A spider was walking across the ceiling. The Mighty Fang and Mencken were on the case -- TMF a bit more energetically than Mencken. TMF was also complaining loudly, demanding that I go fetch the spider down for him. But penguins can't fly, so that wasn't happenin'!
-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
just toss'em into jail for the "crime" of visiting America. With no recourse to lawyer, no ability to call your embassy... yeah, this sure the fuck helps tourism, eh?
Since the New York Times will disappear it behind their paywall any time now, here's the bottom line: Domenico Salerno, an Italian citizen, arrived at Washington Dulles Airport to visit his girlfriend. And after several hours of being interrogated, when he told them he wanted to talk to the Italian embassy, an ICE officer instead made a bogus charge that Salerno was an "asylum seeker" and threw him into the gulag for asylum seekers, where he was held without charges, without recourse to a lawyer, without any contact to the outside world until his girlfriend with the help of Senator John Warner and two former immigration officials managed to find out where he was being held. “Now an innocent European, who has never broken any laws, committed any crimes, or overstayed his visa, is being held in a county jail,” his girlfriend, Caitlan Cooper wrote in an e-mail message to The New York Times last Wednesday, prompting a reporter’s inquiries. After the New York Times started asking immigration officials what was going on, higher-ups in Washington *finally* overruled the ICE gestapo agent who had interned Salerno into the ICE gulag for the crime of demanding to speak with the Italian embassy and got him on a plane back to Rome.
This is Soviet America today, people. So if you're not an American citizen, here is my advice to you: STAY AWAY. Flying into the United States today is like flying into a third world dictatorship. You will have armed goons abusing you, groping you, and humilating you. You may be thrown into prison at any time, without any reason, and without any recourse unless you have well-connected friends who can bring a U.S. Senator and the New York Times to bear on your case. I am ashamed for the nation that I was born in, which has given up its freedoms because it has become a nation of thugs and cowards and sometimes both at once. For shame, America. For shame. Except America and Americans have no shame anymore. Welcome to Soviet America, citizen! I love Big Brother. Don't you love Big Brother too? Let us all be good Sovoks and behave in a government-approved manner and dissent in a government-approved fashion and be good government-approved consumers, da!
-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
Bush and McCain. McCain and Bush. Yeppers, he's a hangin' that anchor on McCain's butt BIG-time.
I made the template a little wider so the text wasn't so scrunched up on the middle. Let me know if it's too wide for you.
-- Badtux the Blogging Penguin
Some folks say, "why are we talking about health insurance rather than health care?" The problem is simple: we have to pay for health care somehow. It isn't free. It doesn't grow on trees. Someone has to pay for it.
The problem is that health care currently takes 15% of the U.S. GDP, but sick people do not make 15% of the U.S. GDP. So requiring sick people to pay the full costs of health care is impossible -- you cannot pour ten gallons of dollar bills out of a five-gallon bucket. Thus health insurance -- paying the costs of the health care system today, so that it is available to you when you get sick tomorrow.
The problem with health insurance is that the current situation, where we have three different health insurance systems -- one for those who qualify for government insurance (Medicare, Medicaid, VA, etc.), one for those who qualify for private insurance, and one (or rather lack of one) for those who are uninsured -- is not working. The government insurance programs account for 50% of the U.S. health care spending but are being cut back to the point where doctors and hospitals are refusing to see those patients, and because only poor people (for the most part) qualify for those programs (other than Medicare), the people getting these services don't have sufficient political clout to assure sufficient funding.
The problem with the private insurance part of the equation is that private health insurance is becoming unavailable for increasing numbers of Americans, both because of cost and because insurance companies simply won't write insurance for large groups of people. Insurance companies today are in a death spiral of increasing costs and decreasing participation. To counter that, they keep kicking sick or potentially sick people out. If you forbid them from doing so, they must raise their rates even more, and even more people become uninsured.
