Freak Out Friday – February 16, 2018

It would seem that there’s really only one thing to talk about this week, but surprisingly, no, there’s a couple of things. So let’s see what we’ve got.

1) This sort of behavior totally ruins my Lysistrata plan. Turns out Trump is being accused of a second affair, this time two years into his marriage with Melania. Traditionally when the first couple heads to Air Force One, they take a helicopter dubbed Marine One to it. Not this time; Melania headed over to it via car so she could travel separately from her husband. That does not bode well for the two of them, and I am convinced that at this point she is waiting for him to die because she’d rather be a widow than just another cast off wife.

2) And so it begins. Robert Mueller indicted thirteen Russians in interfering with the election. While Trump claimed that the efforts did not affect the election (it did) and of course there was “no collusion,” which is going to be a huge meme once he’s convicted of collusion, Hillary Clinton’s assistant, Nick Merrill, was much more specific in his comments: “Today’s revelations confirm what we’ve long known. Time will tell us more, but Russia went to great lengths to undermine our democracy, & the President won’t protect us. No matter your politics, it’s un-American. We have an adversary that is laughing at us, who will act again.” Yes, they absolutely will, as soon as the 2018 elections. Let’s hope to God that vote tabulators will have learned from the 2016 election and will be prepared to prevent it. If they’re smart, they will return to paper ballots which can not be interfered with by hackers.

3) The Rob Porter fiasco. Rob Porter, a former White House secretary, indisputably beat two wives. There’s photos of them,.Yet Trump’s administration incredibly tried to side with him. The White House administration claimed that the FBI was still conducting their investigation, except no, the FBI states that they finished their investigation back in January. But hey, I suppose that wife beaters who hit their wives so hard there are bruises on her face…I’m sure that a lot of them are really great guys.

4) Florida. You need to understand something: I have a fifteen year old. Every single day when I send her off to school, I have no idea whether I’m going to see her at the end of the day. Her school has no metal detectors, which I used to not be in favor of but now am. I am seriously considering getting her a Kevlar vest if I can come up with the $500 required to get a good one. I mean, I always had a sense that when she goes out into the world, anything can happen. She could be robbed, beaten. Then again, she took kung fu lessons so that anyone who tries to attack her will ideally have a really lousy time of it. And my third daughter teaches at a school and also took Kung fu. But if a lunatic comes in shooting, what can they reasonably do? And what did Trump do? He blamed the victims. He blamed the victims. He tweeted, “So many signs that the Florida shooter was mentally disturbed, even expelled from school for bad and erratic behavior..Neighbors and classmates knew he was a big problem. Must always report such instances to authorities, again and again!” You believable fûçkìņg moron. He was reported repeatedly. The police had been brought in by his mother. He was expelled from high school because he was considered too dangerous. He was a White Supremacist. Every single check system that Trump and his NRA šhìŧhëádš will allow was in place and he still had no trouble buying an AR-15, a gun that has no place in a private citizen’s hands. You don’t need it for hunting; it will shred whatever it is you’re trying to catch. You don’t need it for protection unless you’re anticipating a zombie Apocalypse. It has one reason and one reason only to exist: To kill lots of people very quickly. It is the weapon of choice for demented šhìŧbágš who intend to blow a ton of people away. And what does Trump do? He revokes an Obama-era rule that made it harder for people with psychological problems to obtain guns. Gun advocates, of course, hated it, because they claimed it infringed on the Second amendment. No, it didn’t, you morons. The Founding Fathers passed the Second amendment to make it easier for colonists to form militias, not to allow demented psychopaths to acquire whatever weapons they wanted so they could slaughter dozens of people. Don’t you get that the weapons the founders were familiar with shot one bullet a minute, not forty-six. This has got to end.

Did he do anything right? No.

PAD

35 comments on “Freak Out Friday – February 16, 2018

  1. A minor correction: The AR-15 is not manufactured with a full-auto setting, not even for three-round bursts; those are features of the actual, military M-16. There are kits that allow the rifle to be converted, though those are illegal in many states. And the addition of a bump-stock also allows the AR-15 to fire more rapidly. That said, I fully agree that civilians have no need to own this weapon.

  2. And a comment towards the Constitution, including the Bill of Rights: Thomas Jefferson himself noted that the Constitution is a living document, to be modified. It’s not expected to still fit a changing country, any more than the coat one wears as a child should still fit the grown up, to paraphrase Jefferson.

