Wednesday, August 08, 2007

Dastardly darkies break the law!

Let's deport all these illegal immigrants back to where they came. Let's deport all those Negros back to Africa. All those Mexicans back to Mexico. All those honkeys back to Europe. All those Asians back to Asia. America for Americans! America for the Apache/Navajo/Pima/etc.! Send all the illegals back from where they came!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Err, does that mean I need to return to Antarctica? Sigh!

Okay, here's the deal, folks. This so-called 'stepped up enforcement' of the SSN requirement doesn't mean a goddamned thing. Most of the "illegals" work temp jobs -- they're employed by fly-by-night temporary agencies that then contract their services to the "real" employer. They are not employees of their "real" employer, and thus their "real" employer never has to check their social security number. The labor contractor legally has to do so, but he's one guy with a pickup truck with no fixed address, so how is the IRS going to track him down? All this does is hurt small businesses that are trying to do the right thing. It doesn't affect the major employers of the "illegals" at all, since they use the labor-contractor cut-out to avoid having to do things like, e.g., pay social security taxes to the temp workers. It only affects the employers who give real paying jobs to people rather than temp jobs.

Labels: war on brown people

Friday, August 03, 2007

My plan for fixing Iraq

Anybody who proposes a "plan" that does not a) immediately remove U.S. troops from Iraq so that they quit acting like a bull in a china shop and fucking things up (note -- it's a soldier's job to fuck things up, preferably enemies-of-America things, so don't blame the soldiers for this, blame the men who sent soldiers in to do a policeman's job) and, then, b) immediately start paying anybody who's not American to "fix" the situation however they so propose to fix it, regardless of whether the Iraqis are sitting on "our" oil or not, and then, c) pay hundreds of billions of dollars in reparations to the Iraqi people over the next ten years for the damage we've done to their infrastructure and their society... any plan that doesn't call for turning the problem over to someone who, like, knows their shit (which ain't anybody American when it comes to Arab societies)... any such plan should be greeted with only derisive laughter. Because, unfortunately, every single plan that has ever been proposed by any American doesn't pass the giggle test when you run it by an actual Iraqi.

It's time to face facts: We fucked up, and like Bubba in the fancy dish shop, we just ain't got the smarts to fix it. Best thing we can do is get out, and pay for the damage we've done, and hope that the proprietor of that there fancy dish shop can get the old smashed stock repaired or replaced without our "help" (other than our money, of course). At this point in time, anything we do in Iraq, regardless of how well intended, will only make things worse. We might not like knowing that America is not omnipotent and rah rah USA whatchamacallit, but facts is facts, people. We just ain't smart 'nuff as a people anymore to fix even our own fuckin' bridges, much less Iraq's.

- Badtux the Plan Penguin

Labels: iraq, Republican stupidity, war on brown people

Thursday, August 02, 2007

Mitt Romney: Terrorist

See, Mitt Romney sez that the way to get those darkies overseas to love us is to, like, be nice to them. Give them money to buy food and clothes. Build bridges and water treatment plants and roads for them. Open up health clinics and schools for them. That kinda thing. Like Hezbollah does. But any real Republican knows that darkies don't understand it when you're nice to them. The only thing darkies understand is force. That's why Hezbollah is so popular in Lebanon, because they kill so many Lebanese. Uhm, except they don't. They give the Lebanese people free food, run a construction company that builds bridges and houses for them, and so forth. Which darkies view as weakness and thus view you as someone to disdain if you do that kinda stuff for them. Which is why Hezbollah so unpopular in Lebanon. Except they aren't. WAH! Mommy, logic is making my Republican head hurt, make it stop, WAH!

So anyhow, the Mitster stuck his foot into his mouth. But never fear. I'm sure that, like with abortion, universal health insurance, gay marriage, and other such issues where the Mitster believed one thing before he believed another, next week he'll believe that the proper way to deal with those darkies overseas is to bomb and kill them, just like all good Republicans believe. Because, after all, being nice just isn't as much fun. Even if it actually works at gaining friends, unlike the bomb'em to the stone age thingy, but hey, he's a Republican. Logic? BWahahahhah!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: politics, Republican stupidity, war on brown people

Army recruiting illegals

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

Labels: history, military, war on brown people

Monday, July 30, 2007

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

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

Labels: history, war on brown people

Saturday, July 14, 2007

The guerilla in defeat

Look, nobody fights a guerilla war if they don't have to. The only people who fight guerilla wars are the losers. If you can take on an opposing army in a straight-up battle, that's what you do. In Vietnam, the NVA resorted to guerilla tactics not because said tactics were effective. They resorted to guerilla tactics because every time they fought a straight-up battle against the U.S. Army, they got their butt kicked.

"But the U.S. lost in Vietnam!" I hear you say. No. The U.S. left Vietnam. The U.S. left Vietnam because there was no compelling national interest for the U.S. to be in Vietnam. North Vietnam never posed a security threat to the United States, and lacking such a security threat, there simply was insufficient rationale to forever station half a million troops on the other side of the world at enormous expense. Reality is that no guerilla army has ever defeated a professional army using guerilla tactics, and never will. All that guerillas can do is provide pinpricks in the side of a professional army, pinpricks which are painful but not life-threatening by any means. Over time, such pin-pricks can motivate the professional army to go elsewhere, much as the pin-pricks of a thousand flying mosquitos can send a troop of Boy Scouts to the shelter of a screened-in cabin, but the notion of a guerilla defeating a standing army is ridiculous. The Viet Mihn which defeated the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu were not a guerilla army. They did not use guerilla tactics against the French. They were a regular army, equipped with artillery and anti-aircraft cannon, using regular military tactics against an opposing army.

