Bullshit talks

And that's all that ideological bullshit does. It don't solve problems. It don't get shit done. It just makes some assholes feel good about how righteous they are 'cause their ideology is, like, so perfect and shit.

So let's take the individual mandate that's in the Obamacare bill. Right now, I'm not only paying my own health care bill when I pay my health insurance. I'm paying for deadbeats too. Some of these deadbeats are deadbeats for no fault of their own, and I ain't got no problem with helpin' those folks out. Others are just young and dumb and figure that they ain't ever gonna get sick so why the fuck should they get insurance, whatever, and then they fall off their hipster fixie bike and break their arm on the fucking sidewalk and whose insurance pays for that ER visit? You guessed it, *MY* insurance pays for that ER visit.

So how do we solve the deadbeat problem? Well, by requiring everybody who can afford health insurance, to buy health insurance. The individual mandate. That's one way. It ain't the only way. But any way that actually works has to force deadbeats to pay to *someone*, whether that's to the government as taxes or to insurance, else they stay deadbeats and are sucking offa *my* health insurance. And I tella ya, I'm fucking tired of paying for the health care of deadbeats who can goddamn well afford to buy their own fucking insurance, yo.

So what do the Libertopians say about this whole mandates thing? They spew a buncha bullshit about freedom and yada yada. Yeah yeah, bullshit talks, but what's *your* solution, Libertopians? I mean, sure, hospitals can sue folks. And probably even win. And collect fuck-all, 'cause the whole point of insurance is to pay for shit you can't afford yourself by pooling the money of a buncha folks, of whom only a few are gonna fall off their goddamned hipster fixies and break their arm. Like when that dumbass ran the red light and smacked the corner of my Jeep damn well and good. He was responsible for that damage, and he had $20 to his name. 'Cause we have mandates here in California and they work pretty damn well (you don't get license plate stickers unless your insurance is paid up and current), his insurance paid for the fixes to my Jeep. If not for insurance, I coulda sued his ass, sure. And got $20 for my trouble 'cause that's all the dude had in the bank. Fuck that, I wanted my Jeep fixed, and the mandate did that, it got my Jeep fixed 'cause the dude's insurance company paid. What the fuck use is a goddammned lawsuit when I need my Jeep fixed -- or when I need deadbeat hipsters to pay their fair share of the health care of hipsters so that *I* don't gotta pay when they break their motherfucking arm falling off their hipster bikes?!

You got a solution that don't require mandates? 'Cause I'm all ears. All I gotta say is that it has to work in this universe, not some fictional universe with unicorns and cotton candy trees. I ain't got no fucking cotton candy trees in this universe, and if your so-called "solution" requires cotton candy trees for it to work... bogus, yo!

-- Badtux the Practical Penguin

Being religious doesn't exempt you from the law

You can't just go out and start murdering people because your religion says murder is fine and dandy. You can't have fifty wives because your religion says polygamy is God's will. You can't have a meth lab in your bedroom because your religion says meth is God's diet drug. Murder, polygamy, and meth are all illegal, and just because you're a church doesn't mean you get to break the law.

So now the Catholic dress-wearin' kiddie-rapers are whining that Catholic hospitals will have to obey the new health care law, which requires birth control pills to be covered? Fuck them. Fuck them with a blunt baseball bat, like they fucked all those children for all those years. Look. The majority of employees at Catholic hospitals are *not* Catholic. And even among those who *are* Catholic, the majority of Catholics think employers should be required to provide health care plans that cover birth control at no cost, so that women can choose either to use birth control or not use birth control as their religion and conscience dictate. A buncha dress-wearin' pedophiles want special exemption from the law so they can force their ideology on folks who don't agree with it? Fuck that shit, yo. What next, they want a special exemption allowin' them to rape kiddies in the sacristy?

But I'll tell ya what. When the majority of Catholic priests have vaginas, I'll listen to the Catholic hierarchy about stuff that affects women. 'Till then, it ain't none of my fucking business. If the majority of women want birth control, and the majority of women want health insurers to pay for it, and for the matter if the majority of Americans as a whole agree with this law, nobody -- not me, not those kiddie fuckers, not *anybody* -- should have the right to say "no" to that. It's called *democracy*, you dumbfucks, and it ain't surprisin' that a former Nazi Youth don't hold much truck with democracy, but this here ain't goddamned Nazi Germany and I'll be a penguin's uncle if I'm gonna listen to some motherfucking dress-wearin' Nazi tell us that his ideology has to be forced on our women at gunpoint 'cause his ideology is more important than our democracy. Fuck that shit, yo.

-- Badtux the Blunt Penguin

New Mac

I got a new Mac so I'm busy playing with it. There's evil shit happening in the world but I don't feel like talking about any of it right now. Go entertain yourself by playing in the middle of a freeway or somethin', yo!

-- Badtux the Rudely Busy Penguin

Welcome to National Pee Your Pants Day

Today is a national holiday where everybody pees their pants on command while chanting "Save me, oh kindly Big Brother!". We are supposed to either cower in terror that Zombie Dead Osama is coming to get us, or we're supposed to go grab our guns and go kill a darkie for Jeeeezus! The television airwaves today will be filled with death porn commemorating the murder of a couple thousand people in New York City and a few hundred elsewhere with Important People solemnly intoning "we shall never forget". The question of *what* we shall "never forget" is never asked. We've certainly forgotten the names and faces of those who died on September 11, 2001, after all. Well, unless you're one of those who lost a friend or relative in the attack, but folks who lost a friend or relative in the attack aren't one of the Important People who will be intoning "we shall never forget", they'll be someplace private where they can avoid all the death porn.

And let's not even think about all the hundreds of thousands of deaths of innocent civilians and not-so-innocent soldiers (both American and otherwise) that were "justified" by the fact that "them darkies attacked us!" (for any random darkies that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, such as Iraqis, the Taliban, and so forth), or the loss of civil liberties where you now must accede to an anal probe and carry an internal passport oops "government-issued ID" if you want to travel more than a few hundred miles from your home or even vote in many states (gosh , just like the Soviet Union!), or any of that. No no, this is a solemn day, where we worship death while whipping out our big swinging dicks and, like, jizzin' *all over*, not just on our own country, but in random other places overseas where we swing our dicks and jizz all over'em just because, well, because we can.

So it goes. It's enough to drive a penguin to the sauce. Herring sauce, that is.

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

Busy Agenda

That mighty supervillain The Gay Agenda has apparently been really busy lately. First, according to the anti-gay group National Organization for Marriage (NOM), The Gay Agenda caused the East Coast earthquake earlier this week. Whoa! That's really... really. I guess The Gay Agenda caused the earthquake by whipping out his Gay Gun of Gayness and really pounding his sidekick, Pink Triangle Man (see below):

So anyhow, earthquakes apparently never happened in NOM's universe back in the days when America discriminated against gays. (Erm... New Madrid. Just sayin'). So then Pat Robertson weighs in and says the cracks in the Washington Monument are a sign from God. Unlike, apparently, the damage to the National Cathedral, which is just an accident.

I am eagerly awaiting what these folks are going to say about Hurricane Irene coming ashore somewhere on the East Coast. Presumably that's going to be The Gay Agenda's fault too. Talk about one heckuva blow job!

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

War porn

So I understand that the Deathers are shouting, "Show us pictures of dead Osama bin Laden!". Uhm, no. Just no. If you want to verify that OBL is dead, there's plenty of ways to do so -- the most important being independent verification from people who are *NOT* the Obama administration. Navy Seals saw him die. His wife and remaining son saw him die. Plenty of people supposedly saw him die. If these people who supposedly saw him die all say they saw him die, well. Good 'nuff for me, just as I believed Bush when he said OBL pulled off 9/11 because once you got things verified from multiple sources, it's pretty damn hard to fake that shit.

But photographs? Dude. Photographs are so easy to fake it ain't even funny and they don't prove shit. There's only one reason to demand photographs of dead and bloody OBL, and that's to jack off to them. What, Deathers, you folks don't have porn shops in your towns? Sheesh!

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin

A message?

So Glenn Beck asks, "Is God sending us a message with the Japan earthquake"?

Err... let me get this straight, Glennbo. Your invisible almighty great sky spirit is omnipotent and all-powerful and shit, but he's not capable of, like, just picking up the fucking phone if he wants to send us a message, and instead, like, decides to just make things shake and waves crash and people die and shit? So you're saying your invisible sky spirit can do all this, but he can't even make a simple fucking phone call like millions of pimply hormonal 14 year olds manage to do every single day? Dude. Bogus. Your magic undies must be cuttin' off the flow of blood to your brain. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

WARNING: GEEK RANT AHEAD

And today's rant is about "security". I'm fucking *PISSED* about all the fucking "security" bull fucking shit that Red Hat Software (in particular, but most other Linux vendors too) have put into their latest Linux. It just fucking REEKS of acne-cheeked cheeto-stained legends in their own mind who, like, have fucking never held a real job (one where they had to actually GET SHIT DONE IN REAL LIFE IT ENVIRONMENTS instead of masturbating bytes into a computer in an edit-compile-test loop) who come up with "well, doing things the way they have to be done in real-life IT environments isn't secure, so we're going to put all this shit into our distribution to make it fucking impossible for you to do your job because that's the only way to secure the system."

