Talk about your remedy for the over-homogenized love songs on the radio... this is Scout's notion of a love song: "Wolfie", off her 2005 album Kidnapped by Neptune. Once again Scout Niblett shouts crazed lyrics into the microphone as she plays crunchy guitar with her trusty old Fender Mustang...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
But then, it's only what America and Americans deserve for deserting logic and reason in exchange for unthinking faith in talking points and "everybody knows". As I explained to someone predicting Kerry was going to win in 2004 (I accurately predicted Bush the Lesser would win), "50% of Americans are below average... and average ain't so smart anymore." In the end we as a people get the government we deserve. Alas.
- Badtux the Cynical Penguin
Note -- it's just coincidence that the depressing Townes van Zandt song got scheduled for today. These things get scheduled way in advance...
Towns van Zandt near the end of his life. Not sure where this was recorded, appears to be a TV show called "Texas"... if there was a contest for music to slit your wrists to, Towns van Zandt and Leonard Cohen would be in a close race, methinks. Because that's some low-down lonesome sound there, yo.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Straight Democratic ticket, of course. This year's crop of Republicans here in California was especially horrific, whether it was the witches who laid off tens of thousands of workers while giving themselves raises of hundreds of millions of dollars, or the school board candidate who called for eliminating public education, or whatever, they were lame, lame, lame. And sad to say, mathematics (the 50%+1 barrier) says that a vote for a third party is basically a vote for whoever won the rest of the votes, because what would be a coalition of smaller parties in a parliamentary system is a part of a larger coalition party like the Democratic Party in a first-past-the-pole system, so... (shrug). Democrats were "it".
As for the ballot propositions, I never did finish that series, but you can pretty much look at the ones I didn't cover and figure out how I probably voted on them.
By tomorrow evening I'll have my posting on the Republican strategy for victory, how it worked, and why it is disaster for America. Because they aren't going to stop doing what they're doing. What are they doing? Uhm.... tune in tomorrow evening for that one, yo.
-- Badtux the Political Penguin
Over at The Register, a technology recruiter gripes about the poor quality of Computer Science graduates. Then the money quote: "If you haven’t trashed your computer while doing something questionable, then you’re not a computer scientist – you’re just an arts grad who didn’t get laid."
Indeed! I trashed my computer this weekend -- *on purpose*. Not before I made a current backup, of course, but I wanted to try out a new operating system. So I did. That's on my big desktop system, of course, not the Macbook that I'm typing this on, but even when I was a youngster in college who only had the desktop I wasn't shy about trying out new things on it. That's why I have a career today -- I was experimenting with the software that runs most of the Internet now back when it was just some hackerware downloaded off the then-nascent Internet.
But even here in the 'States, the majority of kids graduating with Computer Science degrees have just done coursework on school computers. They've never trashed a brand-new Windows install to check out the latest Ubuntu. They have no idea of anything to do with computers other than what little they needed to know in order to get an "A" on tests. They are, in short, lame, in Comp Sci because they can't spell well enough to be an English major and don't get laid enough to be an arts major and aren't good enough at bullshitting to be a Business major. Both they and my elderly mother view computers as magical things which must not be fucked with or they'll break and be unfixable, rather than as technological objects which people designed and built and which ordinary mortals can swap parts into or re-install at will if something breaks. Indeed, the only difference between them and my mother when it comes to real-life computer skills is that they don't have Medicare if they get sick, thanks to the Democrats being just as lame.
We're back to the problem I talked about earlier, where large chunks of the population view technology as magic, rather than as something created by humans. Because it's magic, it cannot be understood or fixed if it breaks. Thus in terror they refuse to take it apart and examine the pieces, because they might let the magic out and it might do bad things to them. But of course there is nothing magic about my home computer. It is an Antec case with a Corsair power supply, an Intel motherboard with 12 gigabytes of Corsair memory and a Core I7-950 processor, an nVidia graphics card, a pair of 2 terabyte SATA drives, a DVD-R/CD drive, and a few more drives that aren't plugged in right now because those are what I use for experiments. The operating systems I run on it like Linux, ESXi, Citrix XenServer, etc. were downloaded for free off the Internet. None of this is exotic. Anybody can walk into Fry's Electronics or click on the NewEgg.com web site and buy every single piece that's in my computer, and click on Internet sites and download and burn CD's or DVD's of every single thing I have installed on it. There are no white-coated gatekeepers stopping you. Yet the majority of even Computer Science graduates flee in abject horror at the thought of understanding technology well enough to do even a simple thing like a motherboard swap...
