The Gold Standard

As some of you know, I've placed myself on a few of the right-wingnut mailing lists just for the entertainment value. While the results have been entertaining in a way, I haven't posted much about it. That's because while entertaining, they're also rather sad or pathetic.

Case in point: "Dr." Michael Savage (Ph.D.-Mail Order) sent me an email extolling gold as an investment.

Now, first of all let's dispense with a common myth that somehow gold has some sorta inherent value. It doesn't. It's just this shiny metal stuff. You can't eat gold. You can't wear gold. Gold doesn't keep rain off your head or heat your home in the winter. Frankly, as a useful commodity, gold pretty much sucks, meaning that its only value is whatever you can trade it for.

And if you're going to trade a useless commodity for something, well, gold kinda sucks there too. You can't go down to your local grocery store and pay in gold. Unlike that green toilet paper stuff with pictures of dead Presidents on it, you can't buy a burger with gold. You gotta trade it for that green toilet paper first, which is cumbersome to do and involves fees and such.

And finally, gold isn't portable. It's heavy.

All in all, this means gold really isn't very useful as a money. Maybe back in Roman times, when every farmer and shop keeper accepted gold as payment for stuff, but not nowdays. Nowdays it's just this shiny metal that for some reason has this mythos built around it that it's something special, instead of just another metal like lead or iron or copper or whatever.

So why do Republicans rattle on about the "gold standard" as if it were something desirable? Well, it's because gold has one attribute that paper money doesn't: the government can't create more of it. The amount of gold in the world is pretty much fixed, and isn't growing very fast because all of the easily-mined gold was plucked up long ago.

Now, at first glance that might seem desirable. But the deal is, it's only desirable if the amount of goods and services in your economy are fixed and the number of people in your economy are fixed. If the number of people grow and correspondingly create more "stuff" (assuming that per-capita productivity at least holds constant), what you end up with is more "stuff", but not more money. That means deflation -- i.e., if it took $5 to buy some "stuff", now it only takes $4 to buy some "stuff."

You might say, "what's so bad about that?". Well, if you're a millionaire, nothing. You have lots of money, and now that money is going to go further. But if you work for a living, your own services are "stuff". If you're a farmer, the food you grow is "stuff". So you get paid less too. So you don't come out ahead. Only the rich guy does. And if you owe any debts -- if you owe a mortgage on your house, or on your farm -- you now are getting paid less (in admittedly more valuable dollars), but you have to pay back this loan that was taken out in cheaper dollars. In essence, your wealth is getting transferred to the wealthy -- they loaned you $1000 that would be worth $800 in today's money, but you have to pay them back the full $1000.

A perfect example is the deflationary spiral at the start of the Great Depression. Herbert Hoover refused to turn on the printing presses to keep the supply of money at least steady, and as banks collapsed, the money supply collapsed -- there were fewer dollars in the economy chasing the goods and services in the economy. This deflationary spiral resulted in huge numbers of small businesses and farms collapsing as they could no longer pay their debts because the debts were not re-calculated into the now-more-valuable dollars, thus creating windfalls for the big businesses and wealthy agri-businesses that took over their assets and farms and customers. It was the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy class ever in American history, and a perfect example of why Republicans are always rattling on about the gold standard -- or anything else that could cause a deflationary spiral, for that matter.

So anyhow, back to "Dr." Michael Savage (PhD-Mail Order) and his gold scam. It is a scam, you know. You never actually get the gold he's "selling". It is supposedly being held in a warehouse for you that's more "secure" and besides, gold is heavy, y'know, you really don't want to be lugging around all that heavy metal do you? Reality is that you are being sold "shares" in a gold-purchasing consortium. Some of the money you're putting into this consortium may be used to purchase gold. But most of it is going to "expenses". Like the expense of paying "Dr." Michael Savage hundreds of thousands of dollars per year to tout the scam on his radio show.

So anyhow, that's the low-down on gold and right-wing scam artists. Gold. You can't eat it, y'know?

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Windows XP Activation sucks

Have to run it in Parallels on the Macbook to run the VPN tunnel to work (only runs on Windows, GRRR!). So I changed my Parallels setup and re-installed and it decided it no longer wanted to be activated. So I went through the robot and the robot told me I stole my copy of Windows that I paid good money for blah blah, so I called again and punched keys until I got a customer service representative, at which point I got the thing activated again, but gah!

This is a perfect example of yet another piece of stupidity from technology companies. The pirates and hackers cracked Windows Activation years ago. The only people this thing impacts are people like me who build our own computers with our own legal copies of Windows who don't want to put some probably-virus-laden hacked/cracked shit onto computers that we use for work purposes. The script kiddies and such? Fuck, they don't give a shit anyhow about how many zombies are running on their PC, as long as they can play their pirated games on their pirated Windows without the zombies slowing it down too much.

Microsoft... Sony... all those goons who put this bullshit into their products that only affects legit users, not software pirates... well, I ain't gonna say what I want to have happen to them, except that it ain't nice. They're hiding behind the laws that they bought and paid for right now. But if the Republicans get their way and destroy the government as a functioning entity...

Animals

If we are just animals, just meat around bone stuffed into a skin sack like a sausage, does that make our lives futile and worthless?

Mencken would like to strongly disagree. His life has purpose. He eats, he sleeps, he gets palm-on-fur action from his alpha cat (me). He brings furry warmth to the nightly bed. He is kind to his apartment-mates, though he is not afraid to give them a warning whack with the paw if they're starting to irritate him by, like, grooming him when all he wants to do is sleep (yeah, The Mighty Fang is so mean with that biz of always wanting to groom Mencken). What more is there, in the end?

Seems to me that the deranged hairless monkeys with delusions of grandeur who call themselves "human" have a lot to learn from Mencken and his ilk. If these "humans" behaved like animals, rather than like lunatics, this would would be a lot nicer place to live methinks. Humans should be proud to be told "you're acting just like an animal!", rather than viewing it as an insult. After all, what animal (other than the hairless monkey ones) has ever started a war based upon lies, or killed another animal based on what he thinks some imaginary sky demon whispered in his ear? Hmm?

-- Badtux the Animal Penguin

Nightmare #25927

One of the issues the Republican crime syndicate faces is that they lose their magic Get Out Of Jail Free Card on January 20, 2009, when George W. Bush hands over the keys of his office to Hillary Clinton and a Democratic congress can then throw the whole lot of them in jail without them getting pardoned by Gee Dubya.

Which brings up the odd habit that Democratic candidates have of dying in suspicious plane crashes. Now, as we all know, George W. Bush is actually just the front man for the crime family currently running the United States. The "face", so to speak, of the con worked against the American people. Dick Cheney wears the pants in that family. So replacing him with another "face" in 2008 who is capable of working that Get Out Of Jail Free thingy would be just fine with them. Right now, it looks like that actor dude with the 20-year-younger wife who likes displaying her melons, since the other candidates are flaming out (they just don't have the right acting credits to be the face for the con). But really, it doesn't matter. Whoever it is, the crime syndicate will be working his levers.

Problem is, he's going to lose the election. Unless... unless Hillary Clinton and her running mate, Bill Richardson, die in yet another of the suspicious plane crashes that have killed or simply "disappeared"so many Democratic candidates over the decades.

Then the question becomes: what happens if the Democratic candidates die between getting the nomination, and election day? Does that mean we get the kind of election that Saddam Hussein liked to hold, where there was only one real candidate on the ballot -- Saddam? Except in this case, we get Fred Thompson or Julie Annie as our one and only candidate?

Whoever wins the Democratic nomination, I suggest that they don't fly after the nominating convention. Or drive, if driving in anything less than an armored infantry fighting vehicle with their own private security to protect the candidate from the Secret Service. Because the Rethuglicans really are starting to get worried about losing their Get Out Of Jail Free card... and one way the Party in corrupt thugocracies have always dealt with their political opponents is to see their opponents die in suspicious "accidents".

-- Badtux the Worried Penguin

No lack of self esteem

Every cat believes that he or she is master of the universe. And who are we to tell them differently?

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
Yeah, needed a soft fluffy kitty mental health break...

The United States is not Nazi Germany

For one thing, we don't have concentration camps where prisoners are interned for political crimes and forced to do manual labor. We don't have gas chambers (gas chambers are so, like, yesterday, everybody knows that giving an injection of a lethal poison is the way to go!), and the fact that we have 25% of the world's population of prisoners despite having only 5% of the world's population doesn't make us like Nazi Germany at all, uh uh! We don't have policemen demanding your papers please and we have no watch list of potential dissidents who are not allowed to move freely around the country. And we don't invade other nations under false pretenses either. And yes, we have 2.03 million Americans in our work camps, but Stalin had 6 million people in his, so there! We're #2! We're #2! WOOT!

Now, we haven't started exterminating people wholesale yet, but then, neither did Nazi Germany until Eichmann's mission to find some nation, anywhere, that would take Germany's unwanted Jews proved futile because no other nation would accept those Jews (including that bastion of Jewish sympathy the United States, which gave a great "NEIN!" to the whole concept of accepted Germany's Jews). It wasn't until 1942 that the gas chambers started up -- roughly ten years after the Nazis took power. So we can feel good about the fact that seven years after the Busheviks took power, we don't have execution chambers (yet) for all those nasty Islamafascistwhatchamacallits who, like, wear them funny head-dresses and stuff. USA! USA! USA!

And look, we have free speech in America. You're free to say anything you like, as long as you get a license from the government first, purchase thousands of dollars of liability insurance and pay thousands of dollars to the city and don't do it in public where you might disturb people. Why, you're perfectly free to say anything you want as long as you do it somewhere that only people who agree with you can hear! That's what free speech is all about, citizen, being able to freely talk to the walls of your apartment. It's right there in the 1st Amendment!

