Dreamy dark

Mazzy Star, "Halah", off the album She Hangs Brightly. Hope Sandoval is rather goth here. Hmm, Mexican goths? But then, they do have that creepy "Día de los Muertos" holiday, hmm...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Nerd gathering

I understand there was a gathering of nerds in Washington D.C. where they got a bad comic from SNL and a bad comic from Hawaii via Chicago to make bad jokes about Donald Trump, and that Donald Trump is upset about that. Why in the world I would care about that, about any of that, I don't know. But so it goes.

-- Badtux the Baffled Penguin

Ah, that hit the spot...

Had a pork and vegetables rice plate at the local Vietnamese restaurant for lunch today. One doesn't appreciate a working gut until you had to do without one for a few days...

- Badtux the Satisfied Penguin

Further update: Got that Activia yogurt today. Strawberry variety. The verdict is... bleh. Thus far the most palatable has been the mixed-berry Yoplait, where the various berry flavors helped hid the chalky nasty taste.

Rainy day blues

It occurs to me that I have not had a song up here by the lovely and talented Emmy the Great recently. So I went off to browse her videos, and found this one of her being recorded with a handi-cam, with nothing but her guitar and voice, in a park in Spain. This is her sad song "MIA", from the First Love CD (in a slightly more produced/polished version, of course, without wind blowing hair into her mouth!).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

What a poser!

The Mighty Fang poses for the camera...

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Color television

This is Austin band The Black Angels with "You In Color", off of their 2008 album Directions to See A Ghost. Whoa, creepy psychedelic rock from Texas...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Gus Hall of the Republican party

Gus Hall, the long time Stalinist leader of the Communist Party USA, had a hobby of running for President. He did it regularly, like Metamucil for the body politic. In the end, it was a running joke, "oh, it's a Presidential election already? Let's see if Gus Hall is running... YES!" I expect any time now to find Zombie Gus Hall on the ballot again, because death can't keep a good joke down.

So now Ron Paul takes up Gus Hall's mantle and basically announces he's running, again. I suppose it's fitting. After all, Gus Hall was an ideologue who placed his ideology over any attachment to, like, actual reality. And Ron Paul is an ideologue who, if actual reality contradicts his ideology, chooses his ideology over reality. Two peas in a pod, really. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Yo Pat, where are ya?

Pat Robertson is famous for saying that natural disasters are a "punishment from God". He said that about Katrina, he said that about the Haiti earthquake, and so forth. Glenn Beck similarly loves saying that natural disasters are "messages" from God.

So today I eagerly await their pronouncements on the tornados that flattened portions of the South this week. Waiting for them to say these tornados were a punishment from God in three... two... one...

Oh WAIT A MINUTE, I forgot, it's only a punishment from God if it's DARKIES getting flattened, not if it's good god fearin' WHITE folk! Sheesh, what was I thinkin?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

People like this stuff?!

So upon advice of medical professionals, I am now on a daily dose of yogurt, the kind with "active and live culture". I have just one question:

People actually like this stuff?!

Chalk. Bleh. Sour chalk with fruit and sugar (I'm doing the Yoplait, which I'm told was the most palatable). Bleh.

-- Badtux the Bleh Penguin

Slow trespassing

Trespassers William with their song "Different Stars", off their 2004 album of the same name.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Long-term parking

Guess what happens if you park a trailer on a city street for a week or so and don't happen to inform the neighborhood busybody about it? Yessiree, it gets towed. Some folks named Head On Photos parked their trailer on my street. No beef off my back, I figured it was a company run by one of my neighbors but didn't bother checking it out. But the neighborhood busybody lady of course got annoyed after the trailer just *sat* there for almost two weeks with no sign of moving, she *did* check it out and apparently nobody copped to owning the trailer (or if they did cop to owning the trailer, copped an attitude about it), and she called the cops, who promptly red-tagged it for violating the 72 hour limit. I noticed the tag today, it has a date sometime tomorrow on it as the deadline. So sometime tomorrow, no more trailer on my street.

Point, point... if you are starting a new business and want long-term parking for shit like that, rent a space somewhere, don't just dump your junk on some residential street and expect it to be there weeks later when you come back for it. DOH! And it ain't even all that expensive, compared to having to pay towing and impound fees when your junk gets towed. Place where I store my junk, you can rent a trailer storage space for $100/month, which is a helluva lot cheaper than the impound fee's gonna be.

