The punk penguin (punkguin?):
The punk kingfisher:
The improbably green parrot:
9_-pair.jpg)
Is there any scenario in which ducklings are not cute? Continue reading
Monday Morning Cute: Birds
Reply
Monthly Archives: October 2013
This Week in WTF, October 4, 2013
Via karmajello.com
A 20-foot boat filled with 80 pounds of weed capsized at a popular nude beach/surf spot in Santa Cruz, California. Nobody was hurt, because it was totally awesome. The only danger was everyone catching good vibes.
Reports do not indicate whether or not a Doritos truck jackknifed near the beach, spilling its contents, but that would have likely been very convenient.
– I am also inclined to let this headline speak for itself: “Punk Band Shoots Porn Film on Front Lawn of Westboro Baptist Church.” The band, Get Shot!, claims to be “”the first band ever to start a porn site.” Here’s the NSFW link to said site, if you are so inclined, although as of about 9:45 CDT today, the URL leads to a “503 Service Temporarily Unavailable” message. This may be due to Healthcare.gov-caliber levels of traffic, a takedown demand from the WBC, or some other sinister plot. (The video is mirrored on XVideos, if you simply must watch it. I warned you, though.) It also led to this amusing exchange:
@Fredphelps316 Someone from your church's IP address spent 41 minutes looking at our website. That's longer than the video on your lawn!!!
— GET SHOT GIRLS! (@GETSHOTGIRLS) October 3, 2013
Followed by this response:
@GETSHOTGIRLS what the hell is an IP address?
— Fred Phelps (@Fredphelps316) October 3, 2013
That Other Time the Heritage Foundation Advocated for Affordable Health Care
The inventory of Creative Commons images in a search for “Heritage Foundation” is rather small, so this is a picture of a jaguar named Khan from the Wildlife Heritage Foundation. How do you not include a picture of a Jaguar named Khan?
The Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank that has been on the front lines of recent opposition to the Affordable Care Act (a/k/a “Obamacare”). It has not always been so opposed to aspects of the law like the individual insurance mandate, as it rather strongly supported such an idea way back in 1989. As it turns out, its support for various parts of the ACA was in evidence much more recently.
The “universal health care” that many Republicans have recently touted is formally known as the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) of 1986. In short, EMTALA states that hospitals accepting payment from federal programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, cannot deny treatment to a person due to inability to pay or insufficient insurance coverage, if that person is experiencing an acute medical emergency. The government does not directly cover the costs of care required by EMTALA, meaning that the costs either get unloaded as tax write-offs for bad debt, or they are covered by higher hospital costs charged to other patients and private insurers. EMTALA had the best of intentions, but it has had the effect of shifting the costs onto other private actors, not the public. Although the Tea Party has tried, no one has ever seriously argued in recent years that people should not have access to acute care because of a lack of ability to pay. It’s a fundamental human decency thing, at least in my opinion.
The Heritage Foundation generally agreed with these sentiments, i.e. that EMTALA had good intentions but caused many problems, as recently as 2007, and their analysis and recommendations included features now found in the Affordable Care—sorry, Obamacare that they so vehemently oppose all of a sudden. Back in July 2007, John S. O’Shea, M.D., a Health Policy Fellow at The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Health Policy Studies, wrote the following:
The Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) is another example of federal legislation that hurts the very people that it was meant to protect: low-income patients in need of emergency medical services. Enacted in 1986, the law is a congressional response to well-publicized cases in which patients were refused immediate medical treatment based on their inability to pay. Continue reading
Health Insurance is Not Being “Forced on You,” but Your Health Care Might Be Forced on the Rest of Us
![By Thierry Geoffroy (Thierry Geoffroy) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Emergency_room-300x209.jpg "By Thierry Geoffroy (Thierry Geoffroy) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
The individual insurance mandate originated as a conservative, free-market alternative to the single-payer system, with the significant support of the Heritage Foundation, and it was one of the signature achievements of Romney’s term as MA governor. It acknowledges that health insurance should principally be an individual and family responsibility, not something employers should be required to provide en masse, and it takes into account the fact that a person who declines to obtain health insurance becomes a drain on society when they become sick or injured. Republicans, and conservatives in general, were mostly on board with it until the instant that President Obama supported it.
So please, spare us the “forced upon people” *%#@*!#. People who refuse to obtain health insurance because of liberty, if they are otherwise able to do so, ought to agree in advance to decline all health care that they do not pay for out-of-pocket. Otherwise, they are the drain on society, because many hospital emergency rooms cannot turn them away for inability to pay for services. This means that, if you are in a traumatic accident, have no health insurance, and don’t have enough cash on hand to pay for the emergency room, you agree in advance that you’re probably going to die and the taxpayers are not going to help you. You should probably wear a wristband or something so people will know that you do’t want to participate in the social contract.
Here’s the thing, though. If a person refuses to obtain insurance because they think that the individual mandate infringes upon their freedom to do…..whatever it is they think is being infringed, I would still support them receiving medical care in the emergency room regardless of their ability to pay. I would support this because I am not a monster. I just wish that those people would have the courage of their convictions and agree to risk dying rather than accept the government-mandated healthcare that is (to them) such obvious tyranny.
