America — land of the baby kidnappers and home of the cowards

Over 8 months after being ordered to do so by a Federal judge, the Trump Administration says they have no plan to reunite children with their parents because it’d be “a burden”.

A burden. Reuniting children with their parents would be a burden.

This is sick, sick stuff. But this is what America is today. What was once The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is today the Land of the Baby Kidnappers and the Land of Cowards Scared Of Brown People From Central America.

For the inevitable who say “if you don’t like it, leave!” — nope. I can’t change the fact that there are a significant number of Americans who are, well, evil (and I use the word because there is no other word that can apply to a people who support things like this), but at least I can hang around and document the atrocities until it comes time for my ashes to be buried in the landfill. Perhaps the generation coming of age today will be braver and less venal. They could hardly be more cowardly and more venal.

— Badtux the Sickened Penguin

Read Full Post »

Of moral equivalencies

Hamas is a terrorist organization.

There, I said it. They’re a terrorist organization.

What makes them a terrorist organization? Simple: They target unarmed civilians. That is what makes them a terrorist organization.

So a friend of mine posted a photograph on her Facebook page of Razan al-Najjar, the 21 year old paramedic who was targeted and killed by an Israeli sniper from close to 300 yards away while helping people who had been injured. And an Israel defender said: “Why don’t you post Israeli victims of Hamas?” I.e., the Israeli government isn’t doing anything that Hamas doesn’t do.

So he was saying that a terrorist organization targeting civilians is exactly equivalent to the Israeli government targeting civilians so we should post photos of both?

Well, I suppose we could. But the tens of thousands of unarmed civilians killed by Israel far outnumber the hundreds of unarmed civilians killed by Hamas, so we’d mostly be posting photos of Palestinian civilian faces anyhow.

Besides, I thought the Israeli government wasn’t supposed to be a terrorist organization. Even though they’re killing unarmed civilians, unarmed medical personnel even, which is exactly what terrorist organizations do.

But this person apparently believes that because Hamas is a terrorist organization, the fact that Israel’s government is behaving like a terrorist organization is fine and dandy.

So there you have it, straight from an Israel defender: Israel’s government is a terrorist organization. Hey, he said it first — though he apparently didn’t realize what it was that he was saying!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Read Full Post »

White people think that the police are their own personal racism valets

Dear white people: The police are not your personal racism valet to be used to ask questions that you’re too scared to ask yourself because you’re terrified of black people. Quit using them like that. Signed, another white person.

I got into an argument on Facebook today when I mentioned that every single person of color that I knew had had the cops called on them for things that were none-criminal, and that this had *never* happened to any of the white people I knew. He whined that they were just looking for racism so that’s why they saw it. Uhm, no. POC got cops called on them, us white people didn’t.

He kept going back to “but that wasn’t racism, everybody had a good reason to call the cops!” of the three examples I listed, three black women having the cops called on them for having suitcases while black, a former White House staffer having the police called on him *twice* for moving into his apartment while black, and police called on two men at a LA Fitness for playing basketball while black. Yeah, that reason being that they were too scared of people of color to just ask them what was going on, instead calling the cops as their personal racism valets to ask in their stead.

I eventually ended up having to block him because he just kept whining “but that’s not racism!” even though I kept pointing out that cops weren’t called on my white acquaintances, only on my black ones. But none are so blind as those who refuse to admit their white privilege. Sheesh.

A final thought: Maybe The Negro Motorist Green Book is needed again. I mean, when segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever has apparently become public policy again… hey, let’s just set the Wayback Machine to 1948 again, already. SIGH.

– Badtux the “Nope, racism ain’t dead, and police are the new racism valets” Penguin

Read Full Post »

Conspiracy fail

So the Jews run everything, huh?

There are less than 20 million Jews on the whole planet Earth, out of 9 billion people. If the conspiracy theorists are right about Jews running the planet, the other 8.98 billion people on the planet must be pretty darn lame. I mean, even the old Soviet Union needed more people like that to rule over only 200 million people. Surely 8.98 billion people would overturn the rule of 20 million people without a problem, right?

Or else the conspiracy theorists are full of sh*t. Which seems a *whole* lot more likely, doncha think?

