Furball just cost me $25

Yeah, The Mighty Fang decided that the rear patio screen was a climbing tree, and ripped big gaping holes in it. So I had to run to Home Cheapo and get some "cat-proof" screen material and spline to replace the torn screen. That was an hour of my time (between buying the screen and rolling it into the frame) that I'll never get back...

You might remember a few posts back where I said I had to reinforce my cracked bedframe with some mending plates to keep it from collapsing. Here is what a mending plate looks like on my bedframe: It's that metal plate you see along the side of the rail. There is a matching one on the side of the leg, inside the rail. On the backside there is already reinforcement, a crossbrace that goes to the other side of the bedframe, which is what kept the leg from collapsing altogether when it split there at the weak spot (the slot) while I was moving the bed around. I figure that with the crossbrace and these two mending plates, this leg ain't goin' nowhere...

So anyhow, I guess I'm a home improvement penguin today. Not that I own a home, sigh...

-- Badtux the Home Improvement Penguin

Bambi is a thug

Just sayin'. Bloody 4-hooved rats are running amok, killing motorcyclists, breaking into bars, and now attempting to break into a jail. I fully expect to hear on the news tomorrow that Bambi did a drive-by shooting outside of a Disney store.

There's only one good place for one of these four-hooved rats, and that's on a barbecue spit. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Deer-hatin' Penguin

Hey, if *you* had thousands of dollars worth of damage done to your vehicles thanks to these critters, you'd have a sour disposition towards them too, yo!

And in today's news....

Kyrgyzstan burns. I mentioned at one point in time that people who wished for an armed revolution were crazy, because the aftermath was always tragedy. This is the case here too. The folks who ran the last government out of town at gunpoint and installed an interim government, are now ignoring the government they installed and engaging in a bit of ethnic cleansing of ethnic Uzbeks. Just consider it a prelude to what would happen to Mexican-Americans if the teabaggers seized power at gunpoint...

Yeah yeah, I hear you saying. Yet another one of those trashcanistans doing what transcanistans are always doing (lots of waving of guns and killing people), that's not news. Well, except the U.S. has $1 trillion reasons to care, given that Kyrgyzstan is the main transshipment point for U.S. airborne supplies to Afghanistan.

So, SNAFU (Situation Normal, All Fucked Up). Which brings up the question of, "why is the U.S. mucking around in that part of the world anyhow?" And that's a question I have no answer to, since Osama bin Laden, not the Taliban, attacked the U.S. on 9/11/2001... and as far as I know, Osama is in Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

-- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin

Demented Dowd

Johnny Dowd is like the demented love child of Johnny Cash and Bob Dylan. This song, "Swamp Woman", is apparently off his album Wake up the Snakes which is available only from, err, his web site. Uhm, to say that labels are not bustin' down his door is an understatement :).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

And fuck you, Bill Donohue

As you know, I'm not that big a fan of Lady Gaga. I was around when the original Madonna was in her prime, and while Ms. Germanotta does a great update of the whole Madonna act and clearly is a talented performer in her own right, for me it's like, "eh, seen it before." I can understand why the kids who weren't around when Madonna was young go, well, Gaga over Gaga, though. If you've never seen anything like that before, it must seem rather daring and new. And Stef does do it very, very well.

So what am I doing posting a Gaga video, for the second day in a row supplanting the video that *should* be here (which got bumped somewhere later in the month)? Simple: To piss off that asshole Bill Donohue and his one-man "Catholic League", who claims that this video is "anti-Catholic". But I think P.Z. Myers gets the last word here: "...muscular young men gyrating in jackboots and tight shorts and nothing else, the weird headgear, the sadomasochistic imagery, the black leather uniforms, the flaming homoeroticism, and I was thinking, yeah, all that does remind me of Catholicism. I didn't think it was Catholic bashing, though. I thought it was a recruiting video." Heh.

-- Badtux the Catholic Music Penguin

Oh yeah, just to fuck with asshole Bill some more, here's the Dum Dum Girls with their song, "Catholicked":

Now that's some good ole' fashioned girl band rock'n'roll, early 60's style, heh. Even though the song actually dates to, err, 2009.

Notes to self...

1. Spray unwanted weeds in back/front with RoundUp.
2. Get a haircut
3. Shop for washer/dryer. Top loading, none of the front loaders are as reliable as the old top loader designs are, a front loader that lasts more than five years is a rarity and there are 20 year old top loaders still happily sloshing along.
4. Get marigolds for front flower bed to freshen things up
5. Figure out what to do with the big empty space on the left of the fireplace. Put a TV there? I won't watch it, but my mother might when she comes to visit. Put more Ikea book-cases there? I suppose not entirely incompatible with television idea, with modern flat screens... but I'm trying to cut down on my physical book habit and go more to eBooks, which are more environmentally friendly since I already have the computer to read them with...
6. List all the random mismatched cups/glasses/mugs on FreeCycle, maybe someone needs more cups/glasses/mugs and doesn't mind that they don't match. (I had way more than I needed so culled out the mismatches).
7. Move the book-case in the spare bedroom to the master bedroom, place it in corner by the dresser
8. Fix the cracked leg of the bedframe with mending plates.
9. Go get wood screws to screw mending plates to bedframe (grin!)
10. Unpack enough tools in the garage to find the drillbits to drill the pilot holes to screw the wood screws into for screwing the mending plates to bedframe (heh!)
11. Check the mail at the old place
12. Unpack books to free up space in garage, since now the book-cases are where I want them to be.
13. Get one of those cool chairs from Ikea to fill in the space by the doorway in the living room.

Last night I finally got the futon assembled in the living room and got the furniture mostly arranged, now I need to get the bedframe disassembled, thing is I cracked one of the legs moving it around to get the mattresses off and get it disassembled. I'll want to buy a new bedroom set eventually but I'm just going to mend it for now. So after today, the master bedroom should be together...

Temperature today in San Jose is supposed to be in the low 90's. The new place doesn't have air conditioning, it was built before air conditioning was needed and while it'd be trivial to add air conditioning (the furnace unit in the utility room is fairly new and has the chamber for the evaporator), it wasn't needed historically in this area (SF Bay Area), which has a mild Mediterranean climate. Global warming, anybody?

-- Badtux the Busy Penguin

Testilying? You don't say!

You know that Border Patrol agent who supposedly was surrounded by rock-throwing Mexicans and had to regrettably shoot a 14 year old boy by the name of Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca in order to save his own life? Uhm, turns out that there was someone making a video of the incident and, err... the agent lied. The video shows nobody was within at least 30 yards of the agent. Here, see for yourself:

But of course the fact that the agent lied won't change anything, because as I noted earlier, there's two laws in Soviet America -- one for the Stasi 2.0 (our very efficient and deadly police forces that enforce a "soft" police state upon us), and one for ordinary civilians. And murdering 14 year old kids isn't a crime if you're a member of the Stasi 2.0. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Fuck you too, YouTube

HEALTH - USA BOYS from City Slang on Vimeo.

YouTube deleted the video for this gorgeous song because it was "too sexy". WTF?! Fuck you, YouTube.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The cult of safety

They're at it again, the cult of "we must keep our children safe!", today snarling about 16-year old round-the-world sailor Abby Sunderland, whose sailboat is adrift in the Indian Ocean today with a broken mast, saying "her parents should have stopped her!". Especially insulting are the people who bring up 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, killed with her father and flight instructor at the wheel of a small aircraft that she didn't have the experience to take off in the bad weather she took off in. At which point I gotta say... are you fuckin' kidding me?!

Look. A 7 year old is just a baby. She mostly wants whatever Mommy and Daddy wants, and mostly does whatever Mommy and Daddy says to do and lacks the ability to think abstractly. A 16 year old, on the other hand, is a full-fledged person, with her own wants and desires and the ability to reason and think both concretely and abstractly. Stop a 16 year old from doing something dangerous? SNORT! No, you can't stop a 16 year old from doing something dangerous, all you can hope is that you damn well raised her well enough that when she does do something dangerous (which she will do), it's something that won't end up with her dead or permanently harmed.

I dealt with plenty of 16 year olds in my teaching career, and while they're prone to hormonal flights of fancy and bursts of irrational enthusiasm they're perfectly capable of being level-headed and resourceful in the face of adversity. From reading young Ms. Sunderland's blog, she seems pretty typical of the 16 year old that I'm describing here, she's a healthy level-headed resourceful young lady who is irrationally enthusiastic about sailing and has approached it with every bit of obsessiveness that 16 year olds are prone to when they get such an irrational enthusiasm. To compare a 16 year old like this who is her own person to a 7 year old is, frankly, insulting.

And if we're talking safety, if I was going to parent a 16 year old girl, I'd rather have one out in the middle of the Indian Ocean with all the proper safety equipment where I know she ain't gettin' pregnant or picking up a STD or getting date-raped or doing drugs or shit, than deal with raising a 16 year old in regular society. Being a 16 year old girl simply isn't safe regardless of where she is, so if she decides she wants to sail around the world and has the skill and you have the wherewithal to help her do it, WTF not?

But then, I'm not a member of the Cult of Safety that wants to coddle our kids in cocoons for the first 18 years of their lives to keep them "safe". Life is dangerous, and if you try to keep kids "safe" all the time, all you're doing is making it impossible for them to deal with life once they leave home and go out into the world. Which they *will* do, regardless of what you want -- unless you want to lock'em in your basement, they're going to go out eventually and do shit you'd rather they not do. Might as well equip'em with the tools to deal with the invariable shit that happens, rather than try to stop'em -- because eventually you won't be able to stop'em. Just sayin'. Trying to make the world "safe" just creates a prison for all of us, in the end.

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

They're not even pretending anymore

Back when I was growing up in the South, the worst epithet that could ever be placed upon a white person was that of "nigger-lover". Everybody knew you were supposed to hate black people, and if you didn't, if indeed, you said "hey, they're just people like anybody else", you were shunned as unfit for polite company. Well, that went away for a while, but that sewer of filth World Net Daily sent me an email today that it's *back*. Yeppers, author Erik Rush has released a new book via the WND Press saying that America's problem today is an outbreak of... nigger-lovers.

Seriously. "Negrophilia" -- nigger-loving -- is, apparently, according to this book, the affliction of people who are "race traitors" who like blacks more than they like their own race and thus elected President Obama. Oh, Mr. Rush doesn't use those words, of course. He's a polite racist, the new breed that uses fancy made-up words in place of our old racist words we used to use in the Bad Old Days in the South. But that's what he's basically saying, he's just plugging new made-up words into the old holes. He also says that blacks shouldn't like their own race more than other people's race, and the fact that they do is why black America has such troubles.

Nevermind that, as far as I can tell, he's full of shit -- one of the advantages I had as a white teacher in a black school was getting *much* more respect from the parents than the black teachers got, hardly the sort of "preference for things black" that Mr. Rush says is prominent. Rather, it's the fact that he resurrects those old memes from the Old South at all. These folks ain't even pretending anymore, which is why they are in the end doomed to irrelevancy because the younger generation by and large doesn't have time for that kind of nonsense.

-- Badtux the Southern Penguin

Friends in high places

The Mighty Fang saw me put his "Cat Dancer" toy into that cabinet two days ago. He *still* occasionally jumps up there on top of the oven hood and meows at me to open that cabinet and get the toy out for him.

When I put down the kitty kibble last Sunday, ants got into it, and I opened a cabinet and a roach looked back out at me. I promptly put out Combat roach baits and put them in all the cabinets and under the stove and refrigerator, and got some new ant baits that appear to be boric acid in sugar water and put one of them near where the ants were entering the house. Today I notice no more ants other than some dying ones near the bait, and I open a cabinet and a dead roach falls out. Yeah! That's the kind of results that I like to see! And no real danger to the kittehs, since the baits are all hidden away in places they can't get to. Sure beats having to call out an exterminator to spray the place with Premise (the only somewhat pet-safe insecticide, but only available to professional exterminators).

Still way too many boxes to open and unpack. At least I have the kitchen unpacked though. A rotund penguin must have his priorities ;).

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Fried Brains

The Kills, "Fried My Little Brains". Talk about some hot sex :).

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

True, true

If BP was responsible for cleaning up a coffee spill:

Siiiiiiiiigh!

Has someone else like, say, Halliburton or Schlumberger, been given a contract by the government to be prime contractor yet to clean up the Deepwater Horizon spill, with BP being handed the bill? No?

Leadership. It's more than just giving good speech, President Obama. Just sayin'. SIIIIIIIIIGH!

-- Badtux the Bumfuddled Penguin

Telescoping acid trip

One of the best bands of the 90's that you never heard of, The Telescopes, with their song "Celeste". It's been about six months since the last time I played one of their videos, so it was time again...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Like East Germany, only nuttier

Welcome, fellow inmates of Soviet America. In today's news, here's something you did not hear about, except maybe gloatingly on some white-wing web site or buried deep inside a tiny 2-inch side column in the middle of the A-section of your newspaper.

Like our forefathers in East Germany, we are regularly spied upon by our very efficient police agencies, with our every phone call monitored for disturbing content (do not mention the words "terrorist" or "bomb" in your phone calls unless you desire a visit from men wearing black suits). Like in East Germany, soon one shall need to register with The State if you want a phone. And we, too, have a wall at our border, albeit a very porous one intended to keep people out, rather than in.

And, like the former East Germany, we shoot people who cross the wall. If one shot doesn't kill the crosser, why, we shoot him twice. And if he's a kid, why, no big deal. Sergio Adrian Hernandez Huereca was 14 years old, but he's just as dead as if he'd been 34.

According to the witnesses, some Mexican boys were under the bridge in Ciudad Juarez, without wearing backpacks or anything (i.e., they were *not* part of a group crossing the border to stay in America), they were running over onto the American side of the border and back again, taunting the border patrol agents on the other side of the border. The kids started throwing rocks, and one of the border patrol agents opened fire, killing young Sergio on the other side of the border. And on right-wing hate sites everywhere, white-wingers gloat.

At which point I say... wow. Just wow. Look. When I was a kid, we were sort of like the "Little Rascals" gang in our neighborhood, and would have rock fights with the rival gang across the bayou. But none of us ever thought of actually *shooting* at the folks throwing rocks at us. No, we simply threw rocks *back* at them! Wow, what a concept... proportionate force! Wow, I should have been thinking like a Border Patrol agent, and actually shot one of those kids throwing rocks at us. Oh wait, if I'd done that, I would have been sent to jail for life. Oops, my bad, I forgot, there's two laws in Soviet America -- one for the Stasi 2.0, and one for the rest of us. But that's okay, because here in Soviet America we have Freedom(tm), and beside, it was an unseemly darky that died, not a good upstanding tighty whitey, and darkies don't count as real people so it wasn't *really* murder. Alrighty, then!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

A real ball

1990's noise rockers Helium with their song "Superball". Mary Timony, their lead singer and bassist, is still around. Their music is very definitely an acquired taste, there was at least one New York indie label that felt that Helium and/or Mary Timony was going to be their "next big thing" after Nirvana, but clearly that is ridiculous. That would be like me saying that Scout Niblett is going to be the next big thing (snort!)... I love her stuff to death, but lets be real, okay?!

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

New candidates for the dumbest people on the planet

Okay, candidate number one: Angela Merkel, PM of Germany. Says Ms. Merkel, excusing draconian budget cuts, “We can only spend what we receive in income.”

So why is Ms. Merkel a candidate for the dumbest person on the planet? *BECAUSE SHE THINKS MONEY IS THE SAME THING AS WEALTH!* It's not. As I've repeatedly pointed out, money is just pieces of toilet paper with pictures of dead people on it. It's what you *buy* with money that is wealth.

The wealth of a nation such as Germany isn't measured in terms of how many pieces of toilet paper or how many 0's and 1's sit in the central bank's computers. Rather, the wealth of a nation such as Germany is measured in terms of how much goods and services the economy is producing -- and capable of producing. I.e., it's what money can buy that has value, not the money itself, whose only value is the fact that for some reason people will give you real things for it, and whose only intrinsic value is for wiping your butt.

So: Germany is seeing reduced "income". But is it, really? Has the wealth of Germany decreased? Has Germany's ability to produce goods and services suddenly collapsed? NO! Germany is still as wealthy today as it was five years ago! The only problem is, a lot of that wealth is sitting on the sidelines at the moment, idle, and you can only tax things that are moving, not coal that's still in the mine because the factory isn't building widgets, or factory workers sitting idle because people aren't buying widgets, or store owners seeing empty shops for that reason. But the economy still has the same amount of wealth in it. It's just not moving around. It's the moving that turns wealth into income and thus makes it taxable. That, or fiscal policy.

Wait, wait... fiscal policy is a tax on wealth? *YES!* Running deficits paid for either by printing money or by selling government bonds on the open market is a way to reallocate resources in the economy from the private sector into the public sector just like taxes are a way to reallocate resources in the economy from the private sector into the public sector. So in actuality, fiscal policy and money printing activity is a tax -- it's just a tax on idle resources if there are idle resources in the economy. (If there are not idle resources in the economy, on the other hand, it is an tax upon all the other transactions in the economy through either higher interest rates or inflation, but we are nowhere near that scenario so I shall stop here).

Okay, so Ms. Merkel says she must cut because her nation's wealth has declined. But it hasn't, all that has happened is that the wealth stopped moving around and so her tax system can't see it at the moment, meaning it's quite valid to use fiscal policy to tax the idle wealth -- I mean, she'd tax it if it were moving, why not tax it while it's idle too? The fact that she confuses money with wealth and can't figure out that a deficit when there's idle resources is just a tax like any other tax (just one on idle resources) qualifies her as being one of the world's dumbest people. But only one of the world's dumbest people... because, of course, Mish exists. While Mish exists, Ms. Merkel is going to have some competition for that spot, yo!

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Abusive church

Sleater-Kinney, "The Last Song", off of their self-titled first album. I was very surprised when Carrie Brownstein started screaming. Usually screaming duties were Corinne Tucker's.

I'm not quite sure what this song is about. An abusive boyfriend? An abusive parent? All I know is that it's dark, dark, dark... and noisy. Really noisy. Sigh, I miss the 90's, when you could hear some really noisy stuff like this practically everywhere you turned, instead of all the overproduced overcompressed crap...

-- Badtux the Wistful Music Penguin

$13 trillion reasons why right-wingers are idiots

Because they get upset that the U.S. government has $13T in "debt".

Note that I say "debt", but it's not, really. Debt has to be paid back. So when does this $13T "debt" have to be paid back? Let's make this a multiple choice question:

1. Next year
2. 10 years from now
3. 100 years from now
4. Never

Tick....tick...tick....tick... and your answer is? Let's take a look behind... DOOR NUMBER FOUR!

Yes, *NEVER*. Because essentially, this $13T is OWED BY THE SAME PEOPLE WHO LENT IT.

Oh hold on you say, the Treasury holds auctions to sell off Treasury bonds all the time! Well, yes, but the deal is that a) only $3.8T is owed to foreign individuals or government (source), meaning that b) the remainder is money *borrowed* from us that we *owe to ourselves*. And if we choose to never repay ourselves the money that we borrowed from ourselves (or, rather, just roll over the debt year after year), well, so what?

Besides, even $13T is hardly a big deal. U.S. GDP is around $15T/year. If I could afford to buy a $150K house while making $75K/year, then the U.S. could easily repay $30T worth of debt the same way (i.e., by extending repayment over 30 years time). It would require doubling taxes, but it could be done. But really, *why*? I mean, first of all, we owe this money mostly to ourselves, and second of all, the Federal Reserve possesses that most wondrous of inventions, the PRINTING PRESS, and could trade freshly-printed cash for Treasuries with nothing but the stroke of a pen.

At which point I hear the screams of "Inflation!" Well, first of all, as I've repeatedly pointed out, capitalism doesn't work without inflation. Without inflation, money disappears under mattresses and ceases to perform its primary function, which is the lubrication of commercial transactions, thereby causing commerce to grind to a slow drip. And capitalism is a good thing to have, because capitalism allows paying for the capital investment needed to produce future output with the income from that future output, allowing capitalist economies to be far more nimble than economies without capitalism. So... inflation? Given the deflationary pressures we're currently facing, bring it on!

But, more importantly, these Treasuries are already effectively money! The main reason short-term Treasuries are at 0% interest is because people find holding Treasuries to be equivalent to holding cash, and rather than haul around truckloads of cash, they just trade it for Treasuries instead. So if they decide to go the other way around and trade the Treasuries for cash again, how much additional money just got put into the economy? NONE! They started with $1M in cash, and ended up with $1M in cash, for effectively $0 total change in the money supply as far as their personal frame of reference is concerned. In other words, the very act of printing Treasuries is effectively the same as printing money. Making it official at some future point in time makes $0 difference in terms of facts on the ground.

And finally: As I pointed out previously, printing money doesn't cause inflation. Rather, printing more money than there exists goods and services in the economy to trade it for causes inflation. But with 21% real unemployment, there is clearly a *lot* of idle goods and services in the economy that printed money could purchase, with no (zero) change in the effective price of goods and services. In short, we could run a deficit of 10% of GDP this year, financed *entirely* by printing money, and cause no - ZERO - inflation.

So anyhow. Those are the facts. So when hysteria-mongers throw big numbers around and say "oooh, scary" and talk about "solid economic principles", remember: That's solid like THEIR HEADS. Not to mention that this is usually "code" for "gold", about which I've repeatedly noted gold bugs don't understand what money is. 'Nuff said on that.

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

Southern-fried healthcare

Band is Cracker, song is "Take me Down to the Infirmary" off of their 2008 album Kerosene Hat. Just some Southern-fried rock.

- Badtux the Music Penguin