There's nothing to see here, citizen. Anybody who says different is a deranged moonbat and don't you worry, citizen, the brave souls of the Department of Homeland Security shall remove him from your presence shortly so that you do not have to worry your self about that silly "history" stuff he keeps bringing up. Everybody knows the United States is not Nazi Germany. Americans speak English and Germans speak German. Duh!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Checking out Macbook battery life

I earlier said that a Macbook will go about 2 hours on a battery charge. I'm going to test that. I turned off wireless and Bluetooth to save battery life, and will see how long I can go on that while doing typical "work" stuff such as browsing the Internet, editing text, playing with GarageBand (turns out it *will* do the kind of dynamics processing that I ranted it couldn't do, I just need to read the freakin' documentation, funny how that works, heh?), and otherwise doing stuff like I'd be doing on an airplane or train. Not watching a DVD or streaming mp3's, though. Those would probably use more juice.

GarageBand turns out to be able to do more than I thought yesterday. What can I say, I'm new to this Mac and Garageband thingy. Looks like it'll probably do everything I need to do for my own use, including clean up my crappy vocals (heh!). Running the guitar effects is pretty interesting. Hey, I can make my acoustic guitar sound like a Strat, whoa! If I were a pro I'd go for something like Logic Pro that allows lots of things like, for example, "stretching out" vocals phrasing to match an instrumental track (or vice-versa) without making it sound like crap, but for me, my guitar, and my MIDI keyboard for adding things like drums and such, GarageBand *might* do the trick. It's not as if I'm corresponding with myself across country (see: The Postal Service).

Discovered all the AU plugins for GarageBand (and Logic) over at MacMusic. Hmm. So it appears my frustration yesterday was just because I was using a new software app that I didn't know how to use, not because it won't do what I need it to do...

Hmm, currently at 78%, 41 minutes in. That implies that in light use in transit with all the radios turned off doing word processing and such I can get about 3 hours use out of the battery. Turn the radios all on, and battery usage is much higher, I know from experience...

Well, 'nuff techno-geekery for now. Your snark supply shall resume shortly.

-- Badtux the Geek Penguin

The Minstrel Boy

Written by Thomas Moore sometime in the early 1800's, supposedly as a commemoration of the 1798 Irish rebellion against British rule.

The minstrel boy to the war is gone
In the ranks of death you will find him
His father's sword he hath girded on
And his wild harp's slung behind him.

"Land of Song!" said the warrior bard
"Though all the world betrays thee.
One sword, at least, thy rights shall guard,
One faithful harp shall praise thee!"

The Minstrel fell! But the foeman's chain
Could not bring that proud soul under.
The harp he lov'd ne'er spoke again
For he tore its chords asunder.

And said "No chains shall sully thee
Thou soul of love and bravery!
Thy songs were made for the pure and free
They shall never sound in slavery!"

I fired up the new sound gear and checked it out, and did my best Irish imitation. Which is not very good, because the first time I ever even *heard* this song was tonight, so you'll notice my voice searching for the right pitch in various locations (and an occasional hesitant chord change) because I simply forgot what the song sounded like, and I sound Irish only via rough approximation. However, the process did allow me to test out all my gear. Here is what I found:

The Lexicon Lambda does well with a high-output condenser mike, but lousy with a low-output condenser mike or a dynamic mike. Because it is USB bus powered, it just doesn't have the juice to hike those up. I ended up plugging a patch cord to my old mixer to get the guitar mike, the Lexicon handled the output from the mixer just fine.

Dynamics are lousy altogether because I turned the guitar input down to get rid of the hum from the mixer, then had to turn the vocals down to match. I think I'll just leave the guitar input up next time, the hum isn't audible over the sound of the guitar.

The best mike for miking my boomy acoustic guitar is still a hoary old dynamic mike like a SM58C, though maybe an open capsule condenser mike might do the trick. A closed capsule condenser mike booms like the little Boehringers that I got for cheap whoofs too bad. Not restricted to those mikes, BTW, my Oktava does the same thing.

I couldn't adjust the volume in post-processing because GarageBand won't do that beyond a certain point. GarageBand's limitations are pretty serious. So next I'll install the Cubase LE software that came with the Lexicon to see what happens. I hate the thought of spending serious money on music software given how cheap the music hardware is nowdays, I'll have to see whether Audacity runs on MacOS if Cubase LE doesn't do the job. Oh what am I saying, you know I'm going to be buying Logic Express...

Gotta go. Time to install software.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Zzounds!

Yesterday at around 10:30AM I clicked the "Buy" button on that home studio gear that I wanted for my Macbook. About 30 minutes ago I heard a knock on my door and went to take a look. The UPS guy looked up as he was going down the stairs and waved and pointed at a big box.

Big box? But I haven't ordered anything lately except that stuff from Zzounds, and Zzounds is in New Jersey, so the stuff I bought from them yesterday couldn't be here, on the opposite coast, on the next day. And the UPS guy had done a dump'n'run, which they do only on ground shipments, so they couldn't have accidently sent it overnight (they won't release overnight shipments without a signature and besides those arrive before 1pm). So I picked up the big box, convinced that the UPS guy had done a dump'n'run on the wrong doorstep and... uhm... yeah, it was from Zzounds.

Either Zzounds has invented time travel, or they have a fulfillment house in this area. I'm betting on the latter :-). Now the bummer is that I can't check it out until I get my day's quota of work done. Telecommuting is great and all, but sometimes can be distracting, especially since I'm using my Macbook to do my real paying work and my Macbook is what I would want to plug all this new stuff into...

-- Badtux the Distracted Penguin

Review: Apple Macbook

Well, I've had this guy for a month now, so I figure that it's time to give you a straight-up evaluation of the hardware and software, based on my decades of experience in the computer business.

The Apple Macbook comes in three flavors. There's the bottom feeder model without a DVD-R writer put out to meet a price point, a white model with a DVD-R writer in the middle, then a black model with a DVD-R writer and bigger hard drive on top. I have the middle model.

The first impression you get just looking at the Macbook is that it's just so darned pretty. Most computers look like they were designed by ex-Soviet tank designers -- i.e., ugly, functional, with exposed rivets even. The Macbook, on the other hand, looks like a small sculpture or something. It's art. Okay, so maybe that makes this penguin a bird-brain, that he likes pretty things. But that's what you see when you first take the thing out of the box.

Once you get it out of the box, what you get is a laptop that is minimalist but has the necessary things. First, I suppose I should start with what's missing. There is no Cardbus slot. There is no multi-function card reader. There are only two USB ports.

Now for what it has: It comes with an Intel Core 2 Duo processor, either 2.0ghz or 2.16ghz. This is two processors in one package, basically, with Intel's virtualization technology and 64-bit extensions (MacOS currently does not use the 64-bit extensions, but Parallels uses the virtualization features). Memory is 1GB of DDR2-677 memory as two 512M DIMM's. The DIMM's live behind a shield in the battery compartment and you can replace them with two 1GB DIMM's to raise the total memory to 2GB. There is no need to do this unless you are going to run Parallels for running Windows software, as with all virtualization technology Parallels is a memory hog.

The stock drive on my MacBook is a 120gb SATA hard drive. This is more than sufficient -- I currently have the data from my old Windows laptop, the data from my old Linux laptop, and a bunch of Mac applications and files on my hard drive and am using 82 gigabytes of space. That's roughly ten years worth of data on there. But if you want more space, the hard drive lives behind the same shield in the battery compartment as the DIMM's and is easily replaced using the directions on Apple's support website. I put a 250gb Western Digital SATA laptop drive there (model WD2500BVS) from NewEgg there. Note you'll need a Torx #6 screwdriver to take the carrier off the old drive and put it onto the new drive, also note that it must be a SATA drive.

Screen and keyboard: It's a 13.3" widescreen. This is a pretty small screen, but it is sharp and clear. I wanted a smaller laptop than my 15.4" widescreen, which I discovered the hard way does not fit well on airline meal trays or in trains, and unfortunately a smaller screen is the price you pay for that. That said it has proven good enough even for these feeble bird-brained eyes. The keyboard is somewhat unique in its construction. Most laptops have a keyboard that consists of a plastic plate, a circuit board mounted on the plastic plate, and keys mounted to the circuit board. The case has a hole in it the size of the keyboard, and the plastic plate is snapped into that hole after the ribbon cable from the keyboard is plugged into the motherboard. The Macbook does it different in order to reduce the parts count and make the laptop thinner. The circuit board is mounted to the underside of the top half of the case, and the top of the case has individual holes for the individual keys to come through. It looks like the infamously horrible "chicklet" keyboards of the 1980's, but it isn't -- it's just a regular old keyboard, constructed slightly differently. It has very good feel and you do not feel like you're typing on some sort of deranged mini-keyboard. This also has the advantage that the keyboard doesn't flex like with the plastic keyboards, since it is firmly mounted at multiple places to the underside of the top case half rather than snapped into an opening with tabs like typical laptop keyboards. The keyboard also serves as the air intake for the CPU fan -- unlike other laptops, there are no air intake slots on the bottom of the Macbook to suck in dirt and cat hair and be blocked by your clothes when you, like, actually have it on your laptop. While the left back of the bottom gets rather warm in operation, the temperature monitor software that I installed shows that nothing ever gets anywhere near actually overheating (the CPU is rated at 100C, the drive is rated at 60C, the hottest I've seen the CPU is 79C and the hottest I've ever seen the drive is 43C).

