Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Saying Goodbye

2012-01-27T16:48:00.000-08:00

Leonard Cohen's new album, Old Ideas, comes out on January 31. This is his last album, because he's reached that point where he is becoming too frail to continue for long. He knows it. He knows it well. At age 77, he's preparing for his end. This album is his discussions with God about that subject. But Leonard being Leonard, there's plenty of sly wit and self-deprecating humor to leaven the darkness. And women. Can't forget the women. Leonard does like his women.

There's nothing new here, but then neither is Leonard Cohen. This is "Darkness". Enjoy.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

A matter of jurisdiction and standing

2012-01-26T20:49:00.000-08:00

So birthers in Georgia filed complaints with the Georgia Secretary of State that Obama wasn't eligible to be President because he wasn't natural-born (apparently he was born artificially in a test tube?), and the Secretary of State sighed and put the matter in the hands of an administrative law judge to decide. Now, administrative law judges aren't exactly criminal or civil judges. Really, they're not judges at all in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, they make decisions about whether state regulations are being properly applied or not. They are, in essence, clerks, not judges in the traditional sense of the word.

So anyhow, O'Really Taitz was one of the complainants, and promptly subpoena'ed Obama to testify at the hearing via filing service on Obama's Georgia lawyer. Said lawyer than complained that this was nonsense, you couldn't subpoena a sitting President into what's essentially an administrative proceeding internal to the Georgia state government that should simply review the last two dozen court rulings against Taitz and dismiss the complaint out of hand, there was no jurisdiction to subpoena Obama because Obama was not a citizen of the state of Georgia and thus not subject to the jurisdiction of the state of Georgia. The administrative law judge said "Oh yeah? Well I'm going to uphold the subpoena anyhow!"

So there it stands. Obama's lawyer basically said "Screw this, you have no jurisdiction and we will not participate, you've stamped your subpoena, now enforce it." Which is going to be problematic, because see, the Constitution sort of foresaw this problem, and made the President a citizen of the District of Columbia and thus subject only to Federal law for actions he takes as President. The only court with jurisdiction is the Federal District Court in D.C., not some podunk administrator in Atlanta. The only court that Obama must answer to as President is that court, not some clerk in Atlanta. And the lawyer for Obama *couldn't* participate, because participating would implicitly imply that this over-titled clerk had jurisdiction to issue a subpoena, which would open the flood gates to every clerk in every city hall who had a beef against the President issuing a subpoena to their own dog and pony fiasco.

Which, BTW, is an apt description of what actually happened when the hearing actually got underway. No lawyer for Obama. No Obama. Just a circus side-show of freaks and lunatics that were so ridiculous that even the administrative law judge, who is apparently a hard-core Republican but not an insane one, started cutting them off while rolling eyes and sighing heavily.

And no ruling, of course. I'm sure he wants to be well away from that collection of lunatics before he issues a ruling, probably via having a courier deliver it rather than announcing it in person. Because by this time it *has* to be obvious to him exactly what kind of people he's dealing with and that ruling any way other than the obvious (that a dude born in Hawaii is a natural-born citizen as defined by the Constitution) will result in the sort of circus that will consume his life.

-- Badtux the Law Penguin

Okay, this is fugling crazy

2012-01-26T17:00:00.000-08:00

I just got an email from Costco. They're offering me discounted tickets to the Super Bowl for the low, low price of -- get this -- $3,000.

Yes, that's right. $3,000 to go watch a buncha fat millionaires play a children's game. Uhm, yeah. Maybe Mitt Romney can afford to blow three grand to watch a buncha fat millionaires play a children's game, but I got better things to do with my money, like, well, anything, actually...

-- Badtux the WTF Penguin

High road

2012-01-26T16:30:00.000-08:00

The Trishas, "Clockwork". This is thus far an unreleased song. Enjoy.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

On the border

2012-01-25T21:52:00.000-08:00

The Walkabouts, "Bordertown", off their album Watermarks.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Wal-Mart slaves pay more taxes than Romney

2012-01-25T21:28:00.000-08:00

Left unmentioned during all the fuss and furor about Mitt Romney's 13.9% tax rate in 2010 is the fact that Wal-Mart slaves laboring for minimum wage pay a higher percentage of their income as taxes than Romney does. Yes, they don't pay *income* taxes, but they most definitely pay *payroll* taxes, which currently stand at 15.3% if you combine the employer portion and paycheck portion together, which you want to do if you're talking about taxes, as well as pay an average 9.7% sales tax on the percentage of their income that goes to non-shelter items, for an effective tax rate of around 20%.

So is it fair that Mitt gets to pay lower taxes for sitting around and letting his investment advisers move his money around than is paid by someone who works for a living? Uhm... do you need *me* to answer that question for you?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Numbers Penguin

Google's new slogan...

2012-01-25T20:28:00.000-08:00

BE EVIL. Not only are they going to invade your privacy in a massive way, but they are not going to allow you to opt out of this invasion of your privacy -- which, I might add, means they will be violating a new law soon to be passed in the EU to give you the right to be forgotten (i.e., in the EU it shall shortly be *illegal* to not give an opt-out option).

And that's not the only way they've been evil lately. Their stance against freedom of speech in the matter of the Google+ social network is well-known. As an experiment, a researcher used a privacy relay tool often used by people who live in repressive countries and created a Google account. This privacy relay tool routed his Internet requests through a server in France (he didn't choose the exit server, that was chosen by the privacy relay tool in question), at which point he was using Google's French servers. He told Google that he was a male born in 1957 who lived in Iran, and for the telephone number gave the phone number of the Iranian embassy in America (note that he's using Google's French servers from a French IP address to do all this). Then he attempted to sign up for Google Plus with a pseudonym that would protect him from being killed by his government if he were truly an Iranian attempting to set up an account where he and his fellow dissidents could communicate with each other. The results were... err... see for yourself (click on the picture for full size, and the language was reset to English before the snapshot because I'm sure you don't want to read French):

Yep, Google is against Freedom.

Evil. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Freedom-lovin' Penguin

The state of the onion...

2012-01-24T22:24:00.001-08:00

Is tears.

Just sayin'.

Didn't watch, listen to, or read the State of the Union address or its response. If I want bullshit, I'll head up to one of the local ranches and frolick in their barn.

Instead, I cooked corn tortillas and had Mexican-spicy beans, jalapenos, and salad. Penance for the sinful cookies, I suppose, since all of this was basically no-fat and fairly low in calories. As for the cookies, I took them to work and they didn't last 15 minutes. Like piranhas, I tell ya!

-- Badtux the "What smells?" Penguin

WTF?!

2012-01-24T16:17:00.000-08:00

This is WarPaint, "Undertow", off their album The Fool. And I am quite baffled by the fact that these women's music is getting millions of views on YouTube, given that two years ago they were utterly unknown and even today you'll never hear their stuff on the radio, at least not on *these* shores...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Cookies!

2012-01-23T20:52:00.000-08:00

From this recipe:

And on the cooling rack (yes, this is an old refrigerator rack, why do you ask?):

Awefully unhealthy, given that it's two sticks of butter. Oh well, I didn't want to live forever anyhow :).

PS: How did I get those so round? Simple: Ice cream scoop. F*** that "spoon onto cookie sheet" nonsense :).

-- Badtux the Baking Penguin

France outlaws Holocaust denial

2012-01-23T19:34:00.000-08:00

One of the notions that those squishy Yurpeens and Canucks have decided upon is that freedom of speech stops at the point that a) it's false, and/or b) it incites hatred against groups of people. Truth is always a defense, but once truth has been established beyond a reasonable doubt, denying the truth is not a free speech right.

So France has passed a law now stating that publically denying a particular historical fact is illegal in France, and in response, Turkey has thrown a hissy fit. Wait, Turkey? Yes. Because the historical fact in question is the Armenian Genocide, and despite the fact that this is established historical fact, with well-established research showing it happened, Turkey continues to act like a Nazi sympathizer that says "the Holocaust never happened!".

What is baffling to me is why Turkey even cares. This happened years before the modern state of Turkey was created. I can see why they wouldn't want to dwell on it -- just as U.S. history books don't dwell on the genocide of the Native Americans that happened as us white people stole their land -- but this is ridiculous. The Armenian Genocide happened. Denying this is ridiculous and makes you look like an idiot to the rest of the world. If Turkey is trying to impress the EU in order to get entry into the EU, this isn't how to do it -- it just makes them look like a bunch of hot-headed neo-Nazis denying the Holocaust, and makes most Europeans wince and quietly make jokes behind Turkish diplomats' backs unfavorably comparing them to skinheads and other right-wing Holocaust deniers.

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Google: Still evil.

2012-01-23T19:20:00.000-08:00

Google + is notorious for not allowing pseudonyms. Today, Google said they'll allow some pseudonyms. But only under very specific circumstances.

