There have been a number of truly awful and stupid things going on in the world, but I think I’m going to pick on a very particular piece of stupid.

In case it was overshadowed by other, larger economic news, we just bailed out GM, Ford and Chrysler to the tune of 25 *billion* dollars. I’d like to believe that it’s all due to horrible economic conditions — but I’m starting to think it might have a bit more to due with having their heads up their asses. We love putting out big, pointless gas guzzling crapboxes like the Excursion, Humvee, and the Navigator.

Then I catch a television commericial from Cadillac regarding a hybrid version of their fuel sucking Escalade line. Small print indicates that it gets less than 14 MPG… but the real kick in the nuggets comes from GM’s site on it … is that it costs at least $71,000.

I should start by saying that no one needs one of those. It’s a serious “check out my shiny silver-rimmed penis” thing, and that particular mentality is a great deal of why we have no damn public transportation industry, and indeed why we bend over for at least 10% of our paychecks to fund some pretty awful people halfway around the world.

My question to the auto industy is this: are you fucking kidding me? You know we’re in an awful economic climate where new car sales are down because no one has any credit nor cash on hand to buy these overpriced turkeys outright, and you insist on created expensive luxury vehicles which shore up our gas prices (basic supply and demand going on here, no PhD required) and then tack on the word “hybrid” so the rich fuckers who can buy these things can go back to sniffing their own farts and pretending that they’re doing something positive in the world?

Hybrids are, by design, a horrible kludge to keep us all using gasoline, even if it’s only to a lesser degree, because Americans don’t want to transition away from their shiny metal wangs. I mean, we kinda killed our train lines, and have a really sorry excuse for busses and shuttles in all but our most populated areas. Europe has been trying to transition to solar and geothermal power with some distributed charging stations ; still avoiding the issue of people still thinking that everyone needs a car, but at least not requiring petrol.

We’re addicted to oil, and until shitheads start thinking about things other than trying to juice people for more money for large, pointless vehicles, we’re kinda stuck with this stuff. Let’s hope super capacitor technology picks up, and maybe we we’ll see long range EVs for less than 20k$.

If you’ve been outside of a cave in the last few days, chances are that you’ve heard about Lehman Brothers, the latest of the investment firms to fail miserably due to the incredible sham that has been the American housing market. Early news today is showing that foreign markets are starting to fail, and it looks as though AIG may be the next major dropping point.

I’m not sure exactly how low this goes, but my guess is that we’re going to pay for those crooked brokers and investment bankers. Everyone is losing, and losing hard.

There are a few great myths of American culture. One is “house equals security”. In case anyone has been paying attentiont to record foreclosure rates, that’s a crock of crap these days. Another one is “investing is safe and prudent”. That particular turd has been shoved down our throats by the very fuckers who are trying in vain to have us bail them out. Who hasn’t seen commercials filled with happy, young, vibrant Americans, saving for their future by investing with (insert failing investment bank name here)? Of course, we’ve been busy deregulating everything, so it’s not like we shouldn’t have seen this one coming a mile away. That whirring sound you hear is FDR spinning in his grave.

Don’t even get me started on the whole college thing, either. I think I was about 14 the last time I seriously believed any of that was about *learning*. It’s about hedging your bets — I “bet” I can pay off these massive school loans with the job I’ll get from the degree I’m earning. If you can’t, you get to spend the rest of your days working for some large financial institution. You have to pay for it, sooner or later. To quote someone I read recently: “Slavery is slavery no matter how nicely the master treats you.”

“What about heads and pikes”, you may ask… Well, back in the day, there was a very terrible ruler named Vlad the Impaler. When his country was about to be overrun by a Turkish army, Vlad implaled twenty thousand of his own people on pikes. The very sight of this led the Turkish army to avoid Wallachia altogether.

The thing that I’ve been wondering for quite some time is: why isn’t anyone being held accountable? Executives who are suckling enormous quantities of funds into places which they know are bad investments are walking away with hundreds of millions of dollars in “golden parachutes”, some of which are bankrolled by irritated taxpayers like myself. It’s kind of like I walked up to a co-worker, shit on their desk, burned down their house, then walked away with an extra special performance bonus. If any of these people were held accountable for this, perhaps they wouldn’t continue to behave in such an irresponsible way. It would be far too much for me to think that we could ever strip all assets and benefits from executives like that asshole Schwartz, who did nothing other than bomb a company out, to walk away with an enormous sum of money?

Or perhaps an angry mob of investors who have lost their retirements and life savings based on happy-looking television advertisements could tear one of these people to shreds in a parking lot. Not that I’d ever advocate it…. I’m just as surprised as everyone else that it hasn’t happened yet.

UPDATE: If anyone would like to focus some unmitigated anger at someone, try Phil Gramm, the guy who brought you the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act and the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. Did I forget to mention he’s John McDud’s current economic advisor?

I have just posted the first set (from the first two hours) of John Mayer’s summer music festival (here affectionately titled “JohnFest”) from 2008 here:

The technical details … I used my trusty Thinkpad T61 with the Behringer UCA202 to pull sound off the board. As usualy, this means that the quality of the recording is based solely on the job of the mixing engineer. It was cut using mp3cut and normalized using mp3norm, as with most of the Stonewall Tavern recordings. Keep watching for the remaining hours to be posted.

This past week, I stumbled on a strange problem with Dell “PERC” RAID controllers in certain rackmount servers, where they would suddenly just stop working for no apparent reason. The nice people at Dell did actually have firmware available for the PERC 3 and 4 controllers to fix this problem, which was pretty nice.

The part that *wasn’t* nice was that they were some stupid Windows binaries which required a floppy disk to be inserted.

First of all, who has a laptop with a floppy drive anymore, and second of all, what if you, like other sane people, don’t use Windows? Thirdly, how often does a floppy disk magically fail to work in a floppy drive?

I ended up doing the following:

• Create a VirtualBox VM
• Use dd if=/dev/zero of=floppy.img bs=1k count=1440 to create a floppy image, which I mounted in the VirtualBox
• “Format” the floppy image in the VM, because apparently Dell’s fuqtard utility can’t write an image to an unformatted disk.
• Use the stupid utility to write the floppy image.
• Use mkisofs -pad -b floppy.img -R -o cd.iso floppy.img to create a CD image

Dell, I hate you. Your laptops overheat and suck out loud, and your stupid Windows-only disks and defective RAID controllers bother me. I’m not buying any more of your hardware. You can subsidize Microsoft some other way.

“The definition of stupidity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” — Albert Einstein

America has at least a 30 year history of, more often than not, electing the dud. And by dud, I mean the absolutely least qualified or least desirable person for the job. Take a quick look at Saint Ron. That guy was an awful actor, sub-par governor, and an absolute crapbox President. And yet he appeared “strong on terrorism” versus Carter, who actually turned out to be right about our petrol based economy. Too bad that Reagan loved him some terrorists. Oh, I’m sorry, we called them “freedom fighters.” Blowing shit up is still blowing shit up.

Then let’s look at his protege, Bush Senior. Ran against a pretty unassuming guy in Michael Dukakis, but didn’t have anything other than the bubble of Reagan, or perhaps horribly racist campaigning. He got booted after notably lying about raising taxes. Or maybe it was that Oil War we dove into so easily …

And then there’s the current dud. There are vast tracts of the internet devoted entirely to the cyclone of suck that is George W Bush. The guy hasn’t ever succeeded in anything in his life … and we somehow elected him. Twice. Why? (mumble mumble) Terrorism (mumble mumble) Al Qaeda (mumble mumble) Saddam Hussein (mumble mumble) Weapons (mumble mumble) … We’re a bunch of incredible tools for continuing to do this.

But the greatest surprise to me is that a guy who is like Bush more than 95% of the time can possibly have a higher approval rating. It’s like we’re spreading our collective ass cheeks and telling the rich guys who have been fucking us terribly for the last eight years to have another four to impact our National Colon. Bush is polling at somewhere between 22 and 31 percent, according to pollingreport.com, yet McCain seems to have higher ratings across the board, even though his policies don’t differ very much from Bush’s policies. NPR had an interesting take on some of this as well.

Amazingly, we’re faced with a pretty no-brain decision…. We’ve had eight years of disasterous leadership in every area, and have a choice between a candidate who wants to continue doing it and one who doesn’t. I’m *amazed* that we’re not all dead from trying to eat food through our ears or something. There’s just something wrong with most of the people in this country that this isn’t a “slam dunk”. And Democrats, don’t think you’re not off the hook. If you can’t get people to vote for you in *this* election, what the hell are you doing wrong?

I always remember that Bush has at least a 20% approval rating, which means that out of five random people, one of them has parents who are brother and sister, or who has to be told how to breathe. This ain’t that difficult to figure out, guys, you picked a dud *twice*. Strong leadership means admitting to mistakes, not trying to jam a square peg into a round hole until you break the peg. But McCain has been polling above 40%, which is again testing my faith in humanity. The guy isn’t charismatic, doesn’t have good stances on any of the important issues facing the next President, and looks like he’s being eaten by a liver spot. I would have said “unelectable” if I had been asked a year ago. But apparently, reality is suspended, again, for an election cycle, and the Dud will triumph, again.

I would come up with something witty to say here, but I’m just really saddened that it has come down to this. My whole life, I’ve wanted a President who would, you know, care about the environment, energy conservation, and a thousand other things that Presidents *should* care about, but don’t. If we can’t move away from petrol when it costs us more than ever to purchase it, what the hell is wrong with us? I just hope that everyone is happy with The Dud, since we’re going to get four years of that.

Oh, and Joe Lieberman sucks ass. I voted against him in the last election, and will do so again if given the chance. Sorry, just had to get that one in there.

The last time I was ranting, it was about the joke that is the current seperation between church and state. But I think it’s time to take a look at the other part of this mess — us.

“People of faith” seems to be a term which is bandied about an awful lot, which is meant to convey to other people that Jeebus or the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or your multi-armed deity of choice, is watching over them, and is ready to smite at a moment’s notice. Seems to be more Jeebus’s guys, since they’re the most prevalent in America right now, strangely followed by secular people (but not very closely).

I was under the impression for a very long time that religion was supposed to be some sort of special moral code, to keep people living a good life and being nice to other people. A rabbi in an old story said all of their religious teachings could be summed up in the golden rule. You know, treat other people the way you’d like to be treated. Doesn’t exactly take nailing some guy to a piece of wood to figure that out.

The disparity I see seems to be that, while the majority of Americans identify themselves as being some variety of Jeebus’s flock, at least half of the voting ones seem to vote Republican. And as we all know by the teachings of Supply Side Jesus, the guy these people follow would be tarred and feathered by the modern day Republican party. So what gives here?

The most rational explanation that I’ve been given has to do with abortion. (Oh noes! Killing teh babies!) Republicans have more or less taken the let God sort ‘em out sort of way. Who gives a shit if you’re raped? Just pop ‘em out, they’ll add to the flock… I’m sure all of this works just as well as abstinence only education and that albatross of “intelligent design”. Apparently church-goers originally leaned towards the Democratic party, with their platform of social responsibility and, you know, caring for their fellow man. But around the time of the Vietnam War, the Republican party said “if you’re not with us, you’re for killing babies.” And pastors and ministers flocked like the sheep they are to a party which offered them no more than disapproving of abortion.

And here’s where it gets interesting…. Because of this, Republicans don’t want abortion to go away. It’s one of the few things with which they can keep their “flock” of loyal Jeebus-ites at bay.

Ugh.

And then there’s Gay marriage. For some reason, these bible thumpers think it’s an an anathema to let other people do what they want to do. No babies are harmed, or anything…. what gives on that one? There’s some very strong social stigma (at least among males in America) to strongly dislike gay men (but openly want to watch gay women going at it, go figure), probably under the auspices that unless you *hate* gay people, they might turn you gay. I would use the example that someone can no more choose to be gay than they could choose to be black, but apparently we used to hate black people and think them inferior too. Hold on, was that backed by Jeebus’s folks as well?

Look guys, your bearded savior was one of my people. You know, a jew. Somehow, this keeps getting lost when the debates come up. Not only was he Jewish, but he also was a socialist. Funny that. So, when you’re about to go into the voting booth, think about that poor Jewish guy tacked on a cross around your neck, and remember that he’s crying about you fucking the ideals that he got nailed there for in the first place. Then don’t vote for the schmuck (you know, a dud is a dud, no matter how many POW camps he’s been in). It’s pretty simple, America, and even though you’ve shown me how stupid you can be, I’d hope that you can get it right this time. Don’t get distracted by shiny objects or colorful pictures, think about the crying Jewish guy around your neck.

“The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” -The United States Constitution, Article VI, section 3

Somehow it has become some sort of generalized idea that the more pandering dogma a presidential candidate can throw out, the better suited they would be to become President of the United States of America. I don’t find this much more plausible than the idea that the better cannon fodder a person was impacts the type of President they would be.

Sadly, a person’s religion, and indeed their marital fidelities (or lack thereof) supposedly grant us insight into their souls, or at least into what sort of leader we think they’d be.

Weirdly enough, Americans have some sort of inane xenophobic fear that swarthy foreigners will turn them into witches communists homosexuals Muslims. Of course, in the mind of Joe Inbred, this somehow means “terrorist”. Ignoring, of course, the fact that the majority of Muslims don’t blow themselves or anyone else up. That’s about as ignorant as saying that all Christians are ignorant morons who don’t believe in science.

There are some people who say that religion shouldn’t preclude reason, but you generally tend to see that otherwise reasonable people can disregard that reason when their faith is involved. That scares the daylights out of me. What happens if the President decides that god is talking to him and telling him to start World War III? It’s not like Presidents haven’t claimed divine guidance for stupid things before. I mean, tax cuts for the rich kinda smack of a different kind of Jeebus I think. And last I checked, the same guys we rebelled against claimed the same thing… and that didn’t turn out so well.

I just want a good, real energy policy (not the ol’ drill ’till it’s gone) and some Universal Healthcare up in here, but for some reason, none of the Representatives from my shithole state are in support of HR 676, with no apparent explaination. Or maybe it’s because of what Connecticut is/was. I know, I know, vultures whose only job is to make money by denying care are the best people to provide healthcare for Americans. Not like we couldn’t follow the example of grown up nations like the UK, France, Canada…. even CUBA has healthcare for their citizens. We can’t even beat Cuba at anything anymore.

Well, can’t really blame this on god. It’s not god, it’s his fan club I can’t stand, to paraphrase a popular meme. I’ll defer to George Carlin (rest in peace) for the conclusion to this:

“I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.” – George Carlin

Also, I’d like to apologize to Penn and Teller for stealing their title. Apologies, guys.

Note: I’m skipping my usual pathos drenched birthday post about mortality, aging, and life still being exactly as awful in favor of the following…

I’m starting to think that we’re getting dumber, as a nation of people. The causes for this, mainly substitution of conjecture for truth and dropping standards for academic excellence, are pretty well documented in these cases. As being dumber seems to make you happier, you’d almost think that a nation of happy cretins would be preferrable to a nation of intelligent malcontents. On the other hand, how many times do you see the good-hearted doctors on House MD solve a case as opposed to the misanthropic eponymous genius? As far as doctors go, give me the asshole who can cure me.

The instance that brought this on was a minimum wage checkout employee at my local anti-union worker-hating conglomerate chain outlet. She smiled at me while she packed all of my purchased items, including a recyclable bag meant for receiving purchased items, into non-recyclable plastic bags. But she smiled at me the whole time, so everything must still be right and okay in the world, right?

It brought to mind the idea that hordes of people could siphon not only their political opinions, but also racism, other brands of misanthropy, horrid intolerance and ignorance, from some rich drug-addled boob on the radio. At the same time, these listeners purport their intelligence, and even try to argue with those who disagree with easily discountable falsehoods being spewn by their role model. Somehow, I don’t think a guy being paid upwards of $30 million a year by a large corporation, which has a record of squashing things that don’t conform to their idea of the utopian world, has your best interests at heart. Just saying.

In case you happen to be one of these truth dodging candidates for a “Flowers for Algernon” treatment, let me impart some words of wisdom. Important things usually can’t be imparted in a single sentence, except perhaps this one. Let’s take two examples of political misquoting.

1) John McCain saying that the US should be in Iraq for “100 years”. I personally think the guy is a boob for trying to appeal to the “bomb the swarthy towelheads” crowd, but let’s examine the context. McCain says that he was referring to residual troop levels as well, such as the ones we have retained since World War II.

2) Barack Obama saying he was what the world had been waiting for. Politics is a cult of personality, I understand, but let’s also look at this one. A whole bunch of pieces of that quote had been left out, the full quote reading as any other politician would have said.

Yes, I know some of you “try to cut the hedges with the lawn mower” crowd still think that one guy is awesome and one guy is horrible from some awful cut up sound bites or “critical” commentary by some half wit on a Pravda-like propaganda machine. I can’t possibly convince you to think that you’re wrong. But if you’re going to believe something, try to back it up by actually researching it. No, typing it into “fox news dot com” does not count. Check more than one resource, perhaps. Try to aquaint yourself with the world around you in more than a passing way, otherwise you’re just a muppet.

Maybe you’ve divined from the title that I’m not exactly a supporter of the Olympics.

Of course, I have quite a few reasons why I don’t like them, and why I’m boycotting watching or having anything to do with the Olympic Games 2008 in Beijing.

1) Human Rights. Honestly, I don’t think I even have a leg to stand on with regard to this particular issue. It’s not like we torture people, stifle or censor the press, supress opinion or fundamental rights, or occupy a sovereign nation or anything. Do you feel a surge of guilt yet? Still, we shouldn’t exactly be *endorsing* this sort of thing by going. But how can we prove that America is the best hung nation on the planet unless we show ‘em the size of our chemically enhanced collective wang? Which brings me to point two…

2) Nationalism is Racism. The very idea that one person is superior to another one just because of where they were born, live, or what they look like. Not like we ever did something awful like that before. Still, we’re talking about a set of games which were supposed to promote “goodwill” among nations, and yet has turned into more of a violent pissing contest than anything else. The ancient greeks would have been disappointed, I guess, in between bouts of pederasty.

3. Jim Thorpe. Assuming he’s not spinning in his grave, one of the greatest athletes of the 20th century would probably have reminded you that he had his olympic gold medals stripped from him for accepting a few bucks to play a baseball game. What difference could that possibly make, you ask yourself? Well, the Olympics was originally conceived as a way for *amateur* athletes from all over the world to compete, not professionals, hence the removal of Mr Thorpe’s medals. But wait a minute …. isn’t there a USA Dream Team (starring none other than Mr Date Rape himself) playing in the Olympics? That’s right, they changed the rules so we can swing our Nationalist banana hammock around. Fuck fair play, man, game over. If you have to put paid ringers in there, where is your nationalist superiority?

I remember this great, wonderful feeling that America was a nation of innovators. That no matter what the problem is, we would have no trouble solving it with some good ol’ fashioned American “know how”.

What happened?

We have a pharmaceutical industry which in 1999 brought in around 100 *billion* dollars for the top three companies with profits usually above 20%. Yet when was the last time we actually *cured* anything? Fucking polio. I’m not counting shots you have to get periodically, that isn’t really a “cure” for anything, or things that may stop something which may cause something else. Where’s that cure for cancer we’ve been researching for years?

