Problem making my bed

It's lumpy. Of course, we all know why that is...

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Omens and portents

My subconscious is trying to tell me something. I got woken up several times by nightmares last night. The basic theme of all of them was, "evil is coming. Run and hide."

What exactly is tickling my subconscious, I have a bad feeling I'll find out in the coming weeks...

-- Badtux the Omen-scrying Penguin

Another sick Republican motherfucker

Literally, in this case. Maru explains.

It's all about power. These Republicans are Republicans because they want power, they want dominion, they want to rule. They don't want to govern. They don't care about governing. They want only the ability to fuck anybody or anything they want in any way they want, without repercussion.

Missouri state Rep. Scott Muschany(R-Sickfuck) is the latest of the pervert Repubs to be arrested. He was indicted today in connection with a reported sexual assault of a 14-year-old girl on May 17, the day after this year's Legislative session ended.The alleged victim is the daughter of a state employee that Snotty was apparently romantically involved with -- despite being married. So let's get this straight. Scott "Family Values" Muschany was two-timing his wife by fucking his co-worker. AND he was two-timing his co-worker by... fucking his co-worker's 14 year old daughter? Sick sick sick sick SICK.

But I guess you can't expect better from a Republican...

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Make cupcakes, not war

Chocolate cupcakes

I'm a bit hungry, so in honor of this cool t-shirt I went out on the Internets and found this generic recipe for chocolate cupcakes:

• 2 cups all purpose flour
• 2 cups sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon baking soda
• 1/2 cup shortening
• 3/4 cup water
• 2 large eggs
• 3/4 cup milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla
• 4 ounces melted unsweetened baking chocolate

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Line cupcake pans with paper liners.

Combine all ingredients into large mixing bowl. Mix at low speed for 30 seconds, and scrape bowl. Mix at high speed for 3 minutes.

Fill liners 1/2 to 2/3 full of batter. Bake 20 to 25 minutes or until toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.

Cool 10 minutes in pans then remove from pan, and place on wire racks to cool completely.

Frost when chocolate cupcakes are completely cool.

Eat.

-- Badtux the Soon-to-be-more-rotund Penguin

The continuing collapse of the U.S. health care system

Having stomach cramps and are afraid it's your appendix? It's 3am on a Saturday morning and your regular doctor isn't going to be available until next week? Well, head on down to the emergency room... but be prepared to wait. Because while the number of people in the United States has gone from 270,000,000 to 300,000,000 over the past ten years, the number of emergency rooms in America has declined from 4800 to 4500 over that same period of time -- and the number of hospital beds has declined also, from 1,465,828 in 1975, to 1,213,327 in 1990, to 946,997 in 2005. So people back up in the fewer emergency rooms waiting for an open bed in one of the fewer beds available in the medical system.

As Anne Zieger points out, where healthcare is concerned, supply and demand apparently just don't work the way they do in other industries. If demand is going up because a shortage of primary care doctors is leading to even insured people going to emergency rooms for primary care, you would expect there to be an explosion in the number of emergency rooms, not a decline. Supply should increase to match the demand, right? Right?

Except that it doesn't work like that in real life as vs. Republican masturbatory delusions. The reason it doesn't work like that is because of two things: a) health care eats up 15% of the U.S. GDP and sick people don't make 15% of U.S. GDP, meaning that sick people are not capable of paying the full cost of their care, meaning that hospitals can't get emergency room costs reimbursed by the people using their emergency rooms because you just can't squeeze 15% of the U.S. GDP out of people who don't make 15% of the U.S. GDP, and b) insurance companies are refusing to pay for the care that they contracted to pay for, and government isn't making them pay. So emergency rooms, which should be a profit center for hospitals, are instead a massive drain on their financial resources. So no more emergency rooms get built. Not because of lack of demand. Not because of lack of money -- health insurance compannies are making record profits. But because health insurers are refusing to live up to their contractual obligations, and the U.S. government is letting them do so.

Add in the 18% of emergency room visits by the uninsured, and you have a health care crisis. And it's a health care crisis that's 100% predictable. Health insurers have a financial motivation to not pay out claims, so unless there's government intervention to force them to pay out claims, they don't pay. At one time they wouldn't have dared, because from 1968 to 1980 or so they were under warning that if they refused to live up to their obligations, the Medicare system created by LBJ for old farts would be extended to everybody (i.e., Medicare For All) and put them out of business. But nowdays they seem to believe they can simply refuse to live up to their contractual obligations and get away with it. Hmm, I wonder why that is? (Hint: Follow the money... straight into Congress's pockets).