They don't get it. Using your real name on the Internet is fine if all you're doing is sharing recipes with your grandkids. But if you're engaging in political discussion on the Internet, using your real name can be dangerous to your health and safety. In repressive fascist regimes, using your real name on the Internet and espousing politics that are not sanctioned by the heads of the fascist brownshirts can result in your child's cat being cruely murdered, your car windows smashed and tires slashed, or even being shot and killed.

It's as if they want to shut up all us political types. Evil. Simply evil. That is all.

-- Badtux the Pseudonymous Penguin

An armed society is...

2012-01-23T17:46:00.000-08:00

*NOT* a polite society.

According to the Murky News: "Six people, including several teens, were rushed to the hospital Saturday night after an argument at a sweet 16 party led to gunfire. Investigators said 30 to 40 partygoers were in the home's garage when an argument started. The dispute escalated to the point that people pulled out guns and began firing. Police said "multiple" guns were involved and "numerous" shots were fired."

Folks: Robert Heinlein wrote *FICTION*. Heinlein himself admitted that the intention of his works was to get beer money, not to create any grand philosophical statements. Libertarians who view his works as gospel are viewing works that the author admitted were just paid lies as gospel, which makes those libertarians, well, either gullible or stupid. Reality is that an armed society is no more polite than any other society. It's just that in an armed society when folks get irate, they start plugging at each other with firearms rather than with fists.

- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Yucky heart

2012-01-23T16:26:00.000-08:00

This is British indie band Yuck, with their song "Stutter" off their self-titled debut album.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Italian drivers

2012-01-22T21:56:00.000-08:00

I haven't said much about the Costa Concordia shipwreck. The Italian driver jokes pretty much tell themselves, as do the jokes about the unlucky captain's excuse for abandoning ship before everybody was off (he "slipped" and fell into a lifeboat, how lucky!). But this satellite photo of the Costa Concordia from orbit gives you an idea of just how friggin' big that ship really *is* -- and shows you exactly how close it was to land when it ran aground. That ship had no business being anywhere near that island...

-- Badtux the Orbital Penguin

Girl eyes

2012-01-22T16:08:00.000-08:00

I guess if you've managed to release two albums, you're no longer a novelty band.

This is Dum Dum Girls with another of their 60s-girl-band-inspired songs, "Bedroom Eyes", off their new album Only in Dreams.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Trying a new biscuit recipe...

2012-01-21T21:42:00.000-08:00

I'm still trying to get rid of that whole wheat flour. It just doesn't act right. If you've dealt with whole wheat flour you know what I mean, it's not as sticky as regular all-purpose flour and it doesn't have the right texture and it's heavier and etc., so I'm trying to substitute it for half of the flour in regular substitutes and it's not turning out right.

So now I'm trying biscuits with half the flour substituted with whole wheat. And it's not acting right, my biscuits ended up a bit heavier than usual, though they're still nicely buttery and flakey enough and certainly *taste* like biscuits are supposed to taste, even if they aren't quite right...

Ah well. I still have a bunch of whole wheat flour to go through, so I'll have to play with this some more. The amount of butter is what made them flaky (though a bit denser than usual), but they're a bit *too* buttery because of the greater density caused by the whole wheat flour. So maybe I'll substitute a couple tablespoons of shortening for a couple tablespoons of butter. Or maybe try the vodka trick that someone mentioned here a while back, for getting a good consistency without activating the glutens (these biscuits aren't tough so the glutens didn't activate, but they definitely are denser than my regular biscuits!).

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

No recipe, because it's not quite right, more experiments are needed.

The new George Wallace

2012-01-21T20:20:00.000-08:00

In 1976, George Wallace won the South Carolina primary on a platform of race-baiting and bigotry. It was pretty much George's last hurrah, he didn't win any other primaries that year, and soon retired from politics.

Today, Newt "the Grinch" Gingrich appears to have won South Carolina based on a similar plan of attack. Apparently folks in South Carolina liked his race-baiting and his constant attacks on the negro err President, sorta like back when they voted for George Wallace in the '76 primary 'cause George hated him some black people too.

All of which says more about South Carolina than anything that's going to be relevant to the rest of the race...northern Florida is also full of racists, but southern Florida isn't, so I doubt racism is going to stir as many people to vote for the Grinch there. Still, the Grinch is back, bitches! And the Republican dwarf race is still up in the air, with each of Frothy Dwarf, Sleazy Dwarf, and Grumpy Dwarf having won a state. None of them are going to beat the camel in the dwarf vs. camel race, but they're definitely all chugging away as fast as their tiny little legs can propel them!

-- Badtux the Dwarf-watchin' Penguin

Joyful noise

2012-01-21T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Joy Formidable, "I Don't Want To See You Like This", off their debut album The Big Roar.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Gripe of the day

2012-01-20T21:26:00.000-08:00

What's with these people who don't flush the toilet? Are they so impressed by the fact that they managed to produce a turd that they want to preserve the evidence so that *we* can be impressed too? Dude. It's shit. We're not impressed. Flush it down. If your feeble little head can figure out how. If not, how did you manage to make it to a public toilet under your own power in the first place?

Which reminds me -- public art here in the SillyCone Valley sucks. Down in LaLa Land, they get silly public art like this:

So what do we get here in the Silly Cone Valley? We get a drunken wife-beater whose statue spent ten years in a warehouse because he loved killing Mexicans and the Hispanic community was outraged that a statue of this dude was gonna be in a public park, we get a statue of drunken schmoos schmoozing:

And let's not forget the crowning accomplishment of public art in San Jose: An 8 foot tall pile of dog poop:

Compared to a giant silvery head of Lenin with a tiny Chairman Mao balancing atop it, We Suck.

-- Badtux the Random Penguin

Noisy Danger

2012-01-20T16:01:00.000-08:00

The inimitable Scout Niblett does "Ripe with Life" off her recent album The Calcination of Scout Niblett while in her natural environment -- a small night club.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Baffling Carolina

2012-01-19T20:25:00.000-08:00

So we had Dopey Dwarf drop out of the dwarf-race, and now it's Grumpy Dwarf leading over Sleazy Dwarf in South Carolina? WTF?

Poor Sleazy just can't get a break. First we learn that Frothy, not Sleazy, won Iowa. Now Grumpy is poised to win South Carolina. Of course, the core problem is that while Sleazy is skeezy, he's also Mormon. Mormons tend to *not* be fat stupid ignorant devout welfare whores, thus can't be *real* conservatives, right? Right?!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Torch Hate

2012-01-19T16:43:00.000-08:00

Devics, "With the voice of a girl who still hasn't learned", off their torch pop album If You Forget Me.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Great Blackout of 2012

2012-01-18T21:37:00.000-08:00

Today if you went to Wikipedia, you discovered it wasn't there. Why? Because they, like tens of thousands of other sites, were protesting copyright bills in Congress that basically would allow anybody to take down any web site at any time (via redirecting their web site's domain name in the global name registry so that you get a FBI warning instead) by making a spurious claim that said web site was "hosting or encouraging the hosting of copyrighted material". No trial. No jury. No recourse to get your domain name back other than suing the person or entity who made the complaint, which isn't practical for most people, since it's generally law firms out to extort money from ordinary civilians that will be engaged in this sort of conduct (that's true in Germany where such a law is already in place, and there's no reason to think it wouldn't be true here too).

In short: We're talking about a law that would be good only for lawyers, not for anybody else on the planet. It wouldn't even be good for the Hollywood studios pushing it, since all that happens if the global domain name service goes black for accused copyright violators is that alternate distributed name services that are much harder to shut down will go into service, much the same way that the shutdown of the centralized Napster service led to the current Bittorrent decentralized system.

Lawyers. That's the only people who will benefit. Bah humbug!

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Flowers

2012-01-18T16:20:00.000-08:00

The Waco Brothers, "Walking On Hell's Roof Looking At The Flowers". Not exactly what I'd be doin' if I was walking on Hell's roof, but the bro's make it work.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

A joke gone wild

2012-01-17T20:33:00.000-08:00

So anyhow, a bunch of lefties over on Twitter were joking around that since Romney's daddy was born in Mexico, that meant Romney was no more (or less) a "natural born citizen" than Obama is. At which point someone said, "quick, someone tell Crazy Joe over at World Nut Daily!" and sure enough, this morning I got an email blast from Joseph Farah, owner/editor of World Nut Daily, with the Cavuto, "Is Mitt Romney a Natural Born Citizen?"

Dear Crazy Joe: We were JOKING. We weren't being serious. In fact, we were making fun of *you* and your demented crusade to overturn the will of the American voters via legalistic mumbo jumbo about how someone born on American soil might not *really* be a "natural born citizen" (what, he was artificially born?!). I realize that right-wingers have no sense of humor but dude. Get a grip!