The very fact that you use guerilla tactics is an admission of weakness, because if you had the strength, you would mount a full-scale assault using conventional tactics. But in this particular war, the mercantilists have all the weapons. They control a vast right-wing propaganda machine that has propagandized millions of brownshirts to enforce political conformity amongst wide swathes of the population. The anti-globalism activists reach hundreds of thousands with their tactics. The VRWC reaches millions every single night, every day of the week. And furthermore, the mercantilists can't be pinpricked into leaving the way that the Americans were pinpricked into leaving Vietnam. They were born here. They live here. They have much self-interest in perpetuating their rule over the United States, a rule which is very profitable. They're not going anywhere.

Does this mean the situation is hopeless? Probably not. It is starting to dawn upon the more brilliant of the mercantilists that pure mercantilistic oppression of the masses is probably not in their best interests. A kinder, gentler rule works better in the long run because it keeps the sheep contented and on the farm where they can be more easily fleeced than if they jumped the fences due to harsh conditions. The pinpricks of the anti-mercantilism activists, while not particularly hurting these people, have the potential to grow into something larger if the masses are oppressed harder, and heading off a potential adversary at the pass before he has mobilized his full forces is always a wise thing to do. So while this movement will never win, the very fact that it exists brings some unpleasant facts to the fore that our ruling class had unwisely forgotten. But, as with Vietnam, in the end the decision will be made by our ruling class, not by "we the people", who do not rule this nation and have not ruled this nation since the day it was born (unless by "we the people" you mean a wealthy elite, or, as George W. Bush puts it, "my constituency, the haves and the have-mores"). Our noise is important in leading them towards making a wise choice, but in the end, we will no more defeat the mercantilists using guerilla tactics than the North Vietnamese Army defeated the U.S. Army using guerilla tactics. At best, we're a nuisance. Which, in the end, may be good enough.

-- Badtux the Movement Penguin

Labels: politics, protests, war on brown people

Friday, June 29, 2007

Peckerwoods, suits, and sickos

I ran into it first hand working in the oil industry in the early 1980's. Affirmative Action programs had brought the first black oilfield workers into the shop. As far as I could tell, they were competent and did the jobs for which they were hired just fine, but that didn't stop the peckerwoods from grumbling that "goddamned niggers are taking our jobs". Like, the fucking stupid peckerwoods thought they were *entitled* to those jobs, like it was some natural born right or something. Now the peckerwoods are grumbling about how them goddamned cockroaches from south of the border are taking their jobs. Nevermind that the goddamned moron peckerwoods are stupid as a brick and time after time vote for the same goddamned politicians who set up the system that lets the Mexicans swarm across the border. Nevermind that the peckerwoods are lazy, intellectually interested only in beer and football, and do as little work as they can get away with, to the point where a lot of construction contractors I know will hire *legal* Hispanics over legal peckerwoods simply because the Hispanics will work their goddamned tails off while the peckerwoods just slouch around whining about how they're being picked on by "The Man" for, like, being expected to actually WORK. In the HEAT. In the SUN! Without being waited on hand and FOOT! But will they actually get out there and bust their butts to show employers that they're both capable and willing of working hard and getting the job done? Hell no. They prefer drinking beer and whining about Mexicans taking their jobs.

The recording industry suits are the same way. Rather than listen to the public when the public says that, like, firing 1/3rd of the recording artists and suing thousands of your customers is bad business, what do they do? Why, like buggy whip makers whining about that new horseless carriage, they whine that new technology is rendering their job obsolete and should thus be outlawed! It's the same goddamned mentality. They think the world has an obligation to give them a living. Sorta like the linotype operators at the New York Times who whined that the Times had an obligation to provide jobs for them despite all those fancy new computer typesetting widgets the Times had acquired. They went out on strike, the Times said "fine", turned on the computer typesetting widgets, and the linotype operators never came back from strike because, well, they had no jobs to come back to. Technology happens. When it happens, you either learn the new technology and make a living there, or you learn how to say "Do you want fries with that order, sir?". The world has no obligation to give you a good living in the industry you've chosen. Shit, musicians know that, that's why they have day jobs except for a very very few who are lucky enough to make their living at music full time. The suits are scared as hell that they're gonna join the ranks of barristas at Starbucks who work evenings as roadies on the local bar circuit.

Now we get the health insurance companies and their paid lackeys in the corporate media whining about Michael Moore's new film "Sicko" and his call for universal national single-payer health care. They whine, "what about the hundreds of thousands of Americans who work in the health insurance industry?" Oh cry me a river, you see this . ? Yeah, it's the world's smallest fucking violin. They're not goddamned *ENTITLED* to those fucking jobs. Let'em join the rest of us motherfuckers out here on the free market, who have to show that we goddamned *KNOW OUR SHIT* and work our fucking tails off to get ahead. And the same thing for the billionaire profiteers who own those companies. So their stocks in those companies become worthless? oh WAH! You fucking *CHOSE* to invest in the most evil companies on this planet, and now you're going to whine that your choice was a bad choice? It's your own goddamned fault, you stupid-assed bitches! You and your short-sighted asshole demands for moh profit, moh profit, moh profit at the expense of health care quality destroyed our health care system and kills thousands of people every year (*MORE PEOPLE DIE OF DENIED HEALTH CARE COVERAGE EVERY YEAR THAN AMERICANS KILLED IN IRAQ DURING THE ENTIRE WAR!*), so fuck you. Go jump off the goddamned top of a skyscraper or something, you stupid assholes. You deserve to lose all your money for being such jerks as to place profits ahead of people.

