Know your dwarfs

I thought it might be helpful to have a guide to the Republican dwarf-tossing contest oops "primary" contest with the main contestants err candidates. So here we go...

#1: Creepy Dwarf. Creepy Dwarf is best known for his creepy fudge packing exploits. Also for putting his dog on top of his car while on a long vacation trip and exporting several hundred thousand jobs to India and China, which endears him greatly to voters in India and China. Hobby: Whining about people who point out he's running against his very own Obamneycare health care plan.

#2: Frothy Dwarf. Of the various candidates in this dwarf-tossing contest, spends the most time proclaiming how much he loves God and thus is most likely to rape your boy-child if left alone with him in an empty room. Hobbies: Fantasizing about man-on-dog sex, and making children cry.

#3: Goldy Dwarf. Goldy Dwarf is kinda old and stiff and does a lot of ranting at kids about how the only real money is gold coins, which totally baffles them because if you try spending gold coins at a supermarket the clerks just look at you as if you're deranged. The kids like him though 'cause he's, like, totally down with smoking pot. Hobby: Running for President.

#4: Grumpy Dwarf. He's grumpy. He's vindictive. He's ugly. He's best known for shutting down the government because the President made him ride in the back of the bus, and divorcing one of his many wives for the character flaw of having cancer. And for his current wife, Caligula the Impaler, a cyborg kill-bot from the Andromeda galaxy, best known for her helmet of gold disguised as "hair". Hobby: Putting coal in children's Christmas stockings.

#5: Dopey Dwarf. He's not the sharpest tool in the tool shed. Best known for wearing Heath Ledger's jacket while ranting about the evils of Teh Ghey, and having totally MAH-velous hair. And oh, he's not gay. Really. Not at all. No way, no how. Rumors about the size of his closet are just totally wrong, yessiree. Hobby: Looking at self in mirror.

#6: Crazy Dwarf. Along with Frothy Dwarf, spends much of her time talking about voices in her head that told her to run for office, and has the crazy eyes to prove it. Like Dopey Dwarf, spends much time ranting about the evils of Teh Ghey. Married to a man by the name of Marcus, who minces and prances and wiggles his hips when he walks and who is totally not gay. Really. Hobby: Holding conversations with the voices in her head.

#7: Oily Dwarf. His family's oil company has bankrolled his campaign. Also wears magic underwear like Creepy Dwarf and is former leader of Utah, a theocratic nation somewhere in the Middle East between Iran and Iraq that like Iran is ruled by an unelected religious elite that uses elected officials as figureheads to disguise their power. Hobby: Politics.

#8: Flaky Dwarf. Failed one-term governor of a small corrupt banana republic somewhere in South America, where he lost his re-election primary campaign to a dude who capers around in the woods wearing a white bedsheet. Biggest highlight of his gubernatorial career: receiving foreign dignitaries in the governor's mansion while wearing bathrobe and fuzzy slippers. Hobby: Making passionate speeches to an audience of three in supporters' living room.

And finally, gone but not forgotten:

Doughy Dwarf. Best known for taking a mediocre pizza company, and making it into a mediocre pizza company. Hobby: Feeling up women.

These, apparently, are the best men that a major political party can find to run for office here in the USA. Or as Jazzbumpa is so fond(?) of saying: WASF.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Young grass

Youngster Sierra Hull from Tennessee plays "From Now On" at a bluegrass festival. She's now attending Berklee on scholarship getting the other half of her music education, the half where she learns WTF it is that she's been doing by ear for the past ten years of her life, though she could probably play the bluegrass circuit full time and make a decent living at it. But she and Sarah Jarosz aren't interested in doing the burn out quick and stupid thing that the pop tarts like Britney do. I guess bluegrass don't make ya dumb like pop, yo.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Inflation targeting in a 0% realm

There has been a proposal floated to set a Fed inflation target tied to unemployment. The upside is that this could be done simply via a vote of the Federal Reserve board, since this is within the purview of the authorizing legislation for the Federal Reserve. The downside is that it wouldn't work.

Look: I can see why the idea appeals to some people. It completely side-steps the legislative log-jam in Congress. The problem, however, is this: How is the Fed going to create inflation when it already has reduced real interest rates to 0%? Once you hit the 0% boundary, you're basically stuck -- you can't reduce real interest rates below that, because people simply aren't going to pay banks to keep their money in the bank. They just won't. They'll stash their money under mattresses instead, and at that point you're talking about bank collapses and a massive deflationary spiral and a world of hurt.