And so societies crumble, not from war, not from strife, but from utter stupidity as the population forgets how to build the technology that keeps it going. Rome fell in part because the infrastructure of empire -- the roads and aqueducts, the dikes and dams -- no longer were maintained, thus eliminating their advantages in terms of agriculture, sanitation and mobility over the "barbarians". I don't see current civilization doing any better if the current trends keep on keeping on.
-- Badtux the Technology Penguin
Other teams have superstars. The San Francisco Giants have a buncha overgrown kids scraped off the bottom of the barrel having fun playing a kids' game -- and whipping the ass of the overpaid superstars. What's not to like? :).
-- Badtux the Appreciative Penguin
I've done this song before -- Shannon Wright, "Portray" -- but this is a particularly well-recorded live version...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
... if one of us is chained.
The great Solomon Burke, who died back on the 10th of this month, from his 2002 album Don't Give Up On Me.
Today's video got pushed forward a few days. What brought this one up was Ranger mentioning the attitude of both Europeans and Americans towards their immigrant populations. He goes into some detail but my point is simple: Slavery is toxic to democracy. Slavery makes nations weaker, not stronger. The South lost the American Civil War because of slavery, pure and simple -- it was slavery that kept their society sick and weak, and as soon as the North found competent generals capable of taking advantage of the North's superior robustness, the end was swift -- the untold story of the end of the Confederate States of America is that the majority of their soldiers deserted before the end, armies that had over 100,000 soldiers on paper had fewer than 15,000 on the ground. The rot at the heart of the Confederacy, the black pestilence of slavery, simply caused it to collapse from within. Similarly, slavery ended Greek democracy. Sparta was destroyed by slave revolts, not by invaders, and slavery weakened the remainder of the Greek city-states enough that they were easy pickings for the Macedonian invaders of "Alexander the Great".
So go read Ranger's post for the other observations that he makes, which are important ones. But what I have to add is that we must do something about the fact that we have 20,000,000 slaves-in-all-but-name amongst us... or our own democracy is guaranteed to go the same way as Greek democracy. That is what history tells us.
-- Badtux the History Penguin
Leonard Cohen, 1985, "If It Be Your Will" from Various Positions. Not much I can say. It's Leonard Cohen.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Drifty claims that the majority of Americans are vicious, venal monsters and those of us who aren't vicious venal monsters should just secede. As much as I hate to disagree with the talented and beautiful Drifty, I have to. Because the majority of Americans, while certainly impossible to educate, aren't vicious and venal. Rather, they're willfully ignorant -- and proud of it.
They call it "faith" -- a rejection of all factual knowledge, logic and reason in favor of unthinking belief in nonsense -- and they become very upset if you attempt to use logic and reason to remedy their ignorance. They view it as a personal attack upon their core being, all of which is based around believing in nonsense with all their heart while rejecting anything that might contradict said nonsense, and wonder if the next thing you're going to do is come take their guns, Bibles, or make their kids gay marry. They literally cannot be reasoned with, because reason for the willfully ignorant is like water to a cat -- a substance which the majority of them find abhorrent and despicable. They cannot be educated because any facts which contradict their core faith in their Party leaders is rejected out of hand as "liberal lies", something which they apply even to core statistical measures of the state of the nation as published by the OECD or BLS. Your attempts to "convince" them are no more effective than attempting to convince a typical cat to walk on a leash -- it's simply not part of their core nature to listen to facts or reason, and they will fight it with every fiber of their being.
Now, granted, there are monsters out there, who joke about inflicting torment and pain upon others, who gloat when others are harmed, who view inflicting pain and killing people as fun, who laugh when they destroy something which others took years to build. And these monsters find easy pickings amongst the common people, the salt of the earth, you know, morons. But I think Drifty and many on the left misread the willfully moronic majority if they believe the willfully moronic marjority are inherently vicious. They're easy pickings for people like Bigus Dickus Cheney and their ilk. But it *is* possible for them to become embarrassed when they see enough outright brutality against fellow Americans. Otherwise the civil rights movement would have been doomed from the start rather than successful... the majority of Americans probably weren't in favor of equal rights for blacks in 1965, but the sight of all those well dressed black men and women being beat down by thugs wearing sheriff's uniforms, day after day on the evening news, simply was too appalling to ignore.
