Iran is not Iraq

* Iran is a largely mountainous country.
* Iraq is a largely flat country.

* Iran has been a country since the early 1500’s, when the Safavids conquered Persia from the remnant Mongol regime and set up a government that has continued to rule Iran for the subsequent 500 years with occasional regime changes. That Iran claims to be heir to a 2500 year heritage of being a unified nation. Iran is a country that has a long and proud history of being a country for longer than the United States has existed, and has a culture and heritage older than Western civilization as a whole.
* Iraq was never a country until the British cobbled it together from three Ottomon provinces in the 1920’s and then fought a bloody war against rebels in those provinces to enforce their rule.

* Iran controls all of their territory as a unified nation, and its military is loyal to the Iranian nation.
* Iraq has never been a unified nation, and even under Saddam much of the nation and much of the military was under the rule of warlords who were paid off by the national government to stay loyal. The slick thing the U.S. did was pay them more than Saddam paid them, so that they (and the army units they controlled) stayed home when the US invaded. Obviously that cannot be done with Iran.

* Iraq’s military was based upon obsolete Soviet export gear that the Iraqi military barely knew how to operate, and operated via Soviet military doctrine which assumed the availability of unlimited amounts of men and equipment and the ability to retreat and wait for winter if facing defeat.
* Iran’s military uses a hodge-podge of American-derived (reverse-engineered), ex-Soviet, Chinese, and home-grown gear, and has home-grown military doctrines to go with it that have been actually tested against a Western army in Lebanon in 2006 and worked relatively well, in that the invading Israeli army’s tanks were swiftly disabled and the Israelis were forced to declare victory and go home, towing their disabled tanks behind them.

* Iraq had MANPADs which disallowed using helicopters for close support, but that didn’t matter because it’s flat so the US could use tanks.
* Iran has MANPADs wich disallow using helicopters for close support, but the US can’t substitute tanks there for close support because the land is so mountainous.

* Iraq’s air defense system was obsolete Soviet gear that they didn’t know how to use.
* Iran has the latest systems from Russia and China, which aren’t perfect but mean that we can’t just fly B-52’s over Iran and carpet-bomb them until a very lengthy (and expensive) process of degrading those air defenses take place.

Summary: Invading Iran would be much different from invading Iraq. Expect a constant stream of explosive devices, missiles, mines, and rockets to bring progress of U.S. tanks along tank-trap roads in mountainous territory to a crawl. Air superiority will be a given but it won’t be usable in the early days of the war, when Iranian air defenses would make things miserable for U.S. aircraft.

Now add in the fact that the Strait of Hormuz is overlooked by literally tens of thousands of Silkworm anti-ship missiles, all of which will render it impassable due to being littered with hulks within minutes of an invasion of Iran starting, and you will see why only a lunatic would start a war with Iran. Or Donald J. Trump. But I repeat myself.

What’s going to happen? Not war, hopefully. But when it comes to Trump, “*nobody* would be stupid enough to do *that*” doesn’t seem to work anymore for predicting what’s going to happen….

– Badtux the Grouchy Penguin

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Here is a list of every single autism case caused by vaccines:

Here’s a list of every single autism case caused by vaccines:

.

Oh wait, there aren’t any.

The only study claiming a connection was later found to be fraudulent, the doctor who conducted it had his medical license stripped, and the journal that published it publicly apologized and retracted it. This fraudulent study was the *only* study that ever found a link between vaccines and autism. The only one. Every other study which attempted to find a link, couldn’t find one. Yet there are still people who believe that because *one* study that nobody else was ever able to replicate found a link, there’s a link. Uhm, no. That’s not how science works. Especially when the one study turned out to be fraudulent.

Making any claims about the cause of autism right now is ridiculous, because we don’t even know what makes people autistic. When I was teaching special education classes I spent a significant amount of time both interacting with autistic children and reading the then-latest research on autism. What I found was that the definition of autism was descriptive — a child exhibiting a certain set of behaviors was defined as autistic — and that science had only speculation as the the causes of that set of behaviors that boiled down to “sensory processing deficits” (which they concluded based upon brain studies comparing autistic vs “normal” children upon being exposed to various stimuli). After I left teaching they later lumped in Asperger’s with autism and redefined the whole thing as “autism spectrum disorder”, because from what they can tell the sensory processing deficits that are hypothesized as the main trait of autism occurred in both sets of people, just in differing degrees.