Photo credit: By Thierry Geoffroy (Thierry Geoffroy) [CC-BY-SA-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Rare Footage from a Ted Cruz-Led Republican Strategy Meeting
I found the following on YouTube, and I think it offers some useful insight into how Ted Cruz has handled the debate leading up to this week’s government shutdown.
I bought this pen exactly one hour before my bike was stolen! Why? What’s the significance? I DON’T KNOW!!!!!!!
And:
The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It’s like you’re unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting…
Thanks to Marley for transcription assistance.
That Time the Heritage Foundation Promoted the Individual Mandate, Citing “an Implicit Contract Between Households and Society”
If you have the means to purchase insurance for yourself, but refuse to do so because freedom, the taxpayers of the U.S. will foot the bill to treat you for catastrophic injuries, because we are fundamentally a decent people. Don’t take my word for it, though. The Heritage Foundation said so back in 1989, when its Director of Domestic Policy Studies, Stuart M. Butler, Ph.D., promoted the idea of an individual health insurance mandate:
Many states now require passengers in automobiles to wear seatbelts for their own protection. Many others require anybody driving a car to have liability insurance. But neither the federal government nor any state requires all households to protect themselves from the potentially catastrophic costs of a serious accident or illness. Under the Heritage plan, there would be such a requirement. This mandate is based on two important principles. First, that health care protection is a responsibility of individuals, not businesses. Thus to the extent that anybody should be required to provide coverage to a family, the household mandate assumes that it is the family that carries the first responsibility. Second, it assumes that there is an implicit contract between households and society, based on the notion that health insurance is not like other forms of insurance protection. If a young man wrecks his Porsche and has not had the foresight to obtain insurance, we may commiserate but society feels no obligation to repair his car. But health care is different. If a man is struck down by a heart attack in the street, Americans will care for him whether or not he has insurance. If we find that he has spent his money on other things rather than insurance, we may be angry but we will not deny him services – even if that means more prudent citizens end up paying the tab. A mandate on individuals recognizes this implicit contract. Society does feel a moral obligation to insure that its citizens do not suffer from the unavailability of health care. But on the other hand, each household has the obligation, to the extent it is able, to avoid placing demands on society by protecting itself.
(Emphasis added.)
Here’s a PDF copy of the lecture (source), in case the HTML page goes away.
Photo credit: By Stuart Butler [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Republicans Really Don’t Understand Negotiation, It Seems
Pictured: Republican House member (via morguefile.com)
Negotiation is the process of reaching a compromise between two or more opposing parties, each of whom has something the other wants, and who has the legal right to grant or withhold it. My experience has mostly been in litigation, where a plaintiff has a viable claim, and a defendant has the ability to offer a monetary and/or injunctive settlement. The usual purpose of a settlement in litigation is to avoid the future costs/risks of continuing to prosecute or defend the case.
If one party to a lawsuit is asserting claims or withholding evidence in bad faith, proper negotiation is impossible. In many litigation scenarios, a party who engages in such bad faith, or their counsel, may be subject to penalties. In a contract negotiation, the subsequent discovery that a party has withheld or misrepresented material information could be construed as breaching the contract, could invalidate the contract, or could justify modifying the contract on terms favorable to the other party. Our political system, apparently, does not have equivalent checks, unless voters actually go to the effort of holding their elected representatives accountable. This brings us to the current hubbub over House Republicans’ determination to get rid of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “Obamacare”) at all costs. Continue reading
We’re Number Four! Sort Of.
I came across this chart on Wikipedia the other day, showing the distribution of the various orders among the 5,416 currently living and recently extinct species of mammals.
![By Aranae (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mammal_species_pie_chart.png "By Aranae (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons")
You might note that primates rank fourth among all orders of mammals. This order includes humans, other apes (yeah, I went there), gibbons, baboons, monkeys, lemurs, tarsiers, lorises, aye-ayes, etc. I’d say we’re in good company.
In substantial first place, of course, are the rodents, e.g. mice, rats, squirrels, beavers, porcupines, hamsters, guinea pigs, and capybaras.
In sizeable second place, making up nearly 1/4 of all mammal species, are the bats, e.g., uh, bats and flying foxes.
Third place threw me for a second, because I had not heard of Soricomorpha. Turns out that’s the relatively new classification for most types of shrews and moles. They used to be in a bigger order that included hedgehogs, which I remember from my nerdy childhood.
![By José Luis Bartheld from Valdivia, Chile (Monito del Monte) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/551px-Monito_del_Monte_ps6-275x300.jpg "By José Luis Bartheld from Valdivia, Chile (Monito del Monte) [CC-BY-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
The monito del monte. My autocorrect tried to change it to “mojito.”
Anyway, I guess I’m still pretty nerdy about this stuff.
Photo credits: Aranae (Own work) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons; José Luis Bartheld from Valdivia, Chile (Monito del Monte) [CC-BY-2.0], via Wikimedia Commons.