– Badtux the Numbers Penguin

Read Full Post »

So apparently this Toronto asswipe murdered ten people because he was too big an asshole to get laid

No, I’m not joking. He claimed to be an “incel” who was a victim of feminism because he can’t get laid. He’s one of those toxic MRA dudes who think that women should be their property to be raped at will. Talk about an overweening sense of entitlement. Dude should have gotten a sex toy, since that apparently was all he was interested in when it came to women — sex.

Dude’s not bad looking, so his looks are no reason he’s a virgin. Might it have something to do with his obnoxious personality, his sense of entitlement, his view of women as sex toys rather than people? He’s lucky he did this in Canada. Here in the US, he wouldn’t stay a virgin long once he got to serving life in prison for murder.

And to cap it all off, others in the odious MRA community he was a member of are hailing him as a hero and promising to do attacks of their own upon women they view as “Stacys”, i.e., uppity women who won’t have sex with them and view them with disdain. Their obnoxious personality is never the reason why women disdain them, it’s always the woman’s fault.

Jesus, the sense of self-entitlement just never stops…

– Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

Read Full Post »

Well, I guess she won’t be bothering her beautiful mind about anything anymore — not that she ever did.

Barbara Bush, wife of former President George H.W. Bush, dies at age 92.

Barbara Bush was the kind of woman who could stab you in the back while exhibiting the best of manners and grace. She famously didn’t want to waste her beautiful mind thinking about dead Iraqis when her son started his most excellent adventure in Iraq, and had the patrician’s sneer about those who were less than her, famously stating about the Katrina evacuees crammed into the Astrodome, “underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.”.

She had the patrician’s gift of ignoring the suffering of others. Unless it happened to someone of her social class, such as when her child Robin died of leukemia, setting off a lifelong quest to cure cancer. Or her child Neil was diagnosed with dyslexia, resulting in her donating large sums of money and advertising to literacy programs. Other than that, she had the typical American habit of being able to ignore the pain and suffering of anybody who was not of her patrician class, whether it was soldiers being sent into Iraq, the Iraqis themselves, or the Katrina survivors in the Astrodome. That pain and suffering was apparently what was due them because of not being born to wealthy parents like she herself. Like most well born patricians of her era she could be gracious and generous towards individual little people who came to her attention. But actually thinking about the plight of the “little people” in general… why would she bother her beautiful mind about things like that, anyhow?

The best I can say about Barbara Bush is that, unlike her son George W., she never made decisions that resulted in hundreds of thousands of people dying.

The worst thing is that, like most Americans, she simply didn’t care. Why bother her beautiful mind worrying about the deaths of people who were, well, not like her?

And so another patrician is dead. A more polite and well mannered patrician than the recent crop of arrogant assholes who will stab you in your stomach while sneering at you, but still, whether stabbed in the front or stabbed in the back, you’re still dead in the end. Her kind of evil may have been hidden underneath a glove of the finest velvet, but the result, in the end, was the same: a disregard for the plight of the “little people” that led to the sort of pain and suffering that we saw in the Astrodome in 2005, and which Barbara Bush, like most Americans, waved off as irrelevant while making sure her beautiful mind was never bothered with any unsettling thoughts about the plight of those gathered there.

– Badtux the Obituary Penguin

Read Full Post »

Vinod Khosla the Vile and his quest to illegally take access rights from California’s citizens

The guiding law regarding ownership of beaches in California is the California Constitution,, which prohibits ownership of beaches and tidelands (defined as either the high water mark or the start of vegetation, depending upon which is higher). In other words, you can’t own a beach in California, regardless of what Vinod the Vile insists.

The guiding law regarding access to beaches is the California Coastal Act of 1976. This Act was intended to protect access to the coast by maintaining, at a minimum, the amount of access that was available in 1976. The Coastal Act created a new kind of property, access rights, which are created either by use in 1976 or by signing over access rights afterwards. Access rights are similar to the concept of a right-of-way, where an entity has the right to pass through a property on a specified corridor in order to perform some public good such as, say, provide and maintain electrical lines. In the case of coastal access rights, the entity in question is the general public of the State of California, and the public good provided is the beach.