It’s still unclear why processing happens differently in autistic kids, and so we get all this woo around it. There are no obvious structural differences between the brains of autistic kids and the brains of normal kids, but for some reason different parts of the brain light up in response to stimuli between the two sets of kids (autistic and control group). The notion that we understand why this happens and thus can determine a cause for why this happens is laughable and doesn’t at all match up with any actual research into the biological causes of autism. We’re better at describing the behavioral traits of autism and diagnosing autism than we used to be, but still no better at understanding what it actually is on a biological level.

– Badtux the Science Penguin

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Responsible gun owner shoots his nuts off

Yet another “responsible gun owner” shoots his nuts off. A headline that repeats on a regular basis.

This dude’s first mistake was in buying a Hi-Point 9mm pistol. From a review, talking about its accuracy: “Should you try to fire toward your opponent and hope the round doesn’t stray into a crowd, and that the loud noise scares away your attacker? Or do you just drop the magazine and throw the thing at them? If you have a pretty good arm, I wouldn’t discount the second option. It might be your best bet.”

Accompanied by a bench test sheet showing that if you shoot for his head, you’re more likely to hit his testacles. I have never seen a bench test so terrible as what this reviewer got from the Hi-Point 9mm. This wasn’t a pattern. This was random chance that he hit the target at all — at nearly point blank range, with a pistol sighted in on the target in a bench vise!

Makes you wonder if this dude was trying to commit suicide, and managed to hit his balls instead :).

– Badtux the Snarky Gun Penguin

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Why are there so many ignorant people in an era with so much access to information?

I’m one of those people whose life has spanned the transition from the paper era to the digital era. When I went to college, researching any topic required going to the library and using the card catalog and microfiche indexes to locate material. If I wanted government statistics, they were on paper in what was basically 1/4th of the bottom floor of our college library and I had to use a big paper index to find them. Making a copy for later was 5 cents per page. So basically, there was an excuse back then for someone to say something stupid — the information just wasn’t easily available.

But today? If you want to look up tort costs in healthcare, you can look up the total amount spent on medical liability insurance (approximately 0.3% of total healthcare spending), then look up tort limits and healthcare costs by state, and easily see that a) the amount spent defending and paying out on lawsuits is trivial, and b) defensive medicine isn’t really a “thing”, states with strict tort limits don’t have lower healthcare costs on average than those without. Then you can go look for the real causes of high healthcare costs, which isn’t lawsuits. Despite access to every bit of information needed to prove or disprove the assertion “tort costs causes high healthcare costs”, virtually nobody does the few mouse strokes needed to do so.

Instead, we seem to have weaponized ignorance. Ignorant memes that can easily be disproved by a few mouse strokes use social media to sweep the nation within hours of their release by Russian troll factories. Despite the fact that so much information is available, most of the American public seems disinterested in looking it up. And that surprises some people.

But not me. Because I’ve studied American history (hell, I’ve lived half a century of it). Ignorance has always been the preferred state of the average American. Few regardless of the era have cared about education. There’s a *reason* why the atom bomb was built mostly by European immigrants. Even today, close to half of our STEM workforce is foreign-born or the children of immigrants. All that technology has managed to do is allow the ignorant to confirm with each other that their ignorance is truth and anything that doesn’t agree with their ignorant opinions is fake. Science textbooks? Fake. Government statistics? Fake. Scientists? Elitist fakes. By allowing them to confirm with each other that anybody who actually knows anything is a fake, their ignorance is not only confirmed, but weaponized.

The fact that immigrants have contributed much of the intellectual advancement of America in the past century is also why the ignorant are so anti-immigrant. The last thing they want is for people smarter and harder working than they are to render them obsolete. Even if they are.