Finally, there are the uninsured. First of all, what little health care the uninsured get in emergency rooms is generally being paid for by the insured, causing the price of private health insurance to go up, causing more uninsured, causing the health insurance death spiral to become even worse. And generally if someone who is uninsured becomes seriously ill, he or she is dead. Hospitals and doctors will not provide surgical care for those who require, e.g., a kidney transplant in order to live, and the uninsured have no way to pay for long term care such as kidney dialysis. Even insulin for diabetes, hardly the most high-tech or deadly of illnesses, is hard to come by for the uninsured, one lady of my acquaintance had to make the rounds of various charities every month to round up enough insulin to survive another month, which became even more difficult once she lost her eyesight due to the disease not being properly managed due to lack of consistent monitoring by a medical professional. The problem is that we still provide acute care in emergency rooms -- i.e., we keep them from dying -- but we don't provide long term care to keep the uninsured healthy. This has two problems. First one is social -- people do not willingly accept a death penalty for something not under their control, and the result is social unrest and disorder. The second is that, by providing a reservoir of disease carriers in the population and then providing just enough care to kick back a disease but not cure it, we're causing the creation of drug-resistant diseases that soon enough will start killing the insured as well as the uninsured.
In the end, the only way to fund health care in a way that guarantees that some level of health care will always be available as needed is if everybody pays. Everybody benefits from health care, after all, even those who are currently well will become sick at some point in the future and will require it. We can call it a "health care tax", a "Medicare payroll deduction", or an "insurance fee" (if we adopt a Swiss-style mandate system), but whatever we call it, everybody benefits from having health care available to them when they need it, so everybody should pay. Whether it is a Medicare For All scheme paid for via an increase of the Medicare payroll tax that guarantees that all Americans can participate in Medicare, or whether it is a "don't call it a health care tax" mandate that all Americans purchase health insurance (and regulation of said health insurers to make sure that they are paying for the care they're supposed to pay for), any insurance scheme that does not require all people to pay into the funding pool ends up with a lot of dead people, in the end. That's just how the economics works out -- as we're finding out, slowly but surely. This is simple math in the end, like 1+1. And 1+1 always equals 2 no matter how much we'd like it to be 3, or 5, or something else entirely. The answer always comes out the same -- unless everybody pays, a bunch of people end up dying.
-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin
If you're on your own land, doing your own thing, government can demolish your home and steal your land, put you in jail for objecting to it, and then charge you tens of thousands of dollars for what they've done to you.
I've had dealings with folks like Theron Saluteen who live like that. Generally they have problems that keep them from participating in society as a whole, and just want to be left alone. They harm nobody, they aren't out there robbing or killing or raping anything, they're just doing their own thing. They're not pretty, but so what.
But none of that matters in Soviet America, where if you are not a proper little Sovak consumer who behaves the way Party ideology says you must behave, why, ve haff ways of dealing with zat, da? Like bulldozing your home, hauling you away to jail, and charging you $40,000 for the privilege of having your home destroyed.
So it goes, in Soviet America, where we pretend we are free -- as long as we behave in government-approved manner at all times.
-- Badtux the Sovok Penguin
Hundreds, and probably over a thousand innocent Iraqi civilians have been killed by U.S. troops running checkpoints. And what is the attitude of the U.S. high command here?
"If these fucking Hajjis learned to drive, this shit wouldn't happen."
That wasn't a random cracker off the street. That was a full bird colonel, Col. William Rochelle, commander of an entire infantry brigade of 5,000 men.
So what why do we have these checkpoints, anyhow? It's not because they're somehow critical to defeating the Iraqi insurgency. We can't defeat an insurgency in a foreign and alien land using young soldiers who don't know the language and don't know the culture who are led by leaders who believe the answer to bad driving in the Middle East is to make them all into clones of Kansas City drivers. The answer that apologists for our occupation of Iraq make is this:
"If we didn't have checkpoints, thousands more Iraqis would die from suicide bombers."