- Badtux the Head-shakin' Penguin

A treasure

2012-01-17T16:09:00.000-08:00

Ray Wylie Hubbard does a gospel honkey tonk song after about 2 minutes of the funniest banter I've heard in a *long* time. If I ever get to spend a while in Austin, I'd love to see him perform in person... looks like a real fun time.

This is "When She Sang Amazing Grace".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Happy Token Perfect Negro Day!

2012-01-16T20:05:00.000-08:00

As with most Americans, I spent MLK day at work. Because hey, it's only a holiday for a *darkie*, not for a *real* American, so get into those cubicles and onto those assembly lines, wage slaves, and punch out some product for us!

But anyhow, this is the day when we celebrate Token Perfect Negro, who was this nice kindly non-threatening well-dressed black man who, like, wasn't scary and shit like those scary black people demanding social justice and jobs. Token Perfect Negro wasn't one of those scary criminal Negros who did scary criminal shit and such, he wasn't a rabble rouser, he was non-violent and non-threatening and who could hate him, after all?

Of course, the real Martin Luther King Jr. was quite adamant in his demands for social justice and jobs for all Americans, was non-violent but non-violent in a quite intrusive way that got into people's faces and made them pay attention, and there was one helluva lot of bigots, racists, and all-around nasty people who felt threatened by his very existence, to the extent that the FBI had a file on MLK Jr. that was a foot thick. And yes, he spent time in jail for crimes, though the crimes he was put into jail for were crimes of violating the apartheid laws, but still, if the definition of a criminal is someone convicted of a crime, MLK Jr. was a criminal.

And the world is all the better for that. But of course MLK Jr. isn't the person we're not-celebrating today, the person we're not-celebrating today is Token Perfect Negro. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

A song for George W. Bush

2012-01-16T16:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, so Iris Dement wasn't talking about Republicans. But the deal is, I feel the same way about folks who betrayed the nation by putting us into two unwinnable wars and causing the deaths of thousands for the profit of Vice President Halliburton's company. Their invisible sky demon that they worship might forgive them. But I won't.

This is "God May Forgive You (But I Won't)".

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Those darkies are just savages

2012-01-15T17:30:00.000-08:00

They're uncivilized and ignorant and not as good as us, so it's okay to do drone strikes on their villages and kill lots of women and children.

Incidentally, the young programming prodigy who was at nine years of age the world's youngest MCP (Microsoft Certified Professional) recently died after an epileptic seizure and coma. She will be buried near where she was born, near Faisalabad, Pakistan. Her name was Arfa Karim Randhawa, and she died in Lahore, Pakistan, after complications in the ICU.

Yeah, those darkies are all ignorant savages.

-- Badtux the Darkly Sarcastic Penguin

Beautiful assassin

2012-01-15T16:01:00.000-08:00

The Musician Known As Beck wrote an album for French actress Charlotte Gainsbourg and got her to record it in his home studio. The result was the 2009 album IRM, which contains this song, "Time Of The Assassins".

-- Badtux The Music Penguin

Disgusting racists

2012-01-15T10:32:00.000-08:00

Pretty much every nation has a law that says if a citizen of that nation marries a foreign national, the foreign national can get a visa to live in the home country and can eventually get citizenship. So, what would you say about a law that said you could marry anybody you wanted to marry and bring them home to live as long as the person you want to marry isn't a Jew? You'd be outraged at such a racist law, I hope, and make comparisons to Hitler and maybe even mention that Hitler's propaganda referred to Jews as "cockroaches" and thus Nazi Germany outlawed marriages between "Aryans" and Jews because, really, who marries a cockroach?

But this is just a theoretical question, you say, because surely no modern nation would pass some racist law that singled out a single ethnicity for special discriminatory treatment. The international outcry would be deafening. Uhm, except a supposedly modern nation did pass such a law. I'm still waiting for the outcry, though, because the nation is Israel, and the ethnicity being discriminated against is Palestinians. Yeppers, if you're an Israeli citizen and marry an Italian, you can bring your spouse home. But if you're an Israeli citizen and marry a Palestinian... forgetaboutit!

So waiting for the international outrage in... oh wait. I forgot. Condemning racism means you're anti-Semitic. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The French conspiracy

2012-01-14T20:23:00.000-08:00

So Newt Gingrinch's SuperPAC is running ads in South Carolina blasting Romney because Romney can... speak French?

But hey, maybe the Grinch has a point. If not for France helping us out during the French Revolution, we'd have an actual real national anthem that can be sung by mere mortals, rather than the screech-inducing ode to fireworks that is our current national anthem, which trips up far too many pop tarts who attempt to scream it out at the beginning of football games. Not to mention that football would be played with round balls, kicked with your foot, rather than being some bizarre mashup of rugby, wrestling, and line-dancing. And if not for the French, we'd all speak English.

So thanks for nothing, France. Seriously.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Wright Noise

2012-01-14T16:47:00.000-08:00

Before Shannon Wright tried to get all arty Tory Amos piano bar chick on us, she did a lot of raw noisy hard-driving stuff with just guitar and drum. This is "The Path of Least Persistence (Figure II)" off her 2001 album Dyed in the Wool.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Zombie Jerry Falwell endorses Newt Gingrich

2012-01-13T19:33:00.000-08:00

Yes, for true! From beyond the grave, Jerry Falwell endorses Newt "The Lizard" Gingrinch! Because Mitt Romney has a likability problem (as Mike Huckabee put it in 2008, "Mitt doesn’t remind you of the guys you used to work with, he reminds you of the guy who laid you off"). So clearly the GOP needs a candidate far more likable than Mitt Romney.

Of course, pretty much any flattened armadillo they found on a Texas highway would be more likable than Mitt Romney... oh wait. No, that was Rick Perry. Nevermind!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Bad travels

2012-01-13T16:41:00.000-08:00

Cracker with "Eurotrash Girl", off their 1993 album Kerosene Hat.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

War crimes

2012-01-13T08:12:00.000-08:00

The four Marines urinating on corpses have been identified and now Hillary Clinton is calling for War Crime charges.

So let's get this straight: Pissing on dead people -- who don't give a shit whether you're pissing on them or not 'cause they're, like, dead -- is a war crime. But making hundreds of thousands of people dead in the first place by sending U.S. troops into some place they have no business being based on lies? Why, NOT a war crime. So Darth Cheney and his puppet minion GWB aren't war criminals, 'cause the buck stops... well, down there with the grunts, yo!

I can't condone this sort of conduct, but I can understand why it's happening -- and that it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the outcome. We've already lost in Afghanistan. Everybody understands that except the politicians who sent the troops into Afghanistan. Crap, we lost the moment we sent more than a few platoons of Special Forces into Afghanistan, that's a landscape that has chewed up pretty much every invader that's ever dared it. This is the sort of shit that happens when a defeated military is bitterly nursing its wounds after being put into a no-win situation. It's a pisser that something like this happens (literally in this case) and the troops involved should be disciplined (too bad we contracted out the mess halls, these are some grunts who need to peel a *lot* of potatoes), but WAR CRIME? Oh puh-leeze, the real war crime is sending our troops into a no-win situation in a first place. Duh.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Matt Drudge wants you to read his web site...

2012-01-12T21:52:00.000-08:00

unless you're a government employee, at which point I guess you give up your right to read his web site.

Look. There are times when I post things that have folks from unallocated IP addresses stop by. (That is, there is no official entry in the ARIN reverse lookup database for these IP addresses, there's No Such Address, read the initials ;). It's called GOOGLE. Some of those folks are dropping by because it's their job. Some are dropping by because they're on their lunch break. Either way, they typed in something like, say "B-1 crash afghanistan" to Google and came to my blog. That's how the Internet works. That's how it's always worked, all the way back to the early webcrawlers that required you to be really creative to actually find things.

So we are left with two options here: Either Drudge really believes that becoming a government employee means you lose your right to use Google to find articles of interest to you or your employer, or Drudge is a cretin. I report, you decide.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Thought for the day

2012-01-12T21:20:00.001-08:00

If the GOP could get away with digging up embalmed Ronald Reagan and running him for President again, they would. Embalmed Ronald Reagan would probably appear more life-like than Mitt Romney anyhow (dude is almost as robotic as his wife, the killbot from Andromeda Galaxy).

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Guess that eatin' right stuff didn't last

2012-01-12T20:30:00.001-08:00

Tonight I steamed some potstickers made of the flesh of the mighty tofu beast, and ate some kimchi'ed Korean vegetables. I followed it up with some yogurt for desert.

All of which is to no avail, because cooling on top of my stove is a pan of fresh-backed chocolate fudge brownies, which I topped with some 60% cacao chocolate chips as decoration.