Regarding the current Presidential race: Neither candidate has a plan that will do anything about the continuing collapse of the U.S. health care system, a system that was the best in the world in 1975 but now can only barely provide minimal care for most people under the best of conditions (i.e., no plagues or epidemics) and which would totally collapse if stressed by any major disease outbreak. John McCain continues to utter nonsense about the "magic of the marketplace" despite the fact that the marketplace has utterly failed to provide sufficient emergency rooms and hospital beds to meet the nation's needs, and Barack Obama's plan privatizes the profits of health insurers while socializing the costs (by having government take on the expenses of being reinsurer for people who use more than X$ of services due to need for expensive surgeries or cancer treatments or etc.) while doing nothing to force insurers to live up to their contractual obligations. Both candidates get an "F" from this health care penguin for their health care plans. But McCain gets an "F-", and I'll talk about that one later...

-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin

Spinning

You might remember that I bought a stationary bicycle for $50 off of Craigslist (and laughed at the people who paid $350 for it new). Last night I did 45 minutes on it. Still haven't lost my penguin rotundity (sigh!), but at least my resting pulse is down to 70 and my blood pressure is at least 10 below "number to be concerned about" on both systolic and diastolic measures. So in that regard, I've gotten my $50 worth. Now to lay off the herring and jalapeno pizzas, sigh...

I've been alternating riding the KLR and the Nightstrom to work, but will soon take the Nightstrom apart to do the electrical modifications to it. More on that shortly at Moto-Tux. Once I have everything done to the Nightstrom, then it'll be the KLR's turn to get torn down, except in the KLR's case I have some more invasive things to do to it, I want to strip it down to be basically a dirt bike with lights now that I have another bike to serve as my primary commuter and long distance tourer. For example, that big ole' ugly fairing on the KLR has to go...

Pretty soon we're all going to be owned by the Chinese. I work with several teams of Chinese engineers. Don't let anybody tell you that these guys aren't smart or creative. They are. They're green, they don't have the experience, and they have a hard time understanding the context of what you're trying to do (they're geeks, they love technology, they love gee-whiz things, they love exposing all sorts of bells and whistles, they have trouble putting themselves in the heads of customers who aren't geeks who just want to get a job done in the simplest easiest way possible), but that differentiates them from any engineer with less than five years experience... how? Get some experience under their belts, and I can tell you where the new center of world innovation is going to be, and it ain't going to be in the San Francisco Bay Area.

So I spin along, and next up, a posting on the U.S. health care crisis and the collapse of the U.S. hospital and emergency room system...

-- Badtux the Spinning Penguin

Thought for the day

Give a man a fish, and he's fed for a day. Teach a man to fish and give him a fishing pole, and he's fed for life. Steal his fishing pole and then whine that he isn't feeding himself, you're just an asshole -- or a Republican, same difference.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

A non-acoustic interlude

Yesterday I posted a YouTube link to a typical tiny-waif-with-big-guitar-and-single-name of a type that afflicts far too many hip coffee shops thinking they're writing songs that are just so precious and true but actually just recycling all the tropes of every other tiny-waif-with-big-guitar-and-single-name that has ever existed. Don't get me wrong, I dig these types, I mean, I am male, but I don't take them too serious. Which of course drives them insane, but... shrug. Maybe after they grow up. Anybody seen "Jewel" lately?

Anyhow, here is someone who is not a tiny waif with a big acoustic guitar and a single name singing oh-so-precious songs:

Beth Orton, live, playing Stolen Car. (Embedded object fixed, sorry!)

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Governator proposes to fuck the poor and elderly -- again

Governor Schwartzenfuhrer proposes 1% sales tax hike that will fall predominantly on the poor and elderly. The poor and elderly are already buying the minimum needed to survive, and state services to the poor and elderly have already been cut to the point that many are homeless and dying due to lack of medical care (because Medi-Cal disbursements have been cut to the point where no doctors or hospitals will accept Medi-Cal). Having 1% of their income suddenly taken away from them will result in even more misery. Meanwhile, a 0.5% hike in the state income tax would raise just as much money, while not affecting the poor and elderly (who don't pay state income tax), but apparently is off the board because, well, the poor and elderly didn't vote for the Schwartzenfuhrer so he prefers to stick it to them instead.

That's a "compassionate conservative" for ya, though. Never passing by another opportunity to stick it to the poor and elderly if it avoids having to raise taxes on his own peeps, even if it's a trivial and temporary and most importantly, DEDUCTIBLE ON THE FEDERAL INCOME TAX tax hike like the 0.5% hike in the state income tax mentioned above. The poor don't make enough money to pay federal income tax, so even if they did take advantage of the new sales tax deduction, it doesn't get them anything... but hey, we gotta punish them for being poor, we gotta steal not only their bootstraps but their boots, and then whine that they aren't pulling themselves up by their bootstraps when we fucking *stole* their bootstraps by cutting schools to the bone so they can't get an education, depriving them of health care so they're too sick to work, and so forth. Whatta deal!