– Badtux the Ignorance-spottin’ Penguin

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James Damore is out for that wingnut welfare again

Apparently he wants to get on that $100K/speech wingnut welfare rubber chicken circuit, showing up at Young Republicans conkkklaves at universities and public rallies calling for white pride and giving speeches about how the white man is oppressed, oppressed I say, oppressed by The Man. But to do that, he has to raise his profile. Like, for example, by actually filing a lawsuit against Google:

<blockquoteMore specifically, it accuses Google of singling out, mistreating and systematically punishing and terminating employees who “expressed views deviating from the majority view at Google on political subjects raised in the workplace and relevant to Google’s employment policies and its business, such as ‘diversity’ hiring policies, ‘bias sensitivity’ or ‘social justice’…”

There’s one problem with this: California is an “at will” employment state. You have no right to a job in California. You can be fired for any reason in California other than for membership in a protected class enumerated in law. And “conservative asshole” isn’t a protected class in any law of the country.

In short, Google would have been in the right for firing him because they didn’t like his hairstyle or his shoes, because California requires no cause for firing — you can be fired for any reason, no matter how stupid, as long as it’s not because of your sexual orientation, sex, race, or religion, or the special case of “whistleblower” (which requires reporting illegal conduct to the government). Damore claims he was fired for being white or male, but chances of him proving that via discovery are virtually nil. There will be no smoking gun saying “let’s fire this guy because he’s white!”. No, the only smoking gun they’ll find is “let’s fire this guy because his opinions are an embarrassment to our company!”. Which is an entirely legal thing to do in the state of California, because employment here is a private contractual relationship between employer and employee that can be terminated by either side. The Governor Reagan era employment laws in California were written in an era where having Big Government telling a private company who they must employ or not employ would have been considered Communism and thus evil, thus basically your only remedy if you’re fired is to get another job.

But hey, this isn’t actually a real lawsuit anyhow, it’s just to raise Damore’s profile on the wingnut welfare circuit, so it doesn’t matter that a judge will take one look at that and bang “Dismissed” upon receiving Google’s “motion to dismiss for lack of cause”. That’ll give Damore just one more talking point about how he’s being oppressed, oppressed I say, by Big Liberal Meanies. I just find it amusing that Damore is whining about being fired for his opinions, when it’s perfectly legal to do so outside of a union contract or a socialist country. Amazing how Damore hates unions and socialism — both of which probably would have kept him in his cushy job at Google. Talk about reaping what you sow!

Once again, James Damore: Right wing asshole is not a protected class under California law, thus Google can decide they don’t like you so they won’t employ you. It’s called FREEDOM. Google has it. Why do you hate FREEDOM, James Damore? Oh wait, because hating FREEDOM gets you those cushy wingnut welfare speaking gigs. Alrighty, then!

– Badtux the Snarky Penguin

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Trump State Department trying to put The Onion out of business by being more outrageous

A security firm founded by Vladimir Putin’s former commanding officer in the KGB is now in charge of security for the U.S. Embassy and consulates in Russia. Part of their job is to make sure that Russian spies don’t sneak in and plant bugs. Russian. Spies. Charged with preventing Russian spies from planting bugs.

Wow. Just wow.

Trying to put The Onion out of business, folks. I mean, I had to do a double-take to make sure that I was reading the BBC and not The Onion when I read this article!

— Badtux the Flabbergasted Penguin

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Delusional dumbfucks think buggy whips will come back as an industry

Laid-off coal miners are refusing to retrain for other work because they actually believe Donald Trump’s lies about coal coming back.

It’s not. Not within the next 20 years anyhow. Coal power plants have been shut down all over the country because of the fracking industry flooding the market with cheap natural gas. Natural gas powered plants are cheaper to operate than coal powered plants and now that their fuel is cheap too, utilities are falling all over themselves to shut down ugly dirty coal powered plants, and those plants are not coming back. Hell, some of those plants were so decrepit that they had boilers with swastikas on them. Not because their owners were neo-Nazis. Rather, because their boilers were looted from the rubble of post-war Nazi Germany. Yep, we’re talking about 80 year old boilers, still hard at work generating steam to power the steam turbines at these antique power plants. Needless to say, the efficiency of these antiques is not up to modern standards…

But never underestimate the ability of human beings to be delusional. Training for some other form of work involves risk and maybe putting yourself into an intellectually uncomfortable position. If you’re training to be a health aide, for example, you’re going to have to change adult diapers and clean adult bums. That’s just part of the job. If your coal mining job is coming back, why do something so icky, right?

