It's a hell of a town

It's also all the way the hell across the continent and very much "not Portland" but I'm tickled to death that the people of New York City gave a big middle finger to the politics of surrender to plutocracy and corporatism: https://www.theguardian.com/.../winner-supporters...

Because the man himself sums up the real problem of NYC that's the same as the real problems here in Portland: "...there are far too many New Yorkers who do not know if they will be able to call themselves that next year, who do not know if they will be able to afford their rent, or their child care, their groceries, or even their MetroCard.”

 

It's past time that we liberals stopped cowering and apologizing. These billionaire-fluffers are evil and wrong. The GOP is lost, as gibbering mad as a rabid dog, so we can expect nothing from them except their usual lunacy. 

 

But we're not in the Trump Cult and it's time we reclaimed our roots.

 

 

The Great Experiment

 Came across this...

...in the Xhitter feed of this guy.

And even given my long attention to and understanding of the fundamental shallow and rapacious shittiness of "conservative thinking" I was kinda gobsmacked.

WTAF? Seriously, National Review? Lights on in your heads, dumbfucks!

"Grand social experiment"..?

Really, which part of high school civics were you Rushbo-wannabees sleeping through that you missed the whole "American Experiment" thing?

"The establishment of our new Government seemed to be the last great experiment for promoting human happiness."
George Washington, January 9, 1790

The promise of these United States - the only thing about them that has value, the implicit promise the Founders didn't realize they'd made - is the idea of the grand noble experiment in self-government for all of We the People.

No kings. No popes. No lords and ladies, no hierophants, no rigid social framework where those born to rule rule those born to serve.

The entire, central fucking IDEAL of the United States, the core tenet of the values that supposedly make this nation different, is that We are embarked in a "grand social experiment" to see if that can work.

The fact that we've fallen far short of that value doesn't decentralize it. The fact that we have to, that we need to, make reparations to those who, because of our prejudices we wrote into our laws and baked into our society, were held back and held behind the ideal of equal justice under law, doesn't change it's importance.

The armed forces of a Republic are representative of - must represent - the ideals and goals of that Republic. If they do not, they must be held to a higher standard than the civil society around them in hopes of reforming that society. Not the other way around.

For those reasons alone Harry Truman ordered the desegregation of the Army over half a century ago.

I'm sure the National Review tut-tutted that "grand social experiment" that time, too.

In the Age of Trump it's increasingly difficult to hide the vicious racist stupidity behind "conservative" politics. But this was stupidly racist even for these gomers.

I think I hated them a tiny bit less when they were just openly honest Klansmen,

Go Directly To Jail

 

This is what was left behind when the funny farmers came and hauled off our "Jesus wants me to show you my tits" homeless Crazy Lady last May.

Now, our Portland area "Mr. Potter Association" (People for Portland, two lies for the price of one, since these folks are not "people" in the humane sense and they're certainly not "for Portland" in any way but "make Portland more like Lake Oswego") have a new homeless-question poll out.

"Portland-area poll finds huge appetite for tougher tactics on homelessness".

Because of course it did.

Because a huge chunk of people want simple answers to complex problems, want a hammer to make everything that bugs them into a nail.

Lots of people are assholes, too, but that's a whole different thing.

But think about this.

What are "tougher tactics"?

Force.

That's the bottom line, isn't it?

"An overwhelming majority of Multnomah County voters say...people in crisis living on the streets should be required to undergo addiction or mental health treatment.Only 25% of Multnomah County voters said that treatment for people experiencing mental health or substance use disorder should be voluntary; 67% believe “we need legal tools to encourage and compel people to get help. "

How?

How do you "require" some doper to get clean, or some nutter to take their meds?

"Legal tools"? A band saw? Pliers?

"Legal tools". Just say it straight; you junkies and loonies are gonna get straight or go to fucking jail.

Because we have all the money and jail space to shove a bunch of crazy junkies for being crazy junkies, right?

Fuck me runnin'.

"Nearly three-fourths also back a proposal by Mayor Ted Wheeler to enforce a citywide daytime camping ban..."

That's the latest Wheeler gimmick, BTW; force the hobos to pack their shit every morning. And then...what? Hump their ruck all over town? Drive their RV up and down Interstate Avenue from 8am to 8pm?

The Good People for Portland are nutty enough about the hobo camps as it is. Can you imagine the reaction to wandering groups of encumbered homeless people like some sort of Mongol horde with shopping carts instead of horses? And this is the supposedly GOOD idea the Portland city government is proposing?

Nothing has changed since I wrote about this last time. Or, for that matter, since I first wrote about it two years ago. And nothing has changed the conclusion I wrote then:

"...there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space."

Except people like "People for Portland" and the angry Potters they polled are more angry and more vicious and less willing to invest time, money, and interest in actually figuring out ways to get these poor bastards out of the parks and off the streets rather than fantasizing about jailing them.

Am I happy about the "homeless problem"?

Look back up at the picture. That was just one person, in one place. That's unacceptable for a dozen reasons. 

No, I'm not "happy" about the homeless situation.

But I'm at least realistic about it.

While the big megaphone in the hands of these People for Portland is just shouting their nonsense, as random and pointless and unrealistic as the ranting of the Jesus Tits lady, all over the sky above and with about as much hope of actually solving the problem.

The Politics of Stupid

So here's what's been bugging me.

This past November the voters of Oregon went marginally in favor - 50.6 to 49.4 - of a ballot measure, 114, that imposed some restrictions on firearms.

Those included:

• requiring permits issued by local law enforcement to buy a firearm;
• requiring photo ID, fingerprints, safety training, criminal background check, and fee payment to apply for a permit; and
• prohibiting manufacturing, importing, purchasing, selling, possessing, using, or transferring ammunition magazines capable of holding more than 10 rounds and make violations a class A misdemeanor.

 And y'know what?

That's just fine as far as I'm concerned. 

It doesn't infringe the "right to keep and bear arms". It infringes the non-right to keep and bear certain types of magazines, to keep and bear arms without being evaluated for things like criminal records or knowing how to use the fucking things, and being on record so that IF your bang-stick gets used for bad purposes it can be chased back to you.

If I'd have been the ballot measure writer I'd have added some of Jim Wright's "bang bang sanity" proscriptions like making "accidental" shootings crimes that would lose you your "right" to fuck up other people with the weapon you obviously don't know how to use and have no business having and requiring people to store the things like we did in the Army, locked up right.

So vox populi vox Dei, right? Gonna get right on that, sheriff. Right?

No.

Because if you're a wingnut ammosexual then the public spirit only bloweth where wingnut fap-memes listeth, and so, of course, a judge in West Buttfuckistan (or Harney County, which is effectively the same thing...) heard a suit brought by a bunch of these clucks and, of course, has been hammering down Measure 114 because...reasons.