Teach a man to fish, and he's fed for life. Steal his fishing pole and then whine that he is a lazy slacker who doesn't feed himself, and you're just an asshole. Just sayin'.

-- Badtux the ain't-an-asshole Penguin

Osama's driver found guilty of... driving Osama bin Laden

So this is a warning to any taxi driver who picks up a fare. Make sure it's not Henry Kissinger, George W. Bush, or any other war criminal, or you, too, just like Salim Ahmed Hamdan, could be found guilty of driving a war criminal around.

I mean, c'mon. This is it? This is all they got? 7 years, 700 billion dollars, and all we got is a fucking taxi driver? What next? They kidnap and put on trial Osama's barber? Jesus fucking Christ, if this is the extent of America's "war on terror", prosecuting a goddamned TAXI DRIVER for picking up the wrong fare, we're in a helluva goddamned fix, doncha think?!

- Badtux the Taxi-ridin' Penguin

Obama, Afghanistan, and what the hell are we doing there?

Obama wants to "surge" troops to Afghanistan by withdrawing from Iraq. I just have one question: What the hell are we doing there in Afghanistan fighting the Taliban? The Taliban haven't attacked us. They never will. We ought to be ignoring the Taliban. Instead, we're fighting them as mercenaries on behalf of an Afghan central government that we devised and installed which apparently is incompetent to control its own territory and its own people.

In the end, we had no business trying to build an Afghan state in the first place. Our goal in Afghanistan should have been to catch Osama bin Laden and his al Qaeda freaks, the guys who attacked us on 9/11 remember, and then leave. That's our only strategic interest in Afghanistan. Otherwise the place is an armpit, and all we do by staying there is breed enemies. The Taliban never attacked us and as a native Pashtun nationalist movement never will, we have no national interests involved fighting them, and I am still appalled that anybody thinks we have any business dealing with the Taliban in any way other than to make them a deal, "you give us bin Laden and his Arabs, we stop killing you and leave your country." Which is what they want, in the end -- us to leave their country. No more, no less. And bin Laden and his Arabs, remember, are the folks who attacked us on 9/11/2001 -- *not* the Taliban.

And if Obama wants to continue the current failed policies in Afghanistan, I will oppose those policies just as much as I oppose the failed policies of Dear Leader and Dear Leader's Buddy (John McInsane)... in my opinion, Obama has things half-right. Which is better than all-wrong (which is where Dear Leader and Dear Leader's Buddy are), but he deserves to have his feet held to the grindstone on this, and I have no compunctions about doing so.

-- Badtux the Geopolitical Penguin

Cops had no warrant to break in door

Oops!. Prince Georges County (Maryland) cops had no warrant to break in the door of Mayor Cheye Calvo of Berwyn Heights, MD, all they had was a standard search warrant that requires the cops to "knock and announce". A PGC police officer also purjured himself to the judge by claiming he gave the mayor a copy of such a search warrant at the time of the search. In actuality, a police officer brought the warrant to the mayor's lawyer several days after the raid.

So let's summarize:

1. the PGC cops had no warrant authorizing them to break in the door and shoot the mayor's dogs. If they had executed a standard warrant, the mayor would have been able to remove his dogs from the presence of the cops. When they burst in like that and start shooting, obviously there is no such possibility.
2. the PGC cops did not coordinate with the Berwyn Heights police, who could have served the warrant for them without any fuss.
3. the PGC cops lied to a judge about serving Mayor Calvo with a warrant.
4. therefore... ponies!

Reality is that no cop will get fired for lying to a judge, no cop will be fired for illegally entering a home, and the mayor will get some money from the lawsuit against PGC but of course that won't get his dogs back. And the PGC cops will violate someone else's civil rights tomorrow, but it'll be a poor brown-skinned person so we won't hear about it. The PGC police force has been lawless for years, violating people's civil rights, forging false confessions to "solve" crimes, refusing to allow detainees to see their lawyer even when the detainee is demanding his laywer and the lawyer is standing in the lobby demanding to see his client, and otherwise behaving like a miniature Gestapo, and nobody ever does anything about it.

