Wall of Fame Assholes – Page 6

Heroes Doing Hero Things

I know most people expect an officer tasked with defending a school to rush in and engage anybody actively gunning down students. But officers just want to go home to their families at night like everybody else so sometimes they need to make a tactical retreat to keep themselves safe:

PARKLAND, Fla. — Video footage released Thursday from the Florida school where 17 people were killed on Valentine’s Day appears to confirm that a sheriff’s deputy did not try to confront the gunman accused of staging the massacre.

In fact, it does not show disgraced Broward County Deputy Scot Peterson doing much of anything.

In the opening minutes, Peterson is seen walking and talking with what looks like a staffer at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland. A short time later the two of them ride out of view in a golf cart.

I imagine that at least a few Broward County taxpayers are feeling as though they didn’t get their money’s worth out of their sheriff’s department after witnessing four of its deputies abandoning their children to die. Too bad for them though. Even though the sheriff’s department failed to protect their children, the taxpayers will be forced to continue funding the department. To make matters worse, this lack of accountability will likely motivate other officers tasked with protecting schools to also tear around in a golf cart while the children under their care are murdered.

It’s Not Your Body, Slave

I’m of the opinion that each person has the right to do whatever they want with their own body. My opinion isn’t shared by the government. As far as the government is concerned it owns your body and therefore has the final say regarding what you can do with it. For example, if you’re suffering from a terminal illness and want to try an experimental treatment, the government isn’t going to allow you to do so:

WASHINGTON — In a surprising rebuff to President Trump and Republican leaders, the House derailed a bill on Tuesday that would have given patients with terminal illnesses a right to try unproven experimental treatments.

The bill was considered under special fast-track procedures that required a two-thirds majority for passage, and it fell short. When the roll was called, 259 House members supported the bill, and 140 opposed it.

Most of the opposition came from Democrats, who said the bill gave false hope to patients and could actually endanger people dying of incurable diseases, because it would undermine protections provided by the Food and Drug Administration.

We wouldn’t want terminally ill patients trying experimental procedures because that might endanger their lives!

This is just another example of blatant partisanism. The Democrats didn’t shut the bill down because experimental procedures could endanger the lives of those who are already dying, they shut the bill down because it was introduced by Republicans. But both parties do agree that without the passage of this bill it is still illegal for terminally ill individuals to seek experimental treatments, which means both parties are claiming that they own those terminally ill patients. That is the real tragedy of this entire mess.

Euthanasia Airlines

Flying United Airlines is a dangerous proposition. You might be brutally beaten and removed from your flight, you might be randomly selected to lose your seat on a plane and be forcibly removed, or your dog might be killed:

A dog has died on a United Airlines flight from Houston to New York after a flight attendant ordered the animal be put in the plane’s overhead bin.

I’m sure United Airlines is very sorry about this incident just as it was very sorry about that doctor who was beaten and that poor bastard who was removed after the ticket he paid for was cancelled because the flight was overbooked. However, I’m starting to think that United’s claims of remorse may not be sincere. I’m also concerned that United Airlines may start outright executing passengers soon.

Just Hero Things

What do you do when you’re a law enforcer who killed a child when driving over twice the posted speed limit? You sue the mother, of course!

ALBUQUERQUE, NM (KRQE) – – A police officer officer being sued for speeding through an intersection and killing a young boy is now suing the boy’s mother, saying the crash was all her fault.

[…]

The Bernalillo County Sheriff’s investigation of the incident determined APD Officer Jonathan McDonnell was going double the speed limit while responding to a call in May 2017.

However, he says the mother was the one driving carelessly when she turned in front of him.

Laws are for thee, not for me.

Antoinette Suina, the mother, didn’t break the law when she turned on a green light. Officer McDonnell, on the other hand, was breaking the law by driving 80 miles per hour. And less we forget, his driving record before the accident wasn’t exactly stellar:

The Albuquerque Police Department officer whose cruiser collided with a woman’s car last month, killing her 6-year-old son and critically injuring her 9-year-old daughter, has been disciplined in at least six driving-related incidents during his nine years on the force, according to records obtained by the Journal.

So the officer not only broke the law but has a history of doing so. If he didn’t have a badge, things would not be looking good for him and his chances of winning this lawsuit would be roughly zero (and he’s probably already be in a cage). However, he does have a badge so the rules are different. He actually has a chance of winning this lawsuit because he can claim that the accident happened while he was performing his duties and that usually acts as a get out of consequences free card.