And to all of the people above: *THE WORLD DOESN'T GODDAMNED WELL OWE YOU JACK SHIT!*. *Nothing*. Nada. Not one goddamned thing. If you're too goddamned lazy, greedy, venal, and/or stupid to make an honest living, it's your own goddamned fault. Don't whine that I should bail your stupid lazy ass out because you're too stupid to move into the digital media market or too lazy to compete with Mexicans or too greedy to, like, fucking provide the goddamned health care that we pay and pay and PAY for (15%+ of our Gross Domestic Product, or about twice what a universal single provider health care system would require to cover every single American). Just shut your fucking mouth up and go get a job, you lazy slacker assholes, and quit bothering my fucking ass with your whine whine whine whine (oh do you want fucking CHEESE with that whine, assholes?). I'm tired of it. WAYYYY more than tired of it. Goddamn it, get a fucking CLUE, will ya?!

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

As usual, I cross-post my best stuff over at The Medley...

Labels: health care, music, righteous rants, war on brown people

Thursday, June 28, 2007

Let's party like it's 1953!

As a black and white and yellow multicolored penguin, I am of course concerned about this decision, since it means that my multicolored offspring are likely to never be allowed to mix with pale-skinned monocolored monkeys in the schools and thus will be less prepared to interact with them in the workplace and beyond as they go their migratory waterfowl ways. But hey, gotta keep the darkies in their place, right? Why, if white-skinned monocolored monkeys are allowed to mix with dark-skinned monocolored monkeys, it could... it could... uhm... cause the moon to turn into cheese and fall to Earth and cause a plague of mice? Cause San Francisco to slide into the ocean? Cause everybody to come down with leprosy and die horrible deaths? C'mon, folks, I'm reachin' here, help me out!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: education, war on brown people

Sunday, June 17, 2007

War Porn

War does not create. War does not add anything. All war does is destroy. All war does is consume. War does not help economies, because everything created to fight wars does nothing to make people's lives better. Instead, the bullets and bombs and weapons are destroyed by the act of using them, as if the output of those factories had simply been thrown into a bottomless pit. War takes wealth, and turns it into murder.

Yes, murder. I use that word. War is murder. War is the taking of human lives. War is blood and guts and dead children lying in streets and the smell of piss and shit and the screaming of women and wails of children as they die in the crossfire. War is starvation and thirst, as the supply lines of civilization that keep civilians alive collapse in a hail of bombs and bullets and children shit their lives out in the street from drinking contaminated water and women are shot in the head and guts as they venture out of their homes searching for water and food for their children. Those who fight wars do not do anything glorious, unless you are the serial killer Hannibal Lector and believe that the removal of human life from this planet is the most reverent and sacred act that can be done. War is organized murder committed by governments in pursuit of whatever interests the leaders of those governments are pursuing.

Those who fight wars stink. Literally. For the warrior, war means that bathing becomes a seldom-done thing. The cake of dirt and rancid sweat and oil turns your hair into an oily greasy stuff on top of your head that, trapped under your helmet, fells like some sort of animal clasping your scalp. The acrid smell of rancid body oil and sweat and dirt is a bitter taste in your mouth (your nose has long since shut down and no longer smells it). Your underwear is filthy with urine and with feces because toilet paper is in short supply on the front lines. Sometimes you lay on top of your shit -- if your squad is pinned down and you can't move and you gotta go, well, it's a case of shovel a little dirt out on one side of whatever hole you're hiding in using the butt of your rifle, roll over, drop pants, dump, wipe with whatever you got to wipe with, roll back over, shove a little dirt back to try to cover it up enough to keep from squishing it all over you when you move around. This is oh so glorious and glamorous. And never seen when the war porn comes on.

If the war porn -- the movies, video games, and books that describe war -- ever tried to reflect the reality of war rather than some airbrushed glamorized fiction, people would run screaming from the movie theatres. Teenage boys would stare in shock at their video games as their brother or sister or mother or father were dismembered by a bullet in front of their face, begging for mercy, begging for a bullet to put them out of their misery. But of course the war porn does no such thing. Instead, it paints war as glamor and courage and bravery, as a glorious quest that turns a boy into a man.

And so we soak in war porn, every day. War porn comes on our evening news, a curiously sanitized pornography where war happens, yet nobody dies, where there are no dismembered bodies of children lying around on the ground after a 500 pound bomb blows up a daycare, where the men fighting the war look like movie stars instead of people who are very much in need of a bath, where the smell is never described. The smell. Ah yes, the smell. It is, indeed, lucky for the war pornographer that television has no way to transmit smells.

And so the death and destruction goes on, and everybody salutes and goes "hip hip hoorah!" as the war porn plays on their movie and tv screens. And the word "war", which should be a filthy word like "cunt", "nigger", "fuck", and "bitch", instead is used as a word for glorious quests like the War on Drugs, the War on Terrorism, the war on... well, I suppose this is all appropriate, in a way, since the War on Drugs, War on Terrorism, etc., involve the mass destruction of thousands of human lives as white American claps and says "Yeah! Another porch monkey caged! Another spic sent to jail! Another sand nigger killed like a dog! U S A! U S A!". But the horror of war is not, of course, what most people think of when they see the word "war" used in this way. Instead, all they see is the airbrushed glamor of the war porn in which they are immersed each day.

And so it goes, in the Delusional States of America, land of the war porn and home of the sheeple...