Touch pad -- the touch pad is larger than typical for laptops. There is no "scroll" area on the touch pad. Instead, you hold two fingers on the pad and move your fingers around. You can then scroll a window up, down, left, right as desired. There is only one button, but you can set the button to "right-click" if you hold two fingers on the pad and hit the button. Still, I do wish Apple would get off this one-button thing and give folks two buttons on their touchpad, they already did on their Mighty Mouse (yes, it has two buttons though it looks like it only has one), so why not on their laptop touchpad?

If you dock at home, there is a mini-DVI port on the side and you can buy cables to plug into it to drive either a DVI-based widescreen monitor or a standard-size XVGA monitor, MacOS will automatically extend your desktop to the new monitor and you can set it to automatically switch to the new monitor as your desktop if you so desire.

On the right side is the slot-loading DVD drive. On the left side is the MagPower plug (uses a magnet to hold the contacts together -- less wear, and if you trip over the power cord you just pull the magnet out rather than pulling your laptop off the desk), a mini-DVI video output (can drive either a DVI monitor or a SXVGA monitor to extend your desktop), a standard-sized Firewire-400 plug (the standard 6-wire plug, *not* the little 4-wire mini-plug that some laptops ship with), two USB-2 ports, and audio in/audio out ports. The audio in/audio out ports are the dual type that can do either optical in/out or analog in/out depending on what kind of plug you place into them. On the front of the laptop is a small black window for the media control remote that comes with the Macbook (looks sorta like an iPod Shuffle, but it controls your iTunes or iDvd instead so that you can skip tunes even if you're not at your computer), and an oblong light that's used to denote whether your computer is suspended or asleep. There is no latch. Instead, a magnet holds the clamshell closed when you close it up. When you close it up, the system automatically goes asleep. This, unfortunately, is not configurable -- something which is annoying for those of us who want to close up our laptop to keep cats off of the keyboard while some long-running task runs to completion. However, if you have a monitor plugged in as well as external mouse and keyboard then you can close the clamshell and utilize the "wake on keypress" function to wake the computer back up and continue processing on the external monitor.

The Macbook comes with an Atheros Wireless-N chip that can either run on the old Wireless-G frequencies or the old Wireless-A frequencies (which are *far* less crowded and thus likely to be faster). Unfortunately most of the Wireless-N hardware out there will only run at the old Wireless-G frequencies. The exception is Apple's own Airport Extreme access point, which, however, has the disadvantage that it only has 100mbit/sec Ethernet ports despite the fact that Wireless-N is theoretically capable of 120mbit/sec throughput.

The Macbook also comes with a Bluetooth interface. I have successfully used two different Bluetooth mice, a Bluetooth cable, and used it to sync my Treo 700p (Palm smart-phone) via Bluetooth. I also have used Bluetooth DUN (Dial Up Networking) with my Treo to access the Internet while on the road.

MacOS... that's a different post. You can run both MacOS and Windows XP on this thing, and I'll examine your choices there later. Obviously it's optimized for MacOS.

Battery life: Sort of a joke. If you are just reading EMAIL and browsing the Internet, it'll last a little over two hours. Once you fire up anything CPU-intensive that gets the CPU temperature up and the fan howling at its full speed (it's a multi-speed fan), you'll be lucky to get an hour of use out of the laptop before running out of juice. If you need more battery life, carry a spare. That said, the problem isn't that the Macbook uses a lot of juice, the problem is that the battery is fairly small in order to fit into the slim formfactor, while the bits and pieces that Apple uses (the CPU, the Intel chipset, etc.) are the same ones you'd find in a full-size laptop with a full-size battery. One of the reason why Apple left off the Cardbus, SDcard reader, and extra USB ports was to save power, but you can save only so much when the CPU and chipset are sucking down 23 watts and 18 watts apiece, respectively.

Summary

The Macbook is a well-designed little laptop that, incidentally, also happens to be the lowest-cost 13.3" laptop on the U.S. market right now (only the Japanese manufacturers sell laptops in this formfactor in the U.S. market at the moment, and they ain't cheap). It is a perfect example of why "more is better" is false. In the case of the Macbook, "more" would simply use more power and make the laptop thicker and clumsier to use on a train or airplane. The Macbook does everything you need to do, and leaves off everything you won't normally use. My old HP laptop, for example, has a Cardbus slot. I don't have anything that goes into it. I don't know of any user of a recent-model laptop who has anything in that slot. So Apple deleted it. Same deal with the jillion USB ports of some laptops. With Bluetooth keyboard and mouse, there just is no need for so many USB ports. So to save power and space, Apple deleted them. And while the multi-card reader thingy in my HP laptop gets used occasionally, I bought an SD card reader for $10 for my Macbook that plugs into the USB port and is tiny enough to carry in my camera bag, so it goes with my camera bag so that I can transfer my photos on demand to the Macbook, and otherwise isn't sucking power or cluttering my Macbook with hardware to read card formats that I have no interest in reading. But it has all the important stuff, the stuff you really use. In the end, the Macbook is simply a sweet little machine, and it's no wonder that Apple is selling them like hotcakes.

-- Badtux the Technology Penguin

The common ground

What do Santa Claus, Israel, Iraq, the United States, Jews, Muslims, Palestinians, Christians, Tuxologists, the Great Penguin, Jehovah, Allah, and the Easter Bunny all have in common?

I'll give you a hint. I point a human being out to you. Can you show me the "Jew" or "Christian" in him? Can you point it out to me, hold it up to me so I can see what it looks like? If I fire up Google Earth and show you a piece of ground, do you see any lines drawn on that ground that say one side is somehow different from the other?

I guess the first and last items should have made it clear what I'm up to. It's all imaginary. Made up. Just the overheated delusions of jumped up monkeys with delusions of grandeur. There's the world, there's us, there's the stuff in the world, that's it. All this religion and nationality and ethnicity and shit is just made up bullshit. There ain't one single bit of genetic difference between the monkeys who call themselves "Palestinians" and the monkeys who call themselves "Jews", for example. They just made up that silliness and use it as an excuse to kill each other. There is no such thing as some invisible sky demon called "Jehovah" or "Allah" or "The Great Penguin" who strikes down evildoers with lightning bolts or fire from the sky or rains of herring. There's just a bunch of monkeys who try to avoid the knowledge that they're just monkeys by making up invisible sky demons to make themselves feel bigger than other people.

I've been called "anti-Semitic", "anti-Muslim", "un-patriotic" anti-lots of things. But what I really am is anti-bullshit. If you can't smell it, touch it, sniff it, measure it, or otherwise interact with it on a real life basis, it's just made-up imaginary bullshit. And if you come around flogging made-up bullshit, then you deserve the flamethrower you'll get.

The reason you'll get the flamethrower is that bullshit has consequences. "America" may be made-up bullshit, but the guns being carried by monkeys who believe in that made-up bullshit kill just as well as if there was a such a thing as "America" that could be smelled, touched, sniffed, measured. But I can't go and pick up something and show it to someone and say "this is America". I can show people a piece of dirt, but that's dirt. I can show people a building, but that's brick and stone and steel. I can show people a piece of paper with some blotches of ink on it, but that piece of paper isn't "Islam". There really isn't a such a thing as "America" or "Islam" or whatever that you can see and touch. It's just made up bullshit by monkeys with too much imagination and delusions of grandeur.

What we are, friends and mammals, are animals. We are just animals. Animals with big brains and a propensity to spout imaginary bullshit, but animals all the same. We are born, we eat, we defecate, we grow up (can't really say "mature"), we fornicate and reproduce, we grow old, we die. Just like every other animal on this planet. We're unique amongst animals in that we've figured out ways to communicate stuff between us, and figured out ways to build impressive crap, and figured out impressive ways to kill each other and other animals. But in the end, we're just meat. Meat stuffed into sausage skin and wrapped around bone. Meat that has a bad tendency to flap its meat at each other and slice open each other's sausage wrappers to let the meat fall out, but meat all the same.

As for all that other stuff.... it's just bullshit. Made up. Imaginary. Ladies and germs, the Easter Bunny is not real. Neither is "Mexican". Neither is "Jew" or "Muslim". It's all just made up silliness by monkeys that have lost their bearings and lost track of what is true and what is real. What is true and real is that, in the end, we are all just monkeys (well, except those of us who are penguins!), and all the rest of that stuff is just bullshit that we ought to just ignore while we get along with living our little monkey lives in peace. Sadly, though, deluded fools who think made-up bullshit is, like, actually real, keep using those psychotic delusions to give them excuses to kill other monkeys. Pathetic. Simply pathetic. If you're going to kill someone, at least do it for a reason that's real, not for some made-up imaginary nonsense like "race" or "religion" or whatever....

-- Badtux the Bullshit-spottin' Penguin

Pot calls kettle greedy

Sony Records CEO calls Steve Jobs greedy.

Let's see, this is the same guy who regularly rips off music artists by claiming he can't send them their royalties because he can't "find" them, has laid off 1/3rd of his recording artists over the past six years while getting record salaries and bonuses for himself, runs a multi-national conglomerate that conspires with other multi-national conglomerates to keep CD prices artificially and unsustainably high then griping that people won't buy his overpriced wares (hint: ain't *no* way that a 45-minute long CD whose production cost a couple million tops should cost more than a DVD for a 90-minute-long movie that probably cost over fifty million to make, there's a reason why DVD sales are skyrocketing while CD sales are plummeting, and it ain't called "Bittorrent", it's called people maximizing their entertainment value for the money), and otherwise is a pot colored greedy in every single way, and then he has the audacity to call Steve Jobs greedy?

Of course Steve Jobs wants to have all the profits he can get for his company. But Apple doesn't control 40% of the music industry the way Sony does, and people have viable alternatives to Apple if they want to purchase computers, music, or music-playing devices. People buy Apple's stuff because Apple's stuff simply works best, not because of any conspiracy by Steve Jobs to force them to buy Apple stuff, the way that the traditional music labels conspired to force independents out of the distribution chain so that you were forced to buy their product or nothing at all (a plan which of course has backfired on them since the independents now are on the web and taking an increasing chunk of the market from the majors, but the majors' Mafia-type tactics made sense in the 1970's, I suppose)...

