China – Bumbling Bees

Last Week in Weird

8 March 2021 by Darien Sumner

I do not like them, Sam-I-Am

Ah, drag queen story time, that wonderful, family-friendly American institution. Where else can you take your children to have them taught wholesome things than to a dude who’s had himself surgically altered to look as much like the Devil as possible, and who wears a shimmering dress, fishnet stockings, studded leather gloves, and plastic Yu-Gi-Oh hair? Speaking as a father with a young son: that’s a role model, that is!

After all, if we don’t let the cross-dressers indoctrinate our precious youth, they might end up reading horrible far-right hate fear Qanon stuff like that racist Dr. Seuss.

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Last Week in Weird

22 February 2021 by Darien Sumner

It’ll be a cold day in a hot place

I’m sure you’ve heard about the weather. Throughout most of the continental United States, the last week has been unusually cold and snowy (which is because of global warming and don’t you forget it, you horrible science denier). Texas certainly had the worst of it, though; not only were temperatures in the single- or low-double-digits for most of the week, but the infrastructure was unable to withstand the sudden cold — due to years of crony deals, about a quarter of Texas’s electricity is generated by wind and solar, none of which was designed to operate in the cold and buried under snow, and millions of Texans were left without power for days on end, leading to no end of misery and a fair few deaths.

So naturally, deranged rodeo clown Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez says the problem was that Texas didn’t green energy hard enough:

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Last Week in Weird

24 October 2016 by Darien Sumner

The naked truth

(Alternative headlines: "the naked city," "the empress’ new clothes," "Bare Stearns")

You gotta hand it to the New York Daily News; loony-left though it may be, the commie rag nonetheless manages to run some quintessentially New York stories, such as this charming missive about a naked statue of Hillary Clinton put up in Manhattan, and the spasms of violence that ensued almost immediately. The Daily News also has a talent for giving stories humongously unappetizing headlines; this one opens with "SEE IT: Naked statue of Hillary Clinton," which: no thank you.

An artist erected an obscene statue of Hillary Clinton in downtown Manhattan Tuesday morning causing a heated fight between defenders of the profane piece of protest art and women trying to tear it down.

The grotesque caricature of the Democratic candidate appeared outside the Bowling Green station during morning rush hour on Tuesday and shows Clinton with hoofed feet and a Wall Street banker resting his head on her bare breasts.

Man, those Trump supporters and their violent behavior, you know? I fully expect to hear that the attacker — a government employee called Nancy who works for the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian (a federal agency) — is a big Trump backer. That sounds like the right profile, doesn’t it? I expect her backup — an unidentified woman in a hijab — is also a Trumpista.

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Last Week in Weird

12 September 2016 by Darien Sumner

I return smack ack

Now that the Republican primary season is safely far, far behind us, the real senator Rand Paul has apparently been released by the Borg slavers who captured him in the spring of 2015 and replaced him with a neocon replicant. He’s made waves recently by opposing the Obama administration’s plans to sell the Islamic fundamentalists who run Saudi Arabia yet more weapons of mass destruction — this time totaling more than a billion dollars — to be used to slaughter additional tens of thousands of helpless Yemeni civilians. Paul’s opposition to this senseless waste of human life is based, apparently, on trivial things like law and morality, which came as a tremendous shock to ancient robotic newscaster Wolf Blitzer, who once won a Peabody award for announcing that being annihilated by a hurricane is bad for you, but can’t seem to extend the metaphor to cover annihilation by bombs:

"So for you this is a moral issue," he told Paul during the Kentucky Republican’s appearance on CNN. "Because you know, there’s a lot of jobs at stake. Certainly if a lot of these defense contractors stop selling war planes, other sophisticated equipment to Saudi Arabia, there’s going to be a significant loss of jobs, of revenue here in the United States. That’s secondary from your standpoint?"

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An Open Letter to Donald Trump

7 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

Dear Mr. Trump,

Many people I like and respect have come out in support of your presidential campaign, and they all make basically the same point: Trump is the least likely candidate to start World War 3. Just recently, Dr. Walter Block said so in as many words, and it’s not an argument that holds little weight in my mind. My major concern about it, however, is that I’m not at all confident it’s true. While I greatly appreciate many of the things you’ve said in the past, I cannot overlook the fact that much of it contradicts other things you’ve said. For example, your statement that Qaddaffi, as nutbar and sinister as he may have been, was keeping even worse people bottled up was obviously true. I admired the courage and honesty you showed in bringing that up and standing up against the horrible atrocities the Obama administration committed in Libya, but I notice that now you’re saying something quite different.

I understand how this game is played. You have to wobble around so you don’t scare off either the hawks or the doves, and that may be good strategy, but it won’t win you my support. If you want me to go along with Walter Block and Justin Raimondo and agree that you really are the one who won’t start World War 3, it’s going to take more than this. At the moment, I’m being asked to believe that the less-warlike statements were what you really believe, and that the hawkishness was just a cover meant to "seem presidential," but that makes no real sense to me; it could just as easily be that the hawkishness is the real Trump, and the dovish remarks were to pull in the anti-war wing of the Republican party (who obviously wouldn’t support horrible warmongers like John Kasich and Ted Cruz). If you want my support, you’ll have to convince me that you really aren’t in favor of endless war.

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Last Week(s) in Weird

30 May 2016 by Darien Sumner

(We’ve been dark for a few weeks, so, to celebrate the return of Last Week in Weird, we bring you a collection of weird and wonderful tidbits from the last several weeks!)

Vaporizeware

A few months ago, I bought a USB floppy drive. I know what you’re thinking: what’s a floppy drive? See, back in the dark age of technology, data was stored on removable media that could hold up to — up to, mind you — 1.44 megabytes. I distinctly recall carrying all the data I owned in the world around in my breast pocket on three such diskettes. Nowadays this technology has fallen by the wayside, and only crusty old codgers like your humble narrator still remember it.

Crustier even than I is the United States Department of Defense, which recently revealed that the coordination of the nation’s entire nuclear arsenal — which amounts to more than five thousand warheads — is performed by software loaded on original 8-inch floppy disks running on a 1976 IBM Series/1 minicomputer.

Defense has plans to upgrade its nuclear-related technology system soon. Lt. Col. Valerie Henderson, department spokeswoman, said: "This system remains in use because, in short, it still works. However, to address obsolescence concerns, the floppy drives are scheduled to be replaced with Secure Digital devices by the end of 2017. Modernization across the entire Nuclear Command, Control, and Communications (NC3) enterprise remains ongoing."

I’ll be honest with you: it’s fun to pick on the government, but the argument "this system remains in use because… it still works" carries a lot of weight with me, especially considering that you and I will be paying the tab for any upgrades. Honestly, I want these things (assuming they must exist at all, of course) upgraded as infrequently as possible. Since CNBC is shocked at the downright gaucheness of the government using "creaky" technology, I would like to suggest that CNBC foot the bill for upgrading it and leave the rest of us alone.

On second thought, I’d like to suggest that it not be upgraded at all; do we really want the Treasury Department’s ability to assess tax liability to be more efficient or (God forbid) user friendly? Do we really want the tax system or the nuclear launch codes to be an option when the next Guccifer decides to take the United States government for a ride?

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