Well.

I don't really need to go over - again - why fewer people with smaller, slower, less capable firearms is good.

It's the same reasons that a NASCAR-grade Camero isn't street legal. What soldiers need in war is the exact opposite of what Sparky needs behind the counter of the 7-Eleven.

But because the Right has spent more than sixty years grooming these chucklefucks to scree like wounded eagles anytime some sensible reduction in the mad carnival of firearms is proposed here in the Land of the Free trying to make that obvious fact a reality is damn near impossible.

Different day, same nitwit wingnut shit, though, right?

Here's the problem with just shrugging about that.

These dopes are making life harder for all of us, and not just about firearms.

Some of the things they want - more racism, more prejudice, more ignorance, more misogyny - are 1) irritating and vile as well as 2) predictable, but are baked into them and can only be ignored when trivial and mocked and slammed down when violent. 

Any sensible government - any sensible organization - can and will do that. Even corporations, sociopathic sonsofbitches that they are, realize that gays and immigrants and dusky people buy toasters, so being associated with redneck shitbirds is bad for business.

No. It's the other political obsessions that they're being talked into now that are so fucked up.

These ammosexual rule-free Days of Jubilee are one of them.

If you think we're bad here in Oregon look at Florida, where their Wingnut Jesus wants to enact "constitutional carry", meaning that any and everyone can walk around strapped. No rules, no license, no training, no nothing.

Imagine how your average rural Florida deputy sheriff - Nobel Prize winning philosopher and gentle soul that he will be - is going to act now that EVERYone he meets is packing heat?

You think we're way ahead of the mean on copper shooting of randos now?

Oh, and try pulling that shit if your skin color is marginally darker than a sheet of notebook paper.

Fuuuuuucccccckkkkkk.

But even beyond how fucked up that is, is the wingnut neediness to repeal the 20th Century.

When I was learning my trade, an older engineer told me that things like building codes and design requirements were enacted "one death at a time".

Because we would do our best to head off fucked up things like deadly building fires or earthquake collapses based on our best guess on how bad those fires or earthquakes could get.

Then a worse fire or earthquake would come along, kill a bunch of people, we'd learn from that and revise our codes and designs to head off those worse fires and earthquakes.

If you look at public health and safety rules - things like OHSA regs, vaccination requirements, medical practice - between 1900 and 2000 you see a fairly broad, if uneven, progression from "we don't understand and couldn't do anything even if we did" to "oh, okay, here's what's happening and here's how we can prevent or mitigate that."

No everyone was on board with that - look back at the "polio monkey serum" shit that the Birtchers ran with back in the 1940s and 50s - but the public in general agreed; safer is better in the general sense.

So it was less fun to drive with seatbelts and sober. But it was safer for everyone.

It wasn't much fun to get measles shots. But it was safer than getting measles, safer for everyone.

It was more irking to have guards on saws, and rules for ladders. Some things - like the tipping toddler on 5-gallon buckets, seemed even silly and excessive.

Taking the handle off the pump sucked. But shitting yourself to death from cholera sucked worse.

The general public consensus was that this stuff was a minor issue compared to, say, dying horribly of smallpox and cholera or being paralyzed by polio.

Now that consensus is in ruins, and it's for a simple, horrible, stupid reason;

Because the political right's policy goals are subjectively shit - plutocracy, oligarchy, theocracy - they need red cultural meat to feed their C.H.U.D. hordes, something like 40% of the U.S. public, and they've chosen things like democracy, equity, and, yes, public health to feed this ignorant beast.

As the linked article points out, it's killing those CHUDs.

And, as the article also points out, the CHUDs don't care. 

If those cultural "wins" kill those they hate and "own the libs"?

They'll die happy.

How the fuck do you fight that?

That's whackadoodle cult thinking.

That's hashishin thinking, the kind of thinking that made blissed-out drug-addled assassins that you had to kill to stop.

And, as I've also said here before, if that is the case...

...and I believe it is...

...the implication is that our choices are grim; give up all the social and political and economic and even medical gains of the 20th Century,

or,

Kill them.

I know which I think is the worse option.

But I also know that I'm rolling a massive rock uphill to even begin to clue the vast bulk of my supposedly-fellow citizens in that that's even a possibility, much less a necessity.

And so here we are.

They will kill us before they let us take the fucking handle off the fucking pump.

And that, my friend, is a Peak Fucking Stupid way to die.

The Boxer

One of the things that's been so difficult and frustrating for me to watch is my country seeming to be intent on re-fighting fights I thought had been fought (and won for the good...) long ago.

The current insanity of the wingnut Right for all things other-than-heterosexual is one of them.

First, I don't get it.

Do these fucking C.H.U.D.s think that they can just scream and stamp their widdle feet and legislate other-than-heterosexual people away?

Obviously, yes, because that appears to be the idea, such as it is.

That's nuts.

That's like saying that if I close my eyes long enough that the table I'm sitting at will just...go away.

Gay people are...people. Lesbian people, non-binary people, trans people. They're just...people. For fuck's sake, cis-het whacko Christian "conservatives", it's like you're trying to pretend there's nothing in this world not like you (or what you want it to be). 

There's all sorts of people who aren't fucking like you. People who like model trains. People who sleep in Sundays. People who hate green beans. People who like (or love, or lust after) people who may not be the ones you "think" they should.

To insist otherwise?

That's utterly bugnuts.

No, actually, that's worse. Because "wishing people away" is how you start down the road that ends against walls, in shallow graves, or in ovens.

And second, and fuckadoodledoo, I thought we'd settled this on let's-not-do-stupid-shit grounds.

It's plain commonsense; if We the People are going to hand out legal and financial goodies based on things like legal and financial marital status (and We the People want to at least pretend that our society is based on Equal Justice Under Law) then every consenting-adult has to have in on that.

So if I want to marry for the tax writeoff? Cool. If I want to gay-marry, or lesbian-marry, or whoever-so-long-as-we-can-consent for the same bennie?

Also cool.

If I want to love? Lust? Dress like? Be with? Think or talk or be? Someone not manly-man or girly-girl? 

What' s the fucking problem with that?

And, seriously, who the fuck does that hurt? Who is hurt because that's a thing, and that everybody knows and accepts it as a thing?

I mean...if a schoolkid is old enough to know that there's a thing like fucking Donald fucking Trump, he or she or they are old enough to know that Heather has Two Mommies (or Daddies, or whatever...) or some other kid may have guy parts but not really feel very guy-ish. 

Personally, IMO the first should shit-scare all of us waaaaaaay more than all that other stuff, but, whatev'.

I know a lot of this is about supposed-Christian-bible-stuff but, frankly, 1) we're supposed to be a nation under civil law, not a fucking theocracy, and 2) if you're gonna clobber other people with bible-stuff you better not be mixing fucking fabrics or eating a roast beef sando with a glass of milk. 

