Badtux the Snarky Penguin

In a time of chimpanzees, I was a penguin.

Religious fundamentalists are motivated by the sneaking suspicion that someone, somewhere, is having fun -- and that this must be stopped.


Tuesday, August 07, 2007

War is Hell

Wikipedia's Page of the Day is William Tecumseh Sherman, the first modern general -- the first general who truly understood the nature of war in the industrial age.

Read. Discuss. Understand why there was not a single general in the U.S. Army advocating invading Iraq prior to being ordered to do so by Herr Bush.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

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Posted by: BadTux / 8/07/2007 01:49:00 PM  5 comments  

Monday, August 06, 2007

Don't cry for Hiroshima

So, 62 years ago, Hiroshima went up in smoke, and thousands of her citizens too, in the world's first use of a nuclear weapon against a civilian population.

That's supposed to be a bad thing. Like, I'm supposed to feel sad about it or something. But I don't. You know why? Because of the Rape of Nanking. The Bataan Death March. The forced prostitution of women in conquered populations. Military attacks upon every single one of their neighbors except the Soviet Union, generally without provocation or any justification other than a desire for empire and conquest.

What you sow, thus shalt thou reap. If you kill hundreds of thousands of people, do not expect sympathy from me. A government serves only with the consent of its people, for if a people do not consent, if a people refuse to work and pay taxes and enforce the rulings of the government, the government falls. Sympathy when such a people receive in kind what they have sown elsewhere is not in my nature.

What that says about my opinion of my own government and my own people... I shall not go there.

-- Badtux the Bloody-minded Penguin

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Posted by: BadTux / 8/06/2007 11:11:00 PM  6 comments  

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Army recruiting illegals

Yeppers. That's the latest target that the U.S. Army is going after in their quest to fill ranks depleted by the War on Brown People Overseas -- brown people. Mexican brown people. With false promises of citizenship.

Crap, even the Roman Army didn't go that far. They recruited illegals, sure, but they gave the illegals and their families citizenship in exchange for their service.

Hmm, reminds me of another empire that relied on illegal immigrants to staff their army. Say, how's that Roman Empire thingy doin' nowdays? Just askin'!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Posted by: BadTux / 8/02/2007 09:19:00 AM  3 comments  

Monday, July 30, 2007

Fightin' them over there so we don't gotta fight'em over here

Yeah, that's what the tighty righties always say about Iraq, as they cower under their bedsheets in terror of Teh Brown. Thing is, I remember yet another time when we had to "fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here". Except the place was Vietnam. And we really did have terror cells "over here", Communist front groups devoted to "bringing on the revolution." And yeah, they managed to blow up a little shit here and there too.

So how did we defeat "them" (actually, us) over here, even though we didn't defeat "them" (actually, the Vietnamese people) over there? Simple. The FBI infiltrated these groups so heavily that if four radical activists got together to plan an action, three of them were probably FBI informants. The CIA was in on the action too, reporter Walter Pincus of the Washington Post got his start as a CIA operative by infiltrating student groups for example (probably he still is a CIA operative, he tends to break the CIA side of any story in Washington, but what the hey that's how it works in Soviet America). In other words, law enforcement. Duh. And it worked, mostly, until the terrorism started coming from the right-wing (Unibomber, Oklahoma City, abortion clinics, Osama) rather than the left wing. Official Washington was a bit in denial about the possibility of right-wing violence, after so many decades of fighting "the commie threat"=, and did not devote law enforcement resources to infiltrating and neutralizing such groups, instead preferring to go after ill people and people who like viewing videos of kinky sex.

So anyhow, I've heard the latest tighty rightie rhetoric before. Iraq-Nam. Like Viet-Nam, except in urban jungles rather than rural jungles. And you know something? Once we left Vietnam, guess what the VIetnamese people did -- did they follow us over here? Uhm, no. They settled down to rebuilding their country after the many decades of war. Which is exactly what the Iraqi people will do once we leave. But hey, that's drawing on the lessons of history, and tighty righties neither know history, nor care about history. All they care about is their fear of Teh Brown and whatever their political commissars on talk radio and Faux News tell them. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the History Penguin

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Posted by: BadTux / 7/30/2007 08:24:00 AM  3 comments  

Saturday, July 14, 2007

The blood of tyrants

Today is Bastille Day in France, a celebration of the overthrow of the French monarchy. Here is a song which celebrates the overthrow of tyrants. It is the French national anthem. Please go read the English translation of the lyrics and come back.

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. Okay, you're back. So what do you think? Suitably bloodthirsty? Not exactly your typical national anthem, eh, what with all that bit about bloodthirsty ripping of babes out of wombs and such.

Some say that we need our own Bastille Day to overthrow the tyrants who control our nation (who, I might add, are not our elected officials -- they are, for the most part, puppets of the real rulers of our nation, the wealthy elite that prefers to work behind the scenes). The problem is what happens next. Once a people becomes accustomed to blood, there is no end to the blood. Rule of law is over, and rule of gun is the only rule. The end result, typically, is that the worst amongst us come out on top -- those with the least morals, the most willingness to kill upon the slightest whim, the least consideration for the least amongst us.

For the French, the result of overthrowing the monarchy led inevitably to Napoleon, who killed millions during his quest to conquer Europe, including over a million Frenchmen whose lives he threw away. While it would certainly be satisfying to take the puppet George W. Bush to the gallows and stretch his neck, and past that point take all the rulers of America and stretch their necks -- Richard and Helen DeVos, the Olin family, the Bradley family, the Scaife family, etc. -- then what? That road inevitably leads down the same road that the garroting of the French royal family led down -- blood, misery, and millions of dead.

One of the geniuses of our founding fathers is that, by and large, they did not massacre the supporters of the English monarchy once the pro-monarchy forces lost and American independence was secured. Instead, they exiled those supporters to Canada. There was no bloodbath on American soil outside the blood of soldiers. Perhaps, if we are forced to fight a new war of independence against a new monarchy, that would be a reasonable solution for dealing with our own monarchs. Except instead of sending them to Canada (which undoubtedly would not want them), I have a much better idea. Send them to Iraq. Naked. With no possessions. No servants. No soldiers or guards. Drop them naked and alone into the middle of the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad. Hey, if it was good enough for our founding fathers... oh wait, I forget, our founding fathers didn't ship the supporters of monarchy naked to Canada. They tarred and feathered them first. Hmm... stock tip: buy stock in feather companies.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

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Posted by: BadTux / 7/14/2007 11:19:00 PM  6 comments  
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I am a black and white and yellow multicolored penguin making his way as best he can in a world of monochromic monkeys.

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"Keep fighting for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don't forget to have fun doin' it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce." -- Molly Ivins, 1944-2007 "The penalty good men pay for indifference to public affairs is to be ruled by evil men."

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