Now I hear the acolytes of Milton Friedman crying, "what about helicopter drops?!" But what we've seen over the past three years is that helicopter drops -- the Federal Reserve printing money with all the abandon of a Wiemar Republic finance minister -- only accomplishes creating inflation in China and in oil prices. That's because the money gets into the consumer's pocket and the consumer either spends it in China -- since pretty much all he wants to buy is in China -- or he spends it on gasoline to get to work -- since demand for gasoline is inelastic (you don't have any choice but to burn it to get to work) the oil companies can simply increase their prices to suck that money right back out of the workers pockets, and there's nothing that workers can do about it, if they want to work they *have* to drive in the 98% of America that has no functional mass transit system. Then once the oil companies get it, what do they do with it? Well, they either spend it overseas -- which is no help at all to America and Americans -- or they stash it under (virtual) mattresses where it effective disappears from the economy -- again doing nothing to employ the 20%+ real unemployed Americans, and until you get a significant number of those Americans re-employed you *can't* see significant wage inflation, because there's simply too much supply and not enough demand for workers.

So you can't lower interest rates right now, and you can't print money, so how could the Fed create a realistic expectation of inflation? Answer: They can't. All that would happen if the Fed made such an announcement would be widespread laughter, because anybody who's serious knows that Keynes may have been wrong about a lot of thing, but he was utterly correct about what happens at the 0% boundary -- at the 0% boundary monetary policy becomes utterly ineffective, and you must then rely on fiscal policy (i.e., the government directly buying or hiring to create employment in America for Americans) to soak up the surplus workforce, trigger wage inflation, and get things to the point where monetary policy *could* be effective.

Which, given that we're currently in the grips of an Austerian religious ideology which holds that fiscal stimulus is evil, means we are seriously, totally fucked.

-- Badtux the WASF Penguin

Who is this dude?

Obama finds his balls, makes recess appointments to NLRB and CFPB.

But having done this, I'm sure he re-pawned his balls to Joe's Pawn Shop, where they'd been sitting in a back room since his inauguration in January 2009. We'll see, though.

-- Badtux the Baffled(*) Penguin

(*) Baffled by a Democrat showing more courage than a limp waffle, that is, since this is an event that happens perhaps once per decade.

Many crosses

Tom Russell, "Crosses of San Carlos", off his 2009 album Blood And Candle Smoke. The voice of a man who's been around the block a few times and is reporting back to us what he found out there.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The dwarfs

Well, it appears that Creepy and Frothy are the winners in Iowa, with Goldy slightly behind. Grumpy, Crazy, and Dopey are well behind. And of course Doughy already dropped out.

Frankly, I wouldn't leave my boy-child alone with Creepy *or* Frothy. They both have that deranged look to their eyes that makes me think leaving my kid alone with them would be about as safe as leaving my kid alone with a Catholic priest. As for Goldy, I think he'd just bore the kid to death talking about how gold is pretty and should be the only thing accepted as money. Wow, so now I'm evaluating potential Republican presidential candidates on the Pedobear Scale? Wow. Just wow.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Done him wrong blues

The band is HoneyHoney, a sleazy-lookin' dude from Massachusetts and a beauty from Ohio making some honkey-tonk soundin' music that Hank Williams Sr. coulda smiled and nodded at. Thing is, they really didn't set out to make country music, they were going to be an indie band like the White Stripes. It just sorta happened, except what they do isn't Nashville so country doesn't want them any more than indie wants them.

This is "Angel of Death" off their brand new album Billy Jack. Enjoy.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Religion and the end of empires

One of the interesting things I note, looking through history, is that the end of empires corresponds with a huge resurgence in religion. As the Roman Empire was winding down, you had a tremendous religious fervor that resulted in Arianism, Nestorianism, Pelagianism, Macedonians, and other sects/cults, and the reaction of the Church against them, and the entire empire became embroiled in the question of what was acceptable doctrine and what was heresy. The Byzantines, the Russian Empire, even the Soviet Empire if you consider Soviet Communism to be a religion (which I do, since it was faith-based rather than fact-based and became even more faith-based as the empire crumbled towards the end), in all of these reason gave way to faith in an ideology and the worse things got, the more people double down on that whole faith thing. Whether it was praying for God to smite the Vandals at the gates or fervently believing that the next five year plan would surely bring Soviet industry to a higher level than Western industry despite the fact that Soviet industry couldn't even build a crappy 8085 yet, much less the snazzy new 80486 that Intel had just shipped, wishful thinking replaced any realistic assessment of what was happening and what to do about it.