-- Badtux the Porn Penguin

Comment on this over at the Mockingbird's place

Labels: global warming, violence, war on brown people, war on drugs, war on poor people, war on terror, war on women

Thursday, June 14, 2007

Becoming a killer

For those of you who claim you could not be a killer: Do not delude yourself. The Dark Wraith has an interesting little dissertation on the training you get in the Army. The Army as an institution has now existed for 232 years. For every one of those years, it has become better at turning the raw recruits who come through its doors into killers. Volunteer or draftee, willingly or not willingly, it does not matter if you are so kind and gentle that you flinch at swatting a mosquito or crushing a cockroach beneath your shoe. War is Hell, and you shall become not only the instrument of Hell, you shall be Hell. The methods the Army uses do not care about your gentle nature. They work at a deeper level, at the primal level, at a level we try not to think about. A level where even if you know what is happening, you are helpless to stop it. You are not in the Army. You are Army. The Army controls your environment, molds you, shapes you, makes you into what you have to be in order to do your job: a killer.

Go back and read The Fixer's post. Then think about our geopolitical strategy in Iraq, where the only way to "win", the only way for a pro-American democratic government in Iraq to exist, is to win hearts and minds. Then you will begin to understand why we are fucked, and why we shall remain fucked. Our soldiers are good at what they do. They are the pointy end of the stick, that sits between the cruel world outside and protect us from it by killing our nation's enemies dead, dead, dead. Asking them to police Iraq was a fucking stupid idea in the first place. Short of committing sufficient troops and logistics to round up all Iraqis into concentration camps in order to deny the guerrillas the sea of civilians they need in order to disappear into (a classic technique we used in the Philippines to make it safe for, err, Christian missionaries who needed to convert the Catholic population to Christianity), or genocide (the technique Putin is using against the Chechnyans with varying degrees of success), the defeat of the insurgency via force of U.S. arms is impossible.

And we simply do not have the troops for either genocide or concentration camps even if we had the political will in the post-Hitler environment to emulate Hitler to that extent. Even in Vietnam, the Viet Cong were eventually destroyed not by the U.S. Army, but by "President" Thieu's very effective and very brutal secret police (remember the famous picture of a police officer executing a suspected V.C. partisan? That's how it's done, Thieu's brutal dictatorship may not have been capable of motivating the majority of South Vietnamese to defend their nation against North Vietnam, but it was certainly capable of keeping them in line). And we had a helluva lot more troops in Vietnam.

We are fucked in Iraq for so many, many reasons. But the main reason is that our military simply isn't designed for what it has been tasked to do in Iraq. Go read The Fixer's post, and come back and tell me that our military is going to be any use at all in winning hearts and minds and "building democracy". That's not their thing. And wishful thinking on the part of politicians in Washington who've never served and don't know how it works won't change that fact.

- Badtux the Military Penguin The only people who can win a guerrilla war, short of genocide, are the people who live there. Here is how "President" Thieu won his guerrilla war. With our arming of the Sunni, are we looking for a new "President" Thieu?

Labels: war on brown people

Thursday, June 07, 2007

They go to school

But hey, they're just the sons and daughters of sand niggers, so they don't count.

-- Badtux the Saddened Penguin

Labels: education, iraq, war on brown people

Friday, June 01, 2007

White Power!

Bill O'Reilly shows off his nifty white bedsheet:

"McCain and O’Reilly, white power virtuosos:

O’REILLY: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have."

Because, y'know, white males are 36% of the population, yet 79% of the Senate, so they're obviously an oppressed minority and besides, we gotta keep the darkies and uppity wimmins in their place, yassah!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: politics, Republican stupidity, war on brown people, wingnuts

Thursday, May 17, 2007

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day

Of course, it took them *years* to notice that the Busheviks were doing this, while those of us in Blogistan have been ranting about it since, well, since a few months after Mission Accomplished Day when it became apparent that the Busheviks weren't getting us out of Iraq anytime soon including all the firefighters and cops who were in the National Guard in Iraq instead of here protecting us. But hey, they're tighty righties. It takes a while for the thoughts to ooze around in their heads and get to where they can do some good. So let's give'em some slack, eh?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Note: yeah, just got home *again*. The treatise on behavior modification and the notions of "sin" and "redemption" is hereby delayed yet another day. Here, have a snark snack.

Labels: politics, war on brown people, war on terror, wingnuts

Monday, May 07, 2007

I read World Nut Daily so you don't have to

Like all the neo-cons, they're always late to the game. For example, I just got a breathless message from WND. "Iraqi Prime Minister has ties to Iran!" Which is a MEMRI (Mossad) translation of an Egyptian newspaper article, and to which my response is... duh? Look, you stupid neo-con morons, all you had to do was read Professor Juan Cole's excellent web site where he translated articles from the Arab press to that effect literally years before Mossad managed to get around to it. Maliki's ties to SCIRI and its Badr Brigade militia go back literally years. And SCIRI was set up by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards and Iranian intelligence services in the first place as an anti-Saddam force. If you weren't such stupid fucking Mossad suck-ups who refuse to read anything not "ideologically correct", you would have known about this literally years ago.

I mean, c'mon. Back in 2002, before Operation Iraqi Clusterfuck started, I told the dumbasses that invading Iraq would turn it in to Iran West. Shit, George Herbert Walker fuckin' BUSH said the same godammed thing in his memoirs back in '96. What part of "Iraq is sixty percent Shiite" do these stupid fucking neo-cons not understand? But noooo... they knew best. The only problem we were gonna have with the invasion of Iraq, they said, was what to do with all the goddamned flower petals that the population showered us with. Yeah, some flower petals. Are neo-cons the stupidest, most blood-thirsty fucking assholes on the planet, or what?

