military – Bumbling Bees

The Old College Try

30 December 2016 by Darien Sumner

As expected, I got pushback on last week’s article defending the electoral college by demolishing the convenient lies the pro-electoral college people are spreading, which is just the type of absolutely backwards way of going about things that you all read Bumbling Bees to get. What I didn’t necessarily expect — though I certainly should have — was the utter incoherence of some of the pushback I got. In particular, I was informed that counties don’t matter because counties don’t "defend the country" by fighting wars, so they shouldn’t get any say.

Now that’s just all manner of confused. Had this exchange taken place anywhere but Facebook, I would give my interlocutor the benefit of the doubt and assume he understands what we mean when we say that 83% of all counties voted for Trump; as things are, however, I’m honestly not sure. When we say that a given country voted for Trump, you see, we don’t mean that a wizard magically incarnated the counties and sent them to the polling places, where the proud civil servants allowed them to vote as often as they wanted and using any names they wanted. No, see, what we mean is that the people who live in those counties, in the aggregate, voted for Trump. Do you see? The claim that "counties don’t fight wars" is completely silly. One may as well retort that the popular vote doesn’t fight in the wars either.

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Last Week in Weird

7 November 2016 by Darien Sumner

Do the Bartman

Somehow — and I don’t profess to know how — the Chicago Cubs won the World Series last week. The game itself was utterly absurd, packed with virtually every insane occurrence that can occur in the game of baseball — but isn’t it always? That’s part of the wonder of baseball. Against all odds, it still manages to be full of surprises, even long after we should have seen everything there is to see. For my part, I’ve never seen a wild pitch score two runs before. I’ve also never seen a bunt call as bizarre as the one Joe Maddon put on in the ninth inning, a call so bad it makes one wonder if the game really is rigged for maximum drama. Unlike elections, however, baseball would be too difficult to gimmick, what with the unknown ball position and all.

One might ask, not unreasonably, why I’m writing about baseball on a site about libertarianism. I might respond, also not unreasonably, that this is a lesson in property rights; specifically, it’s my blog and I’ll write what I please.

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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

3 October 2016 by Darien Sumner

Government in microcosm

On Wednesday, CNN did one of its hilariously phony "Town Hall" bits, in which a carefully-screened group of people asks prearranged questions, and president Obama uses them as an excuse to talk about how great he art. This week, the widow of a soldier who committed suicide asked the president what could be done to reduce to rate of veteran suicides from its current level of twenty-two per day, and the president, in between two different anecdotes about how many lives he personally has saved through the awesome power of bureaucracy, dispensed this pearl of wisdom:

We are hiring more mental health professionals. But the fact that there’s still 20 a day who are feeling hopeless means that we’ve got to do more. And, you know, anybody who’s watching right now, if you call the, you know, veterans help line, there’s going to be somebody there to answer.

So, really, all those suicidal soldiers need to do is call up the government’s suicide help line, where the highly-trained professionals from the government will be there to help. I guess this story would have a happy ending, then, if it weren’t for one niggling little detail: quite often, when people call the suicide help line, there actually isn’t anybody there to answer.

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Last Week in Weird

26 September 2016 by Darien Sumner

Pretty soon you’re talking real money

If you’re anything like me — and you know you are — you stay up nights worrying that the United States just doesn’t spend enough money on its military. America is only just barely spending as much money as the entire rest of the world combined; how can we possibly expect to be kept safe in the face of the overwhelming existential threat of border skirmishes thousands of miles inland on the other side of the ocean? Clearly our wonderful armed forces require a major overhaul, and I’m pleased to report that it’s only projected to cost a trillion dollars to do so. What a relief!

The price tag to rehabilitate the military after about 15 years of war and relentless overseas operations would be about $1 trillion over a decade, according to the Republican-led House Armed Services Committee…

A $1 trillion increase would require obliterating spending limits passed by Congress and doling out an average of an additional $100 billion each year on the military through 2027.

Oh, a trillion dollars spent over ten years would average a hundred billion a year? I had no idea! Since I was educated in the government schools, this kind of complex mathematical operation vastly overwhelms my tiny peanut brain. Thanks for helping, Stars and Stripes!

