If Jack White was female, this is how the White Stripes might sound...
This is Canadian band "The Pack a.d.", drummer Maya Miller and guitarist/singer Becky Black (hmm, White, Black, huh), with the lead song "Deer" from their new album We Kill Computers, which was just released a week ago. They're definitely rockin' out on this album... if that's your thing, you'll probably like it.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Or at least I'm sure that's how Faux News ("We distort, you believe!") will spin it :).
Others have already commented on the oddities in the April job numbers. More people employed, yet more unemployed people? But that just points out the idiotic definition of "unemployed people" that we've used in this country since Ronald Reagan managed to "disappear" so many unemployed people just in time for his 1984 re-election, through the simple expedient of defining a bunch of the unemployed as not employed, not unemployed, just... not. Personally, I believe that if you've had a job within the past five years you should be counted as part of the workforce, period, even if you might temporarily not be looking for a job for whatever reason. But that would give us an unemployment rate somewhere above 15%, so I expect cows to fly first.
-- Badtux the Employment Penguin
Shannon Wright makes some racket with her guitar, then does "Portray" off of her album Over the Sun.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
I couldn't resist...
This was a quicky with my Macbook's built-in camera and microphone, so the quality ain't there. But I had fun recording it :-).
Note that "The Lord" paid for George Rekers' European cruise. I wonder what people who donated money to Rekers in order to do "the Lord's work" think about all this? Probably still in denial, alas...
-- Badtux the Musical Penguin
There’s only one kind of person who obsesses about gay sex day and night, year after year. You can see a lot of them at this particular parade. Well, and look at a lineup of conservative "anti-gay" Republicans, same deal.
Let’s face it, normal straight people, if you describe a gay sexual act to them, might briefly shudder and say “ooh, squick!”, but they don’t obsess over gay sex day and night, nosirree, they go home and forget about it after an hour or two! But James Dobson, yessiree... all that stuff in his books about applying the paternal hands to the fine, firm young buttocks of young children, oh such firm round young buttocks, oh, oh, oh, oh.... err. Sorry. It's just soooo sexual, what the right Rev. Dobson suggests doing to "discipline" your children, much like the ads at the back of the New Times for those mistresses of discipline, ooooh. Discipline me, mistress, discipline me! Err, sorry, got off track again. Why is it that every time these tighty righties open their mouths about sex, I get these images in my mind? Back to James Dobson. Oooh boy. Dude has more kinks than the whole San Francisco Pride parade combined. What do you bet he's going to be the next dude found with his very own rent boy?!
Finally I leave you with the words of a former cop:
Dobson knows entirely too much about weird sex for me to want to be in the same elevator with him. The whole crowd is bunch of perverts. Normal people, AC or DC, don’t get that involved with studying the fringe of sexual practices. These people have a sick obsession and should be on the watch list. I wouldn’t let any of them walk my dog, much less babysit.Because, presumably, the dog would be walking bow-legged if you let one of these dudes walk your dog... nevermind what happens if you let one of'em babysit your kid ;).
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Sometimes I feel like Malcolm's solution is the only one that actually works...
This is the Arrogant Worms, with their song "Malcolm". Funny, I can't find any vids of it being performed live, heh!
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
The Mighty Fang complains bitterly that I am not fetching the bug for him. I'm not being proper staff!
-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
Steve Earle, with "The Transcendental Blues", y'all.
-- Badtux the Southern Music Penguin
A U.S. school for the disabled tortures its students with electroshock and long-term restraint.
As someone who once worked as a teacher in a center for BD children, I am appalled. We had some seriously ill children in our care, but we never -- *ever* -- resorted to anything like this. The most we ever did was restrain a child who was physically out of control in a non-painful and temporary manner, then escort him to a safe place like an administrator's office where he could reflect on the fact that his classmates were having a fun time up in the classroom. Because that's how we controlled the kids -- by making sure they had a good time as long as they behaved appropriately, making sure they knew at all times what appropriate behavior was expected of them, what good things would happen if they displayed appropriate behavior, and what the consequences would be if they did not behave (generally loss of privileges such as not being able to play with the toys after finishing their work to acceptable standards).
Granted, I was lucky enough to be working with verbal children. But even with non-verbal autistic children engaging in self-mutilation activities that you must stop for the safety of the child, only temporary short-term use could be justified in response to that one specific behavior that is a danger to that child -- *not* as a blanket "punish the kid whenever he doesn't do what I want" measure.
Positive reinforcement *works*. All that punishment like electric shock does is make sadists chortle with glee, and teach children to be fearful, resentful, and avoidant. It doesn't teach children appropriate behavior, and it doesn't make children want to display appropriate behavior, all it teaches children is that adults are sadists. As someone who has worked in that environment, I can say explicitly that there is nothing -- *NOTHING* -- that can justify what the Judge Rotenberg Center for the Disabled has done. My suspicion is that they started out using electroshock for the case that I mention in the previous paragraph. But it is clear that once they used it for that specific case, the ease of use -- and the glee that sadists feel at torturing children -- have led to a situation that is, bluntly, inexcusable torture.
- Badtux the Former Special Ed Teacher Penguin
I've done this one before, but it's been a couple of years. Townes van Zandt, singing the first song he ever wrote, "Waitin' 'round To Die". There's been better singers. There's been better guitar players. There's been better songwriters, maybe. But how many of them can make a grown man cry?
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Today is Freakout de Mayo, where all the tighty righty whitey racists come in from cavorting in the woods where they were dancing around burning crosses wearin' bedsheets and whine that them filthy Messicans is celebratin' an un-American holiday called "Cinco de Mayo" which is apparently about chugging tequila, eating tacos, and marching in colorful parades.
Of course, the majority of them "filthy Messicans" have been here on American soil longer than the bedsheet wearers, given that the average Mexican is about 99% Indio and 1% Spanish, and most of the celebratin' is being done in parts of the country where they've been living for longer than the United States of America has even existed. And most of them are, as I've pointed out in the past, better Americans than most Americans -- they work hard, go to church on Sunday, believe in family, yada yada yada. I'm wondering if most of the tighty righty pantie soiling is caused by envy...
-- Badtux the Holiday Penguin
One of the common delusions amongst privileged white liberals is that racism is exclusively the domain of inbred redneck white trash cretins. Nevermind that most of the sundown towns were in the North (not to mention the entire state of Indiana, where it was actually illegal to enter the state if you were black and the KKK actually ran the state for a while), that inconvenient history of the fact that racism is not restricted to inbred rednecks but afflicts a wide variety of people, including, yes, privileged white liberals gets utterly ignored by today's privileged white liberals.
Meantime, many of the blacks I've known view Hispanics in much the same way that inbred white trash views blacks -- as marauding interlopers snatching up their jobs, little better than cockroaches. I've not been close enough to Hispanics to know whether they view blacks negatively in return, I suspect they're too busy working to bother with racism, I do know that they're scared of blacks though.
What prompts this observation on my part is recent headlines from the local area where gangs of black teens have been assaulting and in some cases killing Asian-Americans. The most racist people I've ever known have actually been Asian. They typically rate people of their particular Asian ethnicity as "real people", other Asians as "not as good as us", whites as "disreputable barbarians but they're so good at organized violence that racism against them is not recommended," and blacks as "little better than monkeys." The late Sheriff Harry Lee of Jefferson Parish, Louisiana, who had his deputies fire on blacks as they tried to flee New Orleans across the downtown bridge in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was Chinese-American and his attitude towards blacks is typical of many of the Chinese-Americans.
In short, racism inevitably leads to violence of this sort, regardless of the race of the racist. It does not surprise me to find black youth attacking Asians. Asians detest them as no better than monkeys -- and the favor is returned. With that kind of toxic attitude on the part of two communities, for there to not be violence would be the miracle...
-- Badtux the "Racism sucks, period" Penguin
The insane Scout Niblett sneers the crazy lyrics of her song "I.B.D." off of her new album The Calcination of Scout Niblett. Entire said album of which is crazy, demented, noisy, and brilliant. She doesn't have her drummer with her here, but she doesn't need him in order to make noise...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
... you're gayer than the gay mayor of gaytown. Bwahahaha! I love it. George Alan Rekers, a Baptist minister who wrote a book about how to raise your boy to be a manly boy instead of a gay boy (some sample advice: Force your child to excel athletics, and forbid him from arts and crafts, because otherwise he'll grow up to be gay), was caught with a boy toy on a cruise ship. Just an innocent encounter, right? Right?!
-- Badtux the Amused-by-hypocrisy Penguin
Hope Sandoval with Mazzy Star's biggest hit, "Fade into You". Like, trippy, dude...
Most of Mazzy Star's output was, alas, profoundly mediocre. This and "Into Dust" are the only two songs that really stand out.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
In Arizona, ESL teachers who don't speak English well are being re-assigned to non-ESL classrooms. ESL classrooms are meant to teach English to children who don't speak English as their native language. The Every Child Left Behind Act says that ESL classrooms must be taught by people "fluent" in English. The official in Arizona who is responsible for ESL NCLB compliance, Adela Santa Cruz, interprets this to mean that if the teacher does not speak English grammatically or consistently does not pronounce words correctly (saying "bery" rather than "very", for example), this teacher does not meet the requirements to teach ESL.