Pot, see kettle. Pot, call kettle black. Pot, look like the biggest fucking greedy dumbass hypocrite to ever walk this planet. 'Nuff said!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Vorschau, dammit! Yes, the German lessons at the hands of Tor and Blogger.com continue!

Making music the Macbook way

Now that I have the cute little Macbook, I'm sorta dissatisfied with my recording setup. My old USB sound system works, but is slow and has more lag than modern ones. My mixer sorta works, but I gotta keep remembering to work around some issues it has because at a gig a bass player plugged his amp into the wrong place and let the magic smoke out (and I ain't kidding about the magic smoke bit, it went "Pop!" and smoke started coming out of it, to say that I was sick to my stomach about my mixer's semi-demise is sorta an understatement!). Besides, it's clunky and this is a small apartment. Modern USB sound systems will accept XLR inputs directly from the mikes as well as accepting input from mixers via the traditional plugs, eliminating the need for a separate mixer entirely if you're not going to be recording a whole band at one time. Also, my USB MIDI interface is a separate thingy and my Macbook has only two USB plugs. So if I want to do MIDI instruments via my keyboard at the same time that I'm recording vocals, my Macbook looks like a freakin' wire farm and I have no USB plugs left.

Okay, so I went and did my research and found that a lot of folks like the Lexicon Lambda for $150 for recording with their Macbooks. You can use Garageband or the software which comes with it, Garageband is a lot easier to use though I'll tell you that much and has plenty of its own effects which work just fine. This also has MIDI IN/OUT plugs. So there goes the mixer, the MIDI controller, and one wall wart...

While I was there I went to look for good vocals and instrument mikes for studio use. Last time I was in the mike market, the only low-cost condenser microphone was a Russian small-diaphragm one for around $200 (Oktava mk-012), which had the typical Russian "quality" (you never knew what you were getting when you bought one). However, as with everything else, the Chinese have come into this market with a bang. Lots of people seem to like the Audio Technica AT2020 Studio Microphone for $100 for both vocals and miking a guitar. Other than a little harshness at the top end easily controlled with a teensy bit of EQ, folks rave that it does as good a job as their $500+ studio mikes yet is cheap and durable enough that they can take it out on gigs if desired without shitting a brick at the thought of their expensive studio mike getting smashed. For a low-end instrument mike, folks have been getting the Behringer C2 Chinese mikes, which come as a pair for $60.

So anyhow, I think I'm going to go ahead and order all this, the mikes are better than what I have (which are live performance mikes that emphasize durability over fidelity -- a good thing, since they definitely show some wear and tear on them) and the USB sound system is *way* better than my antique. Hmm. Basically a complete recording studio for $350 (minus the cost of the laptop)? Whoa! While I must admit some qualms about using the product of Chinese slave labor in my home studio, if it's a choice between no home studio and using the product of Chinese slave labor, I guess there just isn't much choice. Besides, my Macbook was made in China too, as was my previous HP laptop, my keyboard, my mixer, ... Sigh :-(.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Cat pile warning!

Oooh... that feels good on this oh so wonderous Friday afternoon...

-- Badtux the Cat-pile Penguin

Say hello to President Cheney

Oh, I know it's supposedly only going to be for three hours, but if I were President George W. Bush, I would be very careful about my health right about now. Because he ain't exactly a popular man, and President Cheney would love to officially have the title...

BTW, first thing I thought about JFK getting assassinated was, "hot damn, that ratbastard LBJ finally offed him!". History, however, shows that LBJ had nothing to do with it despite being a ratbastard -- LBJ apparently was scared shitless when he took the oath of office, repeatedly asking with sweaty brow "are they after me too? Are they after me too?" fearing that it was a decapitation attempt against the entire U.S. government, and after he fucked over Vietnam voluntarily stepped down and did not run for re-election unlike Georgie who fucked over Iraq but ain't going nowhere. So, reluctantly, as much as I think LBJ was a sumbitch, I have to conclude that he isn't the guy who hired Oswald to knock off JFK...

-- Badtux the Conspiracy Penguin

A favor, if you use Haloscan on your blog

Blogger and Haloscan user John Asscroft, the Attorney General of the Untied States of America, has politely requested that the Haloscan Tor user ban be modified so that blog owners can decide for themselves whether they wish to allow Tor users to post on their blog or not. Please log into Haloscan, then go to their feature request forum and say you want that feature too. Please be polite. Can catch more flies with sugar and all that, y'know?

In my experience, anonymous trolls can be discouraged by *temporarily* turning off anonymous user postings. They try to troll a couple of times, get discouraged, go away, and a week or so later you can turn anonymous posting back on. Still, I think we'll get a lot more traction if we do as the Attorney General did and request an anonymous posting setting that blog owners must specifically enable in order for Tor users to post comments to their blog. That way only bloggers specifically impacted by the Tor ban need to do anything, while other bloggers (typically the less technical types who aren't into that whole Electronic Freedom Frontier cyberliberties thing) can continue the status quo in blithe ignorance without worrying about setting some strange setting when they get odd trolls to their blogs.

-- Badtux the Torrible Penguin

The cyborg threat to national security!

HTML bearbeiten! Verfassen! Vorshau! Yes, my German lessons at the hand of blogger.com continue. And now, drum roll please, the nation's top cop has the scoop on the next big crime threat: Man-machine cyborgs in the employ of organized crime gangs. Yeah, just like in the manga.

It is with a sense of disappointment that I read further and realize that this guy is the top cop of Australia, not of the United States. What, we no longer have the monopoly on moronic coppers here in the old USA? We're no longer #1 in the moronic coppers business? I simply refuse to believe it. After all, a nation where our top copper predicts terror attacks by scrying his stomach growls (and perhaps by how much his corns ache) simply HAS to have a top copper, somewhere, who predicts future threats to the nation equally as fantastical. He just hasn't managed to make it to a microphone yet to utter his screed, that's all!

-- Badtux the "USA! USA! USA!" Penguin
Post veröffentlichen, gosh darn it!

Learning German

For some reason Tor is routing me out a German node, so Blogger is putting all its messages out as German. Good thing I know the Blogger UI by heart :-).

Ozzfest? Someone still goes to these things? My morning commute was a freakin' nightmare. You couldn't get anywhere near the Googleplex in Mountain View because the death metal heads were clogging the roads. Even on my KLR lane-splitting like crazy it was a slow slog. My office mates got in about 20 minutes after I did. Another plus of my motorbike in California!

-- Badtux the Apparently-German(?) Penguin

Thursday blinking

Check out Tor if you're wanting to help out people who need to blog anonymously (such as people who live in totalitarian dictatorships). I set up a Tor server, but discovered that Haloscan won't allow Tor users to connect. Bummer. They must love totalitarian dictatorships, that's all I can figure. So now my always-on Internet connection goes unused when I'm not at home, rather than a bit of it being siphoned off for Tor...

China is such a benevolent country that a guy tried to escape China in the nosewheel of a jet airliner. He died, of course. But the rulers who caused this guy to commit suicide are the guys that Haloscan is helping.

Sprint is building a WiMax network. Cool. Of the Big Four U.S. cellular providers, Sprint is by far the most computer-friendly, with fast data speeds in most markets and a lenient policy for data use. When I was on vacation for two weeks, I used Sprint DUN via Bluetooth to simulate blogging from home.

FBI won't identify country their agent pretended to be from when their FBI agent, pretending to be a representative of a foreign country, offered lots of money to a 67-year-old federal employee to steal nuclear secrets for them. This means the country they were pretending to represent was either China or Israel, since if it was Iran or North Korea you better believe the FBI would be trumpeting it wildly. But China and Israel are our friends (snark!).

Bush Administration refused to buy mine-resistant vehicles for military. In 2004 the Marines requested over a thousand MRAP's. Donald Rumsfeld turned them down because it would not have fit in with the political wing's official line that the insurgency was in its "last throes" (last throes which seem to be awfully long).

Federal judge says that killing U.S. operatives and destroying the career of CIA agents is within the job description of Bush Administration officials, dismisses Plame lawsuit. Alrighty, then!

Bush Administration and Israel love democracy. Except when democracy elects leaders that the Bush Administration and Israel don't like. Gosh, you mean that leaders should not reflect the will of the people who elect them? I thought we had a name for such leaders. It was something like, hmm, "dictator". Or "Bush administration official". Whatever.

And that's the blink as of now...

-- Badtux the Blinking Penguin

Self Esteem

The notion of "self esteem" is the notion that somehow feeling good about yourself means a damned thing other than that you feel good about yourself.

Back when I was teaching in an inner city school in Houston, the central office sent down one of those damned "self esteem" curriculums. I looked around at my classroom, and threw it in the trash. Because if you wanted those kids to feel good about themselves, what was needed wasn't "self esteem". What was needed was clean, safe housing with enough beds for all the kids so kids didn't have to sleep three to a bed. What was needed was a living wage so that these kids' parents didn't have to work 16 hours a day just to keep a vermin-ridden roof over their head and could, like, actually raise their kids rather than being a distant presence only seen during rare weekend periods when one parent wasn't working. What was needed was competent teachers and adequate schooling rather than newbie teachers right out of teacher colleges who didn't have the foggiest notion how to talk to black kids in the ghetto much less teach them. What they needed was hope for the future, hope that they certainly weren't gonna get from a Texas legislature busily cutting children's health care and raising college tuitions, hope they certainly weren't gonna get from a Republican administration in Washington D.C. that was busily gutting the Pell Grant program for sending poor kids to college. What they saw was a dismal dreary present today and the same dismal, dreary future that their parents had, regardless of what they tried to do with their lives, and justifiably they weren't too happy about that.

