If you don’t get a huge SchadenBöner from this little sequence, you are broken.
“But Kim,” you may ask, “why should I get a SchadenBöner from this unhappy tale?”
Read on, Grasshopper (note the date):
All together now:
Tag: Good News
Calm Invective
Here’s a little oeuvre which deserves airing, despite the appalling grammar: Indiana Jones And The Last Franchise.
Even though I was not familiar with about 60% of his cultural allusions, the writing was enough to engage me. After all, you don’t need to be a military strategist to understand that combat is awful, bloody and destructive. I especially liked this little turn:
And, if you ever haul yourself out of bed and find that you have little to smile about… just look up Disney on Google News. It may not bring you joy, but the schadenfreude will most likely bring a smile to your face. At least a little grin.
That happens early in the piece, and it gets better. Here’s the pre-climax exposition:
My great-grandfather was a mason. A brick-layer, I mean, not the… well, you know the other type. He was a master of his craft. Back in the 20’s, his skill was in such high-demand that he was paid to travel the world and build structures in places like Shanghai and Glasgow that stand to this day. In an age of cheap, third-world labor, it can be a bit difficult to imagine the artistry, skill, and talent of a good mason. There’s more to it than slopping mortar onto a brick and stacking another on top. You just don’t see a lot of work like what he was doing, these days. Men like him labored to build cities not just for themselves, but their descendants. They spent their lives – some of them gave their lives – so that their descendants would live in a world that they themselves could scarcely imagine. They build us sprawling, glittering skylines of glass and steel and lights. Man-made miracles of engineering and architecture that would be, quite literally, incomprehensible to most humans from before a certain time.
Yet, the cities they built for us, that they left us, are no longer ours. My great-grandfather did most of his work in Pennsylvania and the North-East. He lived in Philadelphia, in a neighborhood his descendants can’t walk through, day or night. His house is still there. I don’t know who lives in it now, if anyone does. I don’t really want to know, either.
All I know is the fruits of his labors, his house, his city — it’s not just that they don’t belong to his descendants, and, arguably, the country he built them for. We can’t even enjoy them. They were wrested out of the hands of the people, and, without consent, broken, smashed, and destroyed by wicked people, who now hand us the smoldering ruins of our predecessors’ lifetime of work, and say with a smile, Here! We made it better! And, if you dare say otherwise, you’re an ungrateful asshole who should be grateful that they’re deigning to give you a damn thing.
Excellent stuff, and well worth the long read.
Dept. Of Righteous Shootings
Seems as though this man’s car was stolen, but the thieves were unaware that nowadays, you can track your car’s location. Which is what Our Hero did, and confronted said scumbags in a mall parking lot. He made them get out of the car at gunpoint and sit on the ground while everyone awaited the arrival of the San Antonio police.
Well, our Senior Scumbag wasn’t going to take this lying (sitting?) down, so he pulled his own gun and popped off at the car owner.
Whereupon Our Hero wasted the fucker AND shot Scumbag’s accomplice in the leg, I assume lest she wanted to retrieve her late partner’s gun and continue the festivities.
Quote of the day comes from the SAPD chief:
‘Certainly a case of self-defense, is what we have.’
Then, for the lawyers, he added (no doubt with a shrug):
‘We would prefer that they call the police before taking that into your own hands, but he did what he felt he needed to do.’
I think some applause for both the chief and Our Hero would be appropriate:
Texas, baby.
Of course, the family of the corpus delicti is all boohoohoo about it (sent by Longtime Friend and Reader John C.):
“Whether my brother was wrong or right, he had a gun pointed at him. I guess he took it upon himself to defend himself. The guy who shot him is a vigilante, not a hero,” Jose Garcia told KENS 5. “A vehicle is not worth taking someone’s life, I don’t care what kind of car it is. You don’t take the law into your own hands. Now my mom, my family, we all have to suffer and just deal with it.”
Errr well, I hate to break it to you, Jose, but under Texas law, self-defense during the commission of a crime is not justifiable. And the law is always in the hands of the citizen — we just deputize its enforcement to government. But when the government is late to the scene, or absent altogether, it is absolutely the right of the citizen to enforce it. Deputization is not the same as abrogation, despite what government wants you to think.
Also, if a vehicle is not worth a life, your deceased choirboy brother didn’t think the same way — or else he would not have been carrying a gun himself. Clearly, he thought that a car was worth more than a life, which is why he ended up the way he did.
In any event, fuck him, he’s dead, the dangerous criminal asshole. And while you’re right to mourn him, I’ll bet this wasn’t the first time he’d caused the family grief and heartache. Everyone (your family included) is better off without him, as it is without all dangerous criminals.
Truth Spoken Here
Here’s a brief video of a man speaking the absolute truth on the topic of slavery grievance:
I should point out that this appeared on one of the reprehensible Piers Morgan’s TV shows, but as said asshole doesn’t say anything during the clip, that’s not important. As for the actual comment:
Dept. Of Righteous Shootings
Quote of the day:
“It was a robbery that didn’t go well for the robbers.” — San Antonio Police Chief William McManus
Seems as though a man went to draw money from an ATM, whereupon two choirboys approached him to ask him to donate to their church fund*. Apparently, they used the wrong terminology and body language, because our ATM cardholder shot them both dead on the spot.
*according to their relatives, no doubt.
Blockade?
I hadn’t heard of this one before:
Gov. Greg Abbott (R-TX) has approved a plan to disrupt Rio Grande crossings from Mexico to his state by illegal immigrants. His plan is to use a 1,000-foot “marine floating barrier” to visibly block key sections of the river most immigrants have to cross to enter the United States illegally.
The Center for Immigration Studies said the system is made up of large floating balls that spin to keep people from getting on. And while good swimmers can dive under them, “the whole design is to block the thousands, not the one” who can swim under, a state official told CIS. What’s more, the state is also considering hanging “webbing” under the water barrier to make it hard to dive past.
Okay… I’ll be curious to see if this works.
It’s probably cheaper and simpler to implement than my plan involving a few thousand Nile crocodiles, anyway. Or landmines on the opposite bank.