Is this a racist attack on Hispanic teachers? Uhm, somehow I doubt "Santa Cruz" is an Anglo name :-). I'm willing to suspend disbelief long enough to accept the AzDoE's explanation that the intent is that people just learning English should have someone to model their speech after who, well, actually speaks English. In other words, I don't buy the left-wing conspiracy theory that this is an attack upon Hispanic teachers, because it's targeted only at a specific subset of teachers rather than at all teachers, and it's based upon an interpretation of federal law, not upon some racist nonsense coming out of the Arizona legislature.
Now, there's clearly racist bullshit coming out of the Arizona legislature, and Arizona's top education official is clearly a racist Republican nutcase, as his bill to ban ethnic studies in Arizona proves. But let's not read racism into every action taken by any official in Arizona. That way leads to the sort of right-wingnut conspiracy theory bullshit that I regularly make fun of here, where Preznit Obama deliberately took time out of his day to call in a dozen awkward Keystone Kops to march out of time and scare little children and grannies by, err, looking their way. The right wing regularly invents freakouts of that nature to scare their supporters into being even more right-wing. We don't need to emulate that behavior on the left too.
-- Badtux the Non-conspiratorial Penguin
Leonard Cohen sings his song "Chelsea Hotel #2". Another sad love story written by Leonard Cohen as a middle-aged man... for he was indeed a middle-aged man as he was wooing a young Janis Joplin in the halls and lobby of the Chelsea Hotel. It could be a maudlin song, yet somehow you feel like you got a glimpse of Truth when listening to it...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Given recent events in Arizona, which has made it legal to deport anybody who was born in Arizona but is suspiciously dusky and not carrying their passport or birth certificate with them, this song is quite appropriate. Cheech and Chong, "Born in East L.A.", about a dude who gets deported to a country he's never known and has to pay a coyote to get back into the USA where he was born.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
In honor of the Quincy Massacre, where four Teabagger Grannies had their feelings hurt by being asked to step out of the street back onto the sidewalk so that Obama's motorcade could drive by:
Bwahahah!
-- Badtux the Musical Penguin
Note: This is the microphone and webcam on my Macbook, along with the iMovie software that shipped with it. No professional recording gear or software was involved in the recording of this video. Also, I'm usually a flatpicker, not a fingerpicker. But this song wanted to be fingerpicked, so I did my best, given that I'd never played Neil Young's "Ohio" before...
Look at Redfin's listing of homes under $450K in Santa Clara County. Look at the number of short sales on that list -- it's all either short sales, or a (very small) sprinkling of REO's, whether we're talking condos, townhouses, or single family doesn't matter. And most of those short sales have been on the list for six months or more -- one has been on the list for over 500 days (!!!!) and when my broker contacted his broker, my broker found out that bank had just started (finally!) the foreclosure proceedings on this empty vacant home but the owner just declared bankruptcy as yet *another* delaying tactic (since everything is frozen by bankruptcy). This is why I'm not having much luck looking for a new home. We contact a selling broker, and find out that yes, it's listed for X, but either a) the owner isn't *really* trying to sell and is just doing this as a delaying tactic to avoid eviction, or b) the bank wants $X+$50,000 (i.e., much more than the property is listed for) before they'll actually agree to the short sale, and the second lender wants $10,000 to release his lien.
I don't think we're going to be able to get back to normal until those short sales have been turned into REO's (foreclosed bank-owned homes) and turned over to responsible people who can afford them. I've been absolutely baffled by the Obama and Governator administrations' focus on keeping people in homes they clearly can't afford and clearly were irresponsible to purchase in the first place. Whatever happened to the notion of allowing people to suffer the consequences of their own poor decisions? It's not as if they are going to be homeless if they're foreclosed on, after all. They just have to rent for the next five years or so as they rebuild their credit and their cash reserves, hopefully to make a more responsible decision next time.
I moved here to the Bay Area in December 2003, selling a modest home in Scottsdale Arizona to do so. I looked at the housing market and it was clearly demented. No sane person would have bought (rather than rented) at the prices in December 2003, they simply were not sustainable under the median income of the typical Bay Area resident. And they just went higher from there. I'm not an economist (I don't even play one on the Internets), but I can look at the equation, "price of mortgage = X, price of rent = 40% of X, why is anybody buying?", and make the rational choice. Others did not. So be it. Now it's their turn to be renters and let the more responsible people be buyers, and it is extremely frustrating to me that everybody from the President of the United States on down to lowly bank property managers is trying to interfere with the rational operation of the market and keep that from happening.
-- Badtux the Responsible Penguin