But noooo, these kids problems weren't all that. These kids' problems were... low self esteem. So the message we teachers were supposed to impart was: Don't worry, be happy.

Now, the whole notion of "self esteem" is a strange one. I'd say a queer one, but then the gay rights activists would get outraged and stuff, so anyhow. Science is about things that are measurable. But who has ever seen a "self esteem"? So the floggers of the whole "don't worry, be happy" thingy created test instruments full of questions like, "I feel good about myself", and "I feel capable", and then defined "self esteem" as scoring high on that test. The problem then becomes the same damned thing that my professor in Social Sciences Research 501 taught me in grad school: Correlation is not causation.

For example, there is a correlation between umbrellas and rain. If you see a lot of umbrellas, it is likely to either be currently raining, or to start raining shortly. But this doesn't mean that umbrellas cause rain, any more than summer causes drownings. The actual cause of rain is something else entirely.

Similarly, the self esteem gurus with their tests discovered that well-off suburban kids who answered "1" (Agree Strongly)_ on "I feel good about myself" scored higher on academic benchmarks than my inner city kids who answered "5" (Disagree strongly) on that question. Duh. Why the fuck should my inner city kids have felt good about themselves? They were stuck in a horrible mess not of their own making, and every avenue for getting out of that shithole was being systematically taken away from them by Republican assholes whose attitude was "I got mine, and fuck everybody else", why should they have felt good about themselves? But the self esteem gurus then used this test to say, "high self esteem causes better school performance!"

Anyhow, that was the status quo for many years after I left teaching. Teachers were supposed to "foster self esteem" in their students. So finally -- finally --Baumeister et. al. did the research. They actually performed an experiment, as vs. a correlational study. The difference is that an experiment changes something. In this experiment, they taught kids to feel good about themselves (i.e. have high self-esteem). If you teach kids to feel good about themselves ("have high esteem"), do they actually perform better in school? Well, the answer, of course, is NO. In fact, for some kids it actually hurt their performance. After all, if you're already a perfect and wonderful person, what do you need all this schoolwork junk for?

So in the end, science backs up my gut feel from over a decade ago and shows that "self esteem" turns out to be meaningless. Folks feel good about themselves and their lives if they are in a good situation accomplishing things of worth, and feel bad about themselves and their lives if they're in a bad situation accomplishing nothing of worth. Kids who make good grades feel good about themselves because they make good grades, not the other way around. In other words, "self esteem" is effect, not cause. Other than in the special case of "learned helplessness", the whole concept of "self esteem" turns out to have no practical application.

On the other hand, for our rulers, the message "don't worry, be happy!" does make some sense, I suppose. Contented sheep, after all, are easier to fleece. But whether we're talking about low-achieving kids in school or fat people or whatever, "pumping up their self esteem" isn't the path to take in order to get better performance out of them. Rather, taking direct action to provide them better education, better nutritional and exercise choices, etc. while providing incentives to actually engage in those better choices is what needs to be done.

But that's practical advice. And everybody knows that what counts is how happy you are, not whether you are in fact smart or healthy or whatever. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Self Esteem Penguin

Random blinking

Overweight dude gets tired, falls down and can't get up, requires 40 volunteers to haul his lardy 500+ pound ass out of the river. Probably his ordeal was so horrendous that he just had to go over to McDonalds and eat a few dozen Big Macs to recuperate...

Senator David Vitter is a sexual hypocrite. Duh. He's a Republican. That's like saying "avian waterfowl" or "law-breaking criminal". It sorta goes with the territory, y'know?

Bush Administration VA Secretary hits the road. Something about failing to deal with the rash of brain-injured patients that have hit the VA's doors ever since the insurgents in Iraq figured out that rattling soldiers around with IED's scrambled their brains even worse than Dear Leader's cocaine-befuddled brain. How *dare* those disabled soldiers demand medical care after they come back from Dear Leader's little war for oil!

Harry Reid actually makes the Republicans go through with their filibuster threat in the Senate. Democrats go nap in their offices until the last filibustering Republican falls asleep and the Democrats can come back and call a vote on the legislation being blocked by the Republicans.

Republicans invent another fake Clinton scandal. Gosh, this has to be right up there with losing money in an Arkansas land deal on the bogosity meter of scandals...

Just a typical Tuesday in Bizarro World USA...

-- Badtux the Bizarre Penguin

Give these folks a prize!

It seems that the TSA has uncovered yet another group of people that threatens America: Dead people.

Yes, dead people. As in, deceased. Passed away. Gone to meet their maker. Cremated, no less. The brave and mighty warriors of the TSA have figured out, apparently, that dead people make the best suicide bombers because, like, they're already dead. At least, that's all I can figure from the fact that the TSA cleared out a concourse at Miami International Airport because of a suspicious cremated dead person.

I must applaud the brave folks at the TSA for protecting us from suicidal dead people. Especially cremated ones. These brave TSA employees most certainly deserve a prize for their brilliance in protecting us from those dastardly dead fiends. I doubt, however, that said prize shall be a Nobel Prize. Perhaps an IgNobel...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Hmm, appears that Dumbka is down at the moment. See the original Miami Herald news byte, which, strangely enough, is not indexed by Google News. Hmm.... is Google part of the vast cremated zombie threat to America?! Curious penguins want to know!

Another one bites the dust

The San Jose Mercury News used to be a decent rag. As the flagship paper of the Knight-Ridder newspaper chain they did some great reporting over the years, though they were often reluctant to stand behind it when they came under attack by the powers-that-be for reporting things TPTB did not want reported. Now, after being acquired by Denver-based MediaNews which in turned fired half their reporters and editors, the Murky News is reduced to reporting on cats that steal socks. On the front of section B (Local News), no less.

WTF?! Look, sock-stealing cats are cute and all, but on page B1?! That's the level of reporting I'd expect from the Benton(LA) Argonaut (population 2035), not from a major city daily! Is this what we're reduced to in the 30th largest metropolitan area in America? Stupid cat tricks?!

Crap, I might as well just cancel my subscription and subscribe to the San Francisco Chronic. The Chronic may not cover much San Jose news, but it seems that the Murky isn't going to cover it either, so I might as well subscribe to a real paper rather than what is, apparently, going to be just another small town bird cage liner...

-- Badtux the Newspaper Penguin

Yes, it really WAS that easy...

So I finally feel well enough to plug in the USB sound system into the Mac. Hmm. Nothing shows up on the screen. Go into sound preferences. Oh, there it is. Turn on the mixer, and adjust the levels so that my guitar mike hits a couple of bars below the top and my vocals mike hits a couple of bars below the top. Fire up Garage Band. Figure out how to make a track from a "natural instrument". Figure out how to add an "effect" to that track, like compression and reverb, but end up choosing effects from the nifty list of effects ("male vocals" for the vocal mike, "clean" for the guitar -- I'll add a little reverb to it later, but my guitar style prefers a clean soundboard). Assign the vocal mike channel to the track. Create a second track, and assign the guitar mike channel to the track. Make sure the little red "record" icons are lit for both tracks. Press "Record". Huh. That's it?

Yep, that's it. It Just Works(tm). No fuss. No muss. No hassles.

Now I just need to write a couple of songs. (Actually have ideas for a couple, one called "Independence Day" and one called "Liberation", just need to flesh them out).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Those poor Scandinavians...

I mean, they got that socialist medicine thingy going. They got those high taxes and stuff. They probably live in grey dreary cities, eating mush for supper, in impoverished dreary nations where everybody is poor and stuff, right?

Errr... not so much. Turns out that one in 85 Norwegians is a millionaire, as vs. 1 in 125 Americans. *AND* they get free health care. *AND* they get free university tuition. *AND* they have the world's best infant mortality figures. *AND* they have the world's longest lifespan. And their cities are beautiful. And income inequality is relatively low -- with living wage laws and high taxes, the middle class actually control more of the national income than the upper class, and unlike here in the United States, the middle class is seeing their standard of living improve, not decline. Wow, imagine that, what a remarkable thing that must be!

Crap, if that's what socialized medicine and high taxes do for a people, gimme some of dat!

-- Badtux the neo-Scandinavian Penguin

Warning! Kitty pile ahead!

Purrr....

-- Badtux the Soothed Penguin

The goals of the guerilla

As I pointed out in previous articles in this series, nobody fights a guerilla war if they don't have to. People fight a guerilla war because they lack the strength and weaponry to fight a straight-up war against the oppressing government. They fight with two goals in mind: 1) To render the country ungovernable by eliminating or subverting the mechanisms of civil governance such as city counsellors, tax collectors, etc., and 2) to make it as expensive as possible for the oppressor, i.e., to require the oppressor to maintain large and expensive forces to maintain the occupation.

The thing about a guerilla war is that it comes to a positive outcome for the guerilla only in one of two ways: 1) the guerilla forces become powerful enough to take on the opposition forces in a straight-up military campaign, or 2) the nation which has deployed the opposition forces is drained by the expense of maintaining large military forces in the country and withdraws said forces. Other than that, there has never been a successful guerilla war. Just ask the Biafrans. The ones that the Nigerians didn't starve to death, anyhow.

When we talk about Iraq, #1 is out of the question. No nation, anywhere, will ever have the ability to take on the U.S. military in a straight-up military campaign. Like the Israeli military, the U.S. military has an overwhelming technological advantage and will always be able to bring overwhelming firepower upon any opposing forces. Except... uhm... that's what the Israelis thought about Hezballah in Lebanon, right? That a two-bit guerilla army was never going to be able to take on the IDF in a straight-up fight? And HA fought the IDF to basically a standstill, taking out dozens of tanks and killing hundreds of Israeli soldiers, by fighting a smart defense in depth with a massive advantage in terms of manpower, intelligence, and pre-prepared fortifications. If I were a U.S. general right now, I'd be very worried and starting to look at my evacuation options.