Well excuuuuuuse me, Mr. Legend In Your Own Mind. Yes, I administer my systems remotely. What, you think I fucking walk to the motherfucking data center and personally walk into a machine room full of thousands of servers in order to administer my system? And yes, I use VNC to do this. No big deal -- well, until you fucking assholes decided to put this PolicyKit and ConsoleKit bullshit into your software that WON'T AUTHORIZE ME TO DO ADMIN TASKS IF I AM DOING THEM REMOTELY!

Like.... uhm... hellooooo? Clue, you stupid-ass motherfuckers? Like, uhm, this makes all this fancy GUI admin toolkit bullshit you've put together like, fucking USELESS for your biggest customers? Like, uhm, you've had this motherfucking bug in your system for, like, years, and all you motherfuckers will say is that it's a goddamned feature because, well, a VNC session isn't local so it's a security risk so it shouldn't register itself with PolicyKit for doing security dialogues? Well excuuuuuse me for not living in your goddamned ivory tower and needing to, like, get shit done!

Which, of course, this bullshit doesn't keep me from getting shit done. It just means I have to do some *really* insecure shit to get around it while not driving myself motherfucking insane in the process -- like, running VNC as *ROOT*. You think prompting me for a password is insecure? Honey-chile, compared to running Xvnc as root, prompting me for a password is as secure as fucking Fort Knox, yo.

Note that I use the above as just one example of the many, many attempts to "secure" my systems by cheeto-stained geeks who haven't, like, got a clue. In the meantime, every time I look at my motherfucking update log these legends in their own minds have released yet another stream of security update bug fixes because they're such fucking legends they can't even check their own goddamned code for buffer overruns and memory leaks, but what the hey, if my security gets compromised because their motherfucking software is a piece of crap, which is the only time it's *ever* happened (not because of VNC sessions, not because of anything else they're trying to protect me from, but, rather, because they're a bunch of clueless geeks who are legends in their own mind but haven't a clue), it's *MY* fault as the sysadmin?!

And thus ends today's indecipherable rant. If you don't understand anything I said above, just summarize it like this: Linux geeks might know their awk and sed and bash, but they haven't a fucking *clue* as to even the basics of how to make a system usable by mere mortals. What a buncha hopeless geeks... no wonder Apple had to dump every single bit of user interface code ever written for Unix in order to create Mac OS X, the world's one and only Unix system usable by mere mortals... and why why Ubuntu Linux founder Mark Shuttleworth is thinking about the same damned thing. Because these geeks are just fucking hopeless once you get beyond serving up bits and bytes to the Internets... when it comes to UI shit, they're fucking legends without a clue.

-- Badtux the Ranting Geeky Penguin

The Israeli embargo: What's it for?

I feel like I'm in a fucking history class right now. First, Israel attempts to re-enact the Warsaw Ghetto with the Palestinians in the starring role, and then the Palestinians attempt to re-enact the Exodus 1947 except with Israel substituting for the British. Successfully, I might add. They baited the Israelis into doing exactly what they wanted the Israelis to do -- re-enact the Exodus 1947 situation exactly, except with Palestinians in place of the Jews and Israelis in place of the British. And thing is, the Israels *knew* this is what the activists wanted. Fuck, the activists even *told* them so, *dared* the Israelis to do what they did. And the Israelis took the bait anyhow.

So anyhow, the next thing I get from Israeli apologists is, "well, the embargo is necessary to keep military weapons out of Gaza." Really? Courtesy of Andrew Sullivan, let's look at some of the military weapons that Israel is embargoing at the moment...

OMG! F33R the Coriander of Mass Destruction! Flee the Chicken Bombs of Biological Warfare! Beware the Canned Fruit of Genocide!

Uhm, honey, if you're gonna claim that the embargo is about keeping military weapons out of Gaza, how about restricting it to things that, like, are usable as military weapons?

But of course the embargo isn't about keeping military weapons out of Gaza. It's about keeping the Palestinians as impoverished and embittered as possible so that they will remain enemies of Israel. See, Israel's politics requires that Israel have enemies. Israel's current leaders came to power because they rant that Israel is under seige, Israel is threatened by enemies on all sides, and only they are qualified to protect Israel. If there was a viable and thriving Palestinian state, the fact that Israel has no real enemies anymore would be embarrassingly clear, and their whole political situation would become unviable. As I have pointed out in the past, Israel no longer has any external threats to its existence, so Israel's toxic politics requires that they manufacture one -- and what better one than those poor schlobs the Palestinians, who lack any ability to be a real threat and thus are safe to turn into enemies?

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

In which I taunt the cryers of "criticism is anti-Semitism!" again

Okay, so Israel just managed to blow away a buncha folks who were trying to haul food and supplies to the Gaza Strip Concentration Camp, thereby keeping intact the blockade they've had in place for the past three years and, incidentally, risking war with their now-former ally, Turkey. And of course the usual suspects start whining, "we're just defending ourselves from Hamas, what do you want us to do?"

What do we want you to do? Uhm, you really, really want to know that, or you just bullshittin' me? 'Cause it's pretty goddamn simple, actually:

1. Quit bein' a buncha racist fucks. I mean, dude. This used to not be a problem, young Jewish intellectuals were one of the prime driving forces of the Civil Rights movement here in the South that ended state-sanctioned apartheid here, but I swear that every time I interact with an Israeli or one of their apologists nowdays I get the impression that they're channeling General Phil Sheridan when ole' Sheridan said "the only good Indian is a dead Indian." Except substitute "Arab" for "Indian", of course. Shoving the Palestinians onto reservations, killing as many as necessary to get'em to stay in their reservation, and not bothering much with how much food and medical supplies and shit gets in there... dude. That's Sheridan's playbook, we know how this shit works.
2. Quit whining about how persecuted you were back 500 years ago or some shit. Dude. That just makes you sound like a bunch of whiney-ass titty-babies nowdays. Most folks on this planet today weren't even *born* the last time somebody tried genociding Jews, in the meantime we got genocides like, all over fucking Africa and shit, what makes Jews so much more special than the Ibo, or the folks in Darfur, or anybody else who's being genocided, like, *now*? Get over yourself, sheesh. There's 5 billion people on this planet, each and every one of whom thinks they're just as special as you are, and whining about how some folks back before they were even *born* were mean to you is, like, the lamest whiny-ass titty baby shit like, EVAH! Realize that most people don't give a shit that you're a Jew. Playing professional victim might make you feel good, but there ain't a nation outside the Middle East that has any sort of routine discrimination against Jews anymore, and if you don't make a point of being obnoxious about your Jewishness, most people just don't give a shit. This ain't 1937 or some shit, this is the fucking TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY. People got better things to worry about now, other than a few sad sick fucks at Stormfront but who the fuck cares what they think?
3. Quit trying to re-enact the Warsaw Ghetto in Gaza, except with Palestinians playing the starring role. Dude. That's, like, seriously unrighteous, and makes you look like a buncha hypocrits.
4. And while we're at it, quit vaporizing a buncha women and children and regular ole' civilians every time some sick asshole sends a rocket your way. I mean, c'mon. The way to deal with criminals is to kill the criminals, not just some random folks who, like, didn't have shit to do with whatever the criminal done! It's as if the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and we started killing all the Japanese-Americans in retaliation, that's some sick shit, yo! Look, the criminals *want* you to kill civilians. It makes their job of recruiting more criminals easier. Quit giving them what they want, dudes!
5. Uhm, and look. When you sign a treaty, like that Oslo one turning over the West Bank to the Palestinian Authority, would it hurt even a teensy little bit if you, like, actually did what you agreed to do rather than go ahead and send in "settlers" and armed troops to, like, trample all over your word? I mean, crap. That makes you look like two-face lying bastards, yo. That's no way to make friends and influence people. Just sayin'.
6. And finally... quit accusing anybody who criticizes Israel doing obnoxious shit of being "anti-semite" and wanting to exterminate Jews and shit. That just makes you look like the biggest flaming asswipes on the planet. Dude. Get over yourself. Most of us just don't give a fuck about what religion you are, we just don't like assholes, and if we tell you that you're acting like the biggest flaming asshole on the whole fucking planet it ain't got shit to do with your religion or ethnicity or some shit like that, and everything to do with the fact that, like, you're acting like the biggest fucking asshole on the whole fucking planet, yo.

So let's recap: 1) Quit being racist, 2) Quit whining, 3) Quit with this Palestinian ghetto shit, 4) Quit killing civilians, 5) keep your word, 6) Quit calling anybody who points out you're being an asshole of being an anti-Semite (you just prove the point when you pull that shit, yo).

Or, to make it even simpler: Don't Be An Asshole!

Sounds simple enough. Well, except the question of what to do with those sad sick fucks the Palestinians if you aren't gonna put them into apartheid-style Bantustans or Warsaw-style ghettos, but hey, I never claimed to have the answers for everything...

-- Badtux the Rude Penguin