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Labels: bush administration, iraq, war on brown people, wingnuts

Wednesday, May 02, 2007

News bits 5/2/07

Like the cranky old man said last week, George Bush communicated over a year ago that he would not get out of Iraq until he left office. Do we not believe him? So of course he vetoed the money for our troops. But compromise? There is no compromise possible here. The people of the United States want the U.S. out of Iraq. The Iraqi people want the U.S. out of Iraq. The only people who want the U.S. in Iraq are Iran, Osama bin Laden, and the Busheviks, all of whom find it quite profitable for their interests. Dear Leader already declared victory, why, he even held a big party on an aircraft carrier deck with a big banner saying Mission Accomplished in celebration back on May 1 2003, so the "declare victory" part of "declare victory and go home" is done, but Dear Leader is going to continue supporting his buddies in Iran and al Qaeda, because, well, because he's The Decider and the Decider Decides, yessirree... compromise? He won't compromise. Because the Decider doesn't compromise, the Decider Decides. (Cue that "heh heh heh" smirk ).

Los Angeles police attack TV news crews

A Telemundo TV news crew got their ass kicked yesterday by the Los Angeles Police Department, as a wall of riot police swept through where they were holding court and sent a news reporter and three camera operators to the hospital. That link also shows a Los Angeles policeman beating a Fox News camerawoman with his baton in a scene reminiscent of the Rodney King beat-down (except with more targets getting the beat-down). And of course the Mayor of Los Angeles and the LAPD chief say they're shocked, shocked I say that, well, not that a buncha darkies got beat down, but that it got caught on live television broadcasts and looks bad, if you parse between the lines. (And if you think nortenos like Mayor Villaraigosa care if illegals get beat down, you don't know anything about Hispanic culture, they view the illegals as rustic ignorant nobodies who are taking their jobs).

Your Papers, Please

The Real ID Act calls for a national security card to be implemented. The Department of Homeland Security has been charged with writing regulations about what that national security card should look like. Since DHS is run by Busheviks, they of course don't care about public opinion, but the law says they must gather public input prior to implementing their regulations, so they did a single perfunctory "townhall meeting" at U.C. Davis. At that meeting you had your normal folks out there, civil libertarians concerned about the fact that it's a national ID card, advocates for abused women concerned that P.O. boxes are no longer allowed to be on the card (what about people with no fixed address? Apparently they just, err, don't exist in Soviet America... will they be disappeared to gulags like in Soviet Russia?), advocates for the transgendered upset that their biological sex rather than their adopted sex will appear on the ID card, the director of the California DMV upset that it will force millions of Californians to unnecessarily line up at his offices for new driver's licenses that double as the new national ID card, you know, just the normal kooks and flakes. Hold it. The director of the California DMV??? Why does DMV Director George Valverde want to allow terrorists to swim across the Atlantic with knives in their teeth and sneak into our bedrooms and KILL US ALL ?! Obviously he needs to be deported back to where he came from, he obviously is a terrorist himself. I'm sure that people will welcome him back in his homeland of, err... Los Angeles? Huh. Obviously some kind of funny furriner land where folks ain't like us, like Tuvalu, Nauru, Andorra, and Palau. Why does Los Angeles hate America?

Welcome to Soviet America, comrade

Not that it matters, of course. See, here's how it works. The Decider decides. Or he tells his henchmen/cronies to decide. They then decide, and do whatever they decide. That's how it works, see? Public input? Err, you mean the same public that wants us out of Iraq, the same public that elected a Democratic congress to get us out of Iraq? The public is not the Decider in Soviet America, comrade. The Decider or his designated sub-deciders is the Decider. What part of "Decider" do you not understand?

-Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: news, politics, soviet america, war on brown people

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Random nonsense

Some Bible kiddy came around here and spit out a buncha verses that "prove" that Man is inherently evil. I pointed out that his verses weren't even 1/10th of 1% of the Bible and that a handful of verses out of context didn't mean diddly, but I'm not quite sure of that. Anyhow, it's not true. I've travelled all over this country and in a variety of places in the world, and people is people. Mostly apathetic, mostly self-absorbed and concerned only with whatever is happening in their own lives, true. But evil? No. To me, "evil" means that you actually go out of your way to do bad things. And I just have not met many people like that. And I've met a fair number of people who you probably would not want to invite home for dinner, given the fact that I taught in ghetto schools in two different locations. I've met misguided people. I've met stupid people. I've met people who will come to no good end. But I've met precious few people who actually go out of their way to do harm to others simply to do evil, and the one that I remember best is a neo-con "Christian" from Houston who was always ranting and railing about how he didn't want any of his tax money going to pay for schools for "niggers". (Yes, he used that word, at his own private dinner parties, one of which I attended in hopes of getting donations for the school I was teaching at). If the Bible appears to contradict reality, well, either the Bible is wrong or you are reading the Bible wrong. Pick your poison. If you're a Christian who believes the Bible is Truth, the only conclusion you can come to at that point is that your feeble human reading skills simply aren't capable of fetching God's truth out of text written in human language. If you're not a Christian, feel free to consider the Bible just another bunch of snake oil bunkum intended to seperate sheeple from their money.

