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We Don't Soldier So Good

The world's tax dollars hard at work.

Today's Tune

Waiting --Calum Graham

Today's Uber Patriot

From The Columbus Dispatch, via Charlie Pierce:

An Indiana National Guardsman was arrested outside Columbus on New Year’s Day after a state trooper found nearly 50 bombs and the blueprints for a Navy SEAL training facility inside his car, the Madison County prosecutor said yesterday.

Andrew Scott Boguslawski, 43, also had a remote-control device to detonate the bombs, Madison County Prosecutor Stephen Pronai said. Boguslawski’s civilian job is as a groundskeeper at the Muscatatuck Urban Training Center in south-central Indiana. Prosecutors could not say definitively yesterday whether the blueprints in his car were for the facility where he worked.
Boguslawski also had a bulletproof vest in his car, Pronai said.

“He said something to the trooper about making a bomb vest,” Pronai said.
Lt. Col. Cathy Van Bree, a spokeswoman for the Indiana National Guard, said Boguslawski is a specialist in the guard who does intelligence analysis and has top-secret clearance.

Pronai said Boguslawski, who is from Moores Hill, Ind., appeared to be heading to Indiana when a state trooper clocked him going 85 mph in a 70 mph zone on I-70. When the trooper came back to the car to give Boguslawski a ticket, he saw the handle of a gun between his legs.

The trooper ordered Boguslawski out of the car and called for backup. Investigators found three more guns in the car — all loaded — and 48 bombs. They also found material to make more explosives.

Pronai said most of the bombs were small. He said investigators from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have searched Boguslawski’s house, and that local and federal investigators are trying to determine whether Boguslawski planned to attack the military facility. They are also combing through a computer, cameras and GPS found in his car.

Boguslawski is charged in Madison County with one count of manufacturing explosives, a second-degree felony. A preliminary court hearing is scheduled for Friday. He is being held at Tri-County Jail in Mechanicsburg in lieu of a $1 million bond.

Somebody please enlighten me as to how this dipwad from the American MidWest is in any discernible way materially different from any randomly selected Taliban/Al Qaeda dipwad from anywhere in South Asia or the Middle East.

And BTW - when Uncle Charlie talks, we should listen:

The argument really isn't about guns, per se. The argument is about a well-financed, and profitable in return, marketing strategy by weapons manufacturers and their sublets in Congress, and the media bubble that they all inhabit, through which people are fed a constant diet of indigestible paranoid crud about the government and the people in it. This isn't all coming directly from some crackpot on a shortwave in upper Michigan. It's the barely concealed subtext of everything that Wayne LaPierre has said in public in his entire career. It's what's behind the winks from Princess Dumbass of the Northwoods, who brags in her book-like product about giving a gun for Christmas as an act of "civil disobedience." There is a culture being created, and there are reckless, opportunistic people who are turning a buck on it, and not everybody marinating in that culture is necessarily the most well-balanced jar on the shelf. This isn't about guns. It is about weaponry. It is about why someone would arm themselves so luxuriously, and how they came to believe it was necessary. I think we've been awfully damned lucky so far.

I Have A Question

"Conservatives" - especially those identifying as TheoCons - (usually) like to piss and moan about how Da Gubmint always fucks everything up.

A coupla questions really - how come so many TheoCons want Da Gubmint all up in their religion?  If you let Da Gubmint get mixed up in your religion, then doesn't your ideology demand the conclusive assumption that your religion is gonna get all fucked up?

Just wonderin'.

Logical Fallacies Explained

Your Logical Fallacy Is (website - you can scroll thru them all and get a good synopsis for each one)

Today's Tunes

"Tight" and "Nawlins" and "JazzFunk" are not the kinda words that often bump into each other in the same sentence.

Trombone Shorty at NPR Tiny Desk Concerts:

What About Bob?

Juan Cole is not given to the kind of exaggeration necessary for political slagging.  One of the redeeming qualities of "The Academy" is that generally they understand how important it is to maintain their good standing in the company of their peers; so it's pretty rare for any high-profile academician to stray widely from the fold when it comes to speaking out too strongly about much of anything unless he's very confident of his position.  They're really a pretty conservative bunch - which seems odd, doesn't it? - since all we ever hear is that they're exactly the opposite?  I wonder what that's all about.