(There's nothing more despicable than notional theocrats who pick-and-choose their theocracy. You wanna be a nutty God-pesterer? You gotta be full-on-nutzo. Buy it all or nothing. No homosexuals? Then no shrimp and no charging interest. You own it all, you don't get to pick your looney bits.)

Point is...here we are. 

Every whackadoodle wingnut (which means effectively the entire American Republican Party) is screeching like their junk is in a vise about non-heterosexuals being pedophiles (Oh, hi, Roy Moore, Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump, Denny Hastert, Gym Jordan! Ears burning, ma dudes? Yep, talking about your little, ummm..."problems") or "groomers" or every other awful goddamn sexual thing they can throw at the public wall to see if it sticks.

I'll be the first to say that there are troubling things that We the People should be deeply concerned about. Climate. The fact that here in the world's richest and most powerful polity there are people with more yachts than they can ever sail while a couple of miles away there are people who can't sleep indoors. Nonalcoholic "beer". COVID-19.

But the fact that Asami and Korra (and, yes, I totally shipped those two and still do...) love each other?

That's so far down the fucking list...no. Just no. 

It's not even on the fucking list.

It's just two people. Imaginary people, even. In love. Just like people, lots of people, real not-cartoon people, do.

And the fact that we're fighting over this?

Again?

Has me infuriated in a sort of angry-sick-and-tired-of-this-bullshit way.

One of the saddest and most irritating parts of having lived this long has been watching the worst people in my country return to the worst ideas my country ever had and dig up those ideas like a fucking stupid spaniel digging up the stinking remains of a dead rabbit.

Sexism.

Racism.

Homophobia.

I thought we were on the way to burying those sonsofbitches deeper than Newt Gingrich's morals.

Seems I was wrong.

Well, shit.

"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries the reminders
Of every glove that laid him down
And cut him 'til he cried out
In his anger and his shame
"I am leaving, I am leaving"
But the fighter still remains..."

~ Paul Simon

Half FOX and half free

I follow a blog called Stonekettle Station. It's written by a crusty old squid by the name of Jim Wright, and I enjoy his curmudgeonly and iconoclastic take on most things.

But since the election of the Tangerine Toddler Jim has been banging this drum about "compromise".

What compromise? Well...his premise is that there is this critical mass of "good people" out there who have been fooled (or stampeded, or sidled) into voting Republican because they have fears, and the Left just pooh-poohs their fears. So they go out and vote for the Republican who may (or may not) do "something" to change what it is they fear but as often as not simply uses their fear-vote to advance the GOP agenda of more Gilded Age.

The trick, see, is that:

"It seems Democrats have a historic opportunity, a moment when moderate conservatives could be given a choice other than dogmatic partisanship, if the left can pull together, can reach out, can compromise, and can but convince them that their guns and their bibles will be safe. If Democrats can address those fears up above in an honest manner and put them firmly to rest, then now, this moment right here, is an opportunity to prove that the alternative is better."

And y'know what?

I completely agree.

I don't want to take anyone's kid and convince him that his or her faith is a bunch of Bronze Age claptrap. I think it is, but, hell, I also think that french fries are good with mayonnaise.

I don't want to take anyone's Mossberg. Their AR-15? Yeah, maybe. But "their guns", as in ALL the guns? Christ, I'd be a lunatic to think it could even be done; We the People have chosen to offer up a blood sacrifice to the God of Weaponry rather than to disarm and I just have to suck that up.

But...here's where I think Jim hits the wall. He says that"

You find the people, whatever their politics, who believe civilization is better than the alternative."

Which is a great idea, a terrific idea.

Just one little problem...what if the people you're trying to compromise with would rather wreck the joint rather than accept a "civilization" that's not on their terms?

There was this guy. Kind of a liberalish dude, really a mainstream corporate-capitalist sort of politician but in the liberal tradition that believes that governing is to "get things done" for the majority of the citizens. Sorta wonky. Hawaiian dude, funny name, can't quite remember it. But he was president back in the day. Remember him?

Remember how he tried to "compromise" with these people? Offered them all sorts of private profits, all sorts of corporate goodies, tried to defer to their "sensibilities" about things like religion and sex and gender and all that guff?
And remember how they "compromised" with him?

Yeah. Me, too.

Tell me, Jim; how the flippin' fuck do you "compromise" with people - and I'm talking your bog-standard Republicans, your soccer moms and Home Depot dads, not the shoutycrackers and the Stormfront bros - who think and thought that Barak Obama was a Kenyan commie out to destroy their freedoms? Who thought that living through eight years of having to press "1" for English and not being able to use the word "faggot" at PTA meetings was sheer tyrannical hell?

I'm serious. This is getting ridiculous. Jim keeps on and on about "compromise" as if the Left hasn't. Even. Tried. While that's about all the left HAS done. Given ground on abortion. Given ground on equal rights. Given ground on health care. Given ground on "terrorism".

Sweet Christ, these wingnuts have gotten damn near everything they've whined about...but did that motivate them to moderate their insistence that the queers hide back in the closet and stop getting all "married" and the blacks stop getting pissed off about being shot by cops and the wogs be fine with getting carpet-bombed and tortured and the uppity wimmen shut up and lie there and plutocrats get the tax cuts they need to better buy and sell government?

Ummm...no.

And much as I hate to be a "die, die!" libtard (Jim had a post talking about the war of extermination with the aliens in Independence Day and how that's where we're going if we can't compromise...), but equal justice and equitable democracy and other details like clean air and water aren't really negotiable.

They're starting points; from there I'm fine with arguing the details of potty time with people who are terrified that they will be assaulted in the ladies' can by a Cambodian ladyman in a Balenciaga cocktail frock.

Here's what I think.

I think Jim's got the fundamental relationship wrong. It's the fundies and wingnuts that are doing the "die, die!" thing here. They're fine with destroying the U.S. of the New Deal if they can't get white supremacy and plutocracy and corporate oligarchy. They'd rather fight liberalism to the death than compromise with it; their insane furor over the ACA and the other ridiculously moderate liberal institutions of 2017 America - their "fears", as you label them - pretty much gives them away. To them we're "babykillers" and "dhimmicrats" and "libtards".

They don't want to compromise with us. They want to destroy us. Those aren't MY words, they're theirs.

So sorry to spoil the fun. But I think Jim - and my other lefty friends and pundits who keep going on about how we just have to understand and reach out to the poor frightened rubes who went all-in for Trump - are preaching to the wrong choir.

I agree; the nation cannot long survive half FOX and half free; it must become all one or all the other. But I see no reason why those of us who object to becoming serfs to our corporate overlords need to give anything more to the ridiculous fears of Scary Brown People and fifteen bucks an hour and solar power and gay wedding cakes.