    And to those “arm the teachers and administrators” morons… the problem is guns in schools. Will MORE guns result in fewer guns in schools? Will a third grade teacher be a crack marksman? That’s not a reasonable expectation.

    1. The other problem with the “arm the faculty” idea: schools are already underfunded. Teachers are already going into their own underpaid pockets to get classroom basics like pencils and paper. But suddenly there’s funding to arm them?
      .
      —Daryl

      1. Well, of coures.
        .
        Buying educational supplies for those ungrateful kids to learn more than they need to to become good helots and get ideas above their station is an ongoing drain on public resources that should rather be going to make the oligarchs rich.
        .
        Buying a cheap pistol and a ox of ammo for each teacher is a {you should pardon the expression} one-shot expense.

  3. It’s an interesting question. This note is addressed to my daughter Ariel and any other teachers reading this: If your school announced you were going to be given handguns, how would you feel about that?
    .
    PAD

    1. As I am a math instructor, some basic probability:
      .
      Even if the probability of an accident is small, doubling the number of weapons doubles the expected number. Multiplying the number by hundreds of teachers means hundreds more chances of an accident.
      .
      The local news reports at least once a semester a trained officer leaving their gun in a bathroom stall. Now give out enough guns that this is a daily occurrence. The math doesn’t look good.
      .
      And this is just accidents. Teachers have stresses in their lives, just like students. Then there is the chaos for first responders when they come on scene and everyone is waving guns around. The only people who could possibly think this is a good idea are people who think “Call of Duty” is the way the world really works.

    2. Physics teacher here: absolutely no way in hëll. David’s already done a great job summing up reasons.

    3. I’m not a teacher, but my wife is, at a NYC high school. Her response: horrified.
      My response: if the NYPD, whose jobs involve a lot of training for this kind of thing, are unable to prevent wounding bystanders in public situations (e.g. the shooting near 34th street a few years back where a number of passers by were hit by unintended police rounds), why do people think untrained teachers will do better?

    4. I’d quit. I’ve been teaching for twenty years, and such a boneheaded move would eject me from the building. David Oakes does a great job explaining the reason why we don’t want everyone going around armed, especially in a building full of children or fundamentally irresponsible young adults.

      (I call anyone under 18 “fundamentally irresponsible” in this context because that’s how we have to treat them. They can’t sign permission slips for themselves to go on a field trip. Why in the world is it suddenly okay to have fifty extra guns in arm’s reach around them?)

      1. The period-required-for-space-between-paragraphs rule here is because of one line (#928 as parsed in Firefox Quantum) of CSS in the Æros WordPress theme used on this blog, in the “styles.css” file of that theme. Lines #927–929 are:
         
        #commentlist2 li p {font-size:12px;
        margin:0;
        }

         
        That sets the paragraph font size to 12 pixels (in line 927) and all four margins to zero (no unit specified since zero of anything [except °C or °F] is still zero).
         
        Simply inserting a “margin-bottom: 1em;” in there would fix it. But while I’m at it, I’d also suggest eliminating every occurrence of “text-align: justify” since full-justified text doesn’t work well on the web as most web browsers don’t do proper justification (increasing spacing between letters, not just words, and also doing proper hyphenation of long words).
         
        Better yet, find another theme. This one is frankly ugly. There are thousands of WordPress themes, a great many of which are free including some pretty darned good ones. You want one that’s mobile-adaptive (Æros isn’t), HiDPI-capable (Æros isn’t), works with the WordPress Customizer introduced a few major releases ago and perfected over time (I seriously doubt that Æros does that) and has lots of easy-to-use configurability options accessible through the Customizer, etc.

      2. The period-required-for-space-between-paragraphs rule here is because of one line (#928 as parsed in Firefox Quantum) of CSS in the Æros WordPress theme used on this blog, in the “styles.css” file of that theme. Lines #927–929 are:
         
        #commentlist2 li p {font-size:12px;
        margin:0;
        }

         
        That sets the paragraph font size to 12 pixels (in line 927) and all four margins to zero (no unit specified since zero of anything [except °C or °F] is still zero).
         