And if wishes were ponies, we'd have a pony in every young girl's house!
Given that the checkpoints are a) demonstrably not stopping car bombers (and you better believe that if a checkpoint *ever* caught a carbomber, General Petroleum would call a press conference and announced that it was made with Iranian bombs and President Darth Cheney would immediately order airstrikes against Iran), and b) demonstrably have killed hundreds innocent Iraqis, I prefer to go with what can be seen and observed, rather than hypotheticals like "if wishes were ponies we'd have ponies in all young girls' bedrooms" or "if checkpoints didn't exist we'd have thousands more dead from car bombs." Sorry. It's that whole "reality" habit that I just can't kick no matter how much delusional thinking I'm exposed to -- I mean, who should I believe, your hypotheticals or my own two eyeballs?!
As for the notion that COIN ("counter-insurgency") makes any sense for the U.S. Army in the first place, the fact remains that we are an occupier in a foreign and alien land that we don't understand, and thus any sort of anti-insurgency operations conducted by our own military are, by definition, futile. Insurgencies are defeated via counterintelligence, not via military force. Even Joseph Stalin understood that one -- after the Red Army failed utterly to put down the Ukrainian insurgency after WWII, Stalin pulled them out and sent in the NKVD secret police and special forces, who then infiltrated the insurgency until if three insurgents met, two were probably NKVD moles. That strategy terminated the insurgency within four years. And note that the Red Army had the advantage that Ukrainians all knew and understood Russian due to hundreds of years of Russian rule, and due to the hundreds of years of Russian rule had basically the same culture as the Ukrainians -- neither of which applies to our Iraq adventure, where most Iraqis do not understand English and the average American has no more knowledge of Iraqi culture than he has of Martian culture.
Now, that said, there *is* a way to win against an insurgency using conventional military forces. It is the way that the British used against the Boer in the Boer War, or that the U.S. used against the Filipinos in the Filipino-American War. It is best described by Joseph Stalin, once again: "No people, no problem." I.e., genocide. Kill all military age young men, gather up all the women and children into concentration camps, and voila. Of course, then the women and children are dependent upon the logistical tail of your army for their food, water, housing, and clothing, which is most definitely not up to the task of providing these necessities for 20,000,000 people, so after a few months you end up with 15,000,000 corpses, but hey, what's a few million dead wogs, wot? We killed about a million Filipinos out of a population of five million on Luzon Island, mostly via starvation and disease in the concentration camps, but hey, we won, and that's all that matters, what's a little genocide amongst friends anyhow, right? Right?
So yeah, we could win in Iraq via military force -- if we wanted to surpass Nazi Germany as the biggest committer of genocide in world history. Is that what you want? If so... well, there's not much I need to say about that, hmm?
-- Badtux the War Penguin
The Mighty Fang and Mencken are fascinated, fascinated I say, by the downstairs neighbors as they prepare to grill some steaks on their outdoor grill. At least they aren't drooling on the neighbors... starving to death is not their problem.
-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
Yes, folks, that mighty supervillain The Gay Agenda (see left) has prevailed over the forces of Jebus and soon will achieve his villainous goal of (gasp) EQUAL RIGHTS FOR GAY PEOPLE (OMG! The horror! The horror I say!). First, the California Supreme Court says the “right to form a family relationship” applied to all Californians regardless of sexuality. Then that treasonous Governator sez, I respect the Court’s decision and as Governor, I will uphold its ruling. Also, as I have said in the past, I will not support an amendment to the constitution that would overturn this state Supreme Court ruling (Governator! *BAD* Republican! Bad! Bad!). And then to top it all off, a fine patriotic American principal at Ponce de Leon High School in Florida was sued because, well:
Ponce de Leon High School's principal David Davis admitted under oath that he had banned students from wearing any clothing or symbols supporting equal rights for gay people. Davis also testified that he believed rainbows were "sexually suggestive" and would make students unable to study because they'd be picturing gay sex acts in their mind.This fine upstanding upholder of Jebusland morality lost, and now must allow students to wear rainbow clothing and such in support of (gasp) equal rights for gay people (the horror! Oh the horror!).