Instead, I think all y'all guys need to tell the Right all this "compromise" stuff.

I'll be here with the popcorn to see just how far you get with that shit.

Friday Jukebox: Transgender Toilet Trauma Edition

Soundtrack for today's post:



(from Suzanne Vega's brilliant "99.9F" album...)

So I'm a little baffled. I haven't paid enough attention to the usual wingnut suspects to "get" their argument for spending time and money worrying about the junk of who's using the public bogs. Part of this is the whole nutroll of how it seems like "conservative" politics seems to have been boiled down, like last week's roast chicken carcass, to a hot, steaming mess of Lurvin' Jesus, Lickin' Guns, and Hatin' Faggots.

So I'm not sure whether these jokers have the screaming fantods about a guy in a dress using the ladies' room, or a gal in Carhartts sitting down in the guy's stall because it's a potty thing or just simple, straight-up hatin' on people who aren't conventionally gendered.

Thing is...who worries about this?

When I hit the head at, say, Civic Stadium during a Timbers match I'm a LOT more concerned that the drunk guy next to me at the trough is gonna miss the target and wet my shoes down...or that the guy in front of me in the stall line had spicy Chicken Vindaloo for lunch.

What the possibly-not-born-a-dude in the next stall is sitting on? NOT on my radar.

And, seriously, WTF? How is that a "problem"?

Seriously.

I kinda get it if this is really just about politics and rilin' up The Base. Show a red-blooded Republican a picture of a homo and watch him or her get spun up like the little girl in The Exorcist when the priest shows up. They can't help it, so I can kinda see how a GOP "strategist" might think that hammering on the predatory homos in the public pissers might work as a "get-out-the-vote" kind of thing.

But...still. It seems to me like the whole "scary-crossdressing-homos-are-lurking-in-your-potty" meme as a fearmongering tactic is some pretty weak and oddball stuff to try and get votes on. Like I said; who seriously worries about that shit? You'd have to spend a lot of time on alt/transgender/toiletrape to even believe that was a thing.

That, or be stupider than a fucking bag of hammers.

Because as an electoral lie/tactic? Seems to rely on waaayyyyy too much on your targets being hooked on transgender toilet rape porn AND dumber than a fucking bag of hammers.

But..."conservatives"...hmmm.

Maybe not.

Down and Out in Schofield Barracks

A friend of mine put this up on her Facebook feed with the observation "This is a good point":

I see some variation of this stuff from time to time and usually just snort and move on. I have no idea why it pissed me off so much this time. Maybe it's that the Portland coppers are in the process of chasing our local homeless people out from under the Steel Bridge, one more round in the endless "We aren't willing to spend money to try and figure out a solution but we're fine with spending money to kick the problem-can down the road again" game we play here in the Land of the Free to Steal Bread and Sleep Under Bridges.

Maybe it was reading Jim Wright's terrific column discussing the whole nonsensical yet fucking insanely irritating obsession of the roughly-one-third-of-my-fellow-citizens who think of all taxes as theft...unless they're going to pay for killing people and breaking shit in which case, hooah!, America, fuck yeah!

But whatever the reason, it really, really pissed me off.

First, because it's a straight-out, brass-faced, fell-off-the-back-of-the-crapwagon bullshit lie.

Because the poor sad little broke GI or Marine (I add "Marine" because that the person that originally posted this thing has some sort of "jarhead 4 jarhead" header) doesn't "just" get paid $8.85 an hour.

Snuffy and Chesty also get free medical and dental care, free housing, and free meals. That's huge. Like, tens of thousands of dollars a year huge. and that's not all.

The poor little fellow's work clothes are paid for. He walks to work, so he doesn't have to have pay for a car, or gas, or insurance unless he wants to. He gets two weeks paid vacation a year and can spend it paying Motel 6 rates at Fort DeRussey at Waikiki Beach of he wants to fly there. And she doesn't even have to pay more then ten bucks for her vacation travel, either, if she flies space-A, a privilege kinda out of reach of Burger McFlipperson.

Poor little underpaid Joe and Molly are also working towards a guaranteed 50% base pay retirement after only 20 years service (meaning an 18-year-old private is only 38 at retirement) when he or she gets a huge veterans preferment for almost every civil service job.

If he makes 30 years he gets 75% of what is a pretty sweet top-three-grade pay and allowances.

Not to mention the fact that most American troops aren't ragged dog faces out in the tules, but truck drivers, IT techs, wing wipers and sailors who sleep in a bed and go to work in an office.

Plus everybody thanks his GI and Marine ass for their "freedoms" even though the last time an American soldier killed anyone for "freedom" was in 1945.

And second and last, this little screed pisses me off as a sad attempt to belittle the working poor, who have it way worse than 99% of the folks who wear a uniform, and that's coming from someone who wore one for 22 years.

This goes back to Jim's point about the nonsensical notion that paying taxes for tanks and aircraft carriers is a "public good" but paying taxes to help prevent a critical mass of your fellow citizens living in poverty and sickness and ignorance isn't. That somehow nations with lots of weapons are "healthy" and "strong"" even though they may be riven with social dysfunction from fostering a permanent underclass and a poorly educated, unhealthy, credulous citizenry.

That's nonsense, of course. Not that I'd expect a "conservative" to see that. But nonsense all the same.

Hey, I love GIs, too. But a lot of those GIs are gonna get out and find that they're going to have to try and make ends meet flipping burgers or making beds or stocking shelves and trying to do that while paying for their food and clothing and rent and aspirins, so being a dick about how poor people should be poor? That's...well, that's just being a dick.

So. As far as I can see the only "good point" this damn screed makes is the one that every GI figured out long ago;

If you crossbreed a "conservative" with a gorilla what you get you get is a retarded gorilla.

Ha! And you thought I was going to make that joke about Marines, didn't you.

April Fool.

Dear wingnut...(an open letter to "conservatives" on the Malheur Morons)

I've been reading your responses to the outpouring of anger and vitriol that has greeted the news that a bunch of self-identified pals of yours had "occupied" the vacant headquarters building at Malheur NWR out in the lesser paved portions of my home state.

You were angry yourselves, and scornful, that the "libtards' heads were exploding" over this. You seemed incredulous that these scruffy seditionists had aroused such ire on the Left, apparently as much because it is the Left as the subject of that furor. After all, we're supposed to be all "tolerant" and "squishy" about taking stands, except when we nag you about your hatred for things like homos marrying and Muslims...well, being alive...as "intolerant" and "rigid". You don't get it. Why are we so fucking pissed off about a handful of patriots exercising the Constitutional Second Amendment right to protest gummint tyranny?

