TMF killed my Mac :(

Grr! He jumped right up on it and knocked it off the music table!

Luckily it was my spare Mac that I used only for music. I can probably get all my data off of it. Not that there's much there that I don't have elsewhere. TMF can NOT manage to kill my big server, after all -- it weighs 80 pounds and could probably withstand an elephant!

So in other news I've been really, really, really busy at work. As in, from Friday afternoon to now, working 11-12 hour days getting a complex project to the point where I can breathe. As in, there were a dozen other people depending on me getting this done so they could do their own work. So if you're wondering why you're getting really short personal things rather than commentary on the economy, GOP thuggery, and so forth, this is it -- I *finally* got to leave the office on time today. Phew!

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Dem white trash blues

Justin Townes Earle, "Halfway To Jackson", off of Midnight at the Movies. Just some white trash blues, yo.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Right-wing thugs

Right wing thugs love to use violence against their opposition. Because, y'know, violence is manly and all that, and anybody who isn't a right wing thug is just a wuss and, like, fair game, y'know, just another animal, right?

So when I hear that left-wing Texas representative Wendy Davis's office was firebombed, I'm not surprised. I'm not surprised at all. This is the kind of thing that right-wing fascists are always doing, from Mussolini's Blackshirts onwards.

In November, what kind of people do you want to vote for? The people strutting around measuring their penis by how violent they can be against "the opposition" and who relish the thought of imposing their rule upon others at gunpoint, or people who wish to live in a civil society where there is rule of law, not rule of thug? Sadly, there's a big enough minority who want to be thugs that I fear for the safety of all Democratic politicians... I hope Obama's Secret Service detail is better than any Secret Service detail has ever been in the nation's history, because they'll have to be. Because right now Obama looks like the winner in November... and there's a lot of blackshirts frothing at the mouth about that.

-- Badtux the Civil Penguin

If you run a blog via Blogger

[Note: Promoted to the top for a while. See below for actual posts.] Teh Google has made some evil moves and completely broken the stand-alone comments page. It no longer lets you enable email for replies, so if I post on your blog, I never see your reply. *BUT*, the "embedded" comments page -- like what you see if you click on the title of this post -- now works, and *does* include the link to subscribe to email replies by the participants in the thread.

So, how do you enable the "embedded" comments page? Pretty simple.

1. Click on that there little Blogger symbol at the top left of your screen.
2. Click "Settings" on the blog you want to fix
3. Click "Comments" under "Settings"
4. Select the button that says "Embedded below post"
5. Scroll way-ass down to the bottom and click "Save Settings".

And that's that, assuming you're using a standard Blogger template. Which I am, 'cause I was fucked over the *last* time Blogger fucked with their interface 'cause I was using a non-standard template then, and ended up having to dump everything template-wise and go back to a standard Blogger template (just with a different picture behind the header compared to the "stock" template).

-- Badtux the Blogging Penguin

Music Religion

Indie icon Mark Lanegan lends his voice to a lot of projects. This one is Soulsavers, "Revival", off their 2007 album It's Not How Far You Fall It's the Way You Land.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Terrorist searched @ Chicago airport

Well, in fairness, many three year olds are a terror, but not ones in a body cast with a broken leg. Because his wheelchair set off the beeper, the poor little tyke was taken aside -- parents not allowed to come with him -- and searched.

If seeing a child like this being patted down like a convicted criminal checking into a prison makes you feel safe, you don’t belong on board an aircraft, you belong in a psychiatric hospital. Really. Get some help.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

H/T

Taxes are too high?

We can't raise taxes because then companies couldn't spend to invest. Only problem: big American companies like Apple Corporation are sitting on literally hundreds of billions of dollars that they've simply piled under giant mattresses. Sayyyyy... why can't we tax that big hoard of cash? I mean, if Apple was going to spend it, they woulda spent it, right, so clearly they don't need it, right? And it's not as if they're paying huge amounts of taxes on the dough -- they paid a whole 3%, yes, THREE PERCENT, on the cash they got from overseas, and are whining that bringing that cash here to America would mean they'd have to pay SEVENTEEN percent tax. Oh wah! The majority of Americans only wish they paid only 17% tax -- crap, I pay 7.5% sales tax on everything I buy in the first place, nevermind income tax, Social Security and Medicare tax, and all that!

Yet you still have tools whining American companies can't afford tax hikes, even though the taxes are primarily on mattress money like what Apple is dumping on its shareholders today -- i.e., the taxes will basically take money out from under mattresses and put it back into circulation in the economy where it can do some good. Unbelievable. Truly unbelievable. But not surprising. After all, we can't expect corporations today to pay the 1/3rd of taxes that they paid in that horror that was America under that socialist President Dwight D. Eisenhower, instead of the under 10% of taxes that they pay today... why, that'd be Communism!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Trucker cop

Drive By Truckers, "Used To Be A Cop", off of their recent album Go-Go Boots.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Learning to love the rain

Well, no, not really. It seems to have taken out my "real" Internet service again, leaving me on my iPhone :(.

-- Badtux the Wireless Penguin

Trying to get home

Lee Renaldo, once of the Sonic Youth, is releasing his first "real" solo album, i.e., one that is *not* just noise experiments. This is "Off The Wall", off of Between The Times and The Tides which is available on March 20.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

What an arrogant asshole

NYPD rapist cop Michael Pena smirked as his attorney basically said "yeah, my client assaulted the victim at gunpoint, but he didn't rape her." I don't know why he's smirking. Even if he didn't penetrate her (and witnesses say he did, as does the victim), he's still going to jail, and for a cop even jail is hard time -- usually in solitary for their own protection. But when you're an arrogant asshole, I guess you don't think of things like that, you just think "boy, I'm gonna get away with something" and that's that.

-- Badtux the "Throw the book at him" Penguin

Cold, damp, miserable

The Silly Cone Valley has been cold damp and miserable this weekend, plus I've been working (sigh!) so that's been a downer too. I handled that yesterday by going out for a big bowl of chicken pho, the perfect dish for when the sky is spitting occasional bursts of water and the temperature is hovering in the low 50's. The kittehs deal with it like this:

Yay, a kitty pile!

-- Badtux the Bad Weather Penguin

Wasted

Bailey Cooke, "Wasted Time". Apparently not available on any album, as far as I know the only thing she has available is on iTunes and Amazon mp3, and that's her album Tennessee.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

What a lucky man

Iraq vet suffering PTSD snaps, takes out sister, mother, self.

Army Spec. Abel Gutierrez. That was his name. George W. Bush is responsible for these three deaths just as he's reponsible for so many others. And there is no hell after he dies, just darkness, just like for the rest of us. There is no hell, other than the one George W. Bush created on Earth for our soldiers (amongst many other man-made hells), and GWB as a fortunate son will never experience that.

-- Badtux the Cursing Penguin

Noise

Last night after putting the new strings on the Duo-Sonic, I took it for a test drive.

-- Badtux the Musical Penguin

Lucky Pat

They recently held a Pat Tillman Memorial Run here in San Jose, and for some reason that reminded me of this song. The bullet that found him was one of his own side's. Oh, what a lucky man he was.

This is Emerson Lake and Palmer, "Lucky Man", off their 1970 self-titled album.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Re-stringing my Duo-Sonic

Yay fun.

[For those who don't know, the Duo-Sonic has what is known as "classic" tuners. This means that the new strings must be cut to exactly the correct length *before* being run through the holes in the bridge and over the saddles to get to the tuners. Tedious work, sigh.]

Anyhow, I use the best strings around -- Elixir Nanowebs Lights (.10 size) which are nicely slinky on this short-scale guitar -- but while they're long lived, they don't last *forever*. So it goes.

- Badtux the Musician Penguin

Question

How many newspapers in Texas do you think are running the current Doonesbury cartoon making Texas look like fucking morons by mandating that abortion doctors sexually assault rape victims prior to aborting the fetus implanted there by the rapist? Not many, I suspect...

-- Badtux the "The GOP is the Taliban" Penguin

Powder

Tenderloud was a Scandinavian band based in Copenhagen, Denmark. This is "White Lines" off their one and only album Shadow Red Hand released in 2004.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Math is hard

But J. Brad Delong proves that the math behind deficit spending in a down economy works. That is, money in a depressed economy is seeking safe havens to hide in. What's safer than the full faith and credit of the United States of America? Nothing. What to do if bond buyers drive bond rates to effectively negative? Sell more bonds, duh -- I mean, if you're *making* money selling Treasuries, why the hell not?

So anyhow, that's just mathematical proof of what we already knew -- the proper role of government in a consumption-slump-caused recession is to be consumer of last resort, taking the money that would ordinarily be spent on consumption (but is now looking for a mattress to hide under) and putting it to use doing something useful rather than just sitting under a mattress effectively being pretty-colored toilet paper from the perspective of the economy.

Which brings to mind something that JzB and I have been hashing about in emails, about the nature of money and how do you measure the amount of effective money in an economy (i.e., the money actually in use to buy and sell stuff). Some thoughts: 1. Consumer consumption is money. 2. Government purchases is money. 3. Consumer and government wages are money. 4. Capital improvement purchases are money. All of these involve money changing hands in exchange for something of real value (money itself has no real value, it's just toilet paper with pictures of dead people for, it's the fact you can exchange money for things of real value that give it effective value despite no intrinsic value). If you add up all of these money flows in a month, you should have a good notion of the effective money supply in a given month. If you compare this number to the inflation rate, what do you see? I don't know. Maybe JzB will do one of his pretty charts and show us :).

