When war seems to have no costs, people don’t mind new wars (Or: The US is Germany 1941).

What was interesting about life in Germany during WW2 was that until late 1943 when mass bombings of Germany began, life for the average German really didn’t change once WW2 started. Sure, everybody knew someone who’d been drafted and sent to the front, but you still got up, went to work, went to church, children played in the streets, grocery stores had food in them, etc. And yeah, “those” people had been taken away and put into work camps to build war goods, but so what, everybody knew “those” people weren’t any good anyhow, they were all criminals, so it was okay that Germany ran the biggest prison system on the face of the planet.

Then 1943 happened, with massive numbers of Germans killed on the Eastern front as the Soviets pushed back at German advances, and the beginning of mass bombings of German cities causing huge disruptions to daily life. Suddenly life became more desperate. Hellish, even. Support for starting new wars suddenly disappeared. People didn’t want to surrender, exactly, they were still patriotic Germans, but war was no longer a fun and happy thing for them.

The United States has been at war for 18 years now, and we’re still Germany in 1941. We’ll probably always be Germany in 1941 as long as we don’t have waves of bombers flying over us dropping bombs on our cities, because when war seems to have no cost other than full employment for our people, why *not* go to war?

Well, other than the fact that the last war we won was frickin’ seven decades ago, and we needed a huge help by the Soviet Union (which killed 3/4ths of the German military personnel killed during the war) to do it. But if victory isn’t your goal, well.

– Badtux the History Penguin

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Gilroy

Again, and again
the bullets fly
the bodies fall
the children die
the sellers of bullets count their coin.

I stare blankly
at the image so common
numb and sedated
as it repeats and repeats
Over and over
never to end.

For there is money to make
Money to spend
money for death
Death the one last freedom.

At night I dream
of dead children in the night
walking softly
in the dim moonlight
wounds showing
through rips in their clothes
where bullets tore
where bullets killed
They question softly
asking “Why?”
But the only reply
is the sound of coins.

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CBP — Child Border Perverts — kidnaps another child, a US citizen who had to be rescued by the Mexican embassy

Julia Isabel Amparo Medina was 9 years old, presented a valid U.S. passport card to cross the border to go to school, and was detained by the Child Border Perverts because she gave “inconsistent information” when interrogated. She was detained for 36 hours as she was interrogated by multiple strangers who threatened her and lied to her. She had to be rescued by the Mexican embassy after CBP refused to release her to her mother. That’s right, an American had to be rescued from the Child Border Perverts by the Mexicans.

WTF? Apparently none of these Border Patrol agents ever had a sister or a 9 year old daughter of their own. Expecting a 9 year old to give consistent answers when being subjected to deliberately manipulative questioning and false statements from investigators is idiotic and indefensible. A 9 year old girl simply isn’t developmentally capable of handling that situation, period, and shouldn’t be saying *anything* to law enforcement — only their parent should be talking to law enforcement. This is disgusting, racist, and perverted. Great job, child abusers at the CBP, I bet you were stroking yourself in the bathroom afterwards too at that hot 9 year old action.

But hey, she’s *brown*, so that makes it okay. Right? Right?! GRR.

— Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

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The divine rights of kings

The Internet and all the hardware and servers on the Internet as well as the computer you’re using to read this were created by hundreds of thousands of ordinary middle class engineers and programmers and installers and technicians who wrote the code, designed the computers and routers, and built and installed the hardware all the way out to where you’re typing this. Yet virtually none of these people own any of their work. It almost all belongs to the super-wealthy, because of the divine rights of kings. Or something.

Generations from now, people will look back upon our current gilded age with the same revulsion that people today have when they look back upon the days when kings could behead people just on whim and lived lives of luxury while their people starved in rags.

— Badtux the Democratic Socialist Penguin

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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

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So it is done. Apartheid is coming

The next 40 years

This is the main reason that Kavanaugh had to be confirmed immediately, before the Democrats got control of the Senate and could block apartheid supporters. The fact is that white people are becoming a minority within America. When that happens depends on who you ask, but it is happening, and will happen.

Given that, the only way that angry white males, of which Kavanaugh is one, can retain power is via apartheid — by taking away the vote from populations that, well, aren’t white. They dream of a return to the pre-Voting Rights Act segregated South, where black people were denied the vote by any number of means from poll taxes to lynchings, except nationwide and applied to non-whites across a broad spectrum. They really don’t have any choice. George W. Bush had made outreach to Hispanic populations, but Donald Trump has done nationwide what the California Republican Party did two decades ago — via racist acts against Hispanic populations, especially by kidnapping and losing children at the border in order to punish parents, they’ve lost the Hispanic vote for a generation.

The thing about apartheid, however, is that it is not a long time stable situation when it’s the majority of an entire nation that is being suppressed. South Africa and Rhodesia found that out the hard way, they managed to keep their non-white populations suppressed, but the violence needed to do in the face of guerilla warfare by the majority resulted in international repulsion and eventual collapse of their economies and the army of suppression that was funded by their economies. But our angry white male leaders think they have the answer to that — our current cradle to grave police state that tracks everybody from birth to death will allow them to take out the leaders of any opposition with ease, while also being used to remove information about them from the Internet so that angry mobs that wish to hang them from the nearest lamp posts won’t know where to find them.