But never fear, our brave custodian of the moral compass of America, Senator John "Box Turtle", Cornyn, has the answer for preventing man-on-box-turtle marriages (which are an inevitible, inevitable I say, result of allowing gay marriage). To whit, his already-rejected amendment to the U.S. Constitution. But now that 40 million Americans are now victims of that vile Gay Agenda who wants (gasp) equal rights for all Americans (horror!), he feels confident that he can, he can I say, get his amendment passed and thereby keep those niggers faggots in their place. And if that doesn't work, why, he can dig up Bull Connor's body and re-animate it to go whup on some nigger faggot ass, eh? I mean, how dare those horrible darkies faggots think they should have the same rights as good upstanding white heterosexual Americans and Republicans! (Err, given the number of Republicans found boffing folks of the same sex in public restrooms and elsewhere recently, 'Republicans' has to be put separately in that statement, y'know?!).
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
It has been brought to my attention that, for some cat owners, this is "shedding season". I am stumped as to what that means. Does that have something to do with building sheds?
There has been an insinuation that "shedding season" may instead have something to do with cats shedding their fur coats. I categorically reject that insinuation. I vacuum my apartment without fail every week. And every week, I vacuum up a full vacuum cleaner canister of cat fur, regardless of time of year. It is my belief that The Mighty Fang and Mencken, if there were a cat Olympics, would win at least a bronze in the Shorthair Shedding category. But season? Bwhahah! All year long is shedding season for these guys!
-- Badtux the Furry Penguin (but it's not MY fur!)
Spamford Wallace hit with yet *another* judgement for spamming.
As if he cares. Wherever he is, he is "judgement-proof" -- no fixed assets that can be attached, all monies funneled out into places where the law can't touch them.
In this case, Spamford spammed porn links to minors. He should be in jail for that. But I supposed the Department of inJustice is too busy going after sick people to worry about little things like that...
So if anybody knows where Spamford Wallace is, please forward that information to MySpace's lawyers. And if anybody's kid got a MySpace spam from Spamford with a link to a porno site, please file a complaint with the Department of inJustice. Because this is one SOB who deserves a little inJustice, preferably with a 300 pound cell-mate named "Bubba" who loves to repeat, "Squeal like a pig!".
-- Badtux the Much-spammed Penguin
As I mentioned in my previous post, there are over 600,000 soldiers and Marines back from Iraq and Vietnam who need help. But never fear, Dear Leader feels their pain. To honor the sacrifice of US soldiers and Marines killed, maimed, blinded, disembowelled, decapitated, castrated, rendered insane, and otherwise shattered by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is he going to fight for full funding for the VA? For more money for treating PTSD and better processing of disability payments for people whose brains were forever ruined by being rattled around in their skulls like a buncha marbles in a beach ball?
Uh, no. He is going to... err... ah... give up golf.
And penguins weep :-(.
-- Badtux the Unsnarky Penguin
Folks say "well, sure, the Iraq war has been hard on Iraqis, but at least there aren't hundreds of thousands of American dead." Well, true enough. Modern body armor will keep our soldiers from dying. But 620,000 soldiers and Marines -- or roughly 1/3rd of those deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan -- come back and end up either disabled or suffering PTSD. To quote a report on the topic:
According to an April 2008 study by the Rand Corporation, 300,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans currently suffer from post traumatic stress disorder or major depression. Another 320,000 suffer from traumatic brain injury, physical brain damage. A majority are not receiving help from the Pentagon and VA system which are more concerned with concealing unpleasant facts than they are with providing care.
