My roommate picked up the subject of this HCT Cheese Blog after tasting a sample at our last trip to Brennan’s.

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I love the Pentagon, I really do. They turn graft and incompetence into a transcendent art-form — as well they should, since we spend more money on their efforts to keep us safe from largely imaginary threats than we do on anything else each year, and the amount of money we give to the Pentagon annually is almost equal to the combined military budget of every other nation on the face of the earth.

(Check out Global Issues.org for a lot of great graphs on that subject)

A case in point is the F-22 fighter, a plane designed during our worst Cold War excesses to fight a threat that did not, at the time, exist. It still doesn’t; the F-22 was supposed to counter a next-generation Soviet fighter plane that, even now, the Russians don’t have in the air.

That’s ok though; we Americans aren’t about to be caught unprepared for imaginary problems that might, potentially, someday occur, or have *already occurred* in some hellish alternate timeline, or worse still, dystopian future reachable by paradox-generating, temporally displaced cybernetic robots dressed in the skin of steroidal Austrian potheads!

Duh-duh-DUHHHH (drama sting)

Where was I? Ah, yes, the F-22. They cost 350 million dollars a piece and serve absolutely no purpose, except to entertain rubes at air shows. They aren’t used in any of our Glorious Wars overseas, not even the Absolutely-Not-an-Oil-Grab in Iraq. Turns out there’s a very good reason for that:

The F-22 fighter jet can’t get wet.

Seriously. It breaks in the rain. Or if exposed to, say, the abrasive force of rapidly moving air.

I am not making this up.

The aircraft’s radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings — such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion — challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer.

A plane that melts in the rain, or more accurately, falls apart. All for the low, low price of 350 million dollars each, plus maintenance.

“It is a disgrace that you can fly a plane [an average of] only 1.7 hours before it gets a critical failure” that jeopardizes success of the aircraft’s mission, said a Defense Department critic of the plane who is not authorized to speak on the record.

…

Skin problems — often requiring re-gluing small surfaces that can take more than a day to dry — helped force more frequent and time-consuming repairs, according to the confidential data drawn from tests conducted by the Pentagon’s independent Office of Operational Test and Evaluation between 2004 and 2008.

…

The Air Force says the F-22 cost $44,259 per flying hour in 2008; the Office of the Secretary of Defense said the figure was $49,808. The F-15, the F-22′s predecessor, has a fleet average cost of $30,818.

It goes on and on and on — the F-22′s wings are held on by titanium bits that have a high rate of defect. Rather than stop making the bad part, the contractors got the Air Force to agree to inspect the planes more often, at taxpayer expense, to hopefully catch it before the wings fall off in flight.

The canopy for the pilot is defective, it wears out almost 3 times as fast as it should, and at least once failed to open, trapping a pilot inside the plane.

The army of subcontractors produces defective parts not to spec that have to be hand-modified and put into the planes, making each plane unique and parts non-interchangeable.

It can’t communicate with other types of planes, which all of its less costly predecessors can do.

It also can’t do precision bombing, and in an attempt to claim it could, Lockheed managed to crash one (thus costing us 350 million) and killed one of their test pilots.

On… and on… and on.

Oh, and of course whistleblowers have been trying to stop it for years. Fortunately (for the greedy bastards at Lockheed), the Pentagon lied about how much it would cost when they first proposed it, then broke up the plane’s production into a bunch of subcontractors and made sure to put at least one in 44 different states — so that it would be harder to stop making them when it turned out to be a waste.

Recently, Obama has been trying to cancel the F-22 as a token gesture of controlling the Pentagon, and it looks like he may succeed… though of course, the overall cost of the base Pentagon budget will increase, and the wars overseas will continue to pile more money on top of that already astronomical bill.

At least if we ditched the F-22 we wouldn’t be spending billions of our ‘defense’ dollars on a plane that can’t get wet.

Sources: The Washington Post, Global Issues.org, The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation

I was doing my best to catch up on the Sotomayor hearings, reading a transcript on the LA Times site (which is about a hundred times less damaging to your mental stability than listening to the audio of mouth-breathers like Jeff Sessions or Chuck Grassley).

It’s the horror show you’d expect, of course. Ignorant Republicans pressing Sotomayor on those nasty baby-killing doctors, on why anyone, anywhere, should ever be expected to give up their guns (one, I forget which, questioned her on why FELONS shouldn’t have the right to own whatever guns they like under the 2nd Amendment, which she noted even Scalia (or was it his clone, Alito) was sane enough to dispute.