        Simply inserting a “margin-bottom: 1em;” in there would fix it. But while I’m at it, I’d also suggest eliminating every occurrence of “text-align: justify” since full-justified text doesn’t work well on the web as most web browsers don’t do proper justification (increasing spacing between letters, not just words, and also doing proper hyphenation of long words).
         
        Better yet, find another theme. This one is frankly ugly. There are thousands of WordPress themes, a great many of which are free including some pretty darned good ones. You want one that’s mobile-adaptive (Æros isn’t), HiDPI-capable (Æros isn’t), works with the WordPress Customizer introduced a few major releases ago and perfected over time (I seriously doubt that Æros does that) and has lots of easy-to-use configurability options accessible through the Customizer, etc.
         
        I take it Glenn Hauman hosts these blogs?

      3. The period-required-for-space-between-paragraphs rule here is because of one line (#928 as parsed in Firefox Quantum) of CSS in the Æros WordPress theme used on this blog, in the “styles.css” file of that theme. Lines #927–929 are:
         
        #commentlist2 li p {font-size:12px;
        margin:0;
        }

         
        That sets the paragraph font size to 12 pixels (in line 927) and all four margins to zero (no unit specified since zero of anything [except °C or °F] is still zero).
         
        Simply inserting a “margin-bottom: 1em;” in there would fix it. But while I’m at it, I’d also suggest eliminating every occurrence of “text-align: justify” since full-justified text doesn’t work well on the web as most web browsers don’t do proper justification (increasing spacing between letters, not just words, and also doing proper hyphenation of long words).
         
        Better yet, find another theme. This one is frankly ugly. There are thousands of WordPress themes, a great many of which are free including some pretty darned good ones. You want one that’s mobile-adaptive (Æros isn’t), HiDPI-capable (Æros isn’t), works with the WordPress Customizer introduced a few major releases ago and perfected over time (I seriously doubt that Æros does that) and has lots of easy-to-use configurability options accessible through the Customizer, etc.
         
        I take it Glenn Hauman hosts this and other writers’ blogs?

    5. They going to pay for combat training too? One of the biggest problems I have with yokels acting like “range scores” somehow make them a crimefighting hero, they forget that unless the target is shooting back, their scores mean jack-all in a real world scenario. First thing anyone with military training is told to do when the bullets start flying? Take cover and assess the situation; how many assailants? Which direction? Behind hard or soft cover? Are they using hostages as shields? Are they in front of something where bullet penetration will result in civilian casualties? If all clear, rank targets by threat level, aim for body mass of the most threatening target first. This is all done in seconds of mental processing, the result of rigorous training, NOT racking up scores at a stationary target. Unless you’ve HAD that kind of training, as a “guard” you are just a potential liability at best; at worst, you’re a jáçkášš who can’t wait to John McClane his way to front page headlines as a “hero” and maximizing collateral damage

      1. Just want to point out, John McClane was trying to get help and avoid the bad guys the first third of the movie. Before he became the cliche he was in response to.

  4. As I am a math instructor, some basic probability:
    .
    Even if the probability of an accident is small, doubling the number of weapons doubles the expected number. Multiplying the number by hundreds of teachers means hundreds more chances of an accident.
    .
    The local news reports at least once a semester a trained officer leaving their gun in a bathroom stall. Now give out enough guns that this is a daily occurrence. The math doesn’t look good.
    .
    And this is just accidents. Teachers have stresses in their lives, just like students. Then there is the chaos for first responders when they come on scene and everyone is waving guns around. The only people who could possibly think this is a good idea are people who think “Call of Duty” is the way the world really works.

  5. Peter, I think you meant to call Trump an unbelievable fûçkìņg moron. 🙂
    .
    And speaking of your daughters (I can’t believe how quickly kids grow), what is Gwen teaching? Is she teaching locally, close to home, or has she made a new home in another state like Shana?

      1. North Carolina is where Ariel is living and teaching. She was in Tennessee until last year. She went where the jobs are.

  6. And now Trump’s attempts to tie the Russia investigation to the Parkland school shooting has infuriated the survivors of that tragedy. They’re responding to his tweets with disgust and justifiable rage.

    How long do you think it’ll be before Trump lashes out at these kids? Because he’s Trump and it’s inevitable.