And from the Bush Administration, all you hear is that adequate VA care for these disabled is "pork", thus why they're fighting the latest war funding act which calls for full funding for the VA as well as full funding of the GI Bill to pay for college for veterans. They call this "pork". And say we can't afford this -- the minimum that we owe to veterans for sending them into harm's way in a useless war. For shame, George W. Bush and Republicans. For shame. Why do you hate our veterans so much? Is it because they're heros, and you're just a draft dodging dry drunk whose daddy's friends bought you the Presidency but you will always, forever and ever, be a failure? Or is it just that you're an evil mean-spirited dry drunk? I suppose we'll never know...
-- Badtux the Unsnarky Penguin
So the federal Department of Scaring The Crap Out Of People About Drugs Big Pharma Can't Patent issues warnings about how that reefer stuff can cause you to, like, get depressed and psychotic and stuff. Uhm, no. That's not what the research said. The research said there was correlation, not causation. In other words, the research says that folks with mental illnesses tend to self-medicate with marijuana, not that the marijuana causes the mental illnesses. Now, marijuana obviously doesn't help depression, given that the patients surveyed were still depressed after they did their weed fix, thus marijuana use isn't the best route to take if you're depressed. But let's get real. This shit about "OMG! ALL YOUS HAIRS GONNA FALLS OUT AND YOUS GONNA TURN INTO A PSYCO IF YOU SMOKE POT!" just makes people laugh because of its sheer ridiculousnes. Reefer madness, indeed -- on the part of the government's Department of Warring Against Drugs Big Pharma Can't Patent anyhow.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
I'm thinking about a list. There are so many great movies I remember from my young penguinhood that could not be made today. For example, the original Bad News Bears with Walter Matthau, which had him as a hard drinking hard smoking hard swearing washed up old drunk corrupting a buncha little kids. The morality police would have a hissy fit. Which is why the remake of the Bad News Bears totally sucked, all the vinegar got sucked out of it and left nothing but treacle.
Another one is the movie I just watched from NetFlix -- a 14 year old Jodie Foster in The Little Girl who Lives Down the Lane. I had seen this on television many, many years ago and remembered a brilliant performance by Jodie Foster as the lead character. I was probably at an age back then when a crush on Jodie Foster wouldn't have made me the equivalent of the Martin Sheen character in the film, except she was so obviously out of my league intellectually and experience-wise (frankly she scared the penguin poop outta me) that it wouldn't have even occurred to me. Out of curiousity I added it to my queue to see how it held up as an adult. If anything, it was even more creepy and impressive. There are some places where you have to suspend disbelief, but Jodie's acting at age 14 was as impressive as I remembered. Martin Sheen is appropriately sleazy as the pedophile, and the love story was tastefully done (and because this is the European version, we got to see Jodie's older sister's backside, something that the television version of course cut out). But it couldn't be made today. First, there's no explicit blood and violence. A psychological thriller today has to have blood and violence. This is a psychological thriller, not a slasher flick, and moves more like a character-driven play than an action flick. Secondly, the notion of a girl surviving by herself would not be allowed. And the notion of a thirteen year old girl as a murderer would similarly not be allowed, 13 year old girls are required to be innocents in today's movies. And the notion of a thirteen year old and a sixteen or seventeen year old being lovers would not be allowed, a girl of that age in movies today must be virginal, they're not allowed to have sex until they're juniors or seniors in high school (sixteen or seventeen). The studios would take one look at the script, say "This would get us protests from all the tighty righties under the sun", and axe it.
So what's your list of films that would never be allowed to be made today? (And the fact that we can even make such lists says more about America today than I care to think about)...
-- Badtux the Film Penguin
The Mighty Catloaf and Mencken chillin' on the futon. Yeah, I finally took that natty old quilt off the futon and sent it to its great reward in the trashbin down the driveway (it had pieces of cloth pulling out and was losing its stuffing thanks to all the wear and tear of the cats using it as their personal playtoy).