Sigh. First there was the cheesy crackers (well, sorta-crackers anyhow), now this? I need to start baking things a bit more healthy than this!

Update: Chocolate overdose. OMG. Is it possible to have a mouth orgasm? These things are *soooo* rich and, well, chocolaty...

-- Badtux the Fat Penguin

Cruel Rain

2012-01-12T16:35:00.000-08:00

Rocky Votolato, "She Was Only In It For The Rain" from his 2006 album Makers.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Gingrinch PAC releases anti-Romney movie

2012-01-12T07:58:00.000-08:00

The fascinating thing is that, unlike most of what Romney says, the facts I tried checking out in this video actually checked out. Romney's group of corporate raiders was all about stripping assets out of profitable companies that they took over in hostile takeovers and turning them into bankrupt shells, as Romney's group walked away with millions of dollars from stripping the assets and the workers of the former profitable company were thrown out on the streets.

Yesterday while driving home I caught Gingrinch being interviewed on CNN Radio. You got the sense it's not about votes with the Grinch now. This is personal. His distaste and disdain for Romney was so visceral that you almost expected spittle to come out of the radio speakers.

-- Badtux the Dwarf-race-watchin' Penguin

And we pay money for this?

2012-01-12T07:53:00.000-08:00

Intelligence report says Taliban still want to rule Afghanistan.

And water is wet. Duh.

-- Badtux the Duh Penguin

Evil expression

2012-01-12T07:50:00.000-08:00

I love this photo of Frank Zappa and one of his cats. They both have this same wicked expression in their eyes, like they're trying to figure out how to shred something that needs shredding ;).

-- Badtux the Cat-blogging Penguin

Eerie science

2012-01-11T16:00:00.000-08:00

The Black Angels, "Science Killer", off their 2008 album Directions to See a Ghost.

Interesting how such minimalist instrumentation can be sent thru sufficient reverb to get some eerie effects...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

New Hamster

2012-01-11T08:13:00.000-08:00

I suppose I should post something about the dwarf race. Creepy Dwarf won, as expected, but 60% of GOP voters still don't like him and voted for someone else. Goldy Dwarf came out with a surprising second place finish -- apparently New Hamster *likes* cranky old septuagenarians who yell "you darn kids, smoke my grass!", probably something to do with too many fumes from the grass. Oily Dwarf's oil millions apparently worked good enough for a third place finish, followed by Grumpy Dwarf, Frothy Dwarf, and basically out of the race, Dopey Dwarf with basically 0%, who is going to give it one last Texas try in South Carolina then go home to tend his chattel.

I was going to extend the allegory to dwarf vs. camel but at this point we're already too politically incorrect towards the little people so I'll let you watch that race and create your own allegory. Heh.

- Badtux the Dwarf-watching Penguin

Cheese crackers

2012-01-10T23:02:00.000-08:00

That's what I'm trying right now. Rough recipe:

1 cup flour
1 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup whole milk
2-3 tablespoons unsalted butter, cold, grated (sorry, I didn't measure, I just grated into the mixing bowl until there was the amount of butter I wanted ;)
1/2 cup (more or less) grated mild chedder cheese or some other mild cheese or cheese mix (I had some "mexican mix" in the 'fridge from making burritos which was pretty smooth)

Mix ingredients (flour, butter, cheese first, then milk until the dough is the right consistency to hold together as a ball but not be sticky), slap it on some floured wax paper and flour the top slightly to help keep it from sticking, slap another piece of wax paper on top, roll it out into a fairly thin sheet. Fold/cut/relocate edges until rectangular. Use pizza cutter to cut the result into crackers. Put on lightly floured cookie sheet, sprinkle top with more grated cheese to give it a nice texture on the top, bake at 350 degrees for around 20+ minutes until golden brown.

We'll have to see how it tastes, but it certainly *smells* good ;).

-- Badtux the Cooking Penguin

Update: 24 minutes after putting them into the oven, they're cooked, but the texture is wrong. The texture is sort of like a very good pie crust. A *cheesy* pie crust, and a *good* pie crust, but definitely not crispy. Maybe I need to let them cook a little longer... okay, slid back in...

Update #2: 30 minutes they had to come out or become overcooked. Letting them cool but the one I tried again has the consistency of a very good pie crust.

Update #3: I think I know where I went wrong. After I rolled it out the dough needed to rest in the refrigerator for a while to let the gluten relax, it's holding on too tight. I was just impatient.

It appears that this attempt to make crackers failed, though the results are still delicious (as in, most of them are gone within 20 minutes of taking them out of the oven!). I have a good pie crust if I want to make a cheese pie though ;).

Collective punishment

2012-01-10T17:45:00.000-08:00

100 soldiers under house arrest since January 4 at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington State. Virtually all of them are innocent of any misdeed, but military investigators are trying to pressure them to "narc" on whoever stole around $600K in military gear. My suggestion to investigators: You'd have more luck looking for the gear on eBay rather than imposing collective punishment in contravention of the UCMJ.

UPDATE: The more I read on this thing, the more it stinks. The stuff was stolen from an unlocked room *outside* the locked alarmed area where it was supposed to be stored? Who gave the order to move the stuff there? It wasn't a grunt, that much is for sure! And the equipment stolen wasn't stuff that could be hawked on eBay, it is stuff that can only be hawked by someone with connections -- someone likely *not* a grunt. This is sounding more and more like the USS Iowa turret explosion incident where the officers involved covered up their own malfeasance by blaming it all on the (conveniently dead in the Iowa case) grunts.

UPDATE#2: According to Public Affairs, as of 5:45PM today the lockdown is now lifted. Hmm...

-- Badtux the WTF Penguin

Simply amazing

2012-01-10T16:45:00.000-08:00

I've featured Sarah Jarosz singing "Run Away" off her new album Follow Me Down before, but not like this. She gets a helping hand here from Alison Kraus on fiddle and backing vocals, Jerry Douglas on dobro/steel, and Danny Thompson on upright bass.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Note: *STILL* nowhere near the end of cool music for this blog. Spent about 2 hours last night exploring the nether regions of YouTube and ended up programming ten days straight of music plus have a half dozen more sitting in browser windows to sort through that band's songs looking for what would be the most interesting introduction to their music. There is a *lot* of good music out there, folks -- Lady Gaga is *not* the sum total of modern music!

Reminder

2012-01-09T19:59:00.000-08:00

When Libertarians drone about state's rights and how government shouldn't interfere with private decisions, what they're actually defending is, as Rand Paul (R-States Rights) explains, the right of states and residents of said state to treat fellow Americans as second-class citizens and/or property.

'Nuff said on that. I believe people are more important than property. Libertarians, apparently, believe property is more important than people. So it goes.

-- Badtux the Civil Rights Penguin

Dinner

2012-01-09T19:08:00.000-08:00

Chunky chicken noodle soup and fresh-fried bannock soda bread. (At 1/4th the amounts of that recipe!). Yeppers, trying a slightly different bannock recipe this time, one with some oil in it. Also added a teaspoon of sugar for a bit smoother flavor. It seems to have fried up into something that resembles a somewhat-dense biscuit. Tastes fine tho.

As far as I can tell, all the oil does is make the dough a bit easier to work (and no, you don't work it for 12 minutes, you work it as little as possible, maybe 12 *kneads*). 3/2 cup of water doesn't divide easily by four, so I had to sort of guestimate the last bit of water, so for the last bit I just sprinkled a little water in until the last bit of flour could be worked into the dough and the dough held together. Seems to have worked, it turned into a nice little cake.

My original intention was to have crackers with my soup. But no crackers. But had everything needed to whip up a quick soda bread. So I did.

- Badtux the Culinary Penguin

Sunny

2012-01-09T16:09:00.000-08:00

Kaki King, "Sunnyside", off her album Junior. Uhm, Kaki is gay, as this song should clarify if you had any doubts. Not that it matters, other than the unexpected gender pronouns in certain places.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Evolutionary advantage

2012-01-09T08:20:00.001-08:00

-- Badtux the Easily Amused Penguin

I guess they thought I wouldn't notice

2012-01-08T22:53:00.000-08:00

Compost, my Internet provider, did their usual Comcraptastic job and raised my Internet bill by $3 this month. I had looked at the rate hike sheet and had not seen a rate hike for Internet-only service, but apparently I was looking at it wrong, because Comcast certainly raised my rate.

Because I'm now paying more for Internet service without receiving any better service, I guess it's time for me to switch to the competitor, uhm... err... what competitor? Comcast has a monopoly on Internet service in my area! Not a government-enforced monopoly, mind you -- our local government has encouraged AT&T to expand DSL availability, for example, and has been very helpful to ClearWire in getting towers up and encouraged a WiFi startup too -- but none of these have "taken" for the reasons that I discussed earlier in this blog -- i.e., that the primary cost of providing Internet service is infrastructure, infrastructure is a fixed cost regardless of how many people use it, and there just aren't enough customers to pay for twice the infrastructure given that the current rates are already less than that. A competitor simply wouldn't be able to recoup their investment in duplicating Compost's infrastructure, so they won't do it.