The sad thing is that most folks in the area don't care that the PGC cops are serving as judge, jury, and executioner -- they *want* to live in a dictatorship where the police can invade any home they feel like invading and kill anybody or anything they feel like killing regardless of whether they've been convicted of a crime or not. Democracy does not seem to be much loved in today's America, sad to say. The whole Constitution thing, with its separation of powers that says you're innocent until found guilty by a jury of your peers (or by a judge if you forgo the jury), apparently is viewed by the average American today as just a piece of fancy toilet paper, sorta like how Sheriff Joke (Joe Arpaio) gets re-elected every time in Maricopa County AZ despite having killed dozens of people in his jail who have never been convicted of any crime. But the average American apparently thinks that whole "fair trial" thingy is just a quaint tradition that is irrelevant today. Sad. Just sad. Our founding fathers gave us a Republic, and we're pissing it away because, apparently, democracy is just too much hassle for the average American today.

-- Badtux the Disgusted Penguin

An acoustic interlude

I'm off to bed...

-- Badtux the Tired Penguin

Never engage in a battle of the wits with a blond bimbo

Especially if you're a wrinkly old white-haired dude, because she will bitch-slap you big-time. Word of warning. I laughed so hard when I watched this video that I started coughing and now my chest hurts. You have been warned.

See more funny videos at Funny or Die

Score: Paris Hilton 1, John McCain 0. Don't mess with the celebs, Johnny McNasty. Especially when they're richer than your blond bimbo wife will ever be. Their rich parents don't like it, and they know how to make you look like a total jerkoff, big time. Got it?

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Beware the Penis of Mass Destruction!

Three cops in Boulder, Colorado were so terrified by a man rolling around naked in the grass that they fired at him three times with tasers. Apparently Christopher Dornfield's, err, weapon, made them feel small. Now, my suggestion to those cops would be that, if they feel small, they should try some Viagra. But what can I say. I'm sure they were terrified, terrified I say, that Mr. Dornfield was going to use his Weapon of Mass Engorgement to, err, gay rape them or somethin'?

No no, I'm sure they had no alternative but to use a high tech version of every torturer's favorite weapon, the cattle prod, in order to diffuse the mere possibility of Mr. Dornfield aiming his massive Weapon of Mass Engorgement at them. It's just a matter of officer safety. I mean, what, you think they issue police officers with jumbo-sized condoms nowdays? Why, if they hadn't tasered Mr. Dornfield, he might have aimed his massive Weapon at them and... and... EWWWW!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Of tire gauges and idiots

The Center for Strategic and International Studies says that Americans could save around 800,000 barrels of oil per day by doing the things that Obama mentioned that individual Americans could do to help the oil situation -- inflate their tires, tune up their engines, change their air filters. The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030.

In short, Obama was right that opening the coasts of Florida and California to drilling doesn't produce enough oil to drill us out of the hole, and while he has now said he's not opposed to doing this drilling as part of a larger energy solution, he is correct to state that we cannot drill our way out of this oil crisis. The United States uses 20 million barrels per day of oil, of which 70% is imported, so that makes it pretty much obvious that 200,000 barrels of oil are not going to solve the U.S. oil addiction problem without some serious conservation measures -- the simplest of which is the one that Obama suggested.

You don't have to ask me, just ask any mechanic. Or NASCAR. But I forget, that can't be true, because these are liberals, and anything a liberal says is by definition a lie. If, for example, a liberal said that the sky is blue, that's when we'd all know that it's actually purple, because by definition a liberal is a liar. Haven't you learned anything by listening to Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity?! Yeppers, those liberals like those anti-American NASCAR fellers or George H.W. Bush (thanks Rook!) is just lyin' to us about tire pressure, yessiree!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Are Blackwater mercenaries enforcing U.S. drug laws?

That's the suspicion aroused by this photograph. If so, that's disconcerting in more ways than one. Blackwater mercenaries are accountable only to their owner, Erik Prince, who makes Dick Cheney look personable and sane. Placing heavily-armed mercenaries accountable only to the far right in positions where they can use said weapons in pursuit of an agenda that has nothing to do with America or Americans and everything to do with pure, unbridled power... that would be alarming indeed.

So is this just a case of a rogue DEA agent wearing a Blackwater shirt instead of his official DEA shirt? Or something more ominous? Curious penguins don't want to know, but can't keep from asking the question anyhow :-(.

-- Badtux the Querulous Penguin

When cats attack

Be sure to stay around for the ending of this video. It's... horrible! meep!

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Question for the cat-owned people out there

When you go to feed your cat, when you are standing by the kitchen cabinet where the cat food is stored and you pull out the bag of cat food, is one or or more cats going in circles around one of your legs?

If I look down as I pull out the bag and measure out the food, I get dizzy. Around and around and around...

For me, it's The Mighty Fang that does the circle duty. The boy does like his chow. Probably why he's an 18 pounder, heh.

-- Badtux the Dizzy Penguin

Thought for the day

"Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard." -- H.L. Mencken