  7. It has one reason and one reason only to exist: To kill lots of people very quickly.

    That’s the basic reason for most guns.
    .
    {For varying values of “quickly”}

    1. Yes, you can use an assault rifle {and if David Drake, who served a year in A Very Bad Place in the 70s, calls ’em “assault rifles”, then i calls ’em “assault rifles”…} for target shooting.
      .
      You can use a nine-pound hammer to crack peanuts, too.
      .
      Or a vernier caliper to stir paint…

    2. That’s one of the basic reasons. The other was to provide meat for the table when markets and frozen foods were not commonplace. There are not many places in the U.S. of A. where that is still the case.

      Just to clarify my position, I posted this at another site: “Without politicizing the issue, it is deeply troubling that young people are becoming accustomed to news of school shootings. The normalization of incidents of mass shootings is unacceptable. We must now allow this to continue! This must NOT become the new normal.” I don’t think that many folks here would argue the point.

      1. Well SOMEONE argued the point, because Florida lawmakers just struck down a proposed AR-15 ban.
        .

        As usual, Florida be cray-cray

      2. Oh, and multiple Repubs are saying the kids should shut up because people shouldn’t listen to people who are feeling emotional at the moment.
        .
        …Seriously?
        Fûçk those guys.

      3. Anything that fits in your pocket {or a reasonably-concealable holster} and has a barrel shorter and has a barrel shorter than, say, twelve inches, is designed specifically to kill people and is of marginal utility as a hunting weapon, and it was those that were in my head.
        .
        It is those on which the NRA’s strongest efforts to prevent realistic regulations are focused.

  8. Wow… The President with “The Best Brain” and “The Best Words” who regularly has to read off of written notes in order to call another world leader a friend and ally had to have notes written for him to read off of to know how to ask basic questions and to say to students who survived the most recent school shooting, “I hear you.”
    .
    No, jáçkášš, you don’t. Beyond spending most of your adult life proving over and over again that you largely have no sympathy or empathy for anyone or anything that you can’t use for your own gratification, the fact that someone else needs to write you notes so you know how to tell someone suffering that you hear them is pretty much proof that you don’t/can’t.
    .
    The expectations bar has been so lowered for this jáçkášš that people compliment him for the towering achievement of just reading a short speech of someone else’s words without going off script and saying something colossally stupid. On that score, I suppose we should give him credit for not actually saying to a student, “Five I hear you…”

  9. I am truly at a loss for words to describe how stupid his comments were on every level here.
    .
    “I’m hearing more and more people say the level of violence on video games is really shaping young people’s thoughts,” Trump said at the meeting. “And you go the further step and that’s the movies. You see these movies, they’re so violent… Maybe they have to put a ratings system for that.”
    .
    https://www.yahoo.com/news/donald-trump-thinks-apos-first-194352116.html

  10. Okay, not Trump, but… Wow
    .
    Is Ted Cruz just too stupid to know he just insulted most of his base, or does he just think his base is too stupid to know he just insulted them?
    .
    Ted Cruz: ‘Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson’
    .
    “During a discussion about gun rights at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference Thursday, Sen. Ted Cruz said, “The Democrats are the party of Lisa Simpson and Republicans are happily the party of Homer, Bart, Maggie and Marge.”
    .
    https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2018/02/22/ted-cruz-simpsons/364747002/
    .
    I mean, beyond the character attributes he just assigned to his party and the party’s voter base, there’s the topic at hand here. He was citing an episode where Lisa and Homer debate gun control. First, he got his quotes and quote attributions wrong. Second, Homer came off as a total doofus in the discussion. Third, well, to quote from the article….
    .
    “Cruz’s argument is not helped by the fact Homer is a horribly irresponsible gun owner. In the episode he:
    .
    “Threatens to shoot the gun store owner when informed there is a 5-day waiting period.
    .
    “Points the gun at Marge’s head.
    .
    “Points the gun at his own head.
    .
    “Shoots a basketball to get it off the roof.
    .
    “Considers using it to rob a convenience store.
    .
    “Hides the gun in the refrigerator where Bart finds it and begins to play with it.
    .
    “Uses the gun to open a can of beer.
    .
    “Uses the gun to turn on the TV.
    .
    “Pulls his gun on a robber, only to have the assailant take it from him.
    .
    “It is also notable that the left-leaning Lisa becomes president in a March 2000 episode, in which she succeeds President Trump, who left the country with “quite a budget crunch.”
    .
    Okay, Ted… You win. If that’s what you want to describe your party and its supporters as, who are we to argue with you?

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