like, quit threatening to kill people who are, like, carrying around the "not a bomb" stuff? It's, like, totally uncalled for. Thank you!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Afternoon health care snark

If the solution to the problem of Americans lacking health insurance is a new law requiring them to purchase health insurance (a.k.a. RomneyHillaryCare), then it is clear that there is an equally viable solution to homelessness also. Just pass a law requiring the homeless to rent apartments. Voila, no more homeless!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin