The Government Shutdown Kabuki

At least three times today at work, I heard references to the current DC kabuki theater.  Every opinion was "shut 'er down!".  In a building full of engineers, where instead of the roughly 50/50 makeup of the country it's closer to 75% sane, that didn't surprise me.

What surprised me was a couple of details I heard from DC reporter Jamie Dupree during the drive home.  First some background.

Of course, you know we haven't passed an actual budget since '09?  The last actual Federal Budget was in April of '09.  (article from 2012 talking about it, and more in the Dupree article linked).

According to Dupree, the last time budgets were passed on time, that is, according to the constitution and law, was in the mid 1990s. You will note that neatly covers both parties as the majority; no one has the monopoly on irresponsibility.

Congress has not finished its budget work by October 1 (the start of the new fiscal year) since 1996; lawmakers haven't finished their work on time on the 12 individual spending bills that make up the budget since 1994.

Late or improper budgets go way back, though.  What he said that got me is this:

As we count down to midnight Monday night and a possible government shutdown, remember that we are fighting over how to fund the government for only a few months.  Not for a full fiscal year, but just until mid-October under a funding plan from Democrats and to mid-November from the GOP.  

This whole charade, this whole drama-llama, attention-grabbing, media whore-fest, is for either two weeks or six!  Of the 17 or so previous government shutdowns, all but one were over in less than two weeks.  And don't forget, in about two weeks, the "debt ceiling" impasse will happen, with dire warnings over the end of the world, if we don't give the Evil party every penny they want.  Remember, Comrade Peloski said there isn't a single dollar left to cut in the federal budget! 

And, really, Pelosi’s comments make perfect sense. It’s only logical that government spends a million dollars to study the “sexual attractiveness” of fruit flies. It’s only prudent that government pay out $2 billion to farmers for not farming land. And, of course, it is only logical that the government shell out $500 million on a program that would, among other things, try to figure out why five-year-olds “can’t sit still” in a kindergarten classroom.

That doesn't even scratch the surface.  There's $3.4 million for turtle tunnels under roads.  There's the entire budget of the Department of Education.  There's $10 million for algae energy programs.  I'm stealing this from Kevin, but I know he got it from someone else. 

As others have said many, many times:  rope, trees, some assembly required...

And as for the shutdown... let 'er rip.  Shut it down.  I don't see anything to lose.  You have to know that, just like two insurance companies going to a costly courtroom trial, they wouldn't be here if both sides didn't think they had the winning hand politically.  It's like 535 stubborn kids.  Let 'em fight. 

Why Is It?

Why is it that long weekends still seem too short?

For the last month, since my trip to Canada, I've "had" to take vacation days to run my accrued vacation down to the maximum I'm allowed to keep.  I've had every Friday off in the month of September.  This week, I finished the top section of Mrs. Graybeard's fishing rod and applied the first coat of epoxy.  It's essentially impossible to get a photograph in here that captures it, but you can see the color scheme she picked. 

This took quite a surprising amount out of both Friday and yesterday, mostly because my Anal Retentive side wouldn't accept some of the ugly I laid down Friday.  I made myself rebuild it before applying the epoxy.  The epoxy, by the way, will run right off the rod unless you spin the rod while the epoxy sets, and I have an ancient barbecue rotisserie motor for that.  It's the only way to get a relatively smooth finish from it.

What's left to do is the decorative part of the wrap on the bottom section and then finish the whole project.  More than half way there.

In addition, my radio club had an event we were going to help out in, and I was out there for a few hours today.  It's amazing that long weekends start to feel too short after you have a few.  Now it's back to five day weeks. I know: want some cheese with this whine?

VISA Doesn't Want the Gun Business?

According to as story that has started making the rounds, seen on the Daily Sheeple, Authorize.Net, part of VISA corporation, has dropped the gun business.   After being OK with Larry Hyatt's gun shop for four years, they suddenly decided to terminate the business. 

Dear Hyatt Gun Shop Inc,

Authorize.Net LLC (“Authorize.Net”) has determined that the nature of your business constitutes a violation of Section 2.xiv of the Authorize.Net Acceptable Use Guidelines and Sections 3.3 and 11.3 of the Authorize.Net Service Agreement (the “Agreement”).

These sections include, but are not limited to, the sale of firearms or any similar product.

Accordingly, pursuant to Section 4 of the Acceptable Use Guidelines, your ability to access and use the Authorize.NetServices will be terminated on September 30, 2013.

Go read the whole thing.  The Daily Sheeple points out similar things that have happened recently.  It's a safe bet that the politicians that want to destroy the second amendment put pressure on the banks.  No, they have no honor whatsoever. 

Personally - I say F*** 'em.  According to the "1 Minute MBA" video that was going around a few weeks ago, like here on Every Blade of Grass, the gun business in the US is $31.8B per year.  Every credit card transaction gets 3% of the cost, IIRC.  They think they can crush us?  We'll crush them. 

Think of how much damage it would cause VISA if the millions of gun owners simply stopped using credit or debit cards entirely.  For everything, not just buying guns or ammo.

Yet Another Project?

Given my tendency to like to build everything, Mrs. Graybeard was asking me why I haven't done like this guy and built one of those guitar kits you find around.  He bought his kit from these guys, and it's rather nice looking once built.  Right now, it would be a struggle to figure out where I could put something the size of a guitar so I could work on it.  While building a guitar from flat pieces of wood - like real luthiers do - is serious woodworking, this is largely a finishing job meaning you mostly need a clean environment to work.  Since I assumed it was all about lacquer or polyurethane, that means as little cat hair as possible.  (We swear we'll find cat hair inside eggs when we break them for the first time)    But that video sequence and others I've seen use gun stock finishing oil, and the end results look really nice.

Probably not.  I have a nice looking guitar now, and don't see much use for a duplicate of what I own, despite the attraction of building one.  Besides, I still haven't finished the fishing rods.  Either I've gotten way less dextrous in the last 30 years, the materials have changed, or... something... I don't know, but I'm having a heck of a time trying to make it all look good. 

But being a techno-geek, these things are cool.  They're mini-motors that tune your guitar to any alternate tuning you might want.  There are several built in tunings, and room to add some of your own.  Gibson is building these onto some of their guitars, started last year, and it's a neat addition if you're a techie.

I need to retire so I can play with these things.  But if I retire, I can't have these things.

You Really Ought to Go Home - Bill Whittle

Bill Whittle brings his trademark clarity of thought and expression to this incident barely reported on in the media, in which an F-22 pilot did his best impression of the scene from "Top Gun" where Tom Cruise flies upside down over a MIG, and freaks out the Russian pilot.

The Chinese stealth fighters Bill mentions look suspiciously like they copied the F-22.  Given the extent of their espionage in our country, that's not impossible.  Heck, given how our administration is arming Al Qaeda, and sending arms to the Mexican drug cartels, it's not completely out of the question that someone slipped them the plans.  The Chicoms are making a determined effort to break into our avionics companies, and the electronics is the real advantage of these fighters.  The Russians appear to have the head start, but neither should be scoffed at. 

Only Slightly Suspicious

From The Blaze we learn of some market shenanigans accompanying the Fed's announcement that they would not start cutting back bond purchases.

The Fed made the announcement at precisely 2:00 p.m. EST, “as measured by the national atomic clock.”

However, just seven milliseconds after the Fed made its announcement, the Chicago exchanges went crazy with huge orders. Seven milliseconds.

While the Fed is far more open than it was in the old days under Paul Volker, they keep these details secret until they're openly released to the press.  Since the market will move a thousand bucks on whether Ben Bernanke looks like he had a good bowel movement, this is very important information.  Reporters were indeed briefed, but kept under embargo until the deadline, and they won't openly defy the embargo because they don't want to get busted out of having that place with the insiders.   But seven milliseconds?  

CNBC quotes Eric Hunsader, founder of the market analysis firm Nanex, who specializes in looking at "high frequency traders".  Hunsader says:

...he saw simultaneous reactions to the Fed's announcement last week in trading in New York and Chicago. That would be theoretically impossible if the information was released from the Fed's headquarters in Washington. In theory, the trading reaction should have begun in New York several milliseconds before it began in Chicago, because information takes several more milliseconds to travel the longer distance.

"The very first thought I had when I looked at this closely was this is a low latency service," Hunsader said. "We have just very recently looked closely at some of these low latency releases and seen that they are indeed at the same exact millisecond. We have immediate history behind it."

Mother Jones points out that the distance from Chicago to DC is at least 9 milliseconds at the speed of data on a fiber optic cable so it's not that the Fed released the information and it propagated to Chicago.  When you think about the inherent human differences, simultaneous trades can't possibly happen on the same millisecond.  If two people sit beside each other and count down with the same clock agreeing to hit "ENTER" to execute a trade at the same time, they probably couldn't make the same millisecond.  This can only mean all these organizations had the information ready in their computers programmed to execute at the exact same time.

(Eric Allie)

The Fed is looking into this.  Will anything happen?   If it suits them.  Will anything happen about the high frequency trading?  I don't think so, but this seems to lean toward making it more likely.  A lot of people are alarmed about this trading trend, but I haven't really been alarmed by it; a little concerned but not really alarmed. I might have to reconsider that a bit. 

Techy Tuesday: Pollution is a Resource In The Wrong Place

A high school or junior college science teacher once laid that thought on me.  It was in the days when phosphates were first taken out of laundry detergents and the discussion was about how every fertilizer carried a label that details how much phosphate they provide.  It stuck with me because it's a good way of thinking.

The thought is strong with the folks at NASA trying to figure out living in space on long duration missions.  One of the fundamental things in the environment we need to shield astronauts from is high energy cosmic rays.

Radiation effects on the human body can’t be sufficiently attenuated by something astronauts might wear.  We know that the only thing that’s going to protect astronauts is more structural mass between them and the radiation environment of space. The problem is that it costs money to launch mass.  We spend millions of engineering hours eliminating mass.

Another fundamental problem we have is we have to feed them.  While research into closed ecosystems for growing food in space is ongoing, we still basically send up food by rocket. And there's that other problem with food.  What do with it once it has been used...

Possible solution: astronauts spend a certain amount of time every day eliminating mass in a different sense—as fecal matter.  What about using fecal matter to build up mass on the walls of the space station?  Turns out, that’s the plan.  Now, if the class will stop snickering, I’ll tell you about it.

HTI Water Technology has pioneered a technology called "forward osmosis" that is not only useful here, it may be useful for all of us everywhere.

This is a somewhat mature technology, in that it has been successfully commercialized. HTI originally developed forward osmosis for “cold” concentration of food and beverage products, beginning with projects at Oregon State University and The University of California at Davis. In fact, you can buy products today.  Typically, these take the form of plastic sacks.  At Ames, Michael Flynn, the lead of NASA’s Water Technology Development Laboratory, told the Littelfuse Speed2Design group that Forward Osmosis “Hydro Packs” are deployed at disasters like Haiti’s 2010 earthquake and distributed to U.S. troops in the field.

As Flynn described it, using a Hydro Pack is so simple it doesn’t require written instructions. You just scatter them on the ground where there may be suspect water and they will start to work.  The next day, you stick a straw in the clean side and drink slightly salty water.

Read that last paragraph again.  Scatter these little plastic-looking bags on the ground where you suspect dirty water will be, and by the next day water will migrate into the bag, and during the migration the bags will purify it enough for you to drink. And then go read the whole thing on how they might protect the space station and other craft from radiation  by covering them in bags of feces after the water has been removed.

Kinda ruins that image of the gleaming spaceships in Star Trek and all those movies, dudnit?  

Question the School Board, Go To Jail

Last Thursday night, in a Towson, MD. school board meeting, Robert Small was forcibly evicted from the meeting by plainclothes security and then arrested for trying to ask questions about the adoption of the "Common Core" educational curriculum.

The officer pushed Small and then escorted him into the hall, handcuffed him and had him sit on the curb in front of the school. He was taken to the Towson precinct and detained. Small was charged with second-degree assault of a police officer, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to 10 years in prison, and disturbing a school operation, which carries a fine of $2,500 and up to six months. [emphasis added - SiG]

"Second degree assault of a police officer"?  That's police talk for not going limp, saying, "anything you command, your worshipfulness" and doing exactly what they want before they command you.  No one in the room noticed Small do anything remotely like striking the officer, or resisting him.

"Look, I am being manhandled and shut down because I asked inconvenient questions," Small said. "Why won't they allow an open forum where there can be a debate? We are told to sit there and be lectured to about how great common core is."

A few weeks ago, video surfaced of a Common Core defender saying if a student was asked "What's 4 times 3" and answered "11", that was still just peachy, as long as "...they were able to explain their reasoning and explain how they came up with their answer really in words and in oral explanation and they showed it in the picture but they just got the final number wrong..."  While I'll be the first to admit I benefited from partial credit in college math (all of it), I think basic multiplication is still useful for students, especially if they're going to take more math.  Given stories like this, it's natural for a dad concerned about his kids' education to question Common Core. 

Today, the state prosecutor said that the charges against Small were all being dropped.

In a statement emailed to WBAL Radio, State's Attorney Scott Shellenberger said that," it was clear that Mr. Small violated the rules of the meeting and disrupted the meeting. It was also clear that the Officer acted appropriately and did have probable cause to make an arrest on both charges.

The Baltimore County State’s Attorney’s Office has just received and reviewed the facts of this case. In the interest of justice, further prosecution will not accomplish anything more. Therefore, the charges have been dismissed."

I've read some about Common Core and while I'm against it based on what I know about it - and the fact that the Department of Education is one of the easiest heads of the Federal Hydra to justify lopping off - I don't have enough time tonight to write about it tonight.  My concern here is the police state tactics used against someone questioning policy and trying to ensure the best for his kids.  It has the unmistakeable stench of our philosopher kings nudging us to do as they say because we're too stupid to decide for ourselves.  As Beck says, far too often in the history of creating socialist "paradises", the progression is nudge... then shove... then shoot.  

(source - good little article on the subject)

Can't Be. It Would Have Starved to Death

Obama had a brain-eating amoeba?  Can't be.  Looks too fat and healthy.  Sucker would have starved to death.

(Ken Catalino)

Actual Conversation

Between me and Mrs. Graybeard:

Me (looking at eBay):  Look at these plastic little flounders, lures or teasers or something..
Mrs.G:  Are those googly eyes that roll around? I could make earrings out of them.

Me:  No, they just look like stickers.  Looks like they don't move.
Mrs.G: If those migrated during the day like a flounders eye, I would so get those.
Me: You could get some french wires and just thread it on like you were hooking a live bait...
Mrs.G: I bet there's a YouTube video that shows a baby flounder's eye migrating as it grows. (pause) And here it is...

Don't Be Part of the 73%

According to news that broke yesterday, only 27% of the people know what the Federal Reserve's QE program is.  Barely over a quarter of the people understand the single biggest economic story of the decade, the one that will bring misery into their lives as sure as the tides change. 

I know my regular readers are in that 27%, so for the rest of you, QE - quantitative easing - is the creation of money out of thin air.  It increases "liquidity", the total amount of money in circulation, thus allowing banks and the Fed.gov to buy things they ordinarily wouldn't have money for.  In the current version, QE3 or QE4 or QE to infinity and beyond!, the money buys US bonds financing the deficit spending.  We currently buy about 90% of our bonds.  Notice that 90% figure means that the vast majority of our debt isn't being bought by China or Japan or the EU or the Saudis.  We're buying our own bonds - loaning money to ourselves.  The Chinese in particular have been getting rid of US denominated assets as quickly as they can, without panicking the world.  (Note to other anal retentives: substitute the word "currency" for every instance of "money" in that paragraph.  Dollar bills are not "money" in the strict sense; they are currency.  Gold is money.  Silver is money.  Ammo could be money.  Oil could be money.  Paper could not).

Since QE3 started in 2012, the Fed has created $85 Billion per month - over $1 Trillion so far.

If the First Law of Economics is "TANSTAAFL - there ain't no such thing as a free lunch" (as Heinlein put it) we should conclude there must be a cost to QE.  The cost is that it creates vast amounts of currency in circulation, which tends to raise the prices of everything.  That is, QE causes inflation.  It's not that they don't know they're causing inflation, that's one reason why they're doing QE.  They're deathly afraid of deflation because that hurts banks so they're striving to create inflation in the limited (fake) way they measure it.  Inflation hurts individuals, especially savers like retirees and others living off savings.  It encourages the use of credit, inflationary in itself.  QE causes the cost of living to go up, as Ronnie Dunn sings. 

(Estimate of money in circulation - note the long gentle upslope until the 2008 recession)

QE is the reason the prices on the stock markets are being bid up as well as the prices for oil, gas, food and all the essentials of life are being bid up.  It's responsible for the claimed economic growth, and virtually everything the government claims that's going well. 