So let me try and explain why this particular incident got up our collective wick so quickly and so badly.

First, a lot of it is the cumulative hammering you've been doing since...well, it feels like forever but at least the fifteen years since 9/11. We got used to - not okay with, but used to - being called "traitors" and "cowards" and "pussies" because we questioned your excitement about bombing and/or shooting the shit out of the public enemy de jour. We grew to expect that you would call anything we supported, whether it was abortion or freedom from theocracy or using cunning (or economics, or diplomacy, or pretty much anything) instead of bullets, "foolish", "impractical", "cowardly", and "anti-American".

We got used to hearing you describe our belief that taxes are the price of civilization as "stealing" and our conviction that regulation of the commons helped prevent the sort of greed and selfishness that got these Hammond people in trouble as "tyranny".

We didn't like it. Oh, hells, no. But we pretty much gave up trying to unscrew your heads on that subject, figuring that this was just your default setting.

We also got used to the big media outlets giving your whackadoodle ideas equal time just like they were actual human thoughts. So when we tried to discuss things like heading off climate change or not going all Operation Wetback or treating women as women and not as life-support systems for wombs and you started shrieking "Liar!" and "Babykiller!" we just sighed. Forget it, Jake, it's Wingnuttown, we would mutter. It's not worth the aggravation.

We especially gave up trying to warn you, and the newspeople, about the fire you were fucking with your fondness for wild talk about "Second Amendment solutions" to "government is the problem". See, we kept saying, We the People ARE "the government"; that's the idea, anyway.

Right? Kinda baked into the pie back in 1789?

That the problem with "Second Amendment solutions" pretty much led to the sort of "solutions" proposed by the western Pennsylvania whisky distillers and Dan Shays and Jeff Davis. And that those "solutions" were the kind of solutions that led to "solutions" like burning down your kitchen to get the roaches out of the oatmeal bin; ugly and violent and not really "solutions" at all.

Because every time we'd bring that up you'd start shrieking about "gungrabbers!" and "tyranny!".

Sigh.

So. Here we are.

A bunch of your pals - or, at least, people who claim to be your pals - have taken their bullet launchers and their energy drinks (but not enough jerky or cheeze doodles, apparently...) and done, in effect, what Shays and Davis and the whisky rebels did; taken a patch of ground that the U.S. government claims and broken rules the U.S. government has made and are defying the U.S. government to come and make them behave.

And are you guys ashamed about this, this armed sedition? Are you angry that these stupid jamokes are saying the quiet parts of Tentherism and "Second Amendment solutions" out loud? Are you out there with a bullhorn telling these screwheads to knock it the fuck off?

Hells, no. Once again, we're left to remind you that part of "a republic, if you can keep it..." is not losing the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

And, once again, the news media is fucked up like a football bat about this and giving your screwhead pals all sorts of free airtime to blarb their nonsensical screeds and, once again, you're giving, and going to give, us nothing but shit about it.

And we're really, really, really fucking sick and tired of it.

But since we've long figured out that arguing with you about this stuff is like trying to teach German irregular verbs to a cat we're reduced to screaming at these HeeHawsbullah morons and at our federal government to quite treating them like they have a point other than on their fucking heads so's we don't lose the fucking Whisky Rebellion.

Will that work? Doubtful. It hasn't so far. Christ, you're on the verge of electing Donald Fucking Trump your presidential candidate, forcryinoutloud, and the feds have let these goddamn screwhead VanillaISIS teahadis off the hook before. It's not like we're really hoping to get you knuckleheads to try a taste of realism for once.

It's just that sometimes the bullshit gets to the point where a liberal's just gotta fucking vent.

Tortured logic

Y'know what may be the saddest part of the whole "I guess we DO torture..." business?

The degree to which being opposed to torturing helpless prisoners is being cast as a "liberal" issue.

Fuck that.

Torture is among the lowest, vilest, most despicable of crimes. There is no excuse for it other than fear and desperation. As I said earlier; I would harm a captive if I believed that it would save people who depended on me. But then - I would I hope, if I was man enough - I would accept my own guilt and turn myself in with the evidence of my acts as the criminal I was and stand trial for my wrongs.

Torture IS wrong. The wrongest of wrongs. There shouldn't really be any argument over that; it's not a liberal wrong or a conservative wrong, it's a human wrong.

Period.

But somehow this is all getting twisted around into a "liberal" versus "conservative" issue. The peripatetic "conservative" commentor "no one" - who has made his appearance here before as well as over at the MilPub and Jim and Lisa's joint - just described my disgust and horror that my country is now unquestionably in the same class as Imperial Japan and Soviet Russia and Nazi Germany as industrial states that torture their captives as a "liberal rant" (it's over at the 'Pub, but you get the picture).

And, y'know what? That just saddens and sickens me even more.

Because I grew up in a "conservative" house. My father the Master Chief was a rock-ribbed Republican up until the Eighties when he grew sick of Reagan's "government is the problem" bullshit. Many of the most decent, honorable people I know are or were "conservative".

But by that very definition the notion that the nation they love, that I love, could act like the Kempeitai or the NKVD is sickening and saddening to them as it is to me.

I'm sorry, but if you think that wanting to coldcock Dick Cheney for being a cowardly sonofabitch who ran like a frightened sissy when his country called on him to fight but loves the idea of having one of his lackeys torture some A-rab is a "liberal rant" rather than just being justifiably insanely outraged at the craven fucker's utter gall you are completely fucked up like a football bat.

Hugging the bowl

It took a while for me to get beyond Bryn's birthday this year.

Between that, and an exceptionally busy work week, and the Boy's continuing story, and a personal fascination with whatever-the-hell is going on in the Crimea I just haven't had the time to get back to this blog.

Sorry.

Blogging will be light for the next week, too, as I will be working on the Battle for this month: Glorieta Pass, 1863.

But I did want to poke my head up and look around so's you didn't think I'd gone into hibernation or something.

So, some minor bloggage.

Fucking CPAC.

What a goddamn shitshow. The fact that these idiots invited, and then cheered, Ollie Fucking North pretty much puts a stake in whatever-functions-as-the-organ-that-conservatives-have-instead-of-a-heart. Certainly not a brain; anyone who would do anything in the vicinity of Ollie Fucking North other than spit on him is a damn lunatic. The man is a walking skid mark on a U.S. Marine uniform pant.

And to top that there's Scooter Fucking Libby? And Bernie Fucking Kerik? Is this supposed to be a conservative convention or a damn parole board meeting?

Pretty much sums up modern U.S. movement conservatism, though. Neither benevolent nor intelligent, just a seething, wretched hive of angry, vindictive scum and villainy. Not with Extra Felons.

Sheesh.

And in other "conservative" news..."conservative Christians" are upset because of "historical inaccuracies" in a movie about...Noah?