So I will take my bitter pill of an unregulated monopoly up the ass without lube, just like a good American, because what choice do I have? No Internet? Yah, this Libertarian "no regulations" thingy is workin' out *real* good...

-- Badtux the Sore-bum Penguin

Gothic ghost

2012-01-08T16:59:00.000-08:00

The Handsome Family, "Your Great Journey". Southern Gothic from California, from their 2006 album Last Days of Wonder.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Giving the consumer what he wants

2012-01-08T10:25:00.000-08:00

So we should make more stuff in America, you say? So here's the question: Are you willing to put your money where your mouth is?

Look. Shit didn't start getting made overseas because it was better. It started getting made overseas because it was cheaper. I mean, c'mon. Ya got slave labor in Vietnam making underwear, and they're paid a few pennies a day in rice and fish. That's *always* going to be cheaper.

But you say you are willing to pay 50 cents extra for a package of American made underwear? Dude. That experiment's been done. Fruit of the Loom tried it. It didn't work. They went bankrupt and Warren Buffet moved all their production overseas when he took them over.

Same deal with those hard drives made in Thailand, the ones that caused a world-wide shortage when Thailand was hit with flooding. They're about $20 cheaper than if they were made down the street from me in the Western Digital plant that used to make consumer drives back in the early 90's. It might as well be infinity, because once again, people weren't willing to pay a price premium to buy an American made consumer drive. Businesses still happily pay the price premium to buy American-made server-grade SAS drives because they care about quality and reliability as much as they care about price and the American-made drives are simply better quality, but consumers won't buy American-made consumer drives because they cost a sawbuck too much.

Given all this, why *should* business give a shit about America and Americans? I mean, c'mon. American consumers quite clearly have said they don't give a shit about America and Americans, so if the consumers don't care, why should businesses care? It's not as if businesses are charities, after all. They're in business to make money, and if consumers say "we want low prices and don't care that the goods are made in Vietnam", why *should* businesses care? They're just giving consumers what consumers want!

Which is just another reason why WASF...

-- Badtux the Contrarian Penguin

Transient tone burst

2012-01-07T16:10:00.000-08:00

This is Stereolab, "tone burst" off their album Transient Random-Noise Bursts with Announcements. French can be so musical...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Reunion!

2012-01-06T19:44:00.000-08:00

So I hear the Beach Boys are getting back together and are going to go on tour. At which point... WTF?! They're fucking SEVENTY YEARS OLD! Being seventy years old is fine if you're a folkie like Leonard Cohen or Pete Seeger, or a country icon like Willie Nelson. Those folks never sung celebrations of being young in the sun, they were always serious adults. But the Beach Boys made their rep on songs about *surfing* and cars and shit, for cryin' out loud. That's young people stuff, what are they gonna do, come shuffling out on stage in their walkers and sorta jerk spasmodically around while "playing" their instruments (as session musicians play behind the scenes) and "singing" (lip-synching to recordings made when they were young)? WTF?

Maybe the prediction that December 21st, 2012 is the end of the world aren't so far-fetched after all. If septuagenarians can get together and sing "fun fun fun fun surfin' usa!" while jerking spasmodically in their walkers, *anything* is plausible, yo!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Greek terror

2012-01-06T16:32:00.000-08:00

The band Is Tropical is out of France. This is their song "The Greeks", as played by a bunch of French kids re-enacting the War on Terror with some very... graphic... animation of the actual results. I don't know what it is, but watching kids depict what their parents are actually doing seems to bring the horror home in a way that all the dry ink on paper never does.

- Badtux the Music Penguin

Know your dwarfs

2012-01-05T17:03:00.000-08:00

I thought it might be helpful to have a guide to the Republican dwarf-tossing contest oops "primary" contest with the main contestants err candidates. So here we go...

#1: Creepy Dwarf. Creepy Dwarf is best known for his creepy fudge packing exploits. Also for putting his dog on top of his car while on a long vacation trip and exporting several hundred thousand jobs to India and China, which endears him greatly to voters in India and China. Hobby: Whining about people who point out he's running against his very own Obamneycare health care plan.

#2: Frothy Dwarf. Of the various candidates in this dwarf-tossing contest, spends the most time proclaiming how much he loves God and thus is most likely to rape your boy-child if left alone with him in an empty room. Hobbies: Fantasizing about man-on-dog sex, and making children cry.

#3: Goldy Dwarf. Goldy Dwarf is kinda old and stiff and does a lot of ranting at kids about how the only real money is gold coins, which totally baffles them because if you try spending gold coins at a supermarket the clerks just look at you as if you're deranged. The kids like him though 'cause he's, like, totally down with smoking pot. Hobby: Running for President.

#4: Grumpy Dwarf. He's grumpy. He's vindictive. He's ugly. He's best known for shutting down the government because the President made him ride in the back of the bus, and divorcing one of his many wives for the character flaw of having cancer. And for his current wife, Caligula the Impaler, a cyborg kill-bot from the Andromeda galaxy, best known for her helmet of gold disguised as "hair". Hobby: Putting coal in children's Christmas stockings.

#5: Dopey Dwarf. He's not the sharpest tool in the tool shed. Best known for wearing Heath Ledger's jacket while ranting about the evils of Teh Ghey, and having totally MAH-velous hair. And oh, he's not gay. Really. Not at all. No way, no how. Rumors about the size of his closet are just totally wrong, yessiree. Hobby: Looking at self in mirror.

#6: Crazy Dwarf. Along with Frothy Dwarf, spends much of her time talking about voices in her head that told her to run for office, and has the crazy eyes to prove it. Like Dopey Dwarf, spends much time ranting about the evils of Teh Ghey. Married to a man by the name of Marcus, who minces and prances and wiggles his hips when he walks and who is totally not gay. Really. Hobby: Holding conversations with the voices in her head.

#7: Oily Dwarf. His family's oil company has bankrolled his campaign. Also wears magic underwear like Creepy Dwarf and is former leader of Utah, a theocratic nation somewhere in the Middle East between Iran and Iraq that like Iran is ruled by an unelected religious elite that uses elected officials as figureheads to disguise their power. Hobby: Politics.

#8: Flaky Dwarf. Failed one-term governor of a small corrupt banana republic somewhere in South America, where he lost his re-election primary campaign to a dude who capers around in the woods wearing a white bedsheet. Biggest highlight of his gubernatorial career: receiving foreign dignitaries in the governor's mansion while wearing bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Hobby: Making passionate speeches to an audience of three in supporters' living room.

And finally, gone but not forgotten:

Doughy Dwarf. Best known for taking a mediocre pizza company, and making it into a mediocre pizza company. Hobby: Feeling up women.

These, apparently, are the best men that a major political party can find to run for office here in the USA. Or as Jazzbumpa is so fond(?) of saying: WASF.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Young grass

2012-01-05T16:22:00.000-08:00

Youngster Sierra Hull from Tennessee plays "From Now On" at a bluegrass festival. She's now attending Berklee on scholarship getting the other half of her music education, the half where she learns WTF it is that she's been doing by ear for the past ten years of her life, though she could probably play the bluegrass circuit full time and make a decent living at it. But she and Sarah Jarosz aren't interested in doing the burn out quick and stupid thing that the pop tarts like Britney do. I guess bluegrass don't make ya dumb like pop, yo.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Inflation targeting in a 0% realm

2012-01-04T19:57:00.000-08:00

There has been a proposal floated to set a Fed inflation target tied to unemployment. The upside is that this could be done simply via a vote of the Federal Reserve board, since this is within the purview of the authorizing legislation for the Federal Reserve. The downside is that it wouldn't work.

Look: I can see why the idea appeals to some people. It completely side-steps the legislative log-jam in Congress. The problem, however, is this: How is the Fed going to create inflation when it already has reduced real interest rates to 0%? Once you hit the 0% boundary, you're basically stuck -- you can't reduce real interest rates below that, because people simply aren't going to pay banks to keep their money in the bank. They just won't. They'll stash their money under mattresses instead, and at that point you're talking about bank collapses and a massive deflationary spiral and a world of hurt.