If you have time to kill, just click on the "Economics" tag just below this post and you'll get page after page of everything I've written with that tag.  Or go to the search bar at top left and enter QE3 or QE. 

Wall Street Doesn't Believe There Will Be Gun Control Legislation

It went by unnoticed by most of us.  The DC shooting happened and stocks did not go down.  While I don't like the tone of the article, the WSJ has the story:

Once upon a time, news of a killing spree would have sent the stocks of major gun manufacturers into a tailspin, as investors fretted that an outraged public would at last demand new gun-control laws.

As recently as last December, in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Connecticut, shares in gun makers Sturm, Ruger & Co. RGR and Smith & Wesson Holding Co. SWHC both crashed.
...
(This time) The stocks barely wobbled. By the following morning they were actually higher than they had been before the killings. By Tuesday night Sturm, Ruger had hit a new, all-time high.

I laughed the other day when a financial TV news dood was saying the market is so logical; I've always thought the market runs on pure emotion.  They think they're being logical, but just watch reactions to anything.  People are betting real money on their stocks and nobody likes to lose money.  If they thought there was credible threat gun sales would be affected negatively, they'd be dumping those stocks.  Instead, they're bidding them up.  I assume because every time there has been a mass shooting and the gun grabbers start to dance in the blood, people go out and buy something.

 

Cartoon of the Day So Far

Glen McCoy

Techy Tuesday 2 - Making Bridges Earthquake Resistant

Like much of America, I heard of the Loma Prieta earthquake on October 17, 1989, when the news bulletins hit that the World Series had been interrupted by a strong quake.  An image that will never quite leave my mind is the collapsed dual-deck highway, I-880, the Cypress Viaduct. Thinking of what the people trapped between those spans went through as they died has always made my blood run cold.

(source)

But I'm an engineer and while friends say we "think different", we are always about fixing things and making them better.  My homies in the world of Civil Engineering haven't been idle about quake damage and have been researching how to build bridges that can survive really big quakes.  We read in a Design News update that current research is into nitinol, the nickle-titanium alloy used in lightweight, flexible eyeglass frames.  DN links to original work by Cal Tech undergrad Misha Raffiee published at the National Science Foundation. 

A large majority of bridges are made of steel and concrete. While this combination is convenient and economical, steel-concrete bridges don't hold up as well in strong earthquakes (7.0 magnitude or higher). Conventional reinforced columns rely on the steel and concrete to dissipate energy during strong earthquakes, potentially creating permanent deformation and damage in the column and making the column unusable.

The idea is to replace the steel reinforcing bar ("rebar" in common terms) with superelastic Nitinol.  Nitinol is a member of a family of "shape memory alloys"

While the majority of SMAs are only temperature-sensitive, meaning that they require a heat source to return to their original shape, Nitinol is also superelastic. This means that it can absorb the stress imposed by an earthquake and return to its original shape, which makes nitinol a particularly advantageous alternative to steel. In fact, the superelasticity of nickel titanium is between 10 to 30 times the elasticity of normal metals like steel. 

The new designs were modeled with earthquake simulation software developed at the Peoples' Republic of Berkley, and prototype scale models of bridge structures built.  There's a video on another page at the NSF of them testing a prototype to magnitude 8 earthquake levels.  The models and experiment are in agreement, a sure sign they're progressing well.  

They estimate the safer bridge will cost 3% more, but I find that hard to believe.  Civil projects always seem to come in over budget (as well as late) but maybe they mean the materials cost 3% more.  Materials are probably a small portion of the expense in building it.  

Progress is a good thing.  Not getting people crushed in another bridge like the I-880 is a great thing. 

ZoNATION and the Black NRA

I suppose it's not news to most that some douche bag comedian named Sara Silverman did a "Funny or Die" video last week talking about a black NRA.  I guess I don't really understand the point, it's as if the message is everyone knows they should be afraid of the idea of young black men with guns.  It displays epic ignorance of virtually everything: the modern NRA, the history of the NRA, the history of civil rights, the history of the civil war reconstruction...  Epic ignorance of basically everything.

Colion Noir, NRA commentator, had a great response, but I think Alfonzo Rachel's response is better yet.

Masterful

Trade Magazine Creep-Out

I got this magazine as a supplement along with one I subscribe to the other day.  Instant creep out. 