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Last Week in Weird

5 September 2016 by Darien Sumner

Clearly outplayed

The saucy Brits writing for the Daily Mail think I can’t tell what they’re up to. Their plan, quite clearly, is that if they just publish the most comprehensively weird article of all time, Last Week in Weird will overload and break, and I’ll never be able to make fun of them again. Well, I’m pleased to report that their plan only almost worked; I did, against all odds, manage to survive the onslaught from the Mail’s masterpiece: "Pedestrians are baffled by gay traffic lights as little green man is still replaced by same-sex symbols three months after London Pride." I promise I’m not making any of this up.

Transport For London replaced the traditional ‘go’ sign in 50 traffic lights in June around the Trafalgar Square area as a nod to those taking part in London Pride, and they are still in place almost three months on.

However, because the gender symbols happen to look like arrows, some pedestrians are confused which direction they should be walking in and even whether only men or women are allowed to cross at one point, according to The Express.

I’ll be honest with you: I’m not even sure who to make fun of first here. I guess I should start with Transport For London; one would think that the purpose of traffic signals is to control the flow of traffic, no? While I’ll allow that there’s plenty of room to argue about whether or not that’s a viable goal, it’s clearly the reason. Yet somehow Transport For London — a government agency, of course — has decided that selling people the social justice war is so important that the whole entire traffic control system can be subjugated to it. If you’re the kind of person who believes in government traffic control, is this a good use of your money?

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Last Week in Weird

29 August 2016 by Darien Sumner

Here comes the rain again

For the last several weeks, Louisiana has been inundated with rain — reportedly receiving 6.9 trillion gallons of rainfall in one week alone — which has, of course, led to massive flooding. Tens of thousands of people have been displaced by the floods (though, thankfully, very few people have died), and many of them needed rescue. Fortunately, many area residents took it upon themselves to help their fellow man, and a loose coalition of boat owners called the "Cajun Navy" sprang up, which headed out to patrol flooded areas and search for people in distress. There is no doubt that the quick and comprehensive action of the Cajun Navy is much of the reason why so few people have been killed by this record-breaking flood, and it’s a wonderful and awe-inspiring thing to see people coming together to help those in need.

Of course, the government is upset at them because they didn’t ask permission, opting instead just to go save lives.

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Last Week in Weird

20 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

Dude, where’s my jihad?

Thank God we have the federal government to keep us safe from terror. I can’t begin to imagine how terrified I’d be every waking moment without our noble public servants heroically interposing themselves between my stunted, childlike inability to deal with the terror and the terrifyingly harsh existential terror of international terror. In particular, it’s nice to hear that the government is keeping me safe from the terror of hipsters paying their buddies back for beer.

It turns out this poor sap went out drinking with a buddy at a bar in the West Village. Later in the evening, he attempted to reimburse his buddy for $42 worth of beer by sending the money via Venmo, which appears to be Paypal remade for the iPhone. In his drunken hipster daze, he decided it would be funny to note in the comments field that the money was for "ISIS beer funds!!!," in response to which the OFAC "detained" (read: stole) his money to keep it from going to another nefarious hipster beer terrorist.

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Last Week in Weird

6 June 2016 by Darien Sumner

Trash talk

Former governor of New Mexico Gary Johnson won the Libertarian Party presidential nomination last week, beating out John McAfee, Austin Petersen, and a host of other people, most of whom were vastly more libertarian and all of whom were vastly more entertaining than Gary Johnson. I’ve had unkind words for Austin Petersen in the past — and no doubt will again in the future — but in the aftermath of Johnson’s victory, he was all class, pledging to support the nominee anyhow, and presenting him with a fine gift: a replica of George Washington’s personal flintlock. A clearly emotional Petersen informed Johnson that "you have my sword, and you have my gun" as he delivered the gift, in a touching moment no doubt intended to unify a Libertarian Party fractured by an unusually acrimonious primary season.

Gary Johnson then threw the flintlock in the trash.

Apparently, Johnson was "frustrated" that Petersen only pledged him unconditional support and also gave him a valuable and symbolically-charged keepsake and also clearly attempted to unite the party behind the nominee. This, in Johnson’s eyes, was insufficient penance for Petersen’s great sin: he is skeptical of Johnson’s hilariously unlibertarian running mate, former Massachusetts governor William Weld.

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