But of course police states aren’t stable either. They can be maintained for a long time, but only at the expense of collapsing the economy and the impoverishment of the nation, because smart people don’t like police states. Smart people flee police states, or tuck their heads down and refuse to do the sort of entrepreneurship and innovation needed for an economy to thrive for fear that they might attract police state attention. But perhaps the angry white males view being on top of an impoverished failed state is preferable to being ruled by non-whites.

Given how many guns there are in the United States, I am not seeing any way that this situation does not result in bloodshed. Apartheid worked in the American South only because those being suppressed were a minority in the nation as a whole. But I cannot believe that the majority in states like California that are already “majority-minority” will sit by idle while their brethren elsewhere are being suppressed. Either there will be bloody military suppression of resistance, or secession followed by war. All I know is that a hard rain’s gonna fall.

— Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

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Why Republicans are setting up a police state: 30% of Americans will soon rule the other 70%

By 2040 or so, because most young Americans (and immigrants) are migrating to the few large metropolitan areas in states where jobs are plentiful, 70 percent of Americans will live in 15 states. Meaning 30 percent of the population will choose 70% of the senators. And the 30% minority choosing 70% of the Senate will be older, whiter, more rural, more male than the 70% majority who are only getting to vote for 30% of the Senators.

I do not see how the United States is going to survive this. Not as a democracy, anyhow. We have a name for a nation where 30% of the population rules the other 70% of the population. That name is *not* democracy or even republic. That name is “tyranny”.

Americans have thus far shown a remarkable tolerance for living in a police state, as long as that police state is primarily targeting brown people. (For details of this police state, read Radley Balko’s columns in Reason and the Washington Post). But once 30% of the population is using police state powers to impose their rule upon 70% of the population, they may find that the tolerance of Americans is limited. I don’t see a good outcome from that end state. At least, not an outcome that is nonviolent.

– Badtux the Demographics Penguin

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How to get sites removed from the Internet

There is apparently a new law, Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act (FOSTA), which allows the FBI to seize and prosecute the owners of any site that has posts on it where people advertise sex for money. The infamous classifieds web site Backpage.com was removed from the Internet and its owner charged with crimes after passage of this law.

Now, about Backpage.com, they knew what was going on, especially when underage children were being peddled on it, and they did nothing about it, so I’m not particularly concerned that they’re gone. But here’s the problem. Want to get your favorite sites shut down? Just rent yourself a botnet on the darknet (it’s easy, requires nothing but some bitcoin and a bit of trawling through the darknet), create thousands of fake ID’s, flood the site with advertising offering sex in exchange for money, and call the FBI. Voila. You’re done. Site gone.

Congress tailored the law specifically to take out Backpage. The problem is that since the Constitution doesn’t allow laws that apply only to a specific listed individual or company, they had to write a general law. Which can basically be applied to *anybody* who allows users to post comments. Heck, even Facebook could end up in trouble.

Just chalk it up to the law of unintended consequences…

— Badtux the Law Penguin

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Disappeared down the Memory Hole: Orwell was right

Her name was Nasim Najafi Aghdam. She claimed to be a vegan body builder, though with her tall thin physique you couldn’t really tell it unless she was actually flexing, like in this photo from her now-disappeared web site:

And on Tuesday she snapped and took a California-legal handgun (i.e. 10 round limit) onto the YouTube campus, managed to injure four people (consider what she would have done with an AR-15 with a 30 round magazine! But those are illegal in California), and then committed suicide.

All of her social media accounts have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. All of her writings on the Internet have been disappeared down the Orwellian memory hole. Only fragments can be found in various caches and archives on the Internet.

What is interesting is that, in the few writings that I can find, she claims that there is no freedom on the Internet and that the big Internet media companies dictate what you will see or not see. It is interesting that then the big Internet media companies immediately validate her thesis by disappearing her social media presence Orwellian fashion after she snaps. It’s almost as if they don’t want you to see what she was saying. Interesting how they prove her thesis. Too bad about Nasim though, she committed suicide for no real reason, since virtually nobody actually decided to go look for what she was actually saying as versus what the big media companies claim she said. Not that it’s easy to do so — I expect even those various caches and archives to be cleaned out shortly to finish “disappearing” her down the Orwellian memory hole, leaving us only with the prefabricated image of her generated by the big media companies rather than her own words.

2018. It’s 1984+34. War is peace. Tyranny is freedom. Censorship is patriotic. I love Big Brother, he wants only the best for me. Don’t you love Big Brother too?

– Badtux the “Hmmmm…..” Penguin

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So, today was imaginary token Negro day, yay

Where white folk celebrate the kindly Uncle Tom caricature that they’ve made of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who was a nice negro (in their caricature version of him, not in real life, where he was righteous and fiery and said tons of things that white people wouldn’t like to be reminded of today).

So fuck that. I’m more sad about the death of Dolores O’Riordan, whose Irish lilt and clear enunciation made for a distinctive and refreshing voice on a radio filled with sloppy slurred drugged-out singers in the early 90’s. She was only 46, and still in fine voice just a few months ago…

Fuck reality. Donald fucking Trump is still alive despite consuming more Big Macs than the entire city of Detroit, and someone who actually contributed beauty to this world dies young? That’s why I know if there is a God, he’s a vicious and vindictive son of a bitch and I want nothing to do with him. Besides, Hell would have better company.

– Badtux the Sad Penguin

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