#2 is definitely underway. That's the whole point of all the roadside bombs and the destruction of the bridges via truck bombs -- to make it very expensive to supply and support the troops in Iraq. It seems clear that the shaky U.S. economy simply cannot afford the two million or so boots on the ground that would be needed to completely pacify Iraq. The end result is that we will withdraw -- either that, or our military will collapse and #1 (the complete and utter destruction of our military via opposiing enemy action) will occur.

Anyhow, back to the problem of our own monarchs. Our own monarchs control the atomic bomb. You can bet that if some uppity area of the country -- say, California -- gets tired of monarchical rule, our own monarchs will have no compunctions about using whatever force is necessary to make sure that the monarchy does not fall. And you can bet that the poorly-educated and envious military caste who currently make up the majority of our armed forces and internal police forces will have no compunction about doing all the application of force necessary to bring into line people who, after all, aren't like them. Our rulers, by deliberately creating a poorly educated and violent military caste, have ensured themselves sufficient manpower to maintain control over the vast military machinery that this nation has accumulated over the past sixty years.

Now for the question of whether guerilla warfare against our own monarchs has any chance at all of succeeding. The answer to part 1), outright battle, is outright *no*. The military caste which our monarchs have built up -- a military caste which, BTW, also comprises the majority of our nation's police forces -- views with suspicion anyone outside that military caste, and possesses sufficient weaponry to insure compliance upon the part of the majority of the citizenry.

However, the anti-monarchical forces do have a vulnerability to part 2), making monarchical rule more expensive than the alternative. The deal is, you aren't going to do that via violence. Short of massive oppression on the part of our monarchs, the majority of Americans are not in any way going to be supportive of violence. What you have to do is make it expensive to maintain the monarchy. You can do this by moving as much as possible outside of the tax system, by subverting local instruments of monarchical power in order to isolate the monarchs, and otherwise make it difficult and expensive to maintain monarchical rule. This already happening. Our monarchs are now capable of maintaining their rule only via borrowing vast sums of money from foreign and somewhat hostile powers (or do you not consider the poisonous and dangerous toys, tires, and etc. coming from China tantamount to a declaration of hostility?).

The problem then becomes twofold. Either the monarchs will blink and return sufficient power to We The People to keep us sheep contented and on the farm so that we can be more easily fleeced, or We The People will jump the fence and enough of us will refuse to participate in the travesty of monarchical rule that it will be impossibly expensive to imprison us all, at which point... then what? History is not kind to the "then what?" question. Invariably, "then what?" turns out to be a bloodbath, followed by a violent dictatorship controlled by small and violent men that continues the bloodletting. Let us hope that our monarchs see these same two choices ahead of them, and will make the correct decision. Otherwise... well, let us hope there will be no "otherwise".

-- Badtux the Guerilla Penguin

The blood of tyrants

Today is Bastille Day in France, a celebration of the overthrow of the French monarchy. Here is a song which celebrates the overthrow of tyrants. It is the French national anthem. Please go read the English translation of the lyrics and come back.

.

.

.

.

. Okay, you're back. So what do you think? Suitably bloodthirsty? Not exactly your typical national anthem, eh, what with all that bit about bloodthirsty ripping of babes out of wombs and such.

Some say that we need our own Bastille Day to overthrow the tyrants who control our nation (who, I might add, are not our elected officials -- they are, for the most part, puppets of the real rulers of our nation, the wealthy elite that prefers to work behind the scenes). The problem is what happens next. Once a people becomes accustomed to blood, there is no end to the blood. Rule of law is over, and rule of gun is the only rule. The end result, typically, is that the worst amongst us come out on top -- those with the least morals, the most willingness to kill upon the slightest whim, the least consideration for the least amongst us.

For the French, the result of overthrowing the monarchy led inevitably to Napoleon, who killed millions during his quest to conquer Europe, including over a million Frenchmen whose lives he threw away. While it would certainly be satisfying to take the puppet George W. Bush to the gallows and stretch his neck, and past that point take all the rulers of America and stretch their necks -- Richard and Helen DeVos, the Olin family, the Bradley family, the Scaife family, etc. -- then what? That road inevitably leads down the same road that the garroting of the French royal family led down -- blood, misery, and millions of dead.

One of the geniuses of our founding fathers is that, by and large, they did not massacre the supporters of the English monarchy once the pro-monarchy forces lost and American independence was secured. Instead, they exiled those supporters to Canada. There was no bloodbath on American soil outside the blood of soldiers. Perhaps, if we are forced to fight a new war of independence against a new monarchy, that would be a reasonable solution for dealing with our own monarchs. Except instead of sending them to Canada (which undoubtedly would not want them), I have a much better idea. Send them to Iraq. Naked. With no possessions. No servants. No soldiers or guards. Drop them naked and alone into the middle of the Sadr City suburb of Baghdad. Hey, if it was good enough for our founding fathers... oh wait, I forget, our founding fathers didn't ship the supporters of monarchy naked to Canada. They tarred and feathered them first. Hmm... stock tip: buy stock in feather companies.

-- Badtux the History Penguin

Apple Airtunes and wired networks

Contrary to popular belief, you can stream Airtunes over a wired Ethernet to the Apple Airport Express. You have to set up the Airport Express in "bridging" mode and turn on the setting to accept Airtunes over Ethernet, but once you do that, it works fine. I'm currently happily streaming Airtunes from my Macbook to the Netgear Wireless-N router and from thence via Ethernet to the Airport Express.

Right now, my big issue is getting my Windows XP laptop to hook to the Airport Express via Wireless-G. I don't want to hook it to the Netgear Wireless-N router because then it'll slow down everything to Wireless-G speeds. I think I'm having a key conflict here, but how to resolve it is proving difficult. It would sorta suck to have to bring back my D-Link wireless-G router back into the equation when the whole point of this was to simplify my networking setup (which had altogether too many switches, bridges, etc. in the equation).

-- Badtux the Computer Penguin

NetGear WNR854T Wireless-N Router

The full thingy on the box says, "Netgear RangeMax Next Wireless-N Router GIgabit Edition (WNR854T)". It should more properly say, "Pretty Pathetic".

Let's look at the "Pretty" part first. It is pretty. Most wireless routers look like something designed in Communist Russia -- crude, ugly, at best functional. A couple of them look like miniaturized alien spacecraft that just hunkered down for a landing on the shelf above your computer desk. The RangeMax Next, on the other hand, looks like a sleek piece of computer furniture, sorta like the wireless router counterpart of what my Macbook is to computers. It's pretty. It looks great up there above my computer desk.

Also good: All five ports (the four switch ports and the WAN port) are Gigabit Ethernet ports. And the switch ports even work at full speed as just a plain old switch. Tests with my Macbook also show that it is approximately 4.5 times faster than my old D-Link DI-524 Wireless-G router when it comes to retrieving files via the Wifi connection. This is about what you'd expect, because Wireless-N claims to go 240Mbit/sec while Wireless-G claims to go 54Mbit/sec (reality is that neither comes anywhere close to acheiving their claims in the crowded spectrum of my apartment, where I can pick ten WiFI networks out of the air when I go to join my network).

Now for the bad. First of all, let's look at the operating software accessed via the browser interface. It's pretty. It's also pretty pathetic. D-Link has a reputation as bottom feeder Taiwanese junk, but my D-Link is positively brilliant compared to this Netgear POS. My D-Link reboots the router when you change most major settings, but at least the D-Link doesn't take much time to do so. The WNR854T, on the other hand, reboots the router when you change even minor settings, and takes freakin' forever to reboot. Indeed, watching the blinky lights, it appears that many times it reboots twice before it'll finally accept a connection.

Now let's look at that wireless performance. It appears that this router, which uses a Marvell chipset, has problems talking AES to the Atheros chip in my Mac. So using WPA2/AES-PSK does not work with the expected speed. Connections slow to a crawl after the first megabyte or so are transferred. My suspicion is that this is a problem with the key-shifting algorithm used inside the Netgear, which attempts to derive "truly" random numbers using various entropy sources and thus runs out of keys once the entropy pool is exhausted. Whatever it is, I'm back to WPA/PSK, which at least isn't utterly broken like WEP but still isn't as secure as WPA2/AES.

Now, let's look at the "auto" setting for channels. I've set up an alias for the /System/Library/PrivateFrameworks/Apple80211.framework/Versions/Current/Resources/airport utility on my Macbook, so I can type "airport -s" to do a channel scan and see which channels are in use. When I allowed the router to choose its channel, it plunked itself down right in the middle of four other networks! So I moved the Netgear manually to a channel in the middle of three open channels, and it is now operating at the speed I expect.

UPDATE:

So anyhow, I thought I was fine, but then I enabled netatalk on my Linux box and tried to copy over a 500gb file (an ISO image) via the wireless to my Macbook. After exactly 13 seconds, the router rebooted. WTF?! So I tried again. After exactly 13 seconds, the router rebooted. GAH! And this is with the latest firmware update too!

This sucker is going *BACK*. Period. I'm going to try a D-Link DIR-655 next, which uses the same Atheros chipset as the Macbook and hopefully will be far more stable at high speeds.