So, did it work? Uhm. Do you need to ask? Instead of drilling with spears and shields and then marching out and smiting Vandals, the citizens of Rome instead huddled inside their city and prayed to God to smite the invaders. Yeah, that worked out well for them, didn't it? Instead of dumping their crufty ideology and opening up their economy, the Soviets doubled down on ideological purity -- a friend who was an engineer in their missile program during the 1980's noted to me that he wasn't even able to read Western scientific journals unless they'd been vetted for ideological purity by Communist party monitors and half the time so many pages were missing, cut out by the censors, that the journal was useless. Yeah, that really worked out well for them, didn't it?

So now I note another empire devolving into religious fervor -- I mean, what else can you call the collection of religious nutcases that are the so-called "serious" candidates on the Republican side of the aisle? Santorum surging, indeed (giggle!). Thing is, it was predictable. When the American Empire lost its first war in Vietnam -- defeated by a buncha pajama-wearin' gooks in flip-flops, for cryin' out loud -- the rise of something like Reaganism, a faith with no factual backing, was as sure to happen as the shocked withdrawal of the Roman citizenry into religious fervor after the disaster of the Battle of Adrianople. When events seem too huge and horrifying for people to confront and do something about, for some reason they react by withdrawing from the realm of reason and descending into the chasm of wishful thinking, where faith substitutes for fact. And alongside secular Reaganism that rejected reason arose a Christian fundamentalism that in turn rejected reason (despite the fact that no main-line religion rejects reason, even the Catlicks give lip service to reason). The merger of the two was inevitable -- when you have two religious beliefs with such power to explain why things are wrong (i.e., you just haven't prayed hard enough to God / the Free Market Fairy, an explanation which can be used *FOR ANY PROBLEM* with no reasoning required), it became inevitable that the two would end up co-opting each other and breed a mutt offspring that would become even more nasty and vicious due to hybrid vigor.

So anyhow, that's where we are today. The crumbling of the empire has become even more apparent after a buncha Arabs in Iraq beat our noses bloody (and don't say they didn't, why else did our last troops in that country have to creep out in the middle of the night?!), and what that means is that the religious nutcases are just gonna double down on the crazy. Which ain't gonna help a whole lot -- if the Roman citizenry had armed themselves, trained themselves to fight, and taken the fight to the barbarians rather than huddling with their rosaries babbling Hail Marys we'd all be speaking Latin right now, and that's pretty much what Reaganism and Christian fundamentalism consist of, babbling meaningless prayers like late-era Romans rather than doing what it takes to perpetuate the empire. But they have faith, faith I say, in their magical great sky demon and His son, the magical free market fairy, and no amount of reason will ever shake that faith and for some reason people who live in crumbling empires seem to prefer faith to reason so... (shrug). Hang on for the ride, folks. It's gonna be a wild one.

-- Badtux the Reality-based Penguin

Suburban nightmare

As you know, I don't usually do mainstream stuff here. But this video was chilling.

Arcade Fire, "The Suburbs", off of their 2010 album by the same name.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Dumbass of the year, Texas edition

Bumper sticker on a Texas pickup truck: "Capitalism rocks! Socialism sucks!".

Seen in a government-run socialist rest area (which sucks?) alongside a government-operated socialist Interstate highway.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

The Punishment

The kittehs apparently didn't like me leaving them alone for a week.

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

The new year

Azure Ray, "The New Year", off of 2002's Burn and Shiver. A sad song for an upcoming year that all indications say will be quite sad itself...

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

The Las Vegas showgirl of Christmas trees

It has plumes. It has feathers. It has glittery decorations. What else has plumes, feathers, and glittery decorations? Hint:

Except this tree is such overkill that it makes Vegas showgirls look sedate by comparison. Just sayin' ;).

-- Badtux the Christmas Penguin

Merry Christmas!

As usual on Christmas, here is (a very spastic) Lady Gaga!

-- Badtux the Snarky Music Penguin

No posting December 24-January 1

Taking a break... well, other than my Christmas tradition ;).

-- Badtux the Christmas Penguin

California blues

Canadian singer-songwriter Kathleen Edwards, "Goodbye California", off her 2008 album Asking for Flowers. She's supposed to have an album, Voyageur, out in January. I'll try to track down some songs from it and feature them here.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Hot rock

Sonic Youth, "Incinerate", off of their 2006 album Rather Ripped. Pay attention to Steve Shelley's drums back there -- not your standard rock drums, he's every bit as innovative as the guitar players, yet Lee and Thurston got all the notice...

Sadly, Sonic Youth is no more. Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon divorced in October, and plans for an album are pretty much over too.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin