Hey, Butker

... yo mama - biotch.

The Test

It's pretty appalling to keep finding out that so many Americans know so little about our history or our government.

The citizenship test has some of the easiest questions ever - stuff I was taught in grade school - starting like in 3rd or 4th grade.

Nobody's asking you to present a full dissertation on the details of our little experiment in democratic self-government, but holy crap, people, c'mon - ya gotta know some of this to be at least kind of effective in the whole democracy thing.

Democracy is not something we have

unless it's something we do.

And we have to know something about it

to make the damned thing work.

Check yourself:

The next time you hear somebody shit-talk immigrants for not knowing enough about USAmerica Inc, ask them a few of those questions.

Today's Eternal Sadness

A "good guy with a gun" killed a "bad guy with a gun", after the bad guy killed 3 people with his gun at a shopping mall in Indiana, and "conservatives" are cheering because killing somebody with a gun is wrong, and so a guy with a gun had to be killed by a guy with a gun to show how wrong it is to go around killing people with guns - and that's good because of how bad it is.

I guess there could be some kind of fucked up karmic pseudo-logic to it, but in the end, another 4 Americans are dead because of our stoopid Culture Of Gun Violence, and some of these fuckin' idiots are calling it a win.

WaPo: (pay wall)

Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander

A bystander’s decision to shoot a man who opened fire at an Indiana mall was a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.

Police on Monday praised the quick actions of 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken, an armed shopper who killed 20-year-old Jonathan Sapirman after Sapirman killed three people and wounded two others at a mall in the Indianapolis suburb of Greenwood.

“Many more people would have died last night if not for a responsible armed citizen,” police Chief Jim Ison said Monday, repeatedly calling Dicken a “good Samaritan” and his response “heroic.”

It isn’t common for mass shootings to be stopped in such fashion. From 2000 to 2021, fewer than 3% of 433 active attacks in the U.S. ended with a civilian firing back, according to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. The researchers define the attacks as one or more people targeting multiple people.

It was far more common for police or bystanders to subdue the attacker or for police to kill the person, according to the center’s national data, which were recently cited by The New York Times.

In a quarter of the shootings, the attacker stopped by leaving the area, similar to what happened during the July 4 parade in Highland Park, Illinois, where seven people were killed.

“There’s been this statement: ‘The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.’ That’s factually inaccurate because of the word ‘only,’” said Adam Lankford, a criminal justice expert at the University of Alabama who has written books and research papers about mass shootings.

Nonetheless, gun-rights advocates, including the National Rifle Association, used that phrase on social media to draw attention to what happened in Indiana.

Since July 1, Indiana has allowed anyone 18 or older to carry a handgun in public, though private property owners can prohibit firearms. The Greenwood mall has a ban on weapons, according to its conduct code.

Gun Owners of America hopes the mall reconsiders, saying gun-free zones create a false sense of security.

The Greenwood Park Mall, which is owned by Simon Property Group, didn’t reply to a request for comment but released a statement commending first responders and the “heroic actions of the good Samaritan who stopped the suspect.”

Lankford believes it would be a mistake to think armed civilians can be relied upon to regularly stop mass shootings.

“While it’s certainly a good thing in this mall shooting that someone was able to stop it before it went any further, let’s not think we can substitute that outcome in all past and future incidents,” Lankford said. “If everyone’s carrying a firearm, the risk that something bad happens just gets much larger.”

There have been other examples of armed people defending large groups. In May, a woman fatally shot a man in Charleston, West Virginia, after he fired an AR-15-style rifle into a crowd at an outdoor party. She was praised by police, not charged.

In 2017, Devin Patrick Kelley crashed his car and killed himself after bystanders, including one who was armed, chased him after he massacred 26 people at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

Overheard

Asked about preventing gun violence,

Herschel Walker proposed:

“...a department that can

look at young men

that's looking at women

that's looking at social media”.

Yeah - now there's a guy we need

in the greatest deliberative body

in the world

An Observation

 

Those Hyper-Patriotic Americans who hate foreigners and immigrants are the same people who hate large numbers of Americans too.

Yeehaw

Ain't that America.

Today's Reddit

Modern Dad Manual: When you hear the siren, get everybody into the basement, or the center of the house, and then stand in front of the window so you can maybe go viral with a video of the tornado ripping you to shreds with flying glass.

Oops

So we thought the main story would be the eventuality of a spike in Delta infections, and while that's still probably the case, here's a shitty little bonus for us.

KIRO Seattle:

Child sex-trafficking sting at 2021 Sturgis Motorcycle Rally nets 9 arrests

STURGIS, S.D. — A weeklong sex-trafficking sting executed at the 81st annual Sturgis Motorcycle Rally netted nine arrests, each with some connection to children.