Who the hell is Mike Gravel? Some cranky 77 year old who is running for President, apparently. He apparently had to take a city bus merely to get to the Washington Press Club to announce his candidacy. A Democrat of the old populist podium-pounding type. While I agree with some of his stuff, I'm not voting for him -- he's just too goddamned old. But he had some good quotes at the "debate" last week:

• I got to tell you, we should just plain get out. Just plain get out. [... ] It’s [Iraq] their country. They’re asking us to leave, and we insist on staying there.
• You know what’s worse than a soldier dying in vain? More soldiers dying in vain.
• ... this war was lost the day that George Bush invaded Iraq on a fraudulent basis.
• George Bush communicated over a year ago that he would not get out of Iraq until he left office. Do we not believe him? ... How do you get out? You pass the law, not a resolution, a law making it a felony to stay there.
• This invasion brought about more terrorism. Osama bin Laden must have been rolling in his blankets, how happy he was, our invading Iraq.

And oh -- it's the Fourth Annual Mission Accomplished Day, where we declared victory in Iraq... and then didn't go home. Given that we won on May 1, 2003 -- why, The Decider even said we did -- why are we still in Iraq? Mike Gravel is right. We should just plain get out.

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

Labels: iraq, politics, religion, war on brown people, war on terror

Friday, April 27, 2007

The best place for a child is in a prison cell

I most especially applaud the Imigration and Customs Enforcement Agency for refusing to call in the local Child Protective Services to care for children for whom a guardian is not available. When I was in the school system we were directed that if an unattended child was in our custody for two hours after the end of the school day and no parent or guardian were located, we should contact Child Protective Services to take temporary custody of the child until such time as a parent or guardian were located. But the Imigration and Customs Enforcement Agency wisely regards that as just some sissy state law. They are the Department of Homeland Security. They can do whatever they want to, because, like, they're the Federal governent and, like, they got the goddamn ATOMIC BOMB, kapiche? And if you don't like it, you can sleep with the fishes with concrete goulashes! (Or occupy a clean cell at Gitmo as an enemy combatant, whatever). That child needed to be in a cell. It was for his own good.

Yes, I feel safer knowing that ICEA is protecting me from these horrible children, most of whom are even, like, brown (SHUDDER!). If ICEA does not imprison children, why, why... those hideous little brats might sneak into our bedrooms at night and KILL US ALL! Horror!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: civil rights, prison state USA, soviet america, war on brown people

Monday, April 23, 2007

Weeds of Mass Destruction

Silly niCK. Marijuana makes you feel good. If it makes you feel good, it must be Satan's handiwork, like dancing and women wearing pants. Worse yet, it's a method of feeling good that doesn't require sending large sums of money to Big Pharma for Happy Happy Pills, since it is literally a weed that you can grow on your own on your back porch. Big Pharma employs hundreds of thousands of people and pays hundreds of millions of dollars of bribe money to politicians every year. So not only would legalizing marijuana be doing Satan's work, but it would also hurt dozens of hard-working legislators who would have to work for a living instead of live off the Big Pharma payroll, it would hurt dozens of millionaire Big Pharma executives who'd lose a few thousand dollars of their bonus money, but most importantly, it'd hurt all the regular working people who work for Big Pharma, who would lose a few cents off their paychecks if Big Pharma could no longer sell Happy Happy Pills by the bucketload.

Knowing all that, I have just one question for you, niCK: Why do you hate America?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: humor, prison state USA, war on brown people, war on drugs, war on sick people

Beware the Poetry of Mass Destruction!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: prison state USA, sick society, war on brown people

Sunday, April 22, 2007

"Culture of Life" indeedy...

Ah yes, the "Christian" Culture of Life. Offer void at birth.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: abortion, culture of life, health care, religion, war on brown people

Wednesday, April 18, 2007

In case you forgot...

So why the fuck are the goddamned blathering talking heads on television *STILL* talking about some loser doing a one-time slaughter then removing himself from the gene pool, rather than about the continuing slaughter happening EVERY FUCKING DAY in Iraq?

Oh fuggedaboutit, I keep forgetting. One white blond sorority girl at Virginia Tech is worth a million jillion of them overseas darkies who, like, aren't WHITE. Alrighty then! Personally, I think they just ought to provide the white hood and KKK membership upon employment for every major U.S. television news "personality" and every major U.S. newspaper "editor". I mean, c'mon. They push the KKK agenda (white America is all that counts!), why not go all the way and make it official?!

-- Badtux the Ranting Penguin

Labels: righteous rants, sick society, war on brown people

Monday, April 16, 2007

But they're desperate

Yeah, the "surge" thingy sure is workin', ain't it? Them insurgents must really be desperate!! Why, if they weren't desperate, they'd... err.... get a job at Starbucks selling latte's to our brave GI's? Prance around like Japanese sailors? C'mon, somebody, help me here!

-- Badtux the Not-desperate Penguin

Labels: bush administration, iraq, war on brown people

Sunday, April 15, 2007

How much is an Iraqi life worth?

So it goes, in the United States of Delusion, where we pretend that we are a humane and just nation with liberty and justice for all. For all except those people over there who are the wrong color. Or those people over there who worship the wrong god. Or those people over there who speak the wrong language. Or those people over there who ....

-- Badtux the Non-delusional Penguin

Labels: iraq, war on brown people

Friday, April 13, 2007

Flying albatross headed to Iraq

I have mixed feelings about this one. On the one hand, the Osprey isn't safe. It has some significant issues in the software that controls its rotors, and the dadburned things have crashed left, right, up, down, and every whichway. It's fundamentally unstable, and it's fundamentally unstable in a way that no other aircraft in the world is fundamentally unstable, meaning that none of the lessons learned with, say, the F-16, work with it.

