murder – Bumbling Bees

In Extremis

2 November 2017 by Darien Sumner

That nutty old Dr. Walter Block is at it again, being a principled libertarian and rationally evaluating even difficult situations. This time around, his interlocutor has cut right to the chase, and set up an extremely blunt limit situation to challenge him with:

Should the following situations be considered evil?:
– A man who steals food because he has no money to feed his family, assuming that in the place where he lives there is no charitable entity that can provide free food.
– A man who is forced to kill an innocent person because the survival of the entire human species depends on it.
On the other hand, certainly, these are violations of the Non-Aggression Principle, which any libertarian would condemn, but could not previous cases constitute exceptions?

The question of evil is always a vexing one. Dr. Block, rather sensibly, begs off from professing to be some universal moral authority, and evaluates the situations in his capacity as a libertarian theorist, as we’ll see.

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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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Last Week(s) in Weird

17 July 2017 by Darien Sumner

What astonishing coincidences!

Klaus Eberwein, former head of Haiti’s Economic and Social Assistance Fund (a government bureau designed to tax-and-spend prosperity into existence, which has worked exactly as well as one would expect), killed himself this past week, shooting himself in the head in a motel room in South Dade, Florida. This coming Tuesday, he was expected to testify before the Haitian senate’s "Ethics and Anti-corruption Commission."

What do you suppose he was going to say to the commission?

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Last Week(s) in Weird

26 June 2017 by Darien Sumner

Berninating all the villagers

As any fule kno, beloved Vermont senator Bernie Sanders was sent down to earth by St. Karl of Trier to redeem us for the horrible sin of inequality and forgive us our transgressions and also our student loan debt. You may have heard rumors that his mission was actually to bilk gullible kids so he could buy a third house and a really expensive car, but that’s all fake news spread by Russians from Macedonia, so ignore that.

I’m sure you’re as shocked as I am to hear that a man who has literally never done anything productive in his entire life while simultaneously hectoring hard-working Americans about their "greed" and "privilege" would turn out to be a thief. In the illegal sense, even.

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Last Week(s) in Weird

8 May 2017 by Darien Sumner

Bumbling Bees was dark all last week due to technical difficulties. Our apologies! Now to get back to business, and business is weird!

The one good thing about Hillary Clinton

She’s old and infirm, and, seventeen years after her humiliating electoral defeat, it is highly unlikely that she’ll still be haunting around trying to destroy human civilization for fun and profit. Sadly, the same cannot be said for Al Gore, whose pet foundation, the Energy Transitions Commission, is hard at work attempting to end energy generation for the sake of global fairness and also oh didn’t you see that picture of the polar bears on the ice floe??

In particular, the group has released a report outlining its plan to save the world from the dread existential terror of possibly being very slightly warmer than it is now, while at the same time also battling global inequality and presumably paying off your student loans too. It’s going to take a bit to build toward the punch line on this one, but it’s worth it.

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Last Week in Weird

13 February 2017 by Darien Sumner

Representative stupidity

Ah, congress. That branch of the government most beloved by rubes who’ve convinced themselves that they’re being represented, have ever been represented, and should be represented. Speaking for myself, I’ve never been represented in my life; still and all, I’m compelled to admit that there is probably a significant constituency that is quite thoroughly represented by good ol’ Maxine Waters, arguably the stupidest congressman in history.

Poor Maxine. She can’t even get anti-Trump hysteria right. Here’s a charming presser she gave last week in which the press corps deliberately baits her into saying completely false things, and she fails to notice.

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Last Week in Weird

12 December 2016 by Darien Sumner

Olha, que coisa mais linda, mais cheia de graça

Rio de Janeiro has a bit of an image problem lately. Tourists getting murdered on the beach will do that to you, to say nothing of this year’s Plague That Will Destroy Civilization, the dreaded zika virus. Still and all, Rio’s newly-elected mayor has a bold plan that will restore the city to its well-deserved place as the crown jewel of Latin tourism. No, he does. Listen:

"Rio de Janeiro cannot continue treating its tourists as if they were an afterthought," Mr. Crivella, 59, told the audience, emphasizing the need to "shatter" Rio’s "negative image."

"This is something we need to discuss," he said.

You’re on to me, aren’t you. You’ve already guessed that this is going to be something absurd. Still and all, your humble narrator is willing to bet you aren’t guessing anything quite as absurd as the mayor’s actual plan, which is to pay reparations to tourists who are mugged while in Rio. Now, understand this: I don’t mean to say the mayor is setting aside a block of money to pay people who’ve been mugged recently, along with maybe some plan to reduce the muggings going forward. No, the plan is evidently to tell everybody "come to Rio! Sure, you’ll get mugged, but we’ll pay you back!" which I’m not a hundred percent sure is a good sales pitch.

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Liberty and Justice

2 November 2016 by Darien Sumner

In the early stages of her career, Agatha Christie was known for writing engaging whodunits full of lively characters and utterly madcap plot twists. As she matured as a writer, however, Dame Agatha became less interested in zany new ways to kill the dead bodies, and more interested in pursuing heady philosophical investigations about the nature of justice. Many of the stories from her middle period have barely any mystery to them at all; the cast is so small and the events so clear that the focus becomes less on trying to figure out who the killer is and more on investigating the killer’s motivation and that of the detective exposing the truth — as often as not that indefatigable Belgian, Hercule Poirot.

All of which brings us to Curtain. Written at the peak of Dame Agatha’s career (though not published until the end), Curtain opposes Poirot with a villain who is utterly and unapologetically evil, who commits heinous crimes for the sheer pleasure of it, who cannot be dissuaded, and whose crimes, by their very nature, are beyond the reach of the law. If you’ve never read Curtain, beware the rest of this post, as it will be filled with spoilers. If you have, however (or if you don’t care), read on as we explore what Dame Agatha had to teach us about the relationship of justice, the non-aggression principle, and morality.

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Yes, Virginia, the System is Rigged

21 October 2016 by Darien Sumner

Interesting world we find ourselves in, this, what with both major-party presidential candidates claiming that the election is rigged. On the one hand, we have Hillary von Parkinson, Duchess of Slime, beating the war drums by reassuring her supporters that the Soviet Union still exists, and this time it’s hacked into all the elections! Much though I appreciate the incoherent idea that Donald Trump is at once a Nazi and a Soviet, I am still compelled to note that, contra what you may be led to believe, World War II ended a while ago.

On the other hand, Donald Trump has just scandalized the mainstream media — which is to say: the Hillary 4 Eva Super PAC — by refusing to accept the results of an election that hasn’t happened yet. According to the paid Democratic Party interns that pretend to journalism for Politico, this is an unreasonable statement that could destroy democracy and the office of the president, whatever that means. Don’t get me wrong, now: I’m 100% in favor of that outcome, but it’s not going to occur. But just think for a minute: what exactly is Politico so worked up about? Imagine you and I are in a big connect-the-dots tournament, and, three weeks before the tournament is held, I come to you and ask “hey, will you promise to accept that I’m not cheating no matter what happens?” What’s your answer going to be? Are you sufficiently credulous to say yes to that? What if, instead of a plastic "Best Try 2016" trophy, the prize were billions of dollars and world domination? Obviously nobody’s going to agree in advance that the contest necessarily will be fair. Per usual, this is a bunch of nonsensical manufactured outrage.

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Last Week in Weird

17 October 2016 by Darien Sumner