It’s also mind numbingly repetitive, as time and again, on both sides, Senators ask her questions that she then refuses to answer on the basis that the topic is ‘pending’ in the federal courts. Apparently this is an ABA rule/in the code of Judicial conduct, not to discuss cases that might come up soon in your new job. Which rather makes these hearings pointless, as ANY case could come up before the Supreme Court (they are Supreme, durr.. more specifically, under judicial review they can take any case they feel like), thus.. she can’t answer anything of substance. All she can give are broad platitudes, anecdotes, and answer racist attacks, over and over, for days.

What the hell is the point? Really? I’d rather have them answer questions honestly, then recuse themselves for six months, or something. We desperately need a new process for confirmations, we really do.

But the thing I was getting at occurred toward the end of the day on Wednesday, when Cardin got to trying to nail her down on how much respect courts should afford to religious views. He brought up a case where she was on a panel that basically forced a prison to accomodate a Muslim prisoner’s dietary restrictions during Ramadan. All well and good, I suppose, but it got me to thinking about the myriad ways that government bends over backward for religious people, and a: how far you can go in that direction before it becomes hazardous or unreasonably costly, but also b: how these positive perks for faith aren’t awarded to atheists.

First, issue a. Ok, fine, someone needs a slightly special meal during Ramadan… I guess that’s ok. But what if that special meal required something really expensive? What if your religion requires you to eat caviar and drink fine scotch, single-malt, day after day? What if it requires that you eat human flesh? How far do you have to go to accomodate someone’s personal beliefs?

The second is more fundamental, I think. Religious people occupy a position of privilege over all atheists, who are second class citizens as a result, because they can resort to a religious explanation whenever they want, and get that explanation treated seriously, regardless of its real world merit or factual basis, and the sole criteria for determining whether to take it seriously is *whether they ‘sincerely’ believe it*

Take a look, see what I mean:

SOTOMAYOR: I don’t mean to be funny, but the court has held that it’s fundamental in the sense of incorporation against the state. But it is a very important and central part of our democratic society that we do give freedom of religion, the practice of religion, that the Constitution restricts the — the state from establishing a religion, and that we have freedom of expression in speech, as well.

Those freedoms are central to our Constitution. The Ford case, as others that I had rendered in this area, recognize the importance of that in terms of one’s consideration of actions that are being taken to restrict it in a particular circumstance.

Speaking further is difficult to do. Again, because of the role of a judge, to say it’s important, that it’s fundamental, and it’s legal and common meaning is always looked at in the context of a particular case. What’s the state doing?

In the Ford case that you just mentioned, the question there before the court was, did the district court err in considering whether or not the religious belief that this prisoner had was consistent with the established traditional interpretation of a meal at issue, OK?

And what I was doing was applying very important Supreme Court precedent that said, it’s the subjective belief of the individual. Is it really motivated by a religious belief?

It’s one of the reasons we recognize conscientious objectors, because we’re asking a court not to look at whether this is orthodox or not, but to look at the sincerity of the individual’s religious belief and then look at what the state is doing in light of that. So that was what the issue was in Ford.

(from the LA Times, located here)

Consider the implications of what she’s saying here. The relevant precedent to help determine whether or not you have to accomodate a person’s religious request is on the basis of whether or not they sincerely believe it is necessary. So if you sincerely believe something in a religious vein, a positive duty is forced on the state to help you. Atheists, having at best a negative belief that forces no particular action upon them (no ceremonies, no rituals, no commandments on stone tablets), can NEVER MAKE USE OF THIS STANDARD.

Thus, an extremely powerful, flexible, and subjective method of compelling the government to do something is forever closed off if you don’t believe in… something… mystical. A sky-wizard, a talking animal, a spirit guide, Zeus, Odin, Buddha, whatever.

Not only that, but a judge somewhere gets to decide if you do sincerely believe something.

That last part needs another look though, because it really makes this whole thing sick:

It’s one of the reasons we recognize conscientious objectors, because we’re asking a court not to look at whether this is orthodox or not, but to look at the sincerity of the individual’s religious belief and then look at what the state is doing in light of that.

In other words, you are more likely to be able to avoid a draft, to avoid going to war, to avoid being shot and killed, if you believe in God. Specifically, a God that the Judge in your case finds credible.

If you are an atheist, the state is inherently more likely to have you conscripted, sent off to fight in, say, Southeast Asia, and killed. It is official US policy that being religious confers on you a greater right to prevail in claims against the government, in a wide variety of situations/cases; you can get better jobs, better representation, more money from the state, pay fewer taxes, obey fewer laws, avoid criticism for poor performance (see abstinence education under Bush II), etc etc etc. Even better meals in prison, it seems. Being religious grants you myriad privileges denied to the faithless.

It also grants you a greater right to life.

Go to church, or we might kill you, some day, to advance our national interests.

God Bless America indeed.