Maybe it’s just easier to keep people buying drugs to allow them to live rather than curing what’s wrong with them. That sounds awful and callous. I could swear there was a Star Trek episode about just that ….

Back to innovation. I understand that profits are supposed to spur innovation, which seems to be the crux behind current copyright and patent law. Why the hell is the same stupid mouse being juiced even now? (I’m sure good ol’ Walt is pushing up the daisies, and isn’t profiting much from this.) Where exactly is the “innovation” in all of this? I mean, Disney bought out Pixar in 2006 so that it could get into the high-end 3D animation world, but where has it exactly innovated before then? I guess they innovated by retelling the story of Pocohontas, leaving out the part where she was dragged around Europe as a curiosity, or perhaps by remaking old crappy movies? Or perhaps by ripping off a smaller company, denying it and making untold fortunes?

Not to say we have a fully capitalist economy, since we definitely don’t. Our present policy of socializing losses by incompetent morons (who couldn’t resist hiding from the emperor that he had no clothes on), and yet denying that same level of protection to medical needs. Guess we need to make sure these fuckers can earn their 35 million dollar salaries and 16 million dollar bonuses, which we’ll get to pay later. Oh yeah, and the people who lost all that money investing in their firm? While Shwartz and Cayne get their golden parachutes, the ordinary people investing in their supposedly safe firm get the golden shower. There’s your “trickle down economics” at work. Remember how this should encourage innovation and good performance? Riiiiight.

Ever since Saint Ron decided that government regulation was bad, but that we couldn’t trust people to make up their own minds about anything (legislating morality), we’ve seen some nasty, nasty fallout. We imprison way too many people for drug related offences, since we have to declare war on everything, but somehow we can’t possibly keep people from dumping crap into our environment. I’m sure if the founding fathers wanted us to all be White and Protestant, they would have written in a “no marriage for teh gays” line right next to the part about this being a Christian country, and how the President has all encompassing, King-like powers. Oh, wait, they didn’t.

Damn, keep getting off track. America. Not innovating.

We’re still using the same damn space shuttle design we made back in 1981. You’d figure in almost thirty years, we would have something a bit more impressive, maybe? How’s that moon base coming, anyways? Oh, that’s right, we had to divert our attentions towards the terrorists communists. How did that turn out? Did Saint Ron knock the Berlin wall down with one swing of his mighty fifty foot penis? Or did it collapse on itself, as most predicted it would? Yeah, I thought so. Did we ever get back on track? I think not. Our current moron in chief has been systematically dismantling the legacy of FDR, all while telling us that we should just privatize everything. How is that working out for you? Shouldn’t they be able to innovate more, since they make profits, being a private company. Fools.

I just want to see an America where we don’t simply repeat the latest talking point until it becomes fact as it is spewed by some fat pill-popping wanker with a microphone. When people are saying “America sucks”, maybe instead of branding them all as traitors, we should be asking “why?”… “Why do you think this great land ain’t so great anymore?”

I want to see an America where people don’t have to work two jobs for survival. Where we are inventing practical electric cars, not playing catch up. I want to see an America where we know that “energy policy” isn’t a dirty word, and sure isn’t swahili for “drill until there’s nothing left and we’re completely boned.”

I want to see an America which isn’t motivated by Nascar, Jerry Springer, the WWE, and every other pathetic form of entertainment out there. How can we be innovators and world leaders when we can’t even cook our own food anymore? How can we care about our world when some dumb-ass celebrities’ babies are somehow more important?

We should be ashamed, but not of our country. We can’t blame *any* of this on politicians. After all, besides Diebold and some stupid wankers on the Supreme Court, don’t we put these turkeys where they are? Aren’t we the ones eating the fast food, driving the big SUVs, and ignoring science in its entirety? We deserve whatever is going to happen to us. Maybe if everything collapses, we’ll have to get off our fast food inflated butts and remember how to innovate. I can only hope.

(Tom Tomorrow perhaps said it best)