And that's the *only* way to reach the willfully moronic majority -- via their emotions. Unfortunately, the Rethuglicans have the advantage there, because their hate-filled spittle is pure emotion from the start, while those of us who try to fight hate with logic and reason... well. It just doesn't work. And the results on November 2 are likely to bear that out, sadly.
-- Badtux the Heartland Penguin
Below: A liberal tries to lead a conservative to facts and reason.
The Aislers Set was a San Francisco band from the early '00s fronted by Amy Linton that had a sort of Brit-pop sound. After a couple of albums recorded in Amy's basement and some positive critical reviews but no sales, they broke up and went their separate ways. Because only insane people would try to make a living making music today... insane people, or people who have no talent for anything else at all. Only a few bands get actual radio play and sales, and they usually suck, having a prefab regurgitated sound that is all about image and nothing about what makes music speak to the heart. So it goes...
This is "Catherine Says" off of their album How I Learned to Write Backwards...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
The Austerians still continue to insist that the solution to a depression is to cut government spending. If you do that, they say, the magic Free Market Fairy (see left) will wave her (his?) magic wand and make the depression just magically end.
Of course, the question then is, has this ever worked? Has any depression, anywhere, has ever been ended by cutting government spending? And a study of history shows that.... errr. No. None has ever been so ended. Indeed, the solution to the Great Depression was a massive *INCREASE* in government spending — as in, in 1944, government spending consumed over 80% of the U.S. GDP! And total U.S. debt then was *TWICE* what it is today as a percentage of US GDP! Clearly that destroyed the U.S. economy in 1944, which is why, err, the post-war U.S. economy was the strongest that any economy anywhere had ever been, because it had been utterly destroyed by out of control U.S. spending and U.S. debt.
Yet the Austerians still insist that at some point in the future, if we just cut government spending enough, the magical Free Market Fairy will (when? When I’m dead and buried?) wave her magic wand and POOOF! More wealth out of nowhere! Just by magic. In the meantime they continue to insist that the solution to a depression is to literally kill people -- to cut off people's food stamps, unemployment benefits, healthcare benefits, and other such government-provided programs for relieving the misery of the unemployed. Because only once all the unemployed are dead, I suppose, will we have solved the problem of unemployment. That's a rather... final... solution. But I guess that's the new Austerian slogan: "Arbeit Macht Frei durch den Schornstein". Alrighty, then!
- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
San Francisco band Halou with "Wiser", off their 2001 album of the same name. This singer is now the lead singer of another area band, Stripmall Architecture, that also has an interesting sound...
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
At least two of the liberal bloggers that I follow have now been cursed with car troubles that would be cheaply repaired if they had the slightest clue about that box on wheels that they get into every morning to go to work. As in, the parts to repair their vehicle cost less than $100, and if they went to Wal-Mart and bought the necessary tools they'd have a hard time getting above $50, yet they ended up paying over $500 to a garage to fix it. Not necessarily because the garage ripped them off, but because by the time you put a car up on the lift, remove a part, and replace it, you've used a lot of time and infrastructure that the garage could use to repair real problems, and they're going to charge you for it.
Look: The automobile is not magic. It's technology -- late 19th century technology, even. There isn't a single thing in my Jeep that a time traveler from 1920 could not fix with a few references to the service manual. He would not understand how the black boxes sparked the spark plugs and adjusted the fuel mixture, but he would know what they were doing, because there isn't a single principle underlying today's automobiles that was not known in 1920. He couldn't fix the black boxes, but he'd know to replace the black box that is attached to the spark plugs if he pulled a spark plug and didn't see a spark, even if he had no idea how that black box worked. Because spark plugs today are the same damned things they were in 1920, yo. Ain't nothin' new here that the time traveler from 1920 wouldn't figure out quickly, unlike, say, the latest personal computer attached to the Internet.