Eight of the nine men arrested, who range in age from 22 to 54, are South Dakota residents charged with attempted enticement of a minor using the internet, a charge which carries a minimum sentence of 10 years in prison upon conviction, the Argus Leader reported.

The ninth man, a New York resident, is charged with attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor, which carries a minimum sentence of 15 years in prison upon conviction, the newspaper reported.

The South Dakota U.S. Attorney’s Office confirmed the arrests in a Tuesday news release.

According to the Rapid City Journal, the joint sex operation involved the South Dakota Internet Crimes Against Children Taskforce, the South Dakota Division of Criminal Investigation, U.S. Homeland Security Investigations, Pennington County Sheriff’s Office and the Rapid City Police Department.

Specifically, law enforcement placed multiple advertisements on online websites and mobile applications to communicate with online predators. Skout, MeetMe and Whisper, as well as the website fetlife.com, were among the platforms targeted, the Journal reported.

The men arrested include:

• Alec Walker Daniel, 22, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Alexander Wayne Basaldu, 35, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Jesse James Young, 36, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Joshua Robert Lehmann, 34, Rapid City, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Christopher Thomas Dahl, 28, Wolcott, New York: Attempted commercial sex trafficking of a minor.
• Stephen Gregory Fontenot, 39, Black Hawk, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Anthony James Kemp, 54, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• James Dean Hanapel, 20, Ellsworth AFB: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.
• Clayton John Paulson, 36, Spearfish, South Dakota: Attempted enticement of a minor using the internet.

The 2021 rally attracted more than 525,000 attendees, substantially fewer than the record-setting 2015 crowd of more than 747,000, but nearly 14% more than the roughly 462,000 who rode in for the 2020 event, KOTA-TV reported.

And the hardest part for me is resisting the urge to profile these fuckin' slugs as the usual "conservative" MAGA Incel suspects who talk shit while doing almost exactly what they accuse other people of doing.

A Blast From The Past

Smart guy Carl Sagan via Brian Williams at MSNBC

Close Call

A. Keep your fucking dog under control

B. Try to understand that once you pull the trigger, some really bad things can happen

BTW, they teach you all that shit in boy scouts FFS.

Dogs and less-than-good dog-owners, guns, kids, and the knee-jerk reactions of over-protective parents.

What could possibly go wrong?

It would be bad for me to say something like "Whew - dodged a bullet that time, eh?" - cuz that kid certainly didn't - so I won't say that.

Glad that kid's OK.

Not The Onion

Today in Stoopid Rube Tricks

Detroit Free Press:

Whitmer kidnap suspect wants out of jail. He's diabetic, and fears COVID-19

After three weeks in jail, one of the suspects charged with plotting to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer is asking the judge to reconsider her decision to keep him locked up:

He's worried about getting the COVID-19 virus.

Kaleb Franks of Waterford, a recovering heroin addict who says he has turned his life around after doing time for cocaine and home invasion, has diabetes and high cholesterol, takes insulin daily and fears contracting COVID-19 in jail, his lawyer argued in court documents filed this week.

The filing shed more light on the life of the 26-year-old defendant known as 'Red Hot,' who maintains that he can be trusted not to flee and that he is not a threat to society, despite the judge concluding on Oct. 13 that "he remains a danger to the community."

Are You Smarter

...than anybody? Anybody at all?

And then, Ted Cruz jumped in.

Today's Tweet

DumFux with guns.

Yesterday was the 334th day in 2019, and marked the 397th mass shooting.

We really are the stoopid country.

Dipshits with guns... pic.twitter.com/d21RE2ECND
via RexChapman

— Tomthunkit™ (@TomthunkitsMind) December 1, 2019

The View From Out There

An irrelevant freak show

Where The Fuck Are We?

Colbert's question - Have we come to the point where colluding with a foreign power in an attempt to effect the outcome of our elections is a Left vs Right thing?

It's of some import to remember that while 45*'s approvals are in the mid- to high 30s overall, for people self-identifying as Republican, that approval number is still in the mid- to high 80s.

We can cheer and feel hopeful as more "rock-ribbed establishment" Repubs bail on the party and squawk about it, but 45*'s core constituency (as low-life and bottom-of-the-barrel as we know them to be) will likely stay with him for as long as they see him as the guy who went up there to Washington and showed all them buttheads a thing or two.

Because: The point of the exercise for an awful lot of "conservatives" is simply to make liberals mad enough to cry. There's almost literally nothing else to it for some of these mooks.

