SOTI:
Earlier this month, a man was arrested after he allegedly threatened to kill TSA agents. “This is a free country,” he said before swinging a line post at officers who shocked him with a stun gun, according to charges brought against the man. Shortly before his confrontation with TSA, he was reportedly seen headbutting TV screens, stripping naked and masturbating in the airport.
Now who among us can claim never to have wanted to do all that?
I know: you never go Full Belushi.
Impossible? I don’t think so, and nor does this guy, in a very thoughtful and clear essay:
Talk of insurrection, secession, civil conflict and civil war is no longer the chatter of the gullible and the mentally ill.
…
The year 2021 has thus far been a spectacular year for signs of political decline: the US has now seen all the notable “horsemen of the apocalypse” that historically herald strife and revolution appear, one after another. Political division among its elites, increasing loss of legitimacy in the eyes of the population, military defeat abroad, and a new and very ominous crisis in the real economy, with no end date in sight.
Any one of these crises would be bad enough on their own; taken together, they represent a truly serious threat to the stability of the current order.
Read the whole thing.
To my mind, the question is not whether the U.S. would survive a civil war (because it would); it’s what it would look like afterwards. The situation is nowhere close to the First Civil War of 1860, the end of which simply restored the country to the status quo ante. That’s not going to happen this time.
I don’t need to remind anyone on this website that National Ammo Day is in two days’ time, do I?
A cyclist who sparked outrage in Belgium last year after he went viral for kneeing a young girl to the ground during her family’s Christmas Day walk is now suing her dad for sharing the video online.
The footage was filmed by five-year-old Neia’s dad, Patrick Mpasa, during their family walk in a nature reserve in Baraque Michel, Liege Province, on December 25, 2020.
In the video, the five-year-old girl is seen walking by her mother’s side on the snow-covered path as the cyclist approaches them from behind. Just as he rides alongside the girl, he seemingly extends his knee out, hitting the little girl and knocking her to the ground before continuing on his way unbothered.
The cyclist was taken to court in Verviers, only to be given a suspended sentence on the grounds that he had been criticised enough on social media and was ordered to pay the girl’s family a symbolic and pitiful €1 in compensation.
And the best part:
Now, almost a year after the incident, the cyclist is heading back to court to sue the girl’s father for defamation on the grounds that the backlash the video received resulted in him feeling so threatened by the public he was scared to leave his own house.
Act like an asshole, get treated like one. And for the legal action? Dismissed with costs, if there’s any justice left in the world.
Cyclists act like they own the fucking road, anyway.
I remember my dad’s quizzical look when he first learned that water was being sold in bottles. “Selling water? Why don’t they sell air with it?” was the printable part of his response, (Yeah, I know, apples, trees… whatever.)
I confess to having pretty much the same reaction when Combat Controller pointed me at this latest example of foolishness:
Now I have to confess that I thought that this was a spoof / satirical website, and actually refused to believe my friend’s statement that this was, in fact, a bone fide “product” and not some gag to be played on the gullible. Or a piece of Harry Potter merchandise.
However, Doggery’s “craft ice” is being sold in stores, and CC sent me photographic proof thereof.
JHC.
There are two schools of thought on this kind of thing. The first is that of people like Combat Controller, who suggests that we as a nation are so prosperous that we can afford to sell stuff like this, and find a market for it.
I, however, see this as some kind of portent, similar to those things and events which may have appeared a couple of years before the Roman Empire collapsed into ruins.
On the other hand, my dad thought the same about bottled water, and here we still are, lo these many years later.
Your thoughts in Comments.
Guy gets fired, is pissed off about it, goes home, fetches a gun, goes back to his former place of employment and starts voicing his grievance by shooting people.
This being rural Nebraska, however, there just happens to be a shotgun lying around, so the aggrieved assumes room temperature, but sadly, only after killing two people.
Of course, had he not looked down the naughty end of a shotgun, there’s no telling how many more people he’d have killed because as usual, the police were miles away — but that’s not the way it’ll be reported.
Here’s an interesting thing:
The decrease was identified during the Holocene era when human began to form social groups instead of living individually. This allowed them to share information instead of storing it.
By that process, modern brains must be shrinking exponentially as the Internet Effect becomes information-sharing on steroids.
Which would explain rap music and TikTok “influencers”.