And yeah, I know this is the third cat pic I've posted in the past three days. It's my birthday and I'll cat blog if I want to. So there :P.
-- Badtux the Cat-blogging Penguin
And what has happened in a year? Nothing. I am one year fatter. One year older. One year closer to the day when I will be thrown out on the street like a used-up tool, discarded, left to die in the gutter because my owners no longer have any use for me. One more year of watching this nation, which once had a dream regardless of its many, many flaws, slip towards nightmare and collapse, dreams dead or twisted into lies that terrify in the night. And the world slowly winds down as resources are exhausted and life becomes harder every year, until in the end humanity eats itself. Will there be mankind in the end? Perhaps. Perhaps. A few hunter-gatherers living in the poisoned ruins of civilization, dodging the dead zones where radioactivity renders the land unfit for life or poisons in the waters kill anybody who drinks from them. And maybe some small child shall wander and come to the ruins of a building and ask his father, "What is this, daddy?" and his father shall only be able to shake his head and say "Once upon a time we were a better people."
Or maybe it will be only cockroaches in a poisoned blasted land, until some billions of years hence, the burning-out Sun expands and turns the burned out husk of the Earth into vapor.
Or maybe only dust, on a radioactive and poisonous planet incapable of life. In the end it really does not matter, because I will be dead. I have no delusions about that. And once you're dead, that's it. Game over. Gone to dust, like every other animal when it dies. And a hundred years from now, no one will remember my name, or care. That is reality, cold and harsh and implacable, a reality that many flee from and hide behind lies to avoid facing. But so it goes. Penguins aren't much on the whole lying thing. Not many lies on an ice floe in the South Pacific, just sun, and wind, and reality.
-- Badtux the Gloomy Penguin
I finally picked up a DVM switch to switch my DVI widescreen monitor between my Macbook and my Ubuntu Linux server. It's a Belkin switch with two cables and a little remote clicky button so that you don't need a big bulky switchbox on your desk, it hides down below by your server.
There is only one problem: my beautiful little slimline Apple aluminum keyboard didn't work! I couldn't use alt-F3 to get to screen 3, and none of my letters typed right! Indeed, I got some numbers out of them, but the rest... nada.
A bit of investigation on the Ubuntu forums found the problem. It appears that the Linux kernel included with Ubuntu 8.04 "Hardy Heron" misinterprets the thin aluminum keyboard as an Apple iBook keyboard. Well, my BIOS is set to default to turn the numlock selection on upon system boot so that the number pad works on a regular PC keyboard. But iBooks apparently map the number pad to the main keyboard, since they don't have a number pad (duh!).
Solution: Hit what is the "NumLock" function key on an iBook (F6) *twice* to kick the keyboard out of "iBook keypad mode", and your keyboard then works properly under Ubuntu "Hardy". Except for the function keys. To make the function keys work, you must hold down the Fn key (below F13). Otherwise you get the "special" Apple functions. So to switch to console #1, I hold down control-option-fn-F1 and voila, I'm at the CLI console #1. And so forth and so on.
-- Badtux the Geek Penguin
My little Hoover Steam-Vac does a better job of cleaning carpets than it has any right to do, given its small size. Things I've found out: Pre-treat any stains you want gone. Go over any stained areas you want picked up multiple times. Go over main traffic areas several times. Do one room at a time because else you will drive yourself crazy -- it takes about four tanks of water in its tiny little reservoir to do a room, two tanks with soap, two tanks for rinse. Once this is all done, the carpet is pretty much as clean as you can get it with a little machine, you'll need a big truck-borne machine to do any better (i.e., hire a professional for $100+).
Shower doors suck penguin penises. I'm thinking about taking them off and storing them, and putting a shower curtain up there instead. All they do is require constant cleaning (to get the soap scum and hard water spots off of them) and the lower track collects mold and mildew.