-- Badtux the Random Economics Penguin

Welcome to Pi Day

Given the attachment of Southern legislators to objective reality, I am awaiting the introduction of a bill in some Southern legislature to define pi legislatively as exactly 3.14. Because all those other digits after the 4 are just liberal lies intended to confuse our innocent little school children.

- Badtux the Snarkily Cynical Penguin

Half slave, half free is an oxymoron

Of all the various versions of this song, I like Solomon Burke's straightforward gospel-style cover of this song the best. Add in the Blind Boys of Alabama as the backing singers, and everybody else's version is just lame.

"None Of Us Are Free", Solomon Burke, off of the 2002 album Don't Give Up On Me.

Solomon died at age 70 a little over a year ago in Haarlemmermeer, Netherlands, where he collapsed and died at the airport. The old-time gospel singers are pretty much all gone now, and their like will not be seen again, for the culture they came out of -- the Southern black praise song culture transplanted to the North with the black workers who moved North to work in the factories that built the tanks and bombs that won this country's wars -- no longer exists.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Cracker kills black kid for strolling while black

... and gets away with it, claiming he felt threatened by a black kid walking around in his all-white gated community (kid was half-white and was visiting his white father). Because that's all ya gotta say under Florida law to justify killing someone, and the all white jury would agree, so what are the cops supposed to do -- arrest him and charge him with murder? When the only other witness to the incident, a black kid armed with Skittles of Mass Destruction (omg!), is, well, *dead*?

This reminds me of some incident that would have happened back in the Civil Rights era if a black kid had tried walking around in a white neighborhood. Yah, things sure have changed a lot since then -- nowadays they don't bother caperin' round in the woods wearing pointy hats and bedsheets, that was just sorta cosmetic frippery anyhow and looked vaguely ridiculous. But that's pretty much the *only* difference in some parts of the nation.

-- Badtux the "Yay, progress" Penguin

Surging Santorum in Alabama and Mississippi

Sorry, just had to type in that title, because we know all about Santorum, heh ;).

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The end of print

Last edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica was printed two years ago, there will be no more. After 244 years, Britannica Inc. is calling it quits in the print encyclopedia business. They sold a couple thousand copies of the 2010 edition to libraries, but that was pretty much it -- nobody else was willing to pay the price for information they can look up online as easily.

I am conflicted. I must admit that I rarely look up things in books nowadays. On the other hand I spent many a lazy summer evening picking up a random encyclopedia at a friend's house and opening it at random to some page about some topic I knew nothing about, and trying to figure out what they were talking about. In a way this gave me an education that the crappy schools of the desegregation-era South, which were all about trying to keep white boys out of the same schools as them uppity nigras and nothing about providing an education, could not have hoped to give.

And now that's gone, forever. There will be no more children on lazy summer evenings picking up an encyclopedia and turning it to a random page. I suppose it was inevitable anyhow, given the plethora of entertainment options that today's children have -- in my childhood there was one television, showing a black-and-white picture, in a large wooden piece of furniture in the living room, and if the grownups were watching a show that was not appropriate for children we were sent elsewhere to entertain ourselves. And we did, because we had no choice. And in homes full of books, naturally we picked up books. Today... that'll never happen again. Books are becoming obsolete. When I needed a new reference book on Microsoft Powershell, for example, I bought an e-book from O'Reilly, not a paper book. I have limited space on my bookshelves, and I save that for reference books I *can't* get as e-books... which is increasingly few nowadays.

-- Badtux the Wistful Penguin

Sonic Replicant

Well, Sonic Youth is officially disbanded, since Thurston and Kim have divorced and that's pretty much half the band no longer interested. But Steve Shelley always has a gig, and he brings the noise here too.

The band is Disappears, and the song is "Replicate", off their new EP Pre Language.

Hmm, I notice that I just moved from quiet nu-grass to noisy indie-rock. Funny how that works...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Randomness

You've already heard about the U.S. soldier in Afghanistan who went postal on a village. Not much I can say there. There's an easy way to make sure it never happens again: Leave. 'Nuff said.

I finished the red beans and rice. Four meals straight of red beans and rice? Just call me Toots McPenguin ;).

This bloody daylight savings time has walloped me good. So I'm going to wrap it up and head to bed.

-- Badtux the Tired Penguin

Whispery sleep

Crooked Still, "Did You Sleep Well", off their 2008 album Still Crooked.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Too many blows to the head

In today's World Nut Daily, famed economist Chuck Norris says President Obama is behind the recent surge in gas prices, because it's part of his secret Kenyan plot to not get re-elected in November. Or something like that. Hey, it's Chuck Norris. If you're Chuck Norris you don't have to make sense, reality bends to fit *you*. Or something like that.

-- Badtux the Snarky Wingnut Watching Penguin