So it goes. I dropped'em a line that their trailer was red-tagged, no idea whether they'll get the trailer before traffic enforcement comes back again and calls the tow service. This doesn't bode well for the future of their business, though, if they fuck up simple shit like this...

-- Badtux the Helpful Penguin

That birth certificate thang

Obama releases his long-form birth certificate.

Will the release of this document change the mind of birthers? Of course not. World Nut Daily already doubled down on the crazy and announced, "Even Hawaii birth won't make Obama eligible". Other birthers like Oily Taitz swiftly followed suit. Because no document in the world will ever make Obama eligible to be President in their eyes, because no document in the world will ever turn Obama white.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Southern Gothic

Trailer Bride, "Hope is a thing with feathers", off the 2003 album by the same name. Still trying to decide what I think about the rest of their output, but this is a cool song and a cool video.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The end game

I think it's not a secret that I think something has gone way wrong with America, and that things are not going to turn around until utter national disaster has happened and there simply is no choice. Let's look at a few reasons why I think that:

1. A broken media. But this is always been true. What is new today is the phenomenon of crapflooding -- flooding people with so much information from such a wide variety of sources that they are unable to pick out the grains of truth from the flow of utter crap flooding our airwaves and our media. Searching for truth in the babbling cacophony that is our modern-day media is akin to looking for a needle in a haystack, it's there, but carefully hidden under piles of reeking money feces. Back in the days when there was one or two major newspapers in any given town and three networks, it was much easier to dig out those little shards of truth hidden in all the utter crap.
2. Apathetic narcotized population. As long as they have a job (no matter how much they hate it), as long as they can come home and watch their narcotic television shows and play their narcotic video games, they're happy. They don't vote, they don't research the candidates when they do vote, they can't name who their Congressman or Senators are, hell, half of them probably would agree with you if you told them that President Reagan should resign because he's getting too old to be President.
3. A broken political system. The political system has gone astray from any attachment to reality and devolved into a freak show of cowards and babbling lunatics, incapable of spending much attention on any real problem or accomplishing much beyond wasting space and air. Given the previous entry, it seems unlikely this will end anytime soon.
4. A broken social infrastructure. Ironically, the evangelical Christians are probably the only group in America that still has a working social infrastructure, one where they know their neighbors, go to church every Sunday and greet the people on either side of them in the pew by name, help each other in time of need, and donate significant sums of money to charitable causes that they agree with. Most of the rest of America is no longer like that. Most of us don't know our neighbors, have no groups of people with common cause that we meet with on a monthly basis to share and have community with, have no sense of community. We are isolated in our homes, with only our televisions and our computers as our friend. This is no way to organize a society, this is a way to create a society of sociopaths -- which is what it's doing.
5. A broken *physical* infrastructure. Conspiracies by auto makers from the 1920's onwards accompanied by racism in the late 50's to late 80's led to the explosion of suburbs, the collapse of cities, and the utter ruin of most fuel-efficient mass transit systems. Efficient electrically-driven light rail systems were the norm in most American cities prior to the 1940's, and even many small towns prior to the 1940's had heavy rail service connecting them to the rest of the nation. Today, for most of America, the only way to get from here to there is by automobile. The thing is, the automobile is not a sustainable system. It is not sustainable environmentally, it is not sustainable on a per-capita infrastructure basis (requiring acres upon acres of land for nothing but its physical housing in shopping areas and homes and a highway capable of carrying 100,000 automobiles per day takes up ten times more space and requires ten times more maintenance than a rail line capable of carrying 150,000 riders per day), and it is not sustainable spiritually, leading to sterile suburbs where nobody knows anybody and where you can't do anything because anything you could do -- shop, attend plays, whatever -- is somewhere else. Yet America's infrastructure today is built around the automobile, and the hurdles to re-urbanization are formidable. For most Americans, you will take their autos from their cold dead hands... a prediction that will, sadly, likely come true.
6. A broken educational infrastructure. America's educational infrastructure has always been creaky. This has never been a nation that worshiped intellectuals or cared much for intellect. Americans prided themselves on being a nation of doers, not a nation of thinkers. But today's schools prepare students neither for thinking nor for doing. Unless, by "doing", you mean "bubble in pointless bubbles on endless Scan-Tron cards". And then these students hit the universities, which themselves are under attack, confronted with endless budget cuts because the lizard people need their tax cuts after all...