Of course it’s not coming back, but hey, this is the United States of Delusion, so that little factoid just doesn’t mean anything, apparently…

– Badtux the Delusions Penguin

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Sovereign dimwits and their supposed “Supreme Court” cases

The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that you have a right to drive on a public highway without a driver’s license or valid vehicle registration.

Never.

Not ever.

This is not controversial, unless you are a sovereign citizen dimwit, in which case you spew, “Thompson vs Smith! Campbell versus Walker!”

Really?

Thompson vs. Smith was a Virginia state court case in 1930. The question there was whether a police officer or judge could revoke someone’s driver’s license without cause. The Virginia Supreme Court said no — due process rights were vested in a driver’s license, and it could only be revoked for cause via due process. Thompson vs. Smith did *not* state that there was a right to drive upon a public highway without a driver’s license. Rather, it ruled that your driver’s license could not be revoked arbitrarily without cause because that violated due process rights under the Virginia constitution.

Campbell vs. Walker was a Delaware state court case in 1910 and was about whether Walker was negligent when his automobile struck Campbell’s wagon. Both vehicles had a right to be on the road in question because Delaware at the time had no licensing or registration laws, that was mentioned solely in passing while attempting to determine the question of negligence. Walker was sued to pay for Campbell’s medical bills and the wagon. The question before the court was the standards for proving negligence, not whether either party was in compliance with drivers’ licensing laws — there were none in Delaware at the time. At no time did the court rule upon the constitutionality of Delaware’s (at the time non-existent) driver’s licensing law, it was strictly a vehicle liability case and attempting to determine the evidence needed in order to prove liability in such cases.

I stand by my statement: The U.S. Supreme Court has never ruled that you have a right to drive on a public highway without a driver’s license or valid vehicle registration.

Never.

Not ever.

– Badtux the “Man, these people are stupid” Penguin

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There has been no oppression in America for the past 100 years

So says Mike Ditka.

15 year old Elizabeth Eckford wasn’t being oppressed as she attempted to be the first black student in Little Rock High, she was merely being alt-welcomed.

Patrick Harmon wasn’t being oppressed by being shot in the back for being black in Salt Lake City, Utah. He was alt-rewarded.

Rosa Parks wasn’t being oppressed by being arrested for sitting at the front of the bus, she was being alt-praised.

The black day care worker in Pennsylvania wasn’t being oppressed by her employer getting a bigotted letter telling them to fire her for spreading black cooties to their children, she was being alt-praised.

Four little girls killed by a KKK bomb in Birmingham, Alabama weren’t being oppressed. They were being….

Oh fuck it. Mike Ditka is a fucking dumbass who played too much without a helmet.

That is all.

– Badtux the Oppression Penguin

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What’s going to kill this nation is the worship of ignorance, not ISIS / the Taliban / Trump / etc.

58% of Trump voters say higher education is bad for the country.

Fifty. Eight. Percent.

And this surprises me not at all. The worship of ignorance is rampant in the United States. Experts who’ve spent their lives studying and researching a subject have their expertise dismissed with a few pithy talking points by a bleach blonde Fox news bimbo, and millions believe her. Millions willingly embrace bizarre conspiracy theories like NASA is running a child slave colony on Mars or shape-shifting reptilian people control our world. Even the notion that the world is flat has taken on new life in the modern United States.

It’s no wonder, then, that so many of these pro-ignorance people willingly embrace fake news. They are so ignorant that they lack the fundamental knowledge to tell the difference between fake news and real news. And furthermore, they’re proud of their ignorance. None of that sissy intellectual stuff for them, nosirree! And science might contradict the Bible, so it’s clearly out too!

It’s not some foreign enemy that’s going to destroy the United States. It is the cult of ignorance that dominates the nation, where everybody thinks they’re an expert after a couple of Google queries turn up a few web sites. There’s no way that a population so ignorant, so hateful of education, can maintain or sustain an advanced economy. No way. In the end, the United States is going to collapse from within, hollowed out like a rotten apple by the ignorance of the people charged with keeping it intact.

– Badtux the Educated Penguin

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