Wait.

What?

No, this isn't "The Onion".

Seriously, Jesus-pesterers are having kitten-fits because this movie, whatever else the hell it does, doesn't fit the version of a made-up ancient Hebrew version of an older made-up Sumerian tale about a guy who builds a big-ass boat and stuffs animals in it?

(Extra points to the Jesus-pesterers who seem to have spent a ridiculous amount of wasted time trying to reconcile the logistical requirements of a gajillion animals by trying to hammer the Hebrew word "kind" (as in "two of each kind") as ever-larger phylogenetic categories. Apparently there's even a special Jesus-pesterer term for this - "baraminology" - which is essentially the same thing as the "science" of describing the types of ponies in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic.)

The linked article at The Panda's Thumb is made of 100% awesomesauce, BTW; check it out.

"Historical inaccuracies."

Snort.

Speaking of dead conservatives...or were we?

Whatever. Point is, Shirley Temple Black kicked the bucket last month.

I know, I know...she's a film icon, the prototype Child Star and bigger in American film history than Lassie. My problem is that I discovered her in my teenage years and from the lofty maturity of fifteen her juvenile films always seemed cloying, childish, and twee. I've since developed a greater appreciation for her early talents but never quite to the point of loving her or her child work.

My loss, I suppose.

Thing is, I love the heck out of her late Forties work. After the war Shirley had matured into a damn good little comic actress.

She goes toe-to-toe with the heavyweights in The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer and is wonderful as a teenager in Since You Went Away. I've also seen her do delightful work in a piece of postwar comic nonsense called Honeymoon; she really had the chops to make it as an actress in light comedy. It's too bad she didn't manage to keep working past the late Forties, and you have to wonder if her childhood success didn't have something to do with that.

Seriously, think about it. Here was a young actress who was attractive, sexually attractive, but who was indelibly associated with the audiences of the late Forties and Fifties with a six-year-old girl. I mean, imagine; the ick-factor of getting a boner looking a little Curly Top?

Yeah, that.

I should add, though, that it's also probably good for her memory that Pete McCloskey beat her for the 11th Congressional District in 1967.

She ran to his right - she was a pretty conservative Republican for the middle Sixties (not that she'd be considered "conservative" today, mind you) and so we remember the child star, the promising young actress, and the gracious apolitical hostess and not a more divisive conservative Congresswoman in the Nixon (and possibly the Reagan) Era.

My favorite story about her?

Anne Edwards' biography says that when she was invited to the White House in 1935 she shot Eleanor Roosevelt in the ass:

"Temple and her parents traveled to Washington, D.C., late in 1935 to meet President Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor. The presidential couple invited the Temple family to a cook-out at their home in Hyde Park, New York, where Eleanor, bending over an outdoor grill, was hit smartly in the rear with a pebble from the slingshot Temple carried everywhere in her little lace purse." (Edwards, p. 81)

So maybe even then little Bubbles was a red-meat Republican.

Probably just as well we'll never know.

This was kind of intriguing in a very odd way:

"China Southern flight CZ628, operating as a code-share with Japan Airlines Co. (9201) as flight JL5021, was headed to Shenyang, China from Narita airport in Japan when North Korea fired the missile at 4:17 p.m. yesterday, South Korean Defense Ministry spokesman Kim Min Seok said today by phone. The jet was over international water at an altitude of 10 kilometers (32,800 feet) at 4:24 p.m. when it crossed the trajectory of the missile, which reached a height of 20 kilometers, Kim said."

Despite what the article says the two objects were not actually very close in time; seven minutes is a hell of a long time at 400 miles per hour (or more, for the missile).

This wasn't a close call.

The odd part about this for me was that when we used to range fire on Fort Lewis, Washington part of our ballistic arc for high-angle fire was within the flight path for aircraft landing at SeaTac Airport in Seattle. Range Control would close the range for some time, ten minutes before or after (I forget the exact envelope) when an aircraft was scheduled to fly over.

That used to drive us bugnuts. The phrase you'd hear repeatedly was "Little bullet, big sky". But there was no room for any sort of miscalculation when a freakish mishap might kill 200-plus people.

We didn't shoot.

The corollary to this - for me, anyway - isn't that the Norks barely missed a civilian airliner. They misse by a mile. It's that they just didn't give a shit; their impact area was downrange of a commercial air corridor and they just popped off rounds without bothering to check and see if there even WAS anyone out there to hit.

That's almost scarier than if they were trying.

It's Saturday morning and if I thought that the end of the week would bring some relief I was kidding myself. Friday is the kids' "game night", so there were video games played from sunset to damn near midnight (okay, 10:30, but close enough...).

Then it was the Boy's "night to sleep with mommy", which is a toddlerhood ritual that he loves to reenact when he can. But the Girl tends to toddle out to the couch - which is where I sleep when the Boy is doing his Oedipus Junior thing - at the wee hours of the morning, so Peep-Mommy Night is always on a night I can sleep in the next morning.

Usually everybody is happy with this, so it was a bit surprising to be awakened sometime in the dark predawn by the sound of someone being violently ill.

It was my Bride, who was wretchedly hugging the porcelain chalice, shivering and gulping. In the Little House it's hard to escape one another so her struggles were everyone else's. The Boy retreated into his bedroom and shut the door (he's still in there at 9:30...), the Girl toddled out to ask what she could do, and I lay down in our bed listening to the sweet little voice and her mother's strained answers.

The Bride is back asleep now, finally at rest, the Girl is watching some sort of bizarre Minecraft video, and I need to get dressed and wake the Boy so we can go to futsal in a moment.

Just another day, and I promise; more substantive blogging when I return.

Under the mossy rock...

I usually read Ross Douthat and just smirk.

I mean, the guy is a sort of poster-child for "entitled and clueless". His positions on pretty much every issue can be limned by just looking at any sort of potential subject of political, economic, or social dispute and thinking "Now...what would I think about this if I were a clueless douchebag who never had to face a moment's fear or a minute's want in my entire pampered, deferred-to life..?" and you'd have it nailed.

So I can't pretend I was eager to read his latest editorial about why the Teatards shut down the federal government. I figured I'd pretty much sussed out what he had to say. But I had some idle hands and those are, as you know, the devil's playgrounds. So I clicked the link and off I went.

And I found that he DID have something I needed to read, but not, I'm sure, for the reasons he wrote it. Here it is, in his own words:

"Conservative politicians take power imagining that this time, this time, they will finally tame the New Deal-Great Society Leviathan...and then they make proposals and advance ideas for doing so, the weight of public opinion tilts against them, and they end up either backpedalling, getting defeated at the polls, or both."

At which point I have to admit, I didn't smirk.

I laughed out loud.