-- Badtux the Networking Penguin

The guerilla in defeat

Over on Lucky White Girl, the blog proprietor waxes nostalgic about the modern anti-globalization movement, which has proven capable of mustering 10,000 guerillas to take on the Borg-like forces of globalized mercantilism (I call it mercantilism rather than capitalism because government-enforced "capitalism" which takes the wealth of nations and gives it to a privileged few via government-enforced oligopolies is nothing of the sort). She exults over its decentralized nature, its lack of central leaders that can be taken out to destroy the movement, their resilience in the face of overwhelming opposition from the forces of globalized mercantilism. The thing is, by comparing her movement to a guerilla movement, she is admitting that it has been defeated.

Look, nobody fights a guerilla war if they don't have to. The only people who fight guerilla wars are the losers. If you can take on an opposing army in a straight-up battle, that's what you do. In Vietnam, the NVA resorted to guerilla tactics not because said tactics were effective. They resorted to guerilla tactics because every time they fought a straight-up battle against the U.S. Army, they got their butt kicked.

"But the U.S. lost in Vietnam!" I hear you say. No. The U.S. left Vietnam. The U.S. left Vietnam because there was no compelling national interest for the U.S. to be in Vietnam. North Vietnam never posed a security threat to the United States, and lacking such a security threat, there simply was insufficient rationale to forever station half a million troops on the other side of the world at enormous expense. Reality is that no guerilla army has ever defeated a professional army using guerilla tactics, and never will. All that guerillas can do is provide pinpricks in the side of a professional army, pinpricks which are painful but not life-threatening by any means. Over time, such pin-pricks can motivate the professional army to go elsewhere, much as the pin-pricks of a thousand flying mosquitos can send a troop of Boy Scouts to the shelter of a screened-in cabin, but the notion of a guerilla defeating a standing army is ridiculous. The Viet Mihn which defeated the French Foreign Legion at Dien Bien Phu were not a guerilla army. They did not use guerilla tactics against the French. They were a regular army, equipped with artillery and anti-aircraft cannon, using regular military tactics against an opposing army.

The very fact that you use guerilla tactics is an admission of weakness, because if you had the strength, you would mount a full-scale assault using conventional tactics. But in this particular war, the mercantilists have all the weapons. They control a vast right-wing propaganda machine that has propagandized millions of brownshirts to enforce political conformity amongst wide swathes of the population. The anti-globalism activists reach hundreds of thousands with their tactics. The VRWC reaches millions every single night, every day of the week. And furthermore, the mercantilists can't be pinpricked into leaving the way that the Americans were pinpricked into leaving Vietnam. They were born here. They live here. They have much self-interest in perpetuating their rule over the United States, a rule which is very profitable. They're not going anywhere.

Does this mean the situation is hopeless? Probably not. It is starting to dawn upon the more brilliant of the mercantilists that pure mercantilistic oppression of the masses is probably not in their best interests. A kinder, gentler rule works better in the long run because it keeps the sheep contented and on the farm where they can be more easily fleeced than if they jumped the fences due to harsh conditions. The pinpricks of the anti-mercantilism activists, while not particularly hurting these people, have the potential to grow into something larger if the masses are oppressed harder, and heading off a potential adversary at the pass before he has mobilized his full forces is always a wise thing to do. So while this movement will never win, the very fact that it exists brings some unpleasant facts to the fore that our ruling class had unwisely forgotten. But, as with Vietnam, in the end the decision will be made by our ruling class, not by "we the people", who do not rule this nation and have not ruled this nation since the day it was born (unless by "we the people" you mean a wealthy elite, or, as George W. Bush puts it, "my constituency, the haves and the have-mores"). Our noise is important in leading them towards making a wise choice, but in the end, we will no more defeat the mercantilists using guerilla tactics than the North Vietnamese Army defeated the U.S. Army using guerilla tactics. At best, we're a nuisance. Which, in the end, may be good enough.

-- Badtux the Movement Penguin

The AK-47 at age 60

No major army in the world still uses the venerable AK-47 rifle. Its low muzzle velocity means that the big 7.62mm round doesn't manage enough steam to penetrate even modest modern body armor. And the size and weight of that big 7.62mm round means that a soldier can't carry as much rounds as with more modern .223 or 5.45 rounds. Yet at 60 years of age, the AK-47 is still the world's best guerilla rifle.

Part of it is because of the requirements of Soviet-era industry. Soviet industry was, let us say, crude. So when Kalishnikov designed the AK-47, he designed it with largely stamped parts with loose tolerances. The result is a rifle that is dirt-cheap to make and largely idiot-proof and capable of functioning despite neglect by ignorant peasants, tolerant of conditions that would have a modern assault rifle jammed solid. The downside to the loose tolerances is the low muzzle velocity. But then, the first target of any guerilla is not enemy soldiers, who after all represent a foreign and alien presence that will some day leave. The first target of any guerilla is the civilian infrastructure of governance propped up by those soldiers, which must be comprehensively undermined and rendered ineffectual so that when the foreign soldiers leave, the foreign-influenced government can be swept out of office rather than remaining as a tool of foreign imposition upon the body politic. The goal is to kill tax collectors and city councilmen and other such regional tools of the central government and thus render the central government isolated and helpless, not to attack the occupation troops. For every U.S. soldier killed in Iraq, a dozen Iraqi civilians employed by the central government have been killed. They just don't get counted because, well, they're just darkies after all, they're not real people, God's chosen people, the only real humans, Americans.

For that purpose the AK-47 is simply brilliant. Cheap, durable, and quite capable of ventilating someone who isn't expecting to be ventilated, guerillas world-wide love it almost as much as they love their RPG-7's (the funny looking rockets that you always see the guerillas waving around, which are almost as old and cheap as the AK-47). I think it is safe to say that wherever you have a puppet government being propped up by foreign troops, you will see AK-47's. The AK-47, sad to say, is a weapon that will likely see another 60 years of continuous use before being abandoned because the inheritors of the Earth have no hands to use it (besides, cockroaches do not fight wars).

-- Badtux the War Penguin

Buried alive

There is a mound of earth near the intersection of Lick Mill and Hope Drive in Santa Clara, California. Right now it is a rather anonymous mound of earth, with nothing to tell what it is, but when the developer sent a bulldozer to clear the brush and scrub off of it the bulldozer hit bones. Human bones.

Nobody knew what these bones were. Speculations were rampant. There was no record of a cemetery in that location. Was it an Indian burial mound? A Spanish land grant cemetery? Or what? The answer turned out to be, none of the above, and shows more about our society than you would think.

This land was the far corner of the Agnews Insane Asylum in 1906, a vast mental hospital run by the State of California where several buildings from the early 1900's are now preserved by Sun Microsystems as part of their corporate HQ (and how appropriate that is). None of the buildings that Sun Microsystems preserved dates to April 17, 1906. On April 17, 1906, Agnews Insane Asylum was a vast three and four story red brick building with multiple wings. On April 18, 1906, one wing of Agnews Insane Asylum collapsed and most of the rest of the building heavily damaged, shaken apart in the San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 with the immediate loss of 112 lives and dozens more to die over the next few weeks from exposure or injuries. While every tent in the U.S. Army inventory was immediately on its way to San Francisco, it was not until days later that anybody outside of the hospital and its immediate community even knew about the problem at Agnews. In the meantime, to prevent disease, the surviving staff organized the surviving patients to dig a mass grave for the victims, who were then unceremoniously dumped in and covered with dirt. The mass grave was then forgotten, left to sit in a tangle of brush at a far corner of the asylum grounds until re-discovered by the developer. It took forensic anthropologists working with historians digging through archives dating to 1906 to re-discover the contents of this mass grave. Because, after all, the people buried in it were only crazies. Mentally unstable. Untermenschen, as you will. And then, as now, most people viewed these people as being failures, as being weak of mind and weak of will, rather than possessing a disease where their brain produces certain chemicals in the wrong proportions for proper functioning, so it wasn't as if they counted as real people, right?

I am in a beach town on the outskirts of a major city. There is a public restroom at this beach, and three homeless men are holding a very loud discussion about something I've deliberately moved out of earshot of. From experience I know that dealing with these men would be frustrating because they are untreated mentally ill and their minds work in ways that are not conducive to normal conversation, so I simply do not deal with them. After a while the men move away, and I move towards the public restroom. Through the door I see the ass ends of two more homeless men, and I know what they are doing -- they are shooting up. Undoubtedly if I continued through the door I would see white latex gloves and syringes all over as they self-treat their illness with a drug that they can obtain without going through doctors, pharmacists, insurance companies, and all those other things that as homeless mentally ill they have no access to. I move away and go elsewhere.

Later I am in a hotel near the center of this beach town. The surrounding houses are small well-kept cottages dating back to the 1940's and 1950's. The cars parked outside them are not expensive cars, not Mercedes and BMW and Lexus and such, but they are relatively new and shiny and proudly proclaim the middle-classness of these people who can afford to live in this beach town. If this were the early evening, I could walk along these streets and see the homeowners outside proudly pruning their landscaping. I imagine talking to one of them about what I saw at the beach. The confused stare at the outset as their suburban mindset is disturbed by the notion of something outside their own existence. The instant dismissal, "they're crazy, there's nothing to be done, they choose to live that way", not seeing the contradiction between saying they're mentally ill and saying they "chose", not seeing that it was the illness that did the choosing here. And of course there are things that could be done, easy access to doctors and medications and showers and secure lockers for their goods so that they can go to those doctors without fearing loss of what little they possess, and for those who will simply refuse to do so at least easy access to clean needles and secure places to shoot up so that the public restroom becomes merely a restroom again rather than a shooting gallery, but all of that would fall on deaf ears anyhow. Because these are only "crazies". Mentally ill. Weak-willed. Untermenschen, if you will. And acknowledging that they are instead ordinary human beings who were born with a problem with their brain chemistry would require actually, like, doing something. And for these well-dressed middle class people precariously hanging on to their pleasant little homes and their relatively new cars in the shaky economy that the Republican looting of our economy over the last 28 years has produced, doing something other than trying to get what little they can hold onto into their own greedy little hands is just too much work, too much effort, requires too much thought. And besides, those homeless guys at the beach? They're only crazies.