Thing is, all of these reinforce each other. The end result is going to be an America that every year is a little poorer, a little meaner, a little more vicious, until at the end we tear each other's throats out like a pack of rabid dogs goaded to violence while our lizard overlords smile on from their walled estates protected by armed guards, secure in the fact that they can jet out by helicopter and private plane to their estate in the south of France or in Panama if things get too hot here. I don't know what the nature of the end game is going to look like, but in the end there's going to be a tenth of the population, maybe, either huddled together for self-protection in the ruins of our cities like the ten thousand people who huddled in the ruins of Rome in 500 AD (a city which only 100 years prior had held over a million people), or out on the land working as subsistence farmers perhaps on the estates of our new lords, or what. But there's going to be a lot of dead people, and a society that comes out of it that is utterly unlike our current one, which is an evolutionary dead end that simply can't survive because, as with the dodo bird, it has gone down an evolutionary dead end that can't survive contact with outside reality. Maybe somehow the survivors will put together a better society, will re-urbanize, will re-build the infrastructure of community and nation, will create something afresh that is worthwhile. Or it could turn out to be a feudal nightmare. But our current existence will end.

So anyhow, that's my read of the future. I hope I'm wrong about the body count before things hit bottom. But I doubt it. I seriously doubt it. Winston Churchill once said that Americans always do everything wrong until there is no choice but the right one. Thing is, there's a *lot* of wrong choices that can be made between now and then... and most of them end up in complete and utter national disaster, with something better emerging only from the ruins at the end after a lot of dead bodies...

-- Badtux the Apocalyptic Penguin

This blog is endorsed by President Obama

I now await my very own call from a Presidential staffer complaining that I'm using the seal of the executive office to endorse something or another. I can hardly wait! After all, that's probably the only way I'll ever get to talk to a Presidential staffer, or anybody in power other than some lowly intern who isn't allowed to talk to anybody powerful, right?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Note #1: This blog is ANTI-commercial. As in, if you tried to donate money or *anything* to me for running this blog, I'd reject it out of hand. No ads, no solicitations, *nothing* that might imply that I might ever see one red cent out of running this blog will *ever* be posted here, for reasons clear and simple: so that nobody can ever call me and accuse me of using their trademarked name or seal for profit.

Note #2: This blog is not, in fact, endorsed by President Obama, as a cursory read should make clear. The title is sarcasm. S-a-r-c-a-s-m. Look it up in the dictionary, you guy wearin' mirror shades indoors with a black suit. I know it's a big word, but you're a big boy, right?

Running

Kathleen Edwards, "Run" off of her 2008 album Asking for Flowers.

A little harmonica makes all Americana better. Even if written and sung by a Canadian.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The lizard people's war on children continues

I once wangled my way into one of the Houston Republican Party get-togethers back during the early 90′s and figured out just what they were the moment one of the prominent members started talking about how he was tired of paying his tax money to educate other people’s children (this was a short while after complaining about how he could not find good employees for his business), how public schools were socialism and how people who could not afford to send their children to private schools, as he did, simply shouldn’t have children. I interjected, “but the children didn’t choose to be born, why should they be punished for what their parents did?” He simply sneered “they should have chosen richer parents then.” There was nothing I could say to that, since the man was obviously deranged. You would not know this man, who prefers to stay behind the scenes, but you would know the man he got elected as a Congressman from Houston, a man by the name of Tom DeLay…

They are not only sociopathic scum, but they are utterly deranged, living in an alternate universe where there is no cause and effect relationship between cutting education and not being able to find good employees for your business, an alternate universe where children choose what parents they are born to and thus foster children clearly chose to be born as what they are. The fact that these utter psychopaths are running our nation, more or less, is chilling. Yet: Every single one of these lizard people, these sociopathic scum, got elected by the majority of voters in his or her district. Every… single… one. Does that say that the majority of American voters are evil? Are idiots? Are brainwashed fools? I don’t know, I just don’t see any hope for America. I mean, who would vote for people who propose that we send foster children to school in rags (presumably so that *our* children will know not to associate with them)?