In a nation with perhaps the industrialized world's least-comprehensive "social safety net", where a single major illness or screw-up or a couple of cases of hard luck can put you out in the street, where, for example, were I to lose my job through no fault of my own it is entirely possible that I and my entire family will drop into poverty because no one will hire a 56-year-old geologist with a family and a bum hip in one of the shittiest development economies in fifty years...that when you "make proposals and advance ideas" that will make the lives of people like me less secure, more precarious, more likely to end up in poverty in our old age...our opinion "tilts against you".

Can you imagine that?

But there you have it. The inside of the heads of the people who, like Ross Douthat, think of themselves as "small-government conservatives" who..."see as forty years of failure, in which first Reagan and then Gingrich and now the Tea Party wave have all failed to deliver on the promise of an actual right-wing answer to the big left-wing victories of the 1930s and 1960s — and now, with Obamacare, of Obama’s first two years as well."

You note the crucial qualifier here.

The Thirties and the Sixties.

Not the Forties, when Big Government went from a standing Army of 100,000 to one of 8 million. Not the Oughts and Teens when the CIA became part of a Directorate of National Intelligence and the NSA became all of our internet service provider. Not the Fifties, when Ike warned us about the "Military-Industrial Complex" (he left out "Congressional" but, hey, the man had to think of his Party...)

Nope. "Big Government" isn't the National Security Agency. It's not the Department of Homeland Security. It's not the Department of Defense, or the hungry corporate remoras that live off the federal dollar from those organizations; Raytheon, General Dynamics, Electric Boat Company, FLIR Systems, Boeing.

It's poor people.

It's sick people.

It's old people.

It's the "Great Society".

THAT's the evil "Big Government".

THAT's who Ross and his "small government conservatives" want to take out behind the barn and put two into the skull.

THAT's why we are where we are.

Because the people that Ross Douthat talks to, the people who are talking to the numbskulls in Congress, the numbskulls themselves, want to "shrink" government...not by getting rid of all those expensive warships, or by not bombing unpaved parts of the world where someone might be eating some Osama bin Ladin kulfa balls, or by cutting back on agribusiness subsidies, or tax giveaways to Kim Kardashian...but by making sure that I can't get insurance for my pre-existing condition or a pension when I'm too old and sick to work and my broker has looted my 401K.

Honestly.

"And if this attitude sounds more like a foolish romanticism than a prudent, responsible, grounded-in-reality conservatism..." concludes Douthat.

Well, no. Actually. This attitude sounds like the meeching whines of a bunch of sour douchebags terrified that somewhere, somehow, someone they don't like is doing okay because of some tax dollars that they think should be going to the Walton family to buy yet another vacation home.

I'm still waiting for some "prudent, reasonable, grounded-in-reality" conservative to show up with a plan that isn't based on hippie-punching and sour grapes that their side fucked up in 1929.

And if our boy Ross is any example I don't expect that to happen anytime soon.

These fucking people...

Blown Away

Two thoughts:

First; what kind of fucking idiot takes his small children to film a burning fucking fertilizer plant?

Hearing the sonofabitch's kid begging the father to get them out makes me want to do something very medieval to the parent. What. A. Fucking. Tool.

In case you don't know - and I can't imagine anyone who wouldn't know this - ammonium nitrate, the primary component of nitrate fertilizer, is related to other nitrate compounds (such as nitroglycerine) and is a powerful oxydizer. Back when the Army still trained the Special Forces to run guerrilla groups behind enemy lines instead of teaching government goon "armies" to blackmail kebab-stand owners and use power drills on people's kneecaps it loved these things. Fertilizer plants (and grain storage facilities) are basically explosions that haven't happened yet.

And both of them - along with fuel storage and refining plants and God knows what else - are mingled into all sorts of places in Texas, where things like zoning and development regulations are part of the liberal commie Agenda 21 plan to choke off our natural American right to work for shit wages in dangerous places and get whatever hand-me-downs our corporate masters choose to bestow on us.

When I lived in Houston my rundown shitheel apartment was two streets away from some sort of chemical plant. When the wind was right you could get a contact high just breathing, and the air had a sharp, dangerous smell that made me think of open drums of something dark and fuming. I still have no idea what the hell they were brewing over there, but had it been toxic I suspect the first we'd have known about a spill would have been the moment our lungs stopped functioning.

Second, this is exactly the reason I have nothing but loathing and contempt for the sorts of people who try and convince me that American "conservatism" is all about liberty and "personal responsibility" and FREEDOM! in its consuming greed for union-busting and regulation-smashing.

It makes absolutely no sense to me - worse, it stands sense on its head - to insist that "government bureaucrats" - making reckless, boneheaded decisions without popular consent, destroying jobs, issuing edicts, "taking" money in return for nothing - are the embodiment of Pure Evil while insisting that the same sort of actions when taken by corporate bureaucrats or individuals are the highest, best, and noblest acts of civilized mankind.

Texas was where this sort of idiocy took physical form.

Everywhere I went in West and South Texas I saw this sort of shit; dangerous, obviously un-inspected, unregulated commercial outfits shoehorned into little crapped-out towns and rundown parts of the cities, just like my nasty chemical plant. I hadn't been out of the active service for long at that time and sometimes the old mindset would kick in as I drove by some reeking fertilizer plant or immense grain silo across the street from a row of houses; man, give me a rucksack of C-4 and some det cord and I could flatten this whole shitty little town, I'd think, forgetting that this wasn't the Soviet Ukraine and these were my fellow citizens and not inhabitants of some enemy country I'd been tasked to terrify.

But I was young and stupid then, and just passing the time of day.

Today children, men, and women are ripped to bloody rags in West, Texas, because no one bothered to make rules or enforce the rules that might have kept their homes away from the West Fertilizer Plant.

Who was being the young and stupid one during that time, eh?

TC Darwin

I'm always sort of amazed when I run into people who "don't believe" in evolution as the method of the origin of species.

First, because most of these people are "conservative". And, second, because if they would just look around, they'd see a wonderful metaphor for evolution at work in one of their (typically) favorite things; weapons.

I thought about this again because of my son's current favorite on-line game "World of Tanks".

The magilla behind this MMO game is that there's this imaginary world full of World War 2 tanks. It includes every possible permutation and variation of the breed, including tanks that were no more than prototypes or never fired a shot in anger between 1939 and 1945. Oh, and it includes self-propelled artillery, for some odd reason.

But they're all there, and you "buy" a tank or tanks and then you get tossed into battles where you drive around, shoot other people, and get shot. There's no infantry, or mines, or civilians, or politics, or messy wounds or deaths - it's WW2 in a pasteurized bottle, but it's big fun for nine years old.

But here's the catch; you have to start out with a light tank; the VK-31 Leichttraktor for Germany, the Soviet MS-1, or the U.S. T1 "Cunningham".