Yet I continue to read liberal bloggers who apparently haven't a clue. It doesn't take a frackin' genius to understand how cars work. All it takes is a couple of books from your local public library and a good look at the insides of your own car. By the time I was 10 years old I knew how a car worked... because I could read. Yes, read. Not because of magic. Not because I was somehow endowed with mystical powers of Mek. I *studied* it, just like I study anything else I want to learn. Because that's all it is -- learned skill. Not one I'm particularly good at (otherwise I'd have gone into the business, but I'm too darned slow at wrenching to make a living that way), but look. When my pitman arm boot got bummed up and let grease out of the tie rod end and it developed slop, I didn't pay a garage $500 to fix it. I unbolted the end at the steering box with a big crescent wrench ($10 at Wal-Mart), grabbed a big hammer ($5 at Wal-Mart), and went *WHACK*. I then loosened the nuts on the clamps that keep the tie rod end from turning in its socket, unscrewed it from its socket, screwed the new one back in to the same number of threads showing that the old one had shown, bolted everything back together, and that was that. I paid $80 for the OEM tie rod end, already had the crescent wrench, and that was all she wrote.
It doesn't take a genius to do the above, just a willingness to study the service manual to figure out how your car steers. I wasn't born knowing how a car steers, I studied it. And so I paid $80, when a garage would have charged me a minimum of $200 to do the same thing ($120 for the full retail for the part, $80 labor for the hour to whack it out and whack it back in and center the steering wheel again). Yet again and again, I see people who refuse to learn about the things they rely on in their everyday life, who insist upon making everything magic. And then they're shocked, shocked I say, when they get ripped off... but look. If you refuse to learn about the world, you will be victimized. That's just how it works. Ignorance is not an option unless you're a Republican -- and you're not a Republican, are you? Are you?!
-- Badtux the Knowledge-seeking Penguin
Tim Profitt -- the former Rand Paul volunteer who stomped on the head of a MoveOn activist -- told told local CBS station WKYT that he wants an apology from the woman he stomped. Because she hurt his back with her face as he was stomping on it, apparently (?!).
And in other news, Bill Clinton demands an apology from Monica Lewinsky for enticing him into having sex with her, and the Nazi Party demands an apology from the Jewish race for calling them racists, and Roman Polanski demands an apology from Samantha Gailey for his rape of her when she was 13 years old, and... Err. Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Slaid Cleaves sings about an irascible neighbor... "Horses and Divorces". Slaid cuts loose and yodels some Texas country blues, heh.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
... knowing that our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have resulted in a huge increase in the nation's influence in West Asia. If the nation you're talking about is Iran, that is. Which not only has a President in Iraq who spent 20 years as an honored guest of Iran, but now has a President in Afghanistan who accepts bags stuffed full of money from Iran in exchange for being a "good neighbor".
Yes indeed, the War on Terra has been good for the nation... the nation of Iran, that is. Now, granted, Iran is no threat to the United States -- they've never committed acts of terrorism against the U.S., and we have common enemies in the Sunni extremists who want to kick Shia butt as much as they want to kick American butt -- but they're definitely no friend either. The streets of Tehran are still hung with "Death to America" banners, that ought to be a clue, yo.
All this was predictable -- and predicted -- of course. Crap, Poppy Bush predicted it in 1993, which is why he didn't march on Baghdad ("we don't want Iran West in Iraq", he proclaimed). Deal being that sooner or later the U.S. is going home -- democracies aren't very good at that whole empire thing, their attention span is too short, administrations change too often as do the goals and objectives of the nation -- while Iran... well, they're still going to be there. So any idiot could predict that weak governments adjoining Iran (and any government installed by U.S. troops is by definition weak) would end up sucking up to Iran and being heavily influenced by Iran. Any idiot could predict that. Except, apparently, the idiots who run our country today. We are so, soooo fucked....
-- Badtux the Geopolitics Penguin
Hey, if ya gotta do that damned spiel every time, why not rap it? I have no idea who this dude is, but he's decidedly my hero for the day.
-- Badtux the Non-rapping Penguin
Remember, for Republicans a woman's place is not as a political activist. It's either barefoot and pregnant, or on the ground with a man's foot grinding her face into the ground. At least, that appears to be what wee Rand Paul's supporters believe...
I recently heard a Republican say, "I'm through talking." Yessiree, through talking indeed. It's all about ACTION, achtung! Brown shirts optional.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
