It looks like that low-life in Libya may finally be getting what he deserves. That SOB sent fighters out to shoot down an aircraft I was in, so I take his continued existence personally.

But anyhow, if we didn’t have the poor, we’d hgave to invent them as a warning to our children, “see, behave in school and study hard or you’ll end up like *them*!” It’s all about social control. The harder we can make it for the poor, the more we can use the threat of being poor as a lever to control our children and our employees. Don’t report corruption to the Feds, ’cause they’ll leak it to us and we’ll black-ball you in this industry and then you’ll be one of them.

The middle class hasn’t forgotten this lesson, that keeping the poor around miserable and downtrodden is both a threat over their own heads (“spout the official ideology, pretend that the bullshit we’re spewing actually means something, or else”) and an opportunity for themselves when it comes to their own children and subordinates. But our oligarchs seem to have forgotten. That’s the only thing I can think, given that they appear intent upon creating far more poor people than are useful or necessary for that object lesson / threat to hang over people’s head. Perhaps they’ve decided that they have sufficient armed thugs in their employ (many wearing badges) that they no longer need more subtle ways of control. Hosni Mubarak thought that too. Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Orwellian Penguin

Down in San Diego county, when I lived there, one of the largest growers wanted to build what amounted to a college dormitory for his seasonal workers, and he couldn’t get the approval. People went ballistic over the concept of no kitchen, shared bathrooms, and NO PARKING facilities for anything in the county. The grower was concerned that the workers were sleeping rough to save money, because they certainly couldn’t find anything in the county that they could afford to rent, and the fact that he needed them to start work on time during the picking season.

A homeless group down here ran into the same problem trying to build the same kind of facility for day-laborers.

If you’re going to set up a police state, that’s the smart way to do it — everybody’s an informant, everybody’s an enforcer, and Siberia is an economic class, not a geographic place. We could end homelessness here in America within months, even in big cities there’s plenty of empty commercial space that could be used to house the homeless in hostel-type settings, but the homeless are useful. “Don’t rock the boat, or you’ll be a miserable homeless spat-upon nobody just like them.” Thus the reason I blog as a penguin rather than as a member of homo sapiens, especially considering the industry I work in.

The mistake our oligarchs are making right now is that they’ve decided that keeping the general rabble fat and happy is no longer necessary, that they’ve consolidated their power so well that they can make things work in their favor even if they allow the rabble to become increasingly impoverished and desperate. This thirty-year project is new, and thus far seems to be succeeding… but we’ll see. The oligarchs in 1929 thought they’d arrived at a steady state where they could strip the assets of the general population away (via deflating the money supply) without repercussions too, and the end result was FDR and the New Deal.

— Badtux the Sovok Penguin

He had to learn German in secret so he could make his break during a vacation to East Germany. Ordinary citizens weren’t allowed to visit countries where they spoke the local language, all interaction had to be through an official “translator”.

Soviet pilots are not taught to navigate. All long range aircraft have a separate navigator’s position which is filled by a member of the KGB. The KGB are also the only people authorized to have an accurate map of the Soviet Union. The standard maps that you can buy are wrong. I have a couple of Soviet maps in storage somewhere and their location of Moscow is off by at least 100 kilometers. The road signs were just as bad. Their geographic security in the age of satellites was paranoia run amok.

You friend is right to be worried, because any KGB in this country should definitely be assumed to be part of the “Russian mafia”, probably headquartered in the Russian section of San Francisco.

Self-censorship as practiced by the media is worse than government censorship. It is a sign of a slave mentality.

He was especially astounded that I talked to engineers in our Chinese subsidiary freely with no minders present. He explained that even for a telephone conversation with a Western engineer, it would have been very difficult for him to get permission to talk to said engineer, and a minder would have been required to to act as a “translator” even though he understood and spoke English perfectly well. And forget about actually visiting (as our Chinese employees sometimes did for training purposes), they would have been too afraid he would defect.

The big picture is of course the big picture, and you provided it. But it was interesting to get a view of the little picture from the point of view of someone who’d been inside that system, it gave you a real idea of just how fscked the Soviet Union really was by the end after so many years of denying reality, that even a mid-level engineer like my co-worker had to be put into a box for fear of learning too much about the outside world and disrupting the system. Hopefully the U.S. will wake up before reaching that point. I’m not feeling too optimistic, we have different minders here (called “television”, “teabaggers”, “freepers”, and “dittoheads”), but the effect is the same — people are afraid to talk about things that contradict official ideology, except in certain circumscribed circumstances such as on blogs, for fear that they’ll be ostracized, fired, have their homes and vehicles vandalized, or otherwise suffer consequences.

– Badtux the Pessimistic Penguin

If you looked at the list of stuff one of the guys who was posted to the Moscow embassy in 1974 was told to take with him, as it was unavailable in-country, and the list of stuff that wasn’t worth taking because they didn’t have the technology available, you knew that they were in real trouble.

I knew it even earlier when I saw politicians referring to a particular missile as a MIRV. I knew for a fact that while it had multiple warheads, they were definitely not independently targetable, they were totally ballistic, like shotgun pellets. It took them forever to develop a guidance system that was small enough to work in the MIRV environment.

I notice your signatures, BT, even if I don’t comment on them.

Yeah. Steve, I saw them emulating the “killer Ds” and leaving the state to put on the brakes. I wish them well, because the US media is refusing to recognize the protests as significant. Their corporate masters don’t like stories about people complaining about their corporate overloads, and their political “fellow travelers”.

I see the same blanket refusal to acknowledge simple facts that contradict their ideology in our own leaders today. Thus why I sign this post as…

– Badtux the Sovok Penguin

Egypt may have convinced some people that demonstrations can work. but I think they need to ask Al Jazeera to cover it, because the US media will ignore it as long as they can, just like they ignored the Great Depression for years.

Yes, Badtux, the majority of Russian analysts just shook our heads at the garbage that was spewed by Ronnie about the Soviet Union. Almost everything that was said, was nothing more than a fairy tale to support the absurd military build-up by the US to support the MIC.