Now I hear the acolytes of Milton Friedman crying, "what about helicopter drops?!" But what we've seen over the past three years is that helicopter drops -- the Federal Reserve printing money with all the abandon of a Wiemar Republic finance minister -- only accomplishes creating inflation in China and in oil prices. That's because the money gets into the consumer's pocket and the consumer either spends it in China -- since pretty much all he wants to buy is in China -- or he spends it on gasoline to get to work -- since demand for gasoline is inelastic (you don't have any choice but to burn it to get to work) the oil companies can simply increase their prices to suck that money right back out of the workers pockets, and there's nothing that workers can do about it, if they want to work they *have* to drive in the 98% of America that has no functional mass transit system. Then once the oil companies get it, what do they do with it? Well, they either spend it overseas -- which is no help at all to America and Americans -- or they stash it under (virtual) mattresses where it effective disappears from the economy -- again doing nothing to employ the 20%+ real unemployed Americans, and until you get a significant number of those Americans re-employed you *can't* see significant wage inflation, because there's simply too much supply and not enough demand for workers.

So you can't lower interest rates right now, and you can't print money, so how could the Fed create a realistic expectation of inflation? Answer: They can't. All that would happen if the Fed made such an announcement would be widespread laughter, because anybody who's serious knows that Keynes may have been wrong about a lot of thing, but he was utterly correct about what happens at the 0% boundary -- at the 0% boundary monetary policy becomes utterly ineffective, and you must then rely on fiscal policy (i.e., the government directly buying or hiring to create employment in America for Americans) to soak up the surplus workforce, trigger wage inflation, and get things to the point where monetary policy *could* be effective.

Which, given that we're currently in the grips of an Austerian religious ideology which holds that fiscal stimulus is evil, means we are seriously, totally fucked.

-- Badtux the WASF Penguin

Who is this dude?

2012-01-04T19:40:00.000-08:00

Obama finds his balls, makes recess appointments to NLRB and CFPB.

But having done this, I'm sure he re-pawned his balls to Joe's Pawn Shop, where they'd been sitting in a back room since his inauguration in January 2009. We'll see, though.

-- Badtux the Baffled(*) Penguin

(*) Baffled by a Democrat showing more courage than a limp waffle, that is, since this is an event that happens perhaps once per decade.

Many crosses

2012-01-04T16:49:00.000-08:00

Tom Russell, "Crosses of San Carlos", off his 2009 album Blood And Candle Smoke. The voice of a man who's been around the block a few times and is reporting back to us what he found out there.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The dwarfs

2012-01-03T21:53:00.000-08:00

Well, it appears that Creepy and Frothy are the winners in Iowa, with Goldy slightly behind. Grumpy, Crazy, and Dopey are well behind. And of course Doughy already dropped out.

Frankly, I wouldn't leave my boy-child alone with Creepy *or* Frothy. They both have that deranged look to their eyes that makes me think leaving my kid alone with them would be about as safe as leaving my kid alone with a Catholic priest. As for Goldy, I think he'd just bore the kid to death talking about how gold is pretty and should be the only thing accepted as money. Wow, so now I'm evaluating potential Republican presidential candidates on the Pedobear Scale? Wow. Just wow.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Done him wrong blues

2012-01-03T16:05:00.000-08:00

The band is HoneyHoney, a sleazy-lookin' dude from Massachusetts and a beauty from Ohio making some honkey-tonk soundin' music that Hank Williams Sr. coulda smiled and nodded at. Thing is, they really didn't set out to make country music, they were going to be an indie band like the White Stripes. It just sorta happened, except what they do isn't Nashville so country doesn't want them any more than indie wants them.

This is "Angel of Death" off their brand new album Billy Jack. Enjoy.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Religion and the end of empires

2012-01-02T23:00:00.000-08:00

One of the interesting things I note, looking through history, is that the end of empires corresponds with a huge resurgence in religion. As the Roman Empire was winding down, you had a tremendous religious fervor that resulted in Arianism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Macedonians, and other sects/cults, and the reaction of the Church against them, and the entire empire became embroiled in the question of what was acceptable doctrine and what was heresy. The Byzantines, the Russian Empire, even the Soviet Empire if you consider Soviet Communism to be a religion (which I do, since it was faith-based rather than fact-based and became even more faith-based as the empire crumbled towards the end), in all of these reason gave way to faith in an ideology and the worse things got, the more people double down on that whole faith thing. Whether it was praying for God to smite the Vandals at the gates or fervently believing that the next five year plan would surely bring Soviet industry to a higher level than Western industry despite the fact that Soviet industry couldn't even build a crappy 8085 yet, much less the snazzy new 80486 that Intel had just shipped, wishful thinking replaced any realistic assessment of what was happening and what to do about it.

So, did it work? Uhm. Do you need to ask? Instead of drilling with spears and shields and then marching out and smiting Vandals, the citizens of Rome instead huddled inside their city and prayed to God to smite the invaders. Yeah, that worked out well for them, didn't it? Instead of dumping their crufty ideology and opening up their economy, the Soviets doubled down on ideological purity -- a friend who was an engineer in their missile program during the 1980's noted to me that he wasn't even able to read Western scientific journals unless they'd been vetted for ideological purity by Communist party monitors and half the time so many pages were missing, cut out by the censors, that the journal was useless. Yeah, that really worked out well for them, didn't it?

So now I note another empire devolving into religious fervor -- I mean, what else can you call the collection of religious nutcases that are the so-called "serious" candidates on the Republican side of the aisle? Santorum surging, indeed (giggle!). Thing is, it was predictable. When the American Empire lost its first war in Vietnam -- defeated by a buncha pajama-wearin' gooks in flip-flops, for cryin' out loud -- the rise of something like Reaganism, a faith with no factual backing, was as sure to happen as the shocked withdrawal of the Roman citizenry into religious fervor after the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople. When events seem too huge and horrifying for people to confront and do something about, for some reason they react by withdrawing from the realm of reason and descending into the chasm of wishful thinking, where faith substitutes for fact. And alongside secular Reaganism that rejected reason arose a Christian fundamentalism that in turn rejected reason (despite the fact that no main-line religion rejects reason, even the Catlicks give lip service to reason). The merger of the two was inevitable -- when you have two religious beliefs with such power to explain why things are wrong (i.e., you just haven't prayed hard enough to God / the Free Market Fairy, an explanation which can be used *FOR ANY PROBLEM* with no reasoning required), it became inevitable that the two would end up co-opting each other and breed a mutt offspring that would become even more nasty and vicious due to hybrid vigor.

So anyhow, that's where we are today. The crumbling of the empire has become even more apparent after a buncha Arabs in Iraq beat our noses bloody (and don't say they didn't, why else did our last troops in that country have to creep out in the middle of the night?!), and what that means is that the religious nutcases are just gonna double down on the crazy. Which ain't gonna help a whole lot -- if the Roman citizenry had armed themselves, trained themselves to fight, and taken the fight to the barbarians rather than huddling with their rosaries babbling Hail Marys we'd all be speaking Latin right now, and that's pretty much what Reaganism and Christian fundamentalism consist of, babbling meaningless prayers like late-era Romans rather than doing what it takes to perpetuate the empire. But they have faith, faith I say, in their magical great sky demon and His son, the magical free market fairy, and no amount of reason will ever shake that faith and for some reason people who live in crumbling empires seem to prefer faith to reason so... (shrug). Hang on for the ride, folks. It's gonna be a wild one.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Suburban nightmare

2012-01-02T16:53:00.000-08:00

As you know, I don't usually do mainstream stuff here. But this video was chilling.

Arcade Fire, "The Suburbs", off of their 2010 album by the same name.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Dumbass of the year, Texas edition

2012-01-02T07:39:00.000-08:00

Bumper sticker on a Texas pickup truck: "Capitalism rocks! Socialism sucks!".

Seen in a government-run socialist rest area (which sucks?) alongside a government-operated socialist Interstate highway.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The Punishment

2012-01-01T18:08:00.001-08:00

The kittehs apparently didn't like me leaving them alone for a week.

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

The new year

2012-01-01T00:01:00.000-08:00

Azure Ray, "The New Year", off of 2002's Burn and Shiver. A sad song for an upcoming year that all indications say will be quite sad itself...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Las Vegas showgirl of Christmas trees

2011-12-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

It has plumes. It has feathers. It has glittery decorations. What else has plumes, feathers, and glittery decorations? Hint:

Except this tree is such overkill that it makes Vegas showgirls look sedate by comparison. Just sayin' ;).

-- Badtux the Christmas Penguin

Merry Christmas!

2011-12-25T00:02:00.000-08:00

As usual on Christmas, here is (a very spastic) Lady Gaga!

-- Badtux the Snarky Music Penguin

No posting December 24-January 1

2011-12-24T01:57:00.000-08:00

Taking a break... well, other than my Christmas tradition ;).

-- Badtux the Christmas Penguin

California blues

2011-12-23T16:53:00.000-08:00

Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, "Goodbye California", off her 2008 album Asking for Flowers. She's supposed to have an album, Voyageur, out in January. I'll try to track down some songs from it and feature them here.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Hot rock

2011-12-22T16:42:00.000-08:00

Sonic Youth, "Incinerate", off of their 2006 album Rather Ripped. Pay attention to Steve Shelley's drums back there -- not your standard rock drums, he's every bit as innovative as the guitar players, yet Lee and Thurston got all the notice...