Corollary: If their guy does something that makes you mad or scared or whatever, then you're a liberal, and nothing you say matters because nothing you say can be the truth because you're a liberal, and liberals are always wrong, and we win again. All this winning!

But the real kicker is that we can't go on trying to see any of this thru our filter of the Presumption of Regularity.

45*'s hardcore supporters aren't really the ones who put him there, but they're convinced they did exactly that, so they're the ones who have to be convinced he has to go. And we can't sway people who are Fact-Hostile to the point where they've become immune to reason. We have to fight the mechanisms that propagate that hostility - and I don't know how to do that.

"Turbo-Fucked" is a pretty apt descriptor for what we are right now.

Today's Poe Wannabe

This guy is Poe's Law in reverse

...an Internet adage which states that, without a clear indicator of the author's intent, parodies of extreme views will be mistaken by some readers or viewers for sincere expressions of the parodied views.

(CAUTION: I could feel the IQ points dropping off my intellect the longer I listened)

Yeah - and what kids today really need is a dose of good ol' American hardship.  So let's go back to the 1950s when we could count on knowing that at least one of the neighbor kids would be killed or crippled by Polio or Whooping Cough or Scarlet Fever or a car crash because seatbelts are for pussies.  Back when things were so much better here in God's Own USAmerica Inc, that the Death Rate for children was 10 times what it is now.

And no, of course he's not a raging bigot - he just liked it a lot better back when all those scary black people didn't have the same rights as the rest of us.

Fake Lord have mercy.

These assholes are serious about being deliberately stoopid, and this level of Weapons-Grade Dumfuckery just gets worse if we don't take every opportunity to stomp on it.

hat tip = Little Green Footballs

Today's Un-Event

Smart people talking about important stuff:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

The View From Out There

When the whole whole world says you're bug-fuckin' stoopid, one thing you have to stop and consider is that maybe you're bug-fuckin' stoopid.

The Week:

Coverage of the school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, was splashed across newspaper front pages around the world, a testament to the universal horror of a tragedy in which 20 children, all of them ages 6 and 7, were killed in their classrooms by a lone gunman. There was an outpouring of sympathy from the international community, which was inevitably followed by utter bewilderment at America's continued obsession with lethal weapons. The U.S. is home to 270 million privately held guns, which equates to an average of nine guns per 10 people. (In second place, with roughly 1 gun for every two people, is Yemen, "a conflict-torn Arab nation still dealing with poverty, political unrest, a separatist Shia insurgency, an al Qaeda branch, and the aftereffects of a 1994 civil war," notes Max Fisher at The Washington Post.) It is no coincidence that the U.S. also boasts the highest rate of gun-related deaths among developed countries — an American is 20 times more likely to die at the hands of a gun then another member of the developed world. Here, some reactions from around the world:

Canada's The Globe and Mail:
There is something inexorable about the phenomenon of mass shootings in the United States. We have been forced to write about it with tragic regularity for years. We have exhausted adjectives to describe our horror and revulsion. We have stated and restated the problem…
The time for platitudes is past, Mr. President. It’s time the U.S. cured its gun sickness.

And there're 10 more links and excerpts.

The War Goes On

In this particular case, I refer to The War On Women.

via Addicting Info:

On Friday, the Illinois court of appeals upheld a decision that allows pharmacists and medical dispensaries to refuse to give out emergency contraceptives on the grounds of religion.

So here's a thought; maybe I could go to Pharmacy Tech school, wait around for that job at CVS to open up, and then after I'm kinda established, I could convert to the Christian Science brand of religion.  At that point, it seems like I'd be in the perfect position.  I could simply refuse to fill or dispense any prescriptions because my religion forbids it, which means I wouldn't be required to do any actual work.  And they couldn't pressure me or fire me because I could sue their asses off for Religious Discrimination in the workplace.

Who's Side?

I'll have to ask for a temporary suspension of Godwin's 1st Corollary so we can play a quick round of Political Scattergories.  Quick - tell me which side of the standard Conservative/Liberal divide do you think this butthead fits best.

From Addicting Info:

The Mission statement of his current group:
“WE BELIEVE that the current government in America is run by Jews,” and, “WE BELIEVE that the Jews [sic] main goal is the total annihilation of the Aryan race, heritage, & culture.”

Mullet states that not only does he not believe President Obama was born in America, he believes Obama is the anti-Christ, (Ethos Magazine in 2010). On his web post on the American National Socialist Party forum, March 13, 2011 Paul wrote:

”Typical Nigger Behavior and they want equal rights? Really is America that far gone that they can not [sic] see that you can take the nigger out of the jungle but not the jungle out of the nigger.”