Next up: Cleaning out the garage. Wish me luck. And then once all that's done, I'll come back and de-clutter -- get rid of things I don't need or at least move them out to storage. And then I'll be ready to face the next year of my life with a clean nest atop my iceberg...
-- Badtux the Spring Cleaning Penguin
Amazon finally got it to me. Best way I can describe it is "creepy industrial electronica shoe-gazer dance emo". By which I'm talking about the new Portishead album, Third.
Now, I won't lie to you. This isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea. There is a lot going on here, and if you prefer your music to be simple and straight-forward, it will seem like an impenetrable mush to you. But if you love playing with sounds, this is a must-hear.
-- Badtux the Music Penguin
Someone predicted, "She is in the race until the convention, in case Obama somehow becomes indisposed."
Indisposed? INDISPOSED?! Like Bobby Kennedy became "indisposed"? I'm starting to get a chill down my back here, folks. The right wingers have always been rattling their sabres about how the Clintons were murderers and stuff (Vince Foster, anybody?). But given that the only way Hillary can win now is if Obama dies... and she isn't dropping out... what does that say?
I wish I hadn't thought that :-(.
-- Badtux the "Oh shit" Penguin
Mencken investigates this bizarre catnip-smelling thing that was being pulled in front him him via a thread. After sniffing it a couple of times, he dropped it and walked off, curiousity satisfied. Mencken isn't exactly the playing type. Actually, he hates pretty much everybody and everything. Well, except when he wants his tummy rubbed, in which case he hops on my lap and rolls over and lolls ridiculously, dignity forgotten in his ecstasy at getting his full body massage. But hey, a curmudgeon can't be a curmudgeon *all* the time, right?
-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin
Dear Department of Vaterland Security: you're supposed to be protecting us from *terrorists*, not *tourists*. Note to DHS staffers. The second letter in "tourists" is an *o*, not an *e*, and "tourist" only has one "r". I realize that since you're a buncha bucktooth foulmouth backwoods cretins you pronounce "terrorist" the same way as "tourist", but believe me, they're not the same thing. "Terrorists" bring bombs. "Tourists" bring money. Money good. Bombs bad. See? Terrorist bring bomb, terrorist bad. Tourist bring money, tourist good. Got it? Alrighty, then!
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Hot on the heels of the discovery that the border vigilantes talking about how we need to kill all the Mexicans trying to cross the border happen to associate with neo-Nazis, we now have the KKKandidate. Who says we should vote for her because of her support from, quote, "working, hard-working Americans, white Americans". As vs. those shifty lazy niggers and spics, presumably.
No, not talking about David Duke's wife. Talking about, sadly, Hillary Clinton. Who has, like, just totally jumped the shark.
Hillary, give it up. You've lost whatever dignity you ever had, it's time to go before you become a total joke. Sorry, that's just how it is :-(.
-- Badtux the Appalled Penguin
Look, God. I didn't ask for much. Just a minor smiting or two of our overgrown man-child who serves as President in order to chasten his smirking dry-drunk ass a little bit. Maybe a sinkhole to swallow his pig farm in Crawford while he's not there, maybe one of his Air Force One jets catch on fire while he's not in it, maybe one of his slut daughters get photographed doing a little naked girl-on-girl action at a tittie bar, that kinda thing, y'know?
But God, please note that Crawford is spelled C R A W F O R D, *not* Daisetta. You missed, you silly goofball! Please, please, PLEASE get your aim right next time, okay? Because Texas's biggest asshole really deserves Texas's biggest sinkhole, y'know?
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
Yeppers, I now have the 64-bit version of the latest Ubuntu Linux up and going. It's now serving data and print services to my Macbook via netatalk and ipp. Setting up print sharing was easy -- just use the standard printer configuration tool that is in the System menu. Setting up netatalk was a PITA because the standard netatalk configuration doesn't support SSL passwords and the latest MacOS Leopard will no longer do plaintext passwords. In addition, by default avahi isn't set up to advertise Apple shares via Bonjour, so the Linux server didn't appear in the left network servers area of the Mac Finder. So I followed the directions here to re-compile a netatalk with SSL support and enable Apple share advertising via avahi.