I know that UAVs are becoming a larger a part of the military aerospace market, but that's a downright creepy image.  You'd have to be pretty tone deaf to the public outrage about the use of drones on the homeland to publish that.  It's sufficiently science fiction-y that you can convince yourself it's not your own little Metropolis with that large orb on the middle right (is that another planet, or the Death Star?).  As you look at that illustration, it definitely doesn't look like any place on our planet; the large cratered moon on the upper left, the illuminated planet at mid-right and yet another orb at top right.  The buildings remind me of the architecture on Coruscant; the capital planet of the empire in the Star Wars universe. If that's the future, it's a pretty awful place. 

For the record, I don't work in this stuff; I work in civil aviation.  Originally communications radios, like those used for air traffic management, then collision avoidance systems, and lately in weather radar.  Magazines like this one are freebies for subscribers, paid for by the ads they carry.  While everyone who gets Microwave Journal doesn't work in military electronics, it helps their circulation numbers to send us these.
 

Al Qaeda Reads Too Much Paul Klugman

I assume you saw the headline that Al Qaeda wants more lone wolf attacks to bleed the US economically. 

In an audio speech released online a day after the 12th anniversary of the 9/11 strikes, Zawahri said attacks "by one brother or a few of the brothers" would weaken the U.S. economy by triggering big spending on security, SITE reported.

I think he's reading too much Klugman and that "green shoots" bull crap if he thinks he needs to do anything to bleed us.  We're doing a good enough job of it ourselves.  We're bleeding ourselves out faster than the clients calling the suicide hotline. 

And for the occasional passerby who'll read this and say it's the war spending that's doing it, we could zero out military spending except veterans' benefits we've promised, send everyone on active duty home, dock every ship, ground every plane, park every tank, and open us to any attack imaginable, and still run a deficit.  We're still bleeding ourselves to death.  (sources: these overall revenue figures and these spending figures and my favorite, the Debt Clock)

With an estimated deficit currently running about $800 billion for the year, you can see zeroing out the entire blue section still leaves you with about a $150 billion deficit.

Sensing Goes Silent

Donald Sensing at Sense of Events has chosen to go dark for an indeterminate period.  Donald has a rather unique background, as both retired artillery officer and ordained minister; a combination which yielded some interesting perspectives. 

With a hope you see this, sir, I sincerely wish the best of luck to you.  And for everyone else, allow me to post something I purloined from your site:

Surprise of the Day

Those of us over a certain age will remember Joni Mitchell, certainly one of the brightest stars in the music scene in the late 60s and early 70s.  I think of Joni as part of the anti-war counter culture and the late 60s/early 70s hippies.  So I was stunned to watch this interview.  H/T to a link on SurvivalBlog, Joni, now just about 70, sat down with Charlie Rose for an interview recently which made it to YouTube:

I'm starting this clip at what I consider the most important part of this interview, where she starts by talking about the crop of cultural destruction those like her have sown and the harvest of world collapse we are about to reap.  She talks about what a tremendous moral error it was to make vice chic, and how the world is not only paying for it now, but will pay even more heavily in the near future.  Joni's fans might find the whole thing interesting. 

The last verse of her famous song "Woodstock" goes:

We are stardust
Billion year old carbon
We are golden
Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden  -  "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell, 1969

Maybe we should rewrite that verse a little longer to:

We are stardust
We are golden
Our only chance to survive
is growing our own food
so we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden.

Two Wrongs...

We all know the saying kids are taught that "two wrongs don't make a right".

Babalu reports today that Poland has banned using the image of Che Guevara, along with any image that is identified with a fascist or communist system. 

Poland's equality minister, Elzbieta Radziszewska, wants to expand a Polish law prohibiting the production of fascist and totalitarian propaganda so that it includes clothing and anything else that could carry an image related to an authoritarian system.
...
The proposal, which could see the faces of some of the leading lights of communist history such as Lenin and Trotsky removed from t-shirts and flags, reflects a Polish view on communism far different from the rose-tinted and romantic images often found in the West.

While I detest that murdering pig (Che) as much as anyone, and while I know the Polish people have had a closer experience with fascism and totalitarianism than any nation should have, fighting fascism with fascism doesn't seem like the right answer.  I prefer ridicule, and there's no better place than The People's Cube

Remember: don't miss Che Mart!