Too goddamn hot

I’ve been baking the past few days because we *finally* got summer here in the SF Bay area — and boy howdy, we got it with a vengeance. Broke records all around the Bay area on Sunday, and Saturday wasn’t much cooler.

So anyhow, in the aftermath of a lesbian black woman saving the life of an anti-gay David Duke supporting bigot who was attacked by what appears to have been a lone wolf white Bernie Bro, the tighty righties have their panties in a bunch about how those mean lefties are coarsening the public discourse. Like this leftie threatening violence:

Err, yeah.

Or this liberal threatening violence:

Err, ah. Okay. Well, I’m sure this guy has to be a liberal:

No? Okay, so how about this guy who shot someone outside a Milo Yiannopoulos speech? He was clearly a liberal, right.

Uhm, no. He was wearing a Trump hat and had told his wife he was carrying his gun with him to the event so he could kill some liberals.

Okay, so let’s get this straight. You have some liberals saying that we should impeach Trump, one of whom, out of all the millions saying that, decided to start taking potshots at Republicans. Then you got right wingers saying that killing liberals is a great idea, *lots* of right wingers saying that, you can’t throw a rock at Stormfront or Brietbart or the Fox News comment section without hitting one of the right wingers saying that, and that means that liberals are the ones advocating violence.

Yeah, global warming is real, and it’s apparently baked the fucking brains out of half of America. Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Too-warm Penguin

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The most important heroes in the world are those who simply do their job

Attack the ambush.

That’s what our soldiers are trained to do. And, increasingly, our cops too. It’s what two Capitol Police officers did today. Two black Capitol Police officers. Who were there as the security detail for a white Congressman who has made his career running his mouth about how lazy stupid etc. black people are. They were ambushed at a baseball field, and the two black police officers immediately attacked the ambush and killed the ambusher. Because that’s what they do. That’s what they signed up to do. Even if it means defending the life of a bigot.

Capitol Police officers Crystal Griner and David Bailey did their job. It’s a dirty job, but it’s a necessary one. Regardless of what various right-wing assholes (and a few lefties too) say about Second Amendment remedies, it’s a damn nasty idea. Because once we start down that route, we’re talking about rule of gun — and rule of gun always favors the most evil, the most venal, the most willing to murder in cold blood.

And nations ruled by cold blooded murderers are not good places to be.

Just sayin’.

– Badtux the Rule of Law Penguin

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In which the Twitter Troll in Chief trolls from atop a pile of dead bodies:

Do you notice we are not having a gun debate right now? That's because they used knives and a truck!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 4, 2017

Really?

So how’s about this, Twitter Troll in Chief: If the terrorists who struck at the London Bridge / Borough Market had been carrying guns, a lot more people would have died. If they’d had guns, it would have looked a lot like the Bataclan Theater attack in Paris, where 89 people died. But because they only had knives and a truck, only 7 people died.

In short, yeah, this was a victory for UK gun control. A total of 130 people died in the Paris attack, where the attackers were heavily armed with semiautomatic weapons and a lot of rounds of ammunition. A total of 7 people died in the London attack where the attackers were armed with knives and a van. That’s a helluva lot less people than 130.

Of course, His Fraudulency Donald the Trump isn’t the only person trolling. Both of the candidates for Prime Minister in the UK are trolling, hard. Corbyn claims that this shows that the UK interventions in the Middle East are having blowback that endangers British lives for no gain for Britain. May claims that Corbyn is playing politics with the lives of innocent British citizens, while at the same time claiming that the solution to terrorism in the UK is to censor the Internet. Which is, uhm, playing politics with the lives of innocent British citizens — this is something she’s wanted to do for a long time as the “Queen of Mean”.

Meanwhile, here in the United States our copycat terrorists are right wing terrorists, like that nutjob in Portland who killed two men who interfered with his harassment of two Muslim girls and then yelled in court, “You call it terrorism, I call it patriotism. You hear me? Die.” And what does the Twitter Troll In Chief have to say about that?