Sadly, Sonic Youth is no more. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon divorced in October, and plans for an album are pretty much over too.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

'Tis the Season

2011-12-21T21:24:00.000-08:00

Today was the winter solstice, where the day quits dying and starts rising from the dead again. I am decorating my Jeep with evergreen branches as we speak, evergreen branches (or entire trees) being a symbol of the rebirth of the year long-predating Christianity on this most holy of days, when the day quits dying and starts growing again. Well, actually they’re plastic “Christmas” wreaths zip-tied to the grill and spare tire on the rear tailgate, but same difference, right?

Oh yeah, that whole year being born thing is why the Christians decided to celebrate the birth of their Christ on the same day despite the fact that there would be no flocks in the fields of Bethlehem at this time of year (too dang cold!). Birth of sun in the new year = birth of Christ, dig? But the holiday long predates Christianity, as any Wiccan could tell you :).

-- Badtux the Holiday Penguin

Too little, too late

2011-12-21T21:05:00.000-08:00

One of the most important jobs of a central bank in possession of a printing press is to act as a lender of last resort when there is a run on the other banks in the nation. I.e., it is literally physically impossible for a central bank to run out of money, so if a bank with typical reserve ratio of 20% suddenly has 40% of its customers show up wanting their money, it's the central bank's job to trade freshly printed cash for the long-term loans on the member bank's books, then soak the cash back up as the long-term loan gets repaid.

The Federal Reserve, to its credit, did that in the 2007 credit crisis here in the United States. The Fed accepted trash for cash to the tune of over $1.5B, or roughly 6% of the outstanding loans in the USA. But the European Central Bank did not. The Fed did an indirect bailout of some of the most important European banks by trading cash for trash, but nowhere near what would be necessary to re-float those banks -- only enough to keep U.S. insurers of those banks solvent, because the Federal Reserve's charter is to serve the USA, not Europe.

The end result in Europe is deflation, and as I've mentioned here before, deflation is the same thing as debt inflation -- that is, your debts are rising and rising and rising in value until they finally reach the point at which they cannot be repaid, a point which has arrived for far too many Europeans and even entire European countries. There's a term for what happens after that: circling the drain, as debtors default, banks collapse, cause further deflation, causing *more* debtors to default, wash, rinse, repeat, swirling down down down with less and less currency in circulation (it's disappearing under mattresses) until entire economies are reduced to barter, probably the most inefficient method of conducting business, like, evah.

So it's good that the ECB *finally* is stepping forward to do their own trash for cash to keep European banks from collapsing. On the other hand, the ECB is run by Germans, and a good percentage of the banks owed money by the countries on the verge of default are German banks, so it may be that they finally simply didn't have a choice but to do the minimum needed to keep the whole Eurozone from circling the drain into the Barterzone.

But note the *size* of this loan program: less than half the size of the Fed's loan program in 2007, despite the fact that the Eurozone's combined economies are approximately the same size as the USA's economy. Too little. And four years too late.

My suggestion to Europeans (other than the British, who avoided the Euro madness): Turnips. Seriously. When the Soviet ruble collapsed with the nation that created it, turnips were the currency of choice for much of Russia because they're durable, useful (if you have too many turnips you can ferment them to make vodka, even!), and not dependent upon a central bank to make the decision to create them. What, you say this is daft? Well, no more daft than those silly people who collect shiny-colored metal in hopes that it will have value after the Euro collapses. You can eat turnips. You can't eat gold.

-- Badtux the Snarky Economics Penguin

Coal miner's lament

2011-12-21T16:26:00.000-08:00

The trio of women is Red Molly. They're singing "Coal Tattoo", a song by country songwriter Billy Edd Wheeler who, like yesterday's artist, Guy Clark, never managed to sell many of his own albums (1964's Memories of America is his only album that charted) but wrote one helluva lot of songs over his lifetime. The youngsters do it justice.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Quick hits

2011-12-20T22:31:00.000-08:00

Tiny Kim apparently has the support of the security services, which has now sent a number of senior Party officials tiptoeing through the tulips. Seems Tiny Kim ain't as dim as he might have seemed from his early appearances and isn't going to be tiptoeing through the tulips himself anytime soon -- or turnips either, given the abysmal yield of North Korean agriculture over the past couple of decades.

Gratuitous video of new North Korean dictator:

In other news, Newt the Gingrinch appears to think he's running for President of North Korea, what with basically proposing to take judges who rule in ways he don't like out behind the barn and shoot'em in the head or somethin'. The sad part is that there's a large contingent of Americans who break out in giant shit-eatin' grins at the very thought, who have no problem with the notion of living under a North Korean style dictatorship, as long as it's *their* dictator.

Who are the 1% and what do they do for a living? Hint: It ain't work in the way you and I think of work.

Regulations are not a huge jobs killer. Like, duh. If there's demand for my product I don't give a shit about what regulations I have to comply with, I'm gonna hire folks to produce more product.

50% of Americans are too poor to pay Federal income taxes, but they still pay plenty of other taxes, starting with the 15% payroll tax that the 1% (who don't work for a living, they "invest" for a living and don't earn income, they earn "capital gains") don't pay.

The wealth gap, graphically. It ain't a pretty picture.

Why haven't any of these Wall Street fraudsters gone to prison yet, again? Oh wait, because they're "job creators" in some alternate universe where unicorns are pink and cotton candy grows on trees. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Happy birthday, Guy

2011-12-20T16:12:00.000-08:00

Most people have never heard of Guy Clark, but in the music business he is a legend. His own albums never sold, but he has built a reputation amongst musicians as a songwriter's songwriter. And now he is 70 years old.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Quick hits

2011-12-19T23:09:00.000-08:00

71-year-old man drives 225 miles with dead wife in passenger seat beside him. He didn't know what to do without his wife to tell him what to do.

How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? Apparently you just order him to go out on patrol, and he follows orders. So now John Kerry knows the answer to his question.

Over the past four years, the monetary base has been tripled. According to Austrian economists, this means we should be going Weimar, and should have been going Weimar for at least a couple of years. According to Keynesian economists, tripling the monetary base when you're in a liquidity trap will have no (zero) effect. So, uhm... who's right? (Hint: Krugman is right. Of course.)

Soldiers are having trouble feeding their families, and can't find jobs after they're mustered out of service, having a harder time than non-veterans even. America supports our troops, woot!

Yet more evidence of the shrinking middle class. Soon there will be only the filthy rich and the abjectly poor. Serfin' USA, dude!

- Badtux the Hits Penguin

Cat sauna

2011-12-19T16:44:00.000-08:00

The bathroom is the warmest room in my house because that tile floor has an old-fashioned grout base and thus absorbs / radiates the heat that's coming out from under the vanity. Some of that heat from under the vanity also manages to waft its way upwards in the cabinet and heat up the bowl of the bathroom sink. The result: Well, you see the result here.

Especially note the decorative help that The Mighty Fang (for I know it was him, even though I didn't see him do it) lent his sauna. Every cat sauna needs shredded paper confetti to give it a festive look, right? Right?!

But that's okay, TMF is so ridiculously adorable that I can't be angry at him. Here's proof of how adorable he is:

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Raging sea

2011-12-19T16:18:00.000-08:00

This is Laura Marling, "All My Rage", off her new album A Creature I Don't Know. Laura is a British singer-songwriter who is part of a London scene sometimes called "nu folk". She tries for an Irish sea shanty here and manages something interesting.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Idiot of the Week, War on Christmas edition

2011-12-19T08:32:00.000-08:00

San Jose city manager Debra Figone, who said to city council members who wanted her to send a Holiday greeting to city workers thanking them for their hard work over the past year, "don't send an image of the City Hall Christmas tree, we try not to favor one religion over another."

Uhm, say what? The evergreen tree as a symbol of the rebirth of the year at winter solstice predates Christianity by centuries. WTF is with Figone having a problem with it? None of my Jewish friends have a problem with "holiday trees", harumph! The Holiday being celebrated is winter solstice, where the days start growing longer instead of growing shorter and the rebirth of the year is celebrated. The holiday long predates Christianity and is celebrated by most major religions on the planet in one form or another. Christianity decided to celebrate the birth of Christ (according to their scriptures actually born in summer while sheep were in the fields) on this holiday (birth of year = birth of Christ, dig?) but they're a johnny-come-lately on the scene.