On the other hand, the CH-46 Sea Knights that it replaces aren't safe either, for a totally different reason. The Sea Knights are slow fat targets for insurgents. The Osprey, on the other hand, is as fast as a normal prop airplane when it's in level flight, and as quiet as one too, unlike the choppers, which sound like freakin' egg beaters. Its IR signature is insignificant too, which gives IR missiles very little to aim at, and it flys too high and fast for bullets and RPG's to hit. Not to mention that the Osprey has a much longer range than any helicopter, giving the Marines a level of operational mobility that previously was not available.

In the end, given the reality that this thing is going to be used in combat and the chances of it falling out of the sky are probably less than the chances of the Sea Knights getting shot down, I gotta agree with the USMC's decision to deploy. Yeah, it's a risk. But it's not a risk that's avoidable. At least this way when the damned thing crashes, maybe the geeks in the software lab can figure out what the fuck happened and fixed it. When a Sea Knight crashes and kills everybody on board, nobody learns a thing other than that Sea Knights are sitting ducks for insurgents. Doh. Like we didn't already know that...

-- Badtux the Aviation Penguin

Labels: iraq, military, war on brown people

Friday, April 06, 2007

Wingnuts talk up China military threat

China's current defensive posture is, well, defensive -- none of their current weapons other than their few dozen ICBM's are much use for offensive purposes. The Song class diesel-electric boats, for example, while quite stealthy in electric mode (U.S. forces have been embarrassed more than once by one popping in the middle of their exercises after sneaking there undetected), does not have a particularly long range and as far as we know do not have the ability to be refueled at sea, meaning that they are primarily of use for coastal defense. China does not possess any heavy bombers with intercontinental range and as far as we know has no plans to acquire any. The majority of their air force is comprised largely of short-ranged MiG-21 fighters and indigenenous variants thereof which are useless for offensive operations at any significant distance beyond their border. Their Navy is comprised of coastal defense destroyers and submarines and has no ability to sustain operations beyond a few hundred miles of China's coast, lacking tankers and support ships necessary for such purpose. Their Army is large but possesses no useful tanks (just obsolete clones of old Stalin-era Soviet tanks) and thus lacks the primary offensive weapon of modern armies, Chinese investment at the moment is going into producing anti-tank weapons capable of defending against invading M1 tanks, not into a new generation of tanks. Etc.

In the long term, China's military aspirations are something to worry about. As they develop their industrial skills by selling cheap junk to Americans, they also develop the ability to design and build modern weapons. Short term... no. China's current military posture would be hard-pressed to defend the Chinese mainland against any modern adversary, and would successfully do so only because China possesses the advantage of scale (i.e., they have so many of these short-ranged obsolete weapons and so much population base to draw upon, that any attacking military would run out of bullets and anti-aircraft missiles before killing them all).

Even their long-term goal of invading and forcibly re-uniting Taiwan is at least a decade away. Taiwan is defended by modern F-16 fighter jets, the best fighter jet in the world, as well as their own indigeneously-produced fighter jet which is roughly equivalent to the F-18 and Mirage 2000 fighter jets which are somewhat less capable but still quite well able to take out anything China has. China's MiG-21 jets cannot reach Taiwan with any useful military payload, and they have only a handful of Su-30 fighter jets purchased from Russia that are anywhere near modern enough to take on a F-16 (and I would still lay my bet on the F-16). Any invasion fleet of Chinese trawlers would swiftly end up at the bottom of the sea without any U.S. intervention at all.

In short, China's threat to America or to anybody else for at least the next decade is economic, not military. For the moment their biggest military threat is their ability to provide massive amounts of cheap weaponry to asymmetrical warfare organizations in countries such as Iraq and Lebanon and to potential adversary states such as Iran, rather than any direct military threat presented by their own military forces.

-- Badtux the Military Penguin

PS - even their new ability to take out satellites is defensive in purpose. Taking out the GPS satellites would also take out American GPS-guided "smart weapons" and significantly reduce the effectiveness of weapons such as Tomahawk cruise missiles (which are significantly less accurate in terrain-following mode -- e.g., during the 1st Gulf War, before being modified to use GPS, roughly half the Tomahawks fired from naval vessels in the Red Sea ended up actually crashing into our allies Saudi Arabia and Jordan rather than making it across the Arabian Peninsula into Iraq!).

Labels: military, war on brown people, wingnuts

Tuesday, April 03, 2007

Racism

-- Badtux the Multi-colored Penguin

Labels: politics, war on brown people, wingnuts

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

"We" need to fix Iraq?!

This shit of us pretending to be ubermenschen dictating to the unseemly untermenschen mud peoples as to how they should run their country is just bullshit and needs to stop. Fuck, we can't even provide medical care to our own citizens. Why the fuck do we think we can solve the problems of some folks overseas when we can't even solve our *own* problems?!

- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Labels: health care, iraq, sick society, war on brown people

Monday, March 19, 2007

On war

You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. ... You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people [...] can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.

-- William Tecumseh Sherman, 1864

At 9:30pm EST on March 19, 2003, the first bombs dropped on Baghdad, part of a massive bombing campaign that coincided with a military campaign to disarm Saddam's weapons of mass destruction prevent Saddam from harboring al Qaeda terrorists liberate Iraqis like these very well liberated Iraqis: Before the inevitable objections "but we didn't *intend* to kill little girls!", bullshit. When you choose to go to war, you choose to kill little girls. Period. To quote a man who knew war, "War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it". If you intend to go to war, you intend to kill little girls. Period. If you are not willing to kill little girls, then you are not willing to go to war. Those who chose to go to war -- which was some 65% of the American population in 2003 -- implicitly chose to kill little girls. They might claim that this is not what they chose, but they lie. You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable. Choose war, and you choose to kill little girls.