Oh yes, the latest outrage in the lizard people's war on children... homeless woman arrested for THEFT for crime of enrolling her child in school. Because, you see, she didn't have a permanent address in the school district. Or anywhere, for that matter, which is why the federal McKinney-Vento law protecting the right of homeless children to an education was written in the first place, which basically says the school district can't expel homeless children for not having a permanent address in the district. But that didn't stop Republican Mayor Richard Moccia of Norwalk, Connecticut. If you cannot stop the children, he reasoned, then arresting the parents would get those unseemly homeless kids out of the Norwalk schools lickity-split.

Lizard people. Emotionless, empathyless, cold-blooded, with no morality other than greed and avarice. Lizard people. Any person who would arrest a homeless parent for enrolling her child in school is lower than knee-high to a caterpillar. And a *majority* voted for these lizard people! Whether through stupidity or evil…. doesn’t say much for America and Americans. Either we’re too stupid as a nation to continue to exist, or too evil.

-- Badtux the Maudlin(*) Penguin

(*)Who, perhaps fortunately for his liver, is currently unable to drown his sorrows in herring sauce due to recovery from recent stomach disorder, sigh.

A song for the lizard people

And the album version if you're having trouble understanding the lyrics...

Yesterday's post about the evil GOP lizard people who want to punish Michigan's foster children by forcing them to go to school in rags got me depressed, so I moved today's music post forward in time and did this one instead. This is Tom Morello and Boots Riley, Street Sweeper Social Club, with their song "100 Little Curses". Enjoy. Or not. Siiiiiigh!

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Say hello to Rosie

No no, not the ramblin' rose. Rosie the ROSEMARY. That little splotch of green near the foot of the step, between the rose bush and the new back fence.

Don't laugh. Imagine that little splotch of green being six feet tall and four feet wide, which is going to totally happen, if not overnight. Rosie's going to take up that corner quite nicely, thank you very much!

-- Badtux the Gardening Penguin

Back to the future

During the 1870s, powerful financial syndicates controlled the railroads and the coalfields. Coal companies had begun to recruit immigrants from overseas, luring them with "promises of fortune-making". Herded into freight trains by the hundreds, these workers often replaced English-speaking miners who, according to George Korson, "...were compelled to give way in one coal field after another, either abandoning the industry altogether for other occupations or else retreating, like the vanishing American Indian, westward..."[18] Frequently unable to read safety instructions, the immigrant workers, "...faced constant hazards from violation of safety precautions, such as they were. Injuries and deaths in mine disasters, frequently reported in the newspapers, shocked the nation."[18] Twenty-two thousand coal miners worked in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania.[12] Fifty-five hundred of the mineworkers in the county were children between the ages of seven and sixteen years[19] who earned between one and three dollars a week separating slate from the coal. Injured miners, or those too old to work at the face, were also assigned to picking slate at the "breakers" where the coal was crushed into a manageable size. Thus, many of the elderly miners finished their mining days as they'd begun in their youth.[20]

-- From Wikipedia article on the Molly McGuires

One wonders, based upon stories such as Sen. Bruce Caswell, R-Hillsdale(MI) forcing foster children to buy all their clothing at used clothing stores and the continued GOP jihad against Social Security and Medicare, whether the GOP pines for the days when children between the ages of seven and sixteen years earned their keep as virtual slave laborers. Are there no workhouses? Are there no coal mines to put these greedy foster children into? And those old welfare whores sucking off the government Social Security teat should just be tossed back onto the open market. Let them sort coal in the coal mines! Sheesh!

Of course, the blatant unfairness of punishing foster children for something they had no part in creating (you think foster children want to be foster children?!), or of taking away the Social Security retirement that people paid into and worked for during their entire working life, simply makes Republicans guffaw. Fairness, they say, is something losers talk about. Buck it up, they say, life's not fair. Why, if you work really hard in life, if you study hard and do everything you're supposed to do to get ahead, you could even become a personal servant to the rich and powerful, and be allowed to lick their shoes clean every evening!

Uhm, yeah. Ok. Alrighty then. So here's a song for the GOP...

-- Badtux the "Even the mighty fall" Penguin

Update: Bryan at Why Now is equally horrified... see our discussion of the lizard people there.