So why use a Linux box rather than hook a big external hard drive up to my Apple Airport Extreme? Basically, two reasons: Performance, and redundancy. My Linux box is a big dual-core 64-bit server-class box with a ton of memory and big server-class SATA drives RAID'ed together. So I get both high performance, and high data availability out of it -- if a drive dies, my data doesn't. That doesn't apply to a something hooked to the Airport Extreme. My Linux box also has big fans that whoosh lots of air through it, so it never overheats. That, alas, is not the case with the Apple Airport Extreme, which has no fan at all and thus overheats if you breathe hard on it.
The downside, of course, is that it's a big-ass box and uses a ton of power (mostly because I have a couple terabytes of hard drive space in the thing). I probably ought to shut it down when I'm not using it, and just power it up when I'm at home. But that would require that I keep a monitor and keyboard connected to it, which isn't usually the case -- usually it just sits under my desk quietly purring to itself handling file and print requests. With the last Linux install I had on it (Ubuntu 6.06), it just sat under there chuckling away for a full *year* without any reboots or any downtime at all. Can't beat that!
-- Badtux the Geeky Penguin
What good does it do to whack TorrentSpy for $111 million when a) the company isn't in the United States to begin with, and thus b) the chances of getting any money from it are... bwahahahah!
Oh well, the MPAA never had any sense to begin with. They're clinging to an obsolete business model for dear life. Though at least they have the decency to sell entire 90+ minute movies for $15 or less, unlike the record companies, who have been trying to rip people off for 45 minutes of music for $15 or more for the past twenty years.
-- Badtux the Movie-renting Penguin
Border vigilantes whining about the darkie menace and how we must kill all the darkies who want to enter America in order to keep them from contaminating our nation's vital bodily fluids have... neo-Nazi connections.
Color this penguin black, white, yellow, and unsurprised.
-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin
My answer: I doubt it.
Problem is, there's plenty of proof that most Americans want lies. Else they wouldn't believe in invisible sky demons and invisible spirits, which the majority of Americans do believe in, because believing in these things gives them comfort that they're more than just jumped-up monkeys with bad fur and delusions of grandeur, and that there's more to their pathetic lives of quiet desperation than eating, drinking, sleeping, fucking, pissing, shitting, and fighting. Reality of course is that the human race is monkeys with bad fur and delusions of grandeur, and all this "God" crap is just lies invented and willfully grasped by the majority of people in order to give their pathetic useless monkey selves "meaning" other than the fact that some day they, too, shall be worm food. But that truth is harsh and humbling, and the politician who grasps that the people want lies will always come in ahead of the politician who believes that the people want truth. Because we don't want truth. Truth is cold and harsh and merciless, while lies are warm and comforting and give our lives meaning.
Thus lies. The problem with the Bush administration is that they forgot one slight problem with lies -- when you lie, you should lie about things that cannot be easily verified. Like, for example, if you're going to lie about some sky demon that nukes cities and strikes down the first-born of an entire nation, make him an invisible sky demon who lives far, far away in an invisible place that nobody can get to without dying. That way nobody can verify your information (well, not in a way that matters, anyhow :-). Same deal goes with stuff like "trickle-down economics". Sure, it's a lie. But it's a lie that requires advanced statistics to prove is a lie, and it's always possible to say "well, it just hasn't trickled down yet, but it will, it will!" Thing is, the Busheviks have been telling so many lies about things so obviously not true -- "Saddam has WMD!" "Mission Accomplished!" "The Surge is Working!" -- that people are refusing to listen to the lies anymore. While we monkeys do love our lies, we like our lies to not be so obviously lies, Mr. Bush! GAH!
-- Badtux the Lie Penguin