-- Badtux the Baffled-by-ignorance Penguin

Why banjo players are always tuning

2011-12-19T08:00:00.000-08:00

This lament from a beginning banjo player: "I ordered the clawhammer for complete ignoramous book (apparently I am one) and this book which I thought was a beginner book and would use standard tuning starts out with 10 songs in double C tuning followed by 10 more in Sawmill tuning and then six in G tuning (four of which I already know) then on to C minor tuning cumberland Gap tuning (can't it be played in G?) and on and on. Really?"

So now you know why any bluegrass band seems to spend more time waiting for the banjo player to tune up than they spend playing and why banjo players spend half their life tuning and the other half playing out of tune ;).

-- Badtux the Tongue-in-cheek Music Penguin

Little Kim and the Jeep

2011-12-18T21:28:00.000-08:00

I spent most of today getting my ham radio installed in my new Jeep, which involved pulling the antenna wire from the back of the Jeep to the front of the Jeep, finding a place to mount the amp unit, then getting power to it. Then I spent most of the evening rearranging my garage because doing the electrical work showed that my electrical tool/supply box was completely out of control (as in, it ended up all over my garage because I had the stuff to do the work but it was buried in this box full of *stuff*), only to come in and find that Dear Leader has died. Not to be confused with Hopey Changey.

One wonders what the new leader of North Korea is going to do. The only long term hope for North Korea is reunification with South Korea, but the South Koreans are scared to death of such a thing... it took a decade for Germany's economy to recover from the reunification with East Germany, and East Germany was in far better shape than North Korea, which is a complete and utter basket case.

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Dark side

2011-12-18T16:50:00.000-08:00

Eliza Gilkyson, "Dark Side of Town", off her 2007 album Your Town Tonight.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Victory!

2011-12-18T13:45:00.000-08:00

We won in Iraq. Which is why our last troops in Iraq sneaked out to Kuwait at 2AM without telling anybody.

So victory is celebrated nowadays by sneaking out at night, not by a big celebration and victory parade as you exit triumphantly? Gosh, things sure have changed over the last 70 years!

- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

If this is what victory looks like, what would defeat look like? Just askin!

I need to learn how to read Korean

2011-12-17T20:36:00.000-08:00

The English translation on the bag of potstickers said "Kimchi potstickers". I assumed they were stuffed with some pickled Korean vegetables. Instead, it's a tasty mix of some sort of meat with tasty Korean vegetables. What kind of meat? I dunno, I can't read the Korean labeling!

So anyhow, that was my supper tonight -- steamed "kimchi potstickers" and tasty Korean veggies. Yum!

-- Badtux the Potstickered Penguin

Spirited Love

2011-12-17T16:00:00.000-08:00

Noisy London indie group The Duke Spirit with "Lassoo" off their 2008 album Neptune. Oh alright, I gotta say Liela Moss is a stunner as well as being a better-than-decent singer. What can I say, I'm male.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Rats are more empathetic than Republicans

2011-12-17T10:29:00.000-08:00

When a rat hears another rat in distress, that rat will immediately go to help the rat in distress. Furthermore, if they had a chocolate treat, they'd share that treat with the rat that they helped.

So what happens when a Republican sees someone in distress? Well, the first thing they do is ignore the person in distress. See previous post. Next, if they're feeling particularly generous, they might install a switch to allow the person in distress to escape his trap -- a switch which is *outside* the trap, which the person caught in the trap can't reach (e.g., offering mental health services to the mentally ill... out of reach of the person *inside* the trap of mental illness). But that's the end of any empathy. Past that point, it's "get a job, bum!" or "it's your own fault you got caught in a trap, don't whine to me for help!" and a shrug of the shoulder and move on. And if the cries of distress on the part of those caught in the trap become too disturbing, they dispatch the popo to beat the shit out of those in distress in order to shut up that annoying whining from people who are dying. Because as far as lizard people from planet Sociopath are concerned, human beings are just another kind of vermin, and if vermin makes untoward noise, well. Beat it until it's no longer capable of making noise, right?

Sad, isn't it, that rats are more empathetic than a large percentage of Americans?

-- Badtux the "Guess I have more in common with rats than I thought!" Penguin

It's that time of year again

2011-12-17T09:54:00.000-08:00

61 nameless dead. Often mentally ill, ignored during life, spat upon, despised by all but a few, who died young and early of "natural causes" (I guess starvation, exposure, and disease are "natural" but so it goes). Here this year's dead homeless people, homeless people in one of the wealthiest regions of the country, a region with millions of square feet of vacant commercial space at any given time, are given names (click image to embiggen, and pay attention to the age at which those whose age we know died):

-- Badtux the Sombre Penguin

R.I.P. Hitch

2011-12-17T09:15:00.000-08:00

Christopher Eric Hitchens (13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011), dead of cancer, and no, no deathbed conversion to Christianity -- something he'd been worried about as the cancer ate into his body, causing enormous pain. Oddly enough, one of the best obituaries I've read was in World Nut Daily by one of the Christian Taliban true believers who debated him in one of those Christian-vs-atheist debates. Who of course was appalled by Hitch but also somewhat admiring of the way Hitch stood by his principles even to the death when it came to that whole religion thing.

As for Hitch's switch to pro-war political views after 9/11, the less said about that the better, I'm sure most of the lefty blogosphere's all down on that. All I'll say is that the man was a damn fine writer, even at the end and leave it at that.

-- Badtux the Obituaries Penguin

New Mac

2011-12-16T20:49:00.001-08:00

I got a new Mac so I'm busy playing with it. There's evil shit happening in the world but I don't feel like talking about any of it right now. Go entertain yourself by playing in the middle of a freeway or somethin', yo!

-- Badtux the Rudely Busy Penguin

Keeping warm

2011-12-16T20:47:00.000-08:00

There is a furnace output that comes out under the vanity there and the tile floor is one of those old school ones laid on a mortar base, so it holds the heat well. The weather has been chilly lately and I've been running the heat in the mid 60's to sleep better (I'm a warm sleeper nowadays, is there such a thing as male menopause?!), so the kittehs seek the heat -- the bathroom is the warmest room in the house, a good 5 degrees warmer than everywhere else. Poor Mencken, however, refuses to sleep on the floor. Someone might step on him. TMF don't care, I think he's *trying* to trip people :).

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

No Thanksgiving

2011-12-16T16:15:00.000-08:00

Hrm. I'm a bit late with this one. Oh well.

This is Darrell Scott "The Day Before Thanksgiving" off his album A Crooked Road.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Too evil for evil

2011-12-15T19:58:00.000-08:00

The Department of Homeland Security ain't exactly the department of fuzzy fluffy puppy dogs. They have a bad habit of groping grannies and little children at checkpoints, doing warrantless searches at "border stops" well inside the U.S. borders, and otherwise generally treating the Constitution like some sorta toilet paper to wad and flush. So why do I bring them up? 'Cause as evil as the DHS is, there's some evil out there so evil that even the DHS don't want to associate with 'cause of the reek of brimstone. And by that, I'm referring to, of course... Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

If you want the scoop on Sheriff Joe, the place to get it is the Phoenix New Times. They've documented Sheriff Joe's jackboots throwing cripples out of wheelchairs to lie on the floor of jail cells in their own feces and urine... refusing to allow diabetics to take their insulin with predictable result (dead diabetics)... repeated beatings of inmates who have died from their injuries, one of those beatings being one of those cripples thrown out of his wheelchair... and other similar atrocities against people who have been convicted of no crime but poverty (i.e, being too poor to make bail while waiting trial).

The man is evil. Pure evil. Yet the people of Maricopa County, Arizona, have re-elected him every year since a long time ago. What does that say about the folks who live in the largest metropolitan area of Arizona? Disgusting. Just disgusting. That's all I got to say about it.

-- Badtux the Brimstone-smellin' Penguin

Dreamy dancing

2011-12-15T16:09:00.000-08:00

Beach House, "Holy Dancing", off their self-titled debut album.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Close to 50% of Americans are now poor

2011-12-15T08:08:00.000-08:00

A couple of weeks ago, I noted a quietly released and completely unpublicized (except by the official magazine of the Communist Party, WTF is that, that the Communists cover the US better than our so-called "free" press?) Social Security income report which inadvertently pointed out that the median income of the average American was near the poverty line for a family of four, and well under the 133% mark that most experts consider "poor". That is, if you are a single-income family of four in America, you're likely poor. And the Great Recession has made a lot of single-income families of four -- and some no-income ones, for that matter.

Now Census data pretty much confirming the Census data has been released and even our snoozing press had to pay attention to the fact that 1 in 2 Americans are now poor. And mayors are saying that a significant number of people needing food assistance aren't getting any because of cuts to food banks and other social safety networks, but hey, let them eat cake, right? Congratulations, Republicans. Your project, 30 years in the making, to turn America into the world's biggest banana republic with a stinking rich oligarch class and everybody else a poor-ass serf is coming to fruition. Bet you're proud.

-- Badtux the Banana-eating Penguin