But you get pitched into battles with much bigger tanks, everything from mid-war mediums to 1945 superheavies. The Boy spends a lot of time getting shot into Swiss cheese, at which time I remind him that there are two types of light tanks; ones that hang around after the Big Kids show up to play, and live ones.

Which brings me back to evolution.

Because typically we can't "see" things evolve. Natural selection requires environmental change to occur, and that usually occurs over millenia. A type of critter produces several genotypes, and then some change occurs - temperature, salinity, rainfall, vegetation - where one genotype is more successful than the others. But the replacement of one with another often takes lifetimes, typically many lifetimes, to complete.

But in the World of Tanks, the real world of tanks, we've seen a process that neatly duplicates what happens in the evolution of species through natural selection in a single long human lifespan.

The major nations typically went to war in the late Thirties or early Forties with a full suite of armored vehicles;

Light tanks, for scouting,

Medium tanks, for general combat, and mobile action, and

Heavy tanks, for static defense or breaking through an enemy's defense.

(The only exceptions I can think of were the Chinese, who flat-out couldn't afford anything more than a rag-tag and bobtail, and the Japanese, whose armored force was as crude and unsophisticated as the rest of Japanese tactical doctrine.

I should really do a post about them - Japanese armor truly sucked pipe, kind of shocking for a nation whose ambitions were so great...)

Where are they now?

I'll tell you where; they're here, but the tank has evolved.

The deadly natural selection of combat was unpleasant to the light tanks; they were too small and too slow to fight through an enemy's screen of medium tanks, mines, and hand-held antitank rockets (the bazooka and the Panzerfaust were the small mammals that ate the light tank eggs...) and reconnaissance duties increasingly became the province of the aircraft.

And the heavies were just that; too damn heavy. Too slow, too expensive, too few. I don't agree with the old Soviet saying about "quantity has a quality of it's own" but it was true that unless the terrain was ideal the combination of infantry, artillery, tac air, and medium tanks could winkle out a platoon or so of heavies with a little effort.

The light and heavy versions of the species a. tankus converged on the medium to produce the "main battle tank". This vehicle has roughly the speed of a WW2 medium tank (or better) with composite armor and the main cannon of roughly a WW2 heavy tank. The current U.S. M1A1 has a 120mm cannon; the German Panzerjäger Tiger Ausf. B mounted the 12.8 cm PaK 44 L/55. The armor of the Soviet T-80 is comparable to the late-WW2 IS models or the German superheavies.

Modern tanks are clearly an evolution of the WW2 types, an evolution that converged on the medium tank at the expense of the heavy and light types.

Ground reconnaissance duties have now been delegated to other vehicles; light wheeled scout cars such as the U.S. M1126 Stryker or the Russian BRDM/BTR-types, or the tracked carriers such as the U.S. M3 CFV.

Even on the theatre scale the U.S. Army concluded after WW2 that reconnaissance and screening are the province of specialized units (armored cavalry regiments, or ACRs) but armed them with standard main battle tanks and infantry/cavalry carriers. Since the Third Gulf War in 1991 most of these ACRs have been converted to use the Stryker light wheeled AFVs.

Only the British insist that the light tank still has a place on the battlefield.

Their Scimitar AFV is the last of the Great Power lights, and I have a sneaking suspicion that its persistence owes more to the reluctance of the British cavalry to accept that in armored war a modern cavalryman in a light tank is as dead as their horse cavalry forebears were when they met the original armored columns in 1939.

(Oh, and I should note here that the Poles weren't really that stupid; it's a military urban legend...)

For the rest of the world experience has concluded that using a small tank to scout is expensive and unproductive; it is too small to outfight an MBT and too slow to outrun one. Its light armor cannot withstand modern artillery or infantry antitank weaponry. A wheeled vehicle can do the job just as well, and it's loss can be afforded better. Sorry, scouts; it's just not worth training you up to be a tanker.

The natural selection of battle has not chosen the light tanker and his little tank.

So my poor little man and his light tank are trying to fight against not just larger and stronger tanks, but forces that mimic the incredible power of natural selection and species evolution.

No wonder it's such a hard fight.

But he has an excuse; he's nine years old. And we've talked about "evolution" and he's seen the simulacrum happening in the World of Tanks. I tell him; if the tanks were "intelligently designed" the M1 would have been invented in 1916.

Instead, the tank "evolved" as the world's tank designers responded to the natural selection of battle by altering the phenotype of the tank over the course of the 20th Century. The analogy isn't perfect, of course...but it makes the point; "species" can change, do change, as the result of natural selection, and end up resembling something very different from the starting point.

I wonder; what the flamin' hell is the excuse for the "conservatives" who don't "believe in evolution"..? Can't they SEE?

So, all together now:

(For those of you non-German speakers, that's the Panzerleid, the "Tank Song" of the German Army of WW2. Interestingly, for all that the modern Bundeswehr has discarded almost all the old Wehrmacht trappings, the Wiki entry says that the German tankers still sing this song.)

(And I want to tip my hat to commentor "gruff", whose cogent arguments regarding tanks and evolution caused me to revise this post)

The Conscience of a Conservative

"If America made abortion illegal but it was legal in Canada and Americans could cross the borders to get abortions paid for by the Canadian government, would you support invading Canada to end the practice?"This is via a friend who recently remade the acquaintance of a college classmate through Facebook. The gomer, who was so dim then that he was commonly referred to in college as "Joe Zero", has started laying gems like this and "Fanaticism is inherently contradictory with conservatism" on his unsuspecting FB pals.

"Fanaticism is inherently contradictory with conservatism"?

Um.Sure.

I've heard wingnuts come out with this stuff before. Somehow they seem to think that runing around screaming about Canadian abortion butchers, Islamofascist terror boogiemen and Medicare death panels makes them some sort of latter-day Edmund Burke instead of the hillbillie version of the sorority girl from a Wes Craven movie.

And as for this goober's smug little fairy tales...if there ever was anything intellectually coherent to the modern American "conservative movement" other than fear of the darkies, christopathic dominionism, and a pithecanthropicene panic at the thought of paying taxes for ANYthing, it was lost when Ronnie Reagan took office and proceeded to prove that he really WAS unlike the "tax-and-spend" Democrats - he spent like a drunken sailor on his first leave in Manila but refused to raise any revenue at all.

"Fanaticism"? Hell, I'd settle for a little fanaticism if it'd help the stupid bastards attain some level of intellectual coherence. Instead of "fanaticism" all these poor dumb prokes have is a complete refusal of the 20th Century, guns, homos, abortion and a flag-burning amendment. Oh, and trashing the New Deal so my father-in-law can end up living in my fucking garden shed.Movement Conservatism; the Place Where Brain Cells Go To Die.