It seems to me that the only difference between 1906 and 2007 is that today, we don't wait until the mentally ill die before burying them. We do it while they're still alive. And pretend we're not doing it, as we do it. And when they do genuinely die, make sure it gets marked down as "pneumonia" or "heart failure" or whatever, not as what it really is: Suffocation due to being buried alive in a society that eats its own.

-- Badtux the Mental Health Penguin

Penguin blah update

Still feel blah. I have no idea how I could catch a cold in the summertime, but a cold it decidedly is. Not allergies, allergies don't make me feel bad they just make my nose run and the antihistamines knock that out. Antihistamines aren't knocking this out.

Gotta go, have some coffee, mint tea, and chicken soup to suck down, then take a nap.

-- Badtux the Sniffling Aching Penguin

Chicken soup

Since this is the Silicon Valley, I went to the local pho place and got some pho ga -- Vietnamese chicken noodle soup. I got the "small" bowl. I don't see how anybody could eat the "large" bowl at this place, the "small" bowl is decidedly more than I can eat!

Penguin still feel blah, but breathes better. Thanks, Sharecropper!

-- Badtux the Well-Souped Penguin

Penguin don't feel good

Sore throat, all blah... gah.

Too blah to even haul out a cat picture. Though not too blah to pet a cat. Mencken is resting quietly beside me, purring happily, while the Mighty Fang earlier did his catly duty of providing furry softness.

-- Badtux the Ill Penguin

Computer geeks are exciting

My brother Cooter the Suthern Penguin came over from Cooterville to visit. Cooter is a computer geek too. Here is what our day looked like:

7:30am: Get out of bed, put coffee on.
8:00am: Manage to suck down 4 cup pot of coffee. Put another pot of coffee on.
8:30am: He logs onto his laptop at the dining room table. I log onto my laptop on the futon. Hilarity ensues. Okay, maybe not. Just the sound of tapity tapity tapity on the keys, with occasional grumbling from him ("Damned Windows! Close, bastard, close! No, that's not what I wanted you to do, you stupid Microsoft piece of shit! GRRR!").
10:00am: Finally drag him away from his computer. Go to Korean grocer and get some kimchi (cabbage, radish), sprouts, and green tea, as well as buy a wok for cooking stir-fry tonite (after remembering that my last wok had started to rust and I tossed it). BTW, Korean woks are *not* the same as Chinese woks.
11:00am: Eat leftover jambalaya along with kimchi and other veggies. Return to computers. Tapity tapity tapity "why is this computer so freakin' slow? Stupid Microsoft piece of shit!". (I'm just smiling from behind the keyboard of my Macbook).
12:30pm: "Yo, dude! We're gonna miss the tour at the Computer Museum!" (tapity tapity tapity).
12:35pm: "Yo, dude? Hello? We gotta get going!"
12:40pm: Leave for computer museum
1:00pm: Arrive at computer museum. Tour.
3:00pm: Leave computer museum. Go to the Fine Palace of Tasteful Swedish Furniture, buy two of their white book-cases.
3:30pm: Find out that their white book-cases *will* fit into a Jeep Wrangler Unlimited, if you tilt them right and run them at an angle with the passenger seat all the way forward (I had left the back seat at home of course). By this time my throat is hurting from drainage and I feel blah because I have a cold. Brother wedges himself behind me and we drive home.
4:00pm: Take book-cases up to apartment, lean them against wall. Go to respective computers. Tapity tapity tapity tapity.
5:30pm: Cooter sez, "I'm hungry. Let's go to In'n'Out." He is quite taken with In'n'Out, which they don't have back in Cooterville. The notion that they make the french fries by slicing up potatoes right there in front of him fascinates him, the notion that not even the ground beef is frozen amazes him, and he sucks them down. If he could, he would eat every meal at In'n'Out.
6:00pm: Get back from In'n'Out with bag of takeout. Eat.
6:30pm: Go back to computers. Tapity tapity tapity tapity.
9:00pm: Make mint tea for sore throat. Tapity tapity tapity.

Yeah, computer geeks are such exciting people...

-- Badtux the Computer Geek Penguin

Friday critter blogging

I tawt I saw a putty tat!

-- Badtux the Bird-watching Penguin

Chicken and sausage jambalaya

Recipe:

• 1 box Zatarain's Jamalaya mix
• 1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
• 1 teaspoon crushed red pepper (2 teaspoon if you're not a wimp)
• 1/2 pound chicken breast meat
• 1/2 pound andouille sausage or fine kielbasa sausage (andouille is best, but often unavailable)

Dishes required:

• 4 quart covered saucepan, non-stick
• Small stainless steel pot
• Bowl
• Wooden spoon
• Plastic spoon

Directions:

• Using scissors, cut up chicken breast meat into thin strips as if you were about to stir-fry, then cut strips into smaller chunks.
• Put olive oil into stainless steel pot
• Put crushed red pepper into olive oil
• Put pot on stove, turn burner on high
• When crushed red pepper begins to sizzle, use wooden spoon to shove it around a little to make sure it all gets coated with oil and cooked, then toss the chicken into the pot and stir vigorously with wooden spoon until all chicken is coated with pepper and oil and is seared white on all sides. Remove pot from heat and pour chicken into bowl and set aside.
• Toss the wooden spoon in the sink (it touched raw chicken)
• Using scissors or a knife, cut sausage into chunks.
• Cook the Zatarain's in the saucepan according to the directions on the box, putting the chicken and sausage into the mix mixture at the appropriate time.
• Enjoy!

The chicken, cooked this way, is extremely tasty (and spicy!) and combines well with the sausage. The only other thing I would do would be to add some fresh bellpepper (chunked) into this, that's the only thing it really lacks. The local chefs go nuts with their jambalaya, but let's remember that this was invented as a peasant food to take advantage of leftover meats, and thus should be simple. The Zatarains mix already has a fair amount of spices in it and the crushed red pepper and fresh pepper oil adds more, the need for bellpepper is equal parts flavor and texture.

Oh - be careful with the raw chicken, y'all. Make sure you wash your hands well after handling it and don't re-use instruments that touched raw chicken. Salmonella is rampant in raw chicken nowdays.

-- Badtux the Lazy Cook Penguin

About a girl

I am thinking about a girl. On the cusp of woman-hood, staring out upon a cold sea with goose-bumps showing on her arms and legs, I am wondering, what is she thinking? There has been a war on ever since she was old enough to be aware, a war that is increasingly a disaster and that her generation and the generations after her will be paying for, a war that has resulted in tens of thousands of crippled soldiers coming back from Iraq-nam to be dumped on the streets like so much garbage. Maybe her brother is in the Army. Maybe a boyfriend. Like so many of her generation, perhaps possessed of a cynicism and world-weariness beyond her years, as it becomes increasingly clear that her generation will be cleaning up this nightmare for the rest of her life. Is this cynicism hiding anger at the situation in which she will find herself in when she becomes an adult?

I wonder, what does she think of my generation? What does she think about how we have dealt with things? What about the baby boomers, what does she think of them? I fear that it is not going to be positive. What happens next, I wonder? Will the anger simply simmer, simmer, simmer, turning into self-hate and self-disgust as the years go by? Will she become as "bought" as my generation, leashed to our endless cycle of debt and work? Or will the destruction of the American dream by the Busheviks and their ilk result in something more explosive, more violent, more... revolutionary?

If the last, I fear for my own life and safety, for I have certainly done nothing to help make this young lady's life easier. Oh sure, I donated a few bucks to John Kerry and voted for both President Gore and for Kerry, but really, is that all that I could have done? I doubt it. I doubt it. And I doubt she thinks so, either. And really, who can blame her?

-- Badtux the Pensive Penguin

Outrage fatigue

I suppose I could post some outraged screed about how Dear Leader believes in that "rule of law" thingy only when it's a Democrat who gets convicted. But really, are we at all surprised that he pardoned his buddy Scooter? I had already predicted, months before, that Scooter Libby wouldn't serve a day in jail. Because Dear Leader simply does not care. He done been electorated, señors and señoritas. And short of impeachment, which ain't happenin' as long as eleven Republicans don't bolt to the Democratic Party in the Senate (I am counting Joe Lieberman as a Republican), he ain't gettin' UN-electorated, so why should he care? Because of that "legacy" thing? Crap, his legacy done been shot to shit with that Iraq mess, which shall go down as the greatest strategic disaster in U.S. history. He done finished with that "legacy" thing. He just gets to sit in his Oval Office and go "heh heh heh" with that asinine smirk on his face for the rest of his term of office, no matter what, while watching his cronies rub their hands in glee over all the money they're looting from the Treasury while Dear Leader smirks.

In short, it's hard to get outraged over what's not a surprise. I'm just waiting for the bombs to start falling on Iran, myself. I figure that it'll be in October of next year, shortly before the elections. Either then, or December of next year immediately after a Democrat has been elected to the Presidency, just to fuck over his successor -- nevermind that it'd be a disaster for the nation, Dear Leader don't give a shit about the nation, all he cares about is spite and profit for himself and his cronies.

- Badtux the Tired Penguin

The Pledge of Allegiance

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United Corporate States of America. And to the Walmart for which it stands, one corporation, under Manna, with Chinese-slave-produced cheap shit for all.

Happy 4th of July, y'all. And oh, that other flag? Well, that one represents an idea and a nation that's been mostly deceased for the last 42 years, ever since That Bastard LBJ lied us into another senseless war against brown people for reasons that nobody can really understand.

-- Badtux the Cynical Penguin