CRICKETS

But he *does* have this to say:

We need to be smart, vigilant and tough. We need the courts to give us back our rights. We need the Travel Ban as an extra level of safety!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 3, 2017

Which travel ban would have stopped the Portland terrorist, uhm, how? And the “rights” he’s talking about appear to be the right to, uhm, say nasty things to Muslims. Exactly the same right that the Portland terrorist exercised to the point of killing two men who were interfering with his right to terrorize two young Muslim girls.

What a fucking asshole.

That’s all.

– Badtux the Asshole-despising Penguin

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Ariana Grande is the bomb

… but not a bomb.

A bomb is what went off at her concert in Manchester, UK, as crowds of young teenagers left the concert. A bomb is what an asshole Islamist suicide bomber set off in the middle of that crowd, killing at least 22 people and injuring at least 59 others.

And the bombing suspect was already known to have ties to Al Qaeda. Had even been ratted on by his family who told authorities that he was dangerous. Was even on a watch list after he got back from a stint in a terrorist training camp in Libya.

What is needed to stop terrorism isn’t Big Brother listening in on every phone call, observing every street corner with video cameras, or other things of that sort. What is needed to stop terrorism is simple human intelligence — following up when a family calls you and says their kid is a violent Islamist extremist, for example. No amount of listening in on phone calls was necessary in order to identify this asshole as a threat to public safety. All that was necessary was for the authorities to listen to his family, who was saying loud and clear that their kid was a time bomb waiting to go off.

And they didn’t, so people are dead.

I expect there to be plenty of folks who now are going to want to impose all sorts of draconian bullshit to “stop terrorism”. All that’s going to do is add more noise to hide the signal. What’s needed is to listen to the human beings who are already telling us who the dangerous people are, not bullshit like spying on everybody’s phone calls or keeping people from taking their laptop computers onto airliners.

But I suppose that’s common sense, and common sense is no good when there’s power to seize and money to be made pushing snake oil…

– Badtux the Exasperated Penguin

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One nation under brutality

My final thought on United endorsing knocking out the teeth and bloodying the face of 69 year old men who dared raise his voice: What’s interesting is that there’s anybody, anywhere, who think it is appropriate to knock out the teeth and bloody the face of a 69 year old man under any circumstance short of the man brandishing a gun or knife.

The fact that the airline and police actually have defenders just reminds me of how brutal we have become as a nation, where brutalizing both our own citizens and people overseas is seen as normal and acceptable behavior. We have the majority in Congress saying that the solution to hungry people is to take away their food stamps, for example, because we must brutalize those poor people into being less poor — the beatings shall not stop until morale improves! In this case, the man had been sold a fraudulent ticket, one that purported to offer him airline travel but in fact apparently only offered him the chance to sit in a terminal since United wasn’t going to give him the airline travel he’d paid for, and the man was complaining about that. Going from there to knocking his teeth out and bloodying his face is like going 150mph on a public highway crowded with rush hour traffic — no sane person could ever think that was a good idea.

But then, I’m not sure that we as a nation are sane anymore.

– Badtux the “Am I sane?” Penguin

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27% of Europeans say it’s okay to rape a woman under certain circumstances

Frankly, this does not surprise me. I’ve known for some time that many Europeans are misogynist and racist. Other than the Scandinavians, and, surprisingly, the Spanish, this seems to carry over into their attitudes towards rape too, though it appears that eastern Europeans agree more highly than others that it’s okay to rape a woman under certain circumstances. Still, look at France. Surprised? I’m not.

– Badtux the unsurprised-but-still-bummed-out Penguin

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80 dead in Nice, France

The deadly weapon was a heavy truck. Not a truck bomb. Just a truck, smashing into a large crowd gathered at the waterfront and continuing onward through the crowd at high speed until stopped by a hail of police bullets.

I’ve been waiting for our own home-grown terrorists to do the same to a Black Lives Matter gathering, but it appears ISIS decided to do it first. There will be copycats…

– Badtux the Saddened Penguin

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