Twitter – 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

18 January 2018 by Darien Sumner

Boy, did we get in trouble last week! I better not say anything controversial this time.

Nothing to see here

Everybody remembers where he was when Pearl Harbor was attacked. Everybody — with one tiny, insignificant exception — remembers where he was when president Kennedy was shot. Everybody remembers when science discovered that there is an infinite multiplexity of genders that can be changed at will. Now, friends, be sure to center yourselves and enter into your permanent memory banks your exact location when North Korea launched nuclear missiles at Hawaii.

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Last Week in Weird

13 June 2017 by Darien Sumner

I would like to buy a vowel

Like him or hate him, it surely must be agreed that Donald Trump is the most entertaining president of our times. The man has a definite flair for showmanship, and knows just how to run his mouth to drive some people into paroxysms of rage and others into paroxysms of laughter. As often as not, the president’s vehicle for his crazy-man moon ranting is his official Twitter account, which, in contravention to several hundred years of policy, he uses to broadcast to the world exactly what he may be thinking.

And sometimes he uses it to invent new words, such as the marvelous "covfefe" — as in "negative press covfefe" — that sent the internet ablaze. Most users assumed it was a typo (though a rather spectacular one), but the president himself insisted otherwise.

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Last Week in Weird

3 April 2017 by Darien Sumner

You have the obligation to remain silent

Ah, America. Land of the free! Home of the Barves! Where the only thing more cherished than apple pie, baseball, and motherhood is the absolute, rock-solid, George Washington-approved, First Amendment-guaranteed right to free speech. I’m sure you know it by heart:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Of course, as any fule kno, the Constitution is a "living document." What necromantic rites were involved in this black sorcery your humble narrator shudders to think, but apparently the Constitution, quite unlike every other piece of paper in the history of the world, has the power to update itself whenever the disembodied flying devil head of Uncle Sam wills it to be. And, in an astonishing turn of events, He communicates His grand design to us through the federal judiciary. Last week, the holy judiciary handed down the magical new text of the First Amendment, which has apparently been updated with a rider adding "… unless minor bureaucrats don’t like it."

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Last Week in Weird

16 January 2017 by Darien Sumner

Golden slumbers fill your eyes

There is nothing so bizarre that the mainstream press won’t report it — so long as they think it’ll make Donald Trump look bad, anyhow. To wit, Buzzfeed simply couldn’t help itself; in a move that it desperately wants the American people to believe is just normal, everyday journalistic practice, Buzzfeed’s highly-paid staff of journalismic integrisaurs published this report — without verifying it at all — which is riddled with typographical and factual errors, reads like something written by a less-than-especially-bright teenager, and, above all, makes the following startling claim:

According to Source D, where s/he had been present, TRUMP’s (perverted) conduct in Moscow included hiring the presidential suite of the Ritz Carlton Hotel, where he knew President and Mrs OBAMA (whom he hated) had stayed on one of their official trips to Russia, and defiling the bed where they had slept by employing a number of prostitutes to perform a ‘golden showers’ (urination) show in front of him. The hotel was known to be under FSB control with microphones and concealed cameras in all the main rooms to record anything they wanted to.[everything sic]

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Hello Darkness My Old Friend

5 January 2017 by Darien Sumner

The mincing communists over at Salon gave all four of their readers a bad case of the vapors a few weeks ago by calling on Twitter to ban Donald Trump. Their reasoning? He’s, like, rude and stuff. This sort of clueless line-toeing is par for the leftist course with Salon, to be sure, and I don’t intend to waste my time or yours refuting it, not least because I think it would be quite frankly hilarious if Twitter were to ban a popular celebrity loudmouth who will, in a few weeks, also be the sitting president of the United States.

No, what I’ve come to talk to you about today is Peter Van Buren, who is normally a reliable foreign policy commentator, but has apparently acquired some type of Trump Derangement Syndrome Derangement Syndrome, as he’s written an entirely madcap article entitled "Ban Trump, Twitter, and Free Speech" in which he seems to claim that the First Amendment compels the government to nationalize Twitter. You think I’m making that up? You tell me:

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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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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

1 August 2016 by Darien Sumner

Gary Blues

Somebody must have told Gary Johnson that I actually wrote faintly nice things about the Libertarian Party, because he wasted absolutely no time making me regret them. Here he goes making disjointed, rambling remarks to the Washington Examiner’s Tim Carney, in which he states that the federal government should have unlimited power to force people to associate with one another, with, evidently, the single exception that he personally shouldn’t be forced to be a social conservative. You think I’m just trying to make him sound like a fool, but, no, that is pretty much exactly what he says. When Carney asked if the government of New Mexico — Gary’s own home state — should have the power to punish photographers for refusing to cover gay weddings, Gary sputtered out this crazy thing:

Look. Here’s the issue. You’ve narrowly defined this. But if we allow for discrimination — if we pass a law that allows for discrimination on the basis of religion — literally, we’re gonna open up a can of worms when it come stop discrimination of all forms, starting with Muslims… who knows. You’re narrowly looking at a situation where if you broaden that, I just tell you — on the basis of religious freedom, being able to discriminate — something that is currently not allowed — discrimination will exist in places we never dreamed of…

It’s the right message, and I’m sideways with the Libertarian Party on this. My crystal ball is that you are going to get discriminated against by somebody because it’s against their religion. Somehow you have offended their religion because you’ve walked in and you’re denied service. You. (Emphasis original)

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Last Week in Weird

25 July 2016 by Darien Sumner

I ain’t afraid of no jokes

When it comes to trolling, alt-right wunderkind Milo Yiannopoulos — whose name I had to check four times to make sure I spelled correctly — is the very best, like no one ever was. You may recall some months back, when he was mysteriously "unverified" on Twitter, as though suddenly it had become unclear if he was the real deal or perhaps a pod creature or some type of replicant. Well now he’s upped the ante a bit: Yiannopoulos has been officially permanently banned from Twitter. His crime? He irritated Leslie Jones, who is apparently famous, but who I had honestly never heard of until this story broke. Jones was indeed so flustered by Yiannopoulos’ horrible racist harassment campaign that she abandoned Twitter entirely.

The ironic masterstroke, of course, is that Yiannopoulos did not send the tweets that so infuriated Jones. He was, indeed, one of the targets of the tweets, which were sent by an account impersonating Jones. None of this appears to matter to the social justice crowd, who apparently view Jones’ blackness as being higher on the victimhood hierarchy than is Yiannopoulos’ homosexuality. It’s also cute to observe that, just last week, I was pointing out that it’s no longer important for hate crimes to contain any hate or any crime, and now just one short week later it’s not even important if the hate criminal actually did what he’s accused of. But what about Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey’s constant quacking about how Twitter "doesn’t censor?" As Buzzfeed’s bizarrely gleeful summary explains it:

According to the company, Yiannopoulos’s permanent suspension isn’t a matter of speech as much as a matter of behavior — specifically, a violation of Twitter’s rules regarding the targeted abuse of specific users.

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