Four years later, little girls are still dying. As are American soldiers, but they are a tiny, tiny tiny percentage of the dead. Over 650,000 Iraqis have died over the past four years -- or more Iraqis than Saddam managed to kill in his entire 25 year reign. As a people we Americans focus on the dead American soldiers only because we are an ignorant, self-interested people who view anybody who is not American as untermenschen, inhuman, just two-legged cockroaches to be exterminated like vermin. As a people we are cruel and heartless towards anybody who isn't part of our own little enclave of hairless monkeys with delusions of grandeur. We are maliciously vindictive towards anybody who points out that we're just monkeys and no better than any other monkeys on this planet and that we're being cruel and vicious. And little girls still die. And little girls still die.

How many little girls will die before our leaders stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride? How many little girls must die before the piteous mewling of self-interest politicians more interested in political gamesmanship and bullshit do what's right instead of what's expedient? How many? And for what purpose?

"Freedom isn't free," the wingnuts cry. But it seems to me that it is the Iraqi people who are paying the price, especially the 50% of the Iraqi population that is below the age of 18. They are dying by the hundreds of thousands. They are paying the price. How dare we say that we should choose their deaths? Should not the price of freedom be one that the Iraqis themselves decide for themselves? But I forget, they are mere untermenchen, mud people, just filthy cockroaches. They cannot liberate themselves. They need fine white ubermenschen American GI's to do that.

And so they die. And so they die. For no purpose that anybody can tell me. Stop civil war? It's happening. Stop al Qaeda from setting up in Iraq? They're there. Stop ethnic cleansing? It's happening. Prevent a refugee crisis? It's happening. Even the "war for oil" reason, in the end, fails. There is no oil in Baghdad. Yet our soldiers fight and kill and die in Baghdad. For what reason, other than for the sake of ignorance and pride? How many more young girls must die, before we admit that the war was begun in error and perpetuated in pride, and bring the soldiers home?

The answer, sadly, is too many. Far too many. And the answer of the wingnuts is... clap louder. Ah yes. Clap louder. But this penguin, for one, is tired of clapping.

- Badtux the War Penguin

Labels: bush administration, culture of life, iraq, sick society, war on brown people, war on terror, wingnuts

Friday, March 16, 2007

The school of far, far away

Republican to English translation: "No Child Left Behind" = "Fuck the darkies." After all, the easiest way to raise your test scores is not via teaching better -- NCLB provides no money for teaching better, after all. No, the easiest way to raise your test score is to get rid of all those untermenschen -- the poor, the disabled, those who are, let us say, suspiciously dusky (horrors!). After all, if we educated them, why, they might even compete with OUR kids for those prestigious slots at the top ranked universities. Horrors!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Labels: education, war on brown people, war on poor people

Monday, March 12, 2007

"We called it Hurricane FEMA"

Meanwhile, residents of FEMA parks have been given until August to find new housing. There is no new housing in the New Orleans area -- indeed, there has been a total of six hundred reconstruction grants given out thus far, far fewer than needed to rebuild the housing of the New Orleans area that was destroyed by Katrina -- so where do these people go? Well, they get ethnically cleansed to elsewhere, of course, since they are predominantly brown. How dare those nasty mud people expect the government to rebuild housing that was destroyed due to government incompetence! Why, next thing you know, they'll be expecting government to, like, provide fire and crime protection!

But of course they're just unseemly mud people, so nobody gives a shit...

Finally: Congratulations to St. Bernard Parish school superintendent Doris Voitier for winning the 2007 JFK Profiles in Courage Award for her actions in re-opening the St. Bernard Parish schools only months after Katrina hit. Thus far she's not in jail, despite her prediction that she would be. But I'm sure FEMA is working on that. Given the pace that FEMA works, though, I suspect Doris will die of old age first...

-- Badtux the "Racism? In America?" Penguin

Labels: bush administration, katrina, war on brown people

Saturday, March 10, 2007

Every Child Left Behind

Face facts: We, as a nation, don't give a shit about children. We don't give a shit about anything other than our fat narcissistic deranged ignorant asses and our own spoiled rotten selfish violent idiot spawn. Caring about others would require having, like, empathy and the ability to think beyond "me good! Me great! Me love me!". Fuck that shit, this is the United States of Fuckin' America, fuck you, and fuck everybody else, it's all about ME ME ME ME ME!!!!

Shit. This is the kind of crap that makes me feel like burning a fucking American flag. It seems we're devolving into the most stupid, vicious, jackbooted goddamned savages on the whole fucking planet nowdays. I mean, you go into a factory and round up a hundred women and jail them, what fucking moran CAN'T figure out that hey, these women probably have KIDS at SCHOOL and what the fuck do we do about the kids? What kind of fucking moran can't figure out that if you drop bombs on a nation where 50% of the population is under the age of 18, you're going to be killing children left and right? But this is the United States of Fucking Don't Give A Fucking Shit, Dear Leader gave us our goddamned marching orders, so we put on our fucking brown shirts and go HEIL HEIL HEIL! Fuck the little children up the fuckin' ASS, fuck YEAH, USA USA USA USA!!!

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Are we getting fucking outrage fatigue yet? FUCK NO. I ain't even *started* gettin' outraged at the stupid, idiotic, fucking EVIL crap goin' down right now...

Labels: bush administration, iraq, war on brown people, war on terror, wingnuts

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Liberated Iraqis

• Children celebrate liberation of parents
• More pics of children celebrating
• Liberated baby
• Liberated women and children
• More liberation, yessiree
• More to follow, after I finish cursing SOB chickenhawks and get my breath back...