Access rights can be total, conditional, or none, based on what the situation was in 1976. The Coastal Commission was required to inventory and document by the end of 1981 access to all of the beaches of California. Once inventoried, landowners had to maintain the level of access that was provided at that point. If they provided no access, they could continue providing no access or they could voluntarily sell a right-of-way to the State if they so desired. If they provided conditional access, they had to continue providing conditional access under the exact same terms as when the Act was passed, and were required to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way. And if they provided full access… well, same deal. They had to continue doing so, and again, would have to get a permit if they wanted to change the amount of access they provided in any way.

The Act doesn’t require the Coastal Commission to grant a permit. Indeed, the Coastal Commission can deny a permit if a) it would reduce access to the beach, and b) there is no documented ecological or environmental reason or documented public safety reason for reducing access to the beach. The Act calls for maximizing access to the beach, thus is crafted such as to deny permits that would reduce access unless there is an ecological or documented public safety reason for denying access to the beach. (A bunch of unexploded artillery shells due to use as a USMC artillery firing range prior to the passage of the Act would qualify as a public safety reason, for example). The Coastal Commission cannot, however, require a landowner to provide more access than was provided in 1976 without compensating them for that access. That’s the law — the Coastal Commission cannot simply take access rights away from landowners and grant them to the general public, they can only maintain existing access rights and must buy any additional access rights that the public wants.

So anyhow, this is the law in California — it basically freezes access at 1976 levels, and requires the State to pay if it wants to require a landowner to provide more access than at 1976, and basically prohibits a landowner from taking away access that existed in 1976. In 1976, Martins Beach was open to the public. They could walk down the Martins Beach Road from the pavement for free, or they could pay a gate-keeper a small sum of money to drive down Martins Beach Road and park at a parking lot near the beach. When Vinod Khosla bought the land surrounding Martins Beach in 2008, he was warned that he had to maintain this access at the same level as 1976. He did so for two years, then decided he didn’t want to view any of the little people anymore, and locked the gate and put armed guards to keep people out — despite the requirements of the Coastal Act.

So here we are in 2018. The California Legislature passed a law in 2014 reiterating that Martins Beach is public property and that the access rights grandfathered in 1976 continues to exist. The California Court of Appeals affirmed that law, and the California Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal because the law is pretty much cut and dried. Khosla continues to try to prevent access but is handicapped in that because the local Sheriff says he won’t respond to trespassing calls because the surfers who jump the gate and go down to the beach to surf have a legal right to do so. Khosla could probably hire beefy security guards to attack surfers, but the surfers aren’t exactly shrinking violets and the security guards would have to assault the surfers in order to prevent them from continuing down the right of way granted by the 1976 Act, at which point the surfers would defend themselves and beat the crap out of the security guards. Needless to say, security companies are not falling over themselves to have their security guards beat up and charged with assault on a public right-of-way.

So what’s a billionaire oligarch to do when all the courts in the state of California refuse to be bought by his billions? Well… Vinod the Vile knows what to do: Take it to the U.S. Supreme Court. He figures that the Supreme Court got bought by the election of 2016, so he can get his way there.

Will it work? We’ll see. On the other hand, the current status quo, where Vinod can’t call the sheriff to get people thrown out for trespassing and security companies are reluctant to get involved for fear of being charged with assault or having their guards beat up, means that whatever the U.S. Supreme Court decides will be mostly irrelevant. Vinod the Vile will continue to have to watch the “little people” use “his” beach — and will continue to be able to do nothing at all about it.

– Badtux the Beach Penguin
Note: My personal experience with Vinod the Vile dates back to fourteen years ago, when he was the lead investor in our startup and decided to use the company as his personal playtoy to prove out some bizarre theories of his. I left in disgust after three years and the company folded shortly afterwards after he managed to asset-strip it for his own benefit, managing to get four times more money out of it than he invested in the first place by stealing the money from the other investors with bogus loans and other means. Don’t ever, EVER go to work for a company whose lead investor is Vinod the Vile, and don’t *ever* approach him for investment. He will rape you, clear and simple. That’s what he *does*.

Read Full Post »