death – Bumbling Bees

Requiem For a Dream

29 July 2017 by Darien Sumner

Socialized medicine is an unmitigated, unforgivable sin. Placing disconnected bureaus composed of the worst dregs of humanity in charge of determining whether or not a helpless, beautiful little baby will live or die may not be the evil of the greatest scope man has ever devised, but it is quite possible the most acutely disgusting evil. The state must be destroyed, root and branch. This ridiculous hallucination that distant bureaucrats can somehow orchestrate human interaction in a way that makes it better, fairer, more just, or more humane is madness of the highest degree. If you’re not prepared to agree with that yet, what are you waiting for?

Charlie Gard is dead, murdered by the government of the United Kingdom for no better reason than to assuage its pride. Downing Street was unwilling to accept that its sacred socialist hellhole of a medical establishment could possibly be outperformed, and the government sentenced this tiny little baby to death instead. As the father of a precious little squeaky boy not yet a week old, it is impossible for me to put into words my utter revulsion. Not here, anyhow, on a family-friendly blog. We do not engage in gutter language here, and I lack the imagination needed to express sufficiently foul vitriol any other way. So I must leave it to your imagination.

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Time

13 April 2017 by Darien Sumner

This past week saw the death of one of my great comedy heroes, Don Rickles, along with one of my great libertarian heroes, William N. Grigg. As a libertarian humorist, that’s kind of a tough week!

Will Grigg was the great libertarian thinker and writer who is responsible more than anyone else (with the possible exception of Radley Balko) for shedding light on the atrocities committed by the modern American police state. Over the past ten years, Grigg wrote hundreds of articles at his own blog, Pro Libertate, most of them dealing with the American criminal justice system and the wreckage it leaves in its wake. Will Grigg also wrote countless articles and blog posts for lewrockwell.com, and was one of the founding members of the Libertarian Institute. I cannot (and do not) claim to be one of the many people Will Grigg’s work helped to get free from the clutches of the "punitive priesthood," as he called it; I am merely someone who learned from Will Grigg, but that, to my mind, is high praise as it stands.

Don Rickles, of course, scarcely needs an introduction. He was the legendary insult comic dubbed "Mr. Warmth," and was possessed of an inimitable ability to command a stage with his rapid-fire, ceaseless wit. No subject was off limits for Don Rickles, very much including the sacred shibboleths of modern America: race, sex, and handicaps. Rickles had a joke for any occasion, and usually a flood of them; he was callous, he was politicially incorrect, and he was a member of the old school of Jewish comedians who would spontaneously shift into Yiddish just to annoy the audience. He was, in short, the best.

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Last Week in Weird

2 January 2017 by Darien Sumner

Ain’t no rest for the wicked

Bumbling Bees loves you. You know that. And Bumbling Bees is good to you. Other web sites are phoning it in this time of year — wasting your time with boring retrospectives and "Best of 2016" lists, as though said lists don’t begin and end with the utter annihilation of Hillary Clinton. Well, you’ll have none of that here. We’ll be soldiering boldly onward into 2017, because the weird don’t rest, so neither do we.

And neither does Slate, which has just published the absolute worst opinion piece of the year. I know what you’re thinking: mighty bold claim for January second. Still and all, I am confident this piece will survive 363 days of challenges. It’s a piece about a big problem with self-driving cars. Now, let’s play a little game. Take a minute or so and think about what this piece could possibly be saying. What could be this big problem with self-driving cars? What mind-bogglingly stupid thing do you suppose Slate has chosen to ring in the new year? Think of the dumbest thing you can possibly imagine, and then check and see how close you were.

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