Anyhoo - Bob Gates has left our employ, and it's time for him to suck around for his place on the Wingnut Welfare Circuit; but first he has to re-establish his worthiness with the Repub faithful (after all, he went to work for "those people") so he's taken a giant shit on Obama's head no, that ain't it.

He's written a book nope sorry, missed again

Wait, I got it: He's offering a good-n-greasy literary handjob to any "conservative" who needs to get his rocks off by hearing another privileged Washington insider calling The Prez a lazy shiftless no-good dirty infantile pickaninny - all in polite-sounding coded language of course.

But perhaps I go too far - and perhaps that's why I'm a low-rent blogger while Juan Cole gets paid pretty good to do this kinda thing a lot better:

Former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in his new memoir is said to have slammed Vice President Joe Biden for having been consistently “wrong” on foreign policy matters over the past four decades.

Gates’s petty gossip about his former colleagues should put an end to the pusillanimous Democratic Party tradition of appointing Republicans as secretaries of defense in Democratic administrations.

There is a lot to like about Gates. He over time became something like a defensive realist. He appears to have helped prevent Dick Cheney and the Neocons from attacking Iran. He warns against the seductive character of drone warfare, and wants a court to sign off on drone strikes. He said he thought any military commander who wanted to take US troops into another big ground war should have his head examined. He is scathing on the grandstanding and sadism of congressmen during hearings.

But lest it be forgotten, Gates’s career has been checkered and he has been consistently wrong about foreign policy himself. To wit:

1. Gates as a high official at the CIA was involved in the 1970s and 1980s invastly exaggerating the economic and military power of the Soviet Union...

2. When he was a high official at the CIA in the mid to late 1980s, Gates was involved in selling Pentagon weaponry to the Ayatollah Khomeini. ...

3. Not only did the Reagan administration in which Gates served as a loyal capo illegally steal weaponry from Pentagon warehouses...

4. Gates was, further, involved in further covert provision of weaponry, including chemicals and biological precursors to Saddam Hussein of Iraq. ...

5. Gates was among the architects of the US policy of giving billions to far right Muslim jihadis (Mujahideen) such as Gulbadin Hikmatyar in northern Pakistan...

6. The Afghanistan jihad waged by Gates and others at the CIA involved pressuring Saudi intelligence also to raise funds for it. The Saudis asked Osama Bin Laden to help as a fundraiser. ...

7. Gates and others in the Reagan administration appear to have downplayed Pakistan’s nuclear program...

8. Gates thinks that the 2007 Bush troop escalation or “surge” was effective. ...

9. Gates was confident in 2008 that a troop escalation in Afghanistan could allow for free and fair elections and actually said that the Taliban held no territory and the security problems in that country were exaggerated.

10. Gates asserts that he believes that once the US winds down its military role in Afghanistan, that country will be on a fairly good track to success. ...

Sochi 2014

Walt Putin is a Soviet era kinda guy, and he's having a difficult time breaking with the old Soviet habit of trying to get style to triumph over substance. (not that he's the only politico who seems always to fall for his own bullshit - just sayin', y'know?)

Read about some of this shit at UK's Daily Mail.

By The Numbers

Not that it'll matter one little bit, but hey - I'm in full Quixote mode, so fut da wuk.

The success of Costco, Trader Joe’s, QuikTrip and Mercadona, Spain’s biggest supermarket chain, indicate, [business professor Zeynep Ton] argues, that well-paid, knowledgeable workers are not an indulgence often found in luxury boutiques with their high markups. At each of the aforementioned companies, workers are paid more than at their competitors; they are also amply staffed per shift. More employees can ask customers questions about what they want to see more of and what they don’t like, and then they are empowered to change displays or order different stock to appeal to local tastes. (In big chains, these sorts of decisions are typically made in headquarters with little or no line-staff input.) Costco pays its workers about $21 an hour; Walmart is just about $13. Yet Costco’s stock performance has thoroughly walloped Walmart’s for a decade.