No, not Osama bin Laden: Followers of Thomas Merton.
Yeppers, pacifist followers of a pacifist Trappist monk are a threat to America. Why, they might be hiding Weapons of Mass Destruction beneath those nun's wimples and monastic robes.
Herring. Yumm. ERRRP!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
W/props to Pissed Off Patricia for link
One of the untold stories of the past five years of Bush Reich rule has been the dozens and dozens of Catholic nuns, priests, and laity who have been jailed for protesting against the war in Iraq. One by one, they've been disappeared into the American Gulag for weeks or months at a time (or in cases, years), not for harming people, not for stealing from people, not for being a danger to people, but for the crime of standing where The State does not want them to stand, the crime of speaking what The State does not want them to speak, the crime of believing what The State does not want them to believe.
If you want truly scary results, try the Google search Catholic nun sentenced war protest. Apparently these women are hiding weapons of mass destruction beneath their wimples, if you believe what The State says.
The United States is a police state. We just refuse to admit it, because that would mean admitting that the people that the police state is bearing down upon are not thugs and criminals, but, rather, people braver than us, people with the courage to speak out against injustice and war rather than cringe in terror behind keyboards. It would mean admitting that we are a nation of cowards and fools, who believe what we're told to believe, who think what we're told to think, who fear what we're told to fear, rather than the land of the free and the home of the brave. And for most of us, shedding our dearly-held delusions will happen about the same time that an ordinary citizen rather than a member of the unelected elite that rules us is elected to be President of the United States. No no, far better to believe that we live in a free and principled democracy, where the police only arrest and convict people who are guilty of real crimes against humanity, rather than the crime of stating truths that The State doesn't want us to hear....
- BadTux the Clear-sighted Penguin
Looking for my next vege-out material. Joss Whedon (see previous entry) says something along the lines of "The writers of Veronica Mars make me feel like a talentless hack". A quick check of amazon.com shows that the season 1 DVD set is $45 (!!!!). Worth it? Or no? Has any of my three loyal readers seen this show and can comment? Curious penguins want to know!
- Badtux the Vegetating Penguin
I just wasted most of a weekend watching DVD's.
Somehow I missed this sci-fi series when it appeared on TV. Of course, Fox made it easy to miss, running the episodes out of order so that they didn't make any sense and putting it on the air at strange times never two weeks in a row at the same time. It was apparently too intelligent for Fox's executives, who need material dumbed down to their Neolithic level. Hey look! Over there! It's a runaway bride!
Anyhow, Joss Whedon (the Buffy the Vampire Slayer dude) wanted to create a science fiction series that was more about losers than winners, about the kind of people who the haughty captains of the Starship Enterprise would have just soared right over. He also wanted a science fiction future where the good guys fighting the evil empire for their independence lost. So he put together a cast of nobodies, and put together a spaceship that looks more like a pile of junk than something that actually flies and which is totally unarmed when it comes to external weaponry (because, I mean, do you think the evil empire would allow anybody to go around with armed spaceships? Puh-LEEZE!). The results are somewhat uneven, but that is to be expected of the first season of pretty much any science fiction show -- go watch the first season of Babylon 5 or Star Trek.
But while Fox killed the series and refuses to sell the rights back to Joss for further episodes (and Joss refuses to have anything to do with Fox ever again), the one season that did get made is now available, in proper order, on DVD. And while Fox owns the series rights, they don't own the movie rights, so Joss basically made a two-hour episode of Firefly as a movie called Serenity that wraps up a few of the hanging plotlines (and a couple of the characters). Although, given its poor sales and Fox's refusal to let go of series rights, this pretty much is the end of the line for the Firefly franchise.
Too bad. More of Summer Glau's feet would have been a firm antidote to a bad day at work. Given that nobody other than Joss Whedon seems to think Summmer Glau is worthy of a major role, and Joss isn't doing any work in TV nowdays because of his opinions about the scumbags at Fox (Fox apparently has blackballed him in the TV industry, using their influence and Australian moneybags to make him persona non grata), this is likely the only chance we'll ever have of seeing the young lady on the small screen. A firefly, indeed... one chance to shine bright, and the rest is downhill from there.
- Badtux the Movie Penguin
This is a story. This is a story about four very talented people (and a few less-talented people) who came together and did the impossible within less than eight months, creating a technical accomplishment that is being sold to this very day.
And then the story ends in the typical maneuverings of men of wealth and the insane games they play with the lives of people, and all that talent, all that potential, is scattered to the four winds, none to ever achieve anything of note again.
When is it, I wonder, that dreams become lies, that hope becomes futile, that one must face the certainty that this is it, that this life of pointless mastication and defecation and fornication and unending drudgery is all you will ever have, all that you will ever be, and that the only hope for the future lies with your children, not with yourself? For in the end, the vast majority of us are fireflies. We shine brightly for one moment, then our light disappears forever, lost in the fog of everyday life as we go through the motions every day pretending that our life matters.
Which, in the end, is a hilarious notion, for we are monkeys. Monkeys with delusions of grandeur. We live, we die, and in the end, all turns back to dust. In the end, no human accomplishment survives. Even the Great Wall of China and the Pyramids shall eventually be nothing but dust. Yet we persist in believing, persist in shining our tiny light, no matter how feeble, into the face of the universe, even after it fades to a dull glow on its way to dying out. That futile flickering in the face of the immenseness of eternity, that desire to say to the universe, "Here I am! I live!" is perhaps the most ludicrous, yet, strangely compelling, story ever told.
And that, perhaps, is the most horrifying tragedy of the Bush regime. By deciding to govern via fear and hate and violence, the result has been the death of hope. Those who have seen their dreams crushed, their children killed, their homes destroyed, they have no hope, and they kill and kill and kill, not caring any more if they are killed. Those who are sent to kill, those who are sent to destroy, themselves are destroyed, their feeble firefly light quenched under the load of horrifying memories and the weight of hate that settles into their souls and corrodes all like acid. And those here in America who want to believe, who want to hope, have their dreams crushed by the immense costs of perpetual war for perpetual peace, see their children's futures pouring out of the nation's coffers into the sands of Mesopotamia, see the inevitable future of an impoverished uneducated and increasingly marginalized nation that will be mean and ugly and filled with violence and hate and no hope for the future. Some give in to despair. Some, some refuse to acknowledge reality, refuse to see anything but the hopeful future in which they wish to believe, shine their firefly light for a brief moment into a cloud of destruction for it to be seen by none at all. And others... others become a little bit crazy, embracing the mean, embracing the ugliness and violence and hate.
And in the end, none of matters. The Republican values of "greed is good" and "he who dies with the most toys, wins" have no more effect upon the universe than a firefly's light in the evening sky. A thousand thousand years from now, nobody will know how many millions of dollars Dick Cheney had when he died. Nobody will care how many nations George W. Bush conquered during the course of his insane plan to create peace through war. Yet we persist in our belief that we are something other than monkeys with delusions of grandeur, that what we do somehow matters. Yet we persist.
And that is both the tragedy of our lives, and the only meaning it will ever have.
-BT
This MRE menu is one of the least-loved ones in the MRE repertoire. Let's start by looking at the entre', freshly decanted onto a plate after heating:
Man, look at that alarming red color! And no, that's not meat spilling out. That's zuchinni. The entre' is edible only if you put powdered parmisan cheese on it (which luckily packs well in the field). If you do that, you can eat it without feeling like you're choking it down. Otherwise it is virtually inedible.
It doesn't get better from there. The "Potato sticks" are basically potato chip crumbs because the white-coat wizards at MRE Central haven't yet figured out how to package potato chips so that they won't get turned to powder by a helicopter drop (I must say they do have the proper grease-and-potatoes taste of cheap potato chips tho!). The "pound cake" requires peanut butter to make it edible. Then there's the bag of peanuts -- peanut butter *AND* peanuts, in the same packet? Nobody can eat that many peanuts at a sitting and feel good!
Not even the accessory pouch manages to avoid being a disaster. The accessory pouch contains a tiny bottle of Tabasco sauce... which is utterly incapable of making this disaster edible, what is needed is a small pouch of powdered parmesan cheese.
Definitely trade this off to the hard-core peanut lovers in your neighborhood when the Big One hits and you're parcelling out the booty from your last trip to the disaster aid center where they're handing out MRE's. If you must eat it, eat it -- it won't kill you, and if you can scrounge up some powdered cheese it's even edible -- but this one definitely deserves its general reputation.
- Badtux the Culinary Penguin
So sayeth Robert Reich, pointing to unsustainable deficits and an aging population of lazy feckless baby boomers who refuse to save for retirement and who refuse to work once they hit age 65, yet who demand that all of us born to later generations sustain their unsustainable lifestyle.
Learn a real skill (one that uses your hands). Buy a good set of tools for fixing stuff. Learn how to build a house out of nothing but mud and straw. Third World America is coming, and it isn't gonna be pretty...
-BT
Of course, these were only Mexicans (not real people) working on this factory farm, so putting a fence or warning area around the manure pools wasn't necessary. It's not as if people could have drowned there... just untermenschen, unseemly mud people, and there's plenty more where they came from.
- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin
In last week's episode, I brought a box full of old papers out of storage to sort through, The King claimed it, I evicted The King, and The King went off to sulk under the sofa.
So now I have finished sorting/shredding/filling black plastic bags with trash, and there are two black plastic trash bags and an empty box sitting on the floor. CatTux comes by and licks one of the plastic trash bags for a while (what's with that?!), then decides that it is time to do his duty of investigating the box. While The King, still sulking under the sofa, looks on, he places his paws up on the edge of the box to support him while he dutifully peers inside, and...
Cool! Except, CatTux puts his paws up on the bottomside of the box and... it falls back over! Oh well, guess that means it's nap time...
And that ends this day's episode of Catside Theatre. Have a very nice day!
- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
I *finally* dared the MRE Vanilla Dairy Shake of Death for lunch today.
Verdict: Flawed, but still good.
There are two basic problems: 1) when made with cold water, it turns out pretty lumpy. 2) It's hard to tear open the package without tearing it too far and making it hard to, well, shake (!). So if I had to do it again, I'd open the packet using the scissors on my Leatherman Juice (which goes everywhere with me when I'm in the field... the one I have is the perfect size, big enough to be useful but small enough that I don't feel like I'm carrying a big lump of iron in my pocket).
Still, once you get that all squared away, it tastes fine. Not like a chemical spill, which apparently is what the strawberry or chocolate versions taste like. So it turns out that all the fear and trembling was for nothing. I'd have no problem at all with drinking this thing while in the field.
- Badtux the Satisfied Penguin
Gasp! Barry Bonds used steroids!
And in other news, the ocean is still filled with salt water.
Alrighty, then!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
John Edwards, Kerry's hapless running mate, has announced he's running for President (again). If he became the Democratic candidate for President, the Republicans would wipe the floor with him.
Edwards was incredibly weak as a VP candidate. He didn't pull in North Carolina for his ticket, and Dick Cheney wiped the floor with him in the VP debate. Dick was the pure epitomy of evil there, never stating anything true if a lie would do, and Edwards looked flustered and bewildered and a lot like he was wanting to shout "Objection, your honor! The witness is purjuring himself!" every time Cheney popped out another great big lie.
Edwards is a good guy, but he just doesn't have the right stuff to confront the pure evil that is today's Republican Party. Sorry. That's just the truth.
- Badtux the Political Penguin
In third world nations, government officials prosecute you for criticizing government officials or government agencies.
Well, actually, we arrived some time ago, when the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the Feds to prosecute a guy for the crime of holding up a sign critical of King George at a time when King George could actually see it. But this is just a punctuation mark.
We are now a third world nation. The United States of America is dead. The Third World States of America are all you will ever know, all that your children will ever know. And as far as I can tell, nobody gives a damn, or cares to do shit about it.
- Badtux the Saddened Penguin
Carl's Jr. just introduced a jalapeno burger.
As a native Louisianian I of course cannot pass up spicy food. I love Korean cuisine -- oooh, that spicy red sauce! When I fix pizza, I put jalapeno peppers all over it before I stuff it in the oven. But my jalapeno burger fix has gone unfulfilled ever since I moved out of Whataburger territory (you can get your Whataburger with jalapenos, and yum is it good!). It just isn't worth trying to fix hamburgers for myself from scratch -- you can't buy just two or three buns, you have to buy a whole eight-pack (which I won't eat up before they go bad), and besides, hamburgers are best cooked on an outdoor grill over a charcoal and wood fire and my iceberg is currently docked at an apartment complex that prohibits charcoal or wood grills.
Well, my lust for a jalapeno burger goes unfulfilled no longer. And, alas, a Carl's Jr. is only a 3/4th mile walk from my apartment...
Evil. Evil evil evil, I say. Now I know why the workers at Carl's Jr. wear those caps and smocks... it's to hide the horns and tail!
- Badtux the Waddling Penguin
At one time I considered moving to a third world country, but then I realized that I already was moving to a third world country. Or, rather, a third world country was moving to me.
Consider this:
So the next question: How does one survive in a third world country with a smigeon of dignity and comfort left?
One possibility is to move to a first-world country. Unfortunately, everybody else in a third world country has that same idea, and first-world countries tend to slam the doors shut pretty quickly on anybody who can't buy their way in. And buy-in typically is a *lot* of money -- as in, the equivalent of a million dollars. Some first-world countries have special programs to bring in people from third-world countries with talents that they can use (see, for example, Canada), but even that has some serious limitations -- limitations on age of people they'll accept, limitations on numbers, etc.
