Republicans are sick fucks

Republicans — of the USA variety — are sick fucks:

I attended Frank Luntz’s dial group of 30 undecided—or sort of undecided—Republicans in St. Petersburg, Florida, last night…and it was a fairly astonishing evening.

Now, for the uninitiated: dials are little hand-held machines that enable a focus group member to register instantaneous approval or disapproval as the watch a candidate on TV.

***

In the next segment—the debate between Romney and Mike Huckabee over Huckabee’s college scholarships for the deserving children of illegal immigrants—I noticed something really distressing: When Huckabee said, “After all, these are children of God,” the dials plummeted. And that happened time and again through the evening: Any time any candidate proposed doing anything nice for anyone poor, the dials plummeted (30s). These Republicans were hard.

But there was worse to come: When John McCain started talking about torture—specifically, about waterboarding—the dials plummeted again. Lower even than for the illegal Children of God. Down to the low 20s, which, given the natural averaging of a focus group, is about as low as you can go. Afterwards, Luntz asked the group why they seemed to be in favor of torture. “I don’t have any problem pouring water on the face of a man who killed 3000 Americans on 9/11,” said John Shevlin, a retired federal law enforcement officer. The group applauded, appallingly.

I have mixed feelings about the USA. On the one hand there’s Silicon Valley, MIT, Bill Clinton, Democrats, California, scientists, some of the world’s best technology companies, venture capitalists, startups, etc. And on the other hand there’s religious nutters, creationists, Republicans, Texas, George Bush, televangelists, Blackwater, guys who bomb abortion clinics, and other assorted filth.

Maybe the best thing that could happen would be if the Red states and Blue states divorced. Then the Blue states could, along with Canada, Australia and Japan, join the EU (they’d probably have to give it a new name — how about “United Democratic Nations”). And the Red states could go their own way and do whatever they wanted

(via Balloon Juice)

Japan’s stealth fighter project, the Mitsubishi ATD-X

Japan has a stealth fighter project, the Mitsubishi ATD-X. Japan did want to buy the American F-22 fighter, but the US government has refused to sell it to Japan, citing the risk of its technology falling into the wrong hands (i.e. China’s). Instead, the USA has offered to sell Japan the F-35 fighter, which has less capable stealth and is less maneouvable than the F-22.

Incidently there has been some French involvement in the programme:

France has been supporting the Japanese stealth program: between September and November 2005, the model was tested in the French government’s radar cross-section (RCS) range. Using the French range is logical. At Bruz, near Rennes, France’s DGA defense agency’s CELAR (center for military electronics) laboratory constructed the Solange indoor RCS range. A photo found here shows that Solange may be the biggest indoor RCS range in the world, capable of measuring a real fighter rather than a subscale mock-up.

It’s interesting to speculate that this may evolve into a Japanese-European joint programme, since Europe does not currently have its own stealth manned fighter programme (though it does for stealth UAVs). One possibility is that Japan could agree to buy European fighters now (either Rafale of Eurofighter Typhoon) in return for European purchases of the new Japanese aircraft. Europe and Japan have an incentive to co-operate on stealth programmes, since the alternative of buying from the USA has disadvantages, not the least being the USA’s reluctance to sell its most advanced gear.

(via Slashdot)