Another possibility is to move to a second world country. These are countries which were once third world countries, but now are increasingly prosperous and democratic, with a growing middle class, decreasing income differences, and improving educational system. Most of these countries today that welcome foreigners (to a lesser or greater degree) are in South and Central America. Costa Rica, Panama, Chile, Uruguay, and to a certain extent Argentina and Brazil have increasingly diverse and robust economies that produce everything from microchips to jet airliners, yet remain inexpensive enough that you can support yourself in fine fettle with relatively modest occupations. Once again you're going to have to buy your way in with hard currency, but the amount of hard currency is much less than for the first world countries -- for example, to get into Costa Rica will cost you $150K, Panama $100K. (Note: Verify this, it changes regularly!). And while you'll be adrift in a culture that you can't really understand and will have the typical life of an immigrant in a new and strange country (i.e., lots of hard, hard work to barely get by, little influence upon the direction of your newly adopted country, etc.), your children have an opportunity to become enthusiastic participants in that country's future -- most of these countries have been quite friendly to the descendents of immigrants (especially immigrants of European or Asian ancestry), who after a generation or two typically rise to the top of the country's socio-economic structure.
The final option is to move to a third world country, except you don't have to move to do that. The question then becomes one of how to a) survive, and b) insure some degree of comfort and dignity, while living in the third world country that the United States will become after the dollar collapses and the Wal-Marts of the land become empty shells.
And that, alas, is a question whose answer I am still working on.
-BT
One of the most irritating notions I've ever run across in the computer industry is the notion that the ability to solve ridiculous mathematical puzzles has anything to do with your performance as a software engineer. I just had an encounter with an engineering group whose manager *loves* those stupid things. All he hires are engineers that are good at those puzzles, and all that those engineers do when they interview potential new engineers is (doh) pepper them with puzzles.
Now, this engineering group is not particularly productive or effective. As far as I can tell, they consistently lag their competition by at least 6 months when it comes to the product cycle. But still, they persist at their ludicrous notion that the ability to solve trivial little artificial problems has anything to do with solving real-world problems.
Note: I'm not ranting this way because I'm particularly bad at those stupid little puzzles. Rather, I think it's utter nonsense. When I interview someone, I want to know what they've done and what they can do. I care about results, not about their ability to solve something unrelated to results. Furthermore, if the guy is any good, I want to convince him that our company is staffed by no-nonsense results-oriented types, not by a bunch of freakin' air-heads who go around solving problems that have nothing at all to do with real life. Furthermore, I want to give him some info about what he'd be doing if he came to the company, so that if he wasn't interested in doing that kind of stuff, he could tell me and we could both save some time on a match that wouldn't work. But what the hell, that's why I'm an engineer and not a manager. If I cared about bullshit, I woulda already bullshit myself into one of those six-figure-salary executive jobs. Sigh...
- Badtux the Rant-o-matic Penguin
Just popped upon the next MRE pouch, "Red Beans, Rice, & Sausage". Two items therein: "Filled Pretzels, Chedder Cheese" and "Cheese spread".
So I kneaded the cheese spread as directed on the package, opened it up, opened up the pretzels, dipped them into the cheese, and... junk food heaven! A bit salty, and HORRIBLY bad for you, being a bit over 400 calories of which almost half of it is fat, but yummy all the same.
If these items aren't a popular trade item for the guys in the field, they musta grown up in a different country from the one I grew up in, 'cause this was, like, the very *essense* of junk food!
- Badtux the Waddling Penguin
I got another box out of storage to sort through its contents. I turned my back, and said box was reclaimed by The King as his new throne:
- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
$@#$%. Adorable little ragamuffin with... with... THIN MINT COOKIES. AGH! Can... not... resist... $$$ flying out of wallet... haul huge sack home with me... AGH!
Those demented elves are at it again. Oh sure, they might call themselves "Girl Scouts", but we penguins know better. They are... WAISTLINE ENHANCEMENT DEMONS. That's what they are, yessiree! Especially the ones with the THIN MINTS.
Gotta go. A thin mint (or two, or three, or twenty, or thirty) is calling my name...
- Badtux the Waddling (more, now!) Penguin
Well, I still haven't dared try the dairy shake. Instead, I tried another MRE that I had at work: Menu 13, the cheese tortellini.
This was *GOOD*! It might have been vegetarian, but it was quite tasty, sort of like a high-grade Chef Boy-Ar-Dee. Comfort food all the way. I'll trade the "meatloaf" (Friskies) MRE for this one any time of day. The lemon poppy pound cake that came with it, on the other hand, was merely edible. I tried it with and without the peanut butter that came with this MRE. Either way, it was uninspiring. The other stuff that came with it is this:
-- Badtux the Fine Cuisine Penguin