Just Another Hero Doing Hero Things

A Tennessee hero has made headlines for ordering a hero under his command to heroically execute an unarmed man:

A sheriff in rural Tennessee was inadvertently caught on police body cam footage ordering deputies to shoot an unarmed man engaged in a slow speed chase, NewsChannel 5/WTVF reported.

The body cam revealed Sheriff Oddie Shoupe’s conversation with a deputy after the fatal shooting of Michael Dial, who was struck in the head after refusing to pull over his 1976 pickup truck when officers attempted to pull him over for driving with a suspended license.

Of course this situation was tragic and the brave sheriff wishes it could have gone differently…

“If they don’t think I’ll give the d*mn order to kill that motherf*cker they’re full of sh*t,” Sheriff Shoupe added. “I love this sh*t. God I tell you what, I thrive on it.”

Or not.

I have my doubts that Sheriff Shoupe’s attitude is unique. I would actually bet money on the fact that a lot of people who share his attitude are drawn to law enforcement because it allows them to act on their urges without concerns for consequences. Granted, because this was actually caught on video the sheriff may end up having to step down. However, I doubt that he or the officer who was “just following orders” will face the criminal charges they so deserve.

Objective Truths

Should books on a bookshelf have their spines facing out or in? I never realized that this was even a debate but apparently it is:

“Man, do people hate it,” she says, talking about the way she stacked her books. “It’s silly that I have to say this, but I do read and I like books, too.”

Why might anyone wonder? Maybe because Ms. Meininger, 33, who lives in Hannibal, Mo., had arranged her books backward, with the spines facing the wall.

The minimalist look has caught on in certain design circles. By turning books around, the taupe and white page edges are shown on a shelf instead of book spines that often don’t match the rest of the décor.

Much like the use of the Oxford comma, this seemingly subjective debate actually has an objectively correct answer: spine out.

A Reasonable Response by Reasonable People

Nuclear weapons provide humanity the capability to wipe out an entire city with a single missile. However, with the exception of the end of World War II, they haven’t been used in warfare. Each country that has developed nuclear weapons has performed a lot of test detonations to show the world how big their dick is but nobody has dared use them because they’re not seen as a reasonable response to anything other than weapons of mass destruction.

The Pentagon wants to change that attitude. Instead of treating nuclear weapons as an unreasonable response to anything other than weapons of mass destruction, it wants to treat nuclear weapons as a reasonable response to a list of other things including malicious hackers:

WASHINGTON — A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.

For decades, American presidents have threatened “first use” of nuclear weapons against enemies in only very narrow and limited circumstances, such as in response to the use of biological weapons against the United States. But the new document is the first to expand that to include attempts to destroy wide-reaching infrastructure, like a country’s power grid or communications, that would be most vulnerable to cyberweapons.

The paradox of nuclear weapons is that they offer a terrible power but are only useful as a deterrent. If you have nuclear weapons and your enemy has nuclear weapons, peace can exist because you both have the power to wipe the other side out. Neither side will launch because it will result in their demise as well. But what happens when a nuclear armed country acts in an unreasonable manner? What happens when one decides to nuke a nonnuclear power? In all likelihood that nuclear power would be seen by other nuclear powers as unreasonable, unstable, and an imminent threat. Their fear could lead them to bring aggression, possibly nuclear aggression, against the unreasonable nation.

As WOPR in the movie War Games concluded, when nuclear weapons are involved the only winning move is not to play.

Just Another Day Ending in “Y”

It’s another day ending in “y,” which can only mean that another dog has been executed by a law enforcer. But this incident contains an added bonus. Not only was a dog injured but so was a 9-year-old kid who was in the room:

On the evening of Dec. 30, Danielle Maples was making nail polishes with her children. The atmosphere in her home changed when her husband threatened to hurt himself. Maples called 911 to get help.

Then after police arrived – as she and her husband stood outside their home unarmed – she heard two gunshots from inside.

A Wichita police officer fired at her dog – in a small living room occupied by her four children, ages 6 to 10.

Suddenly, the already stressful evening turned into a nightmare.

When the officer shot at the family dog in the same room where her four children were gathered, a bullet fragmented and ricocheted off the concrete floor beneath the carpet where her 9-year-old daughter sat. The girl suffered wounds above her eye. At the hospital, Maples saw a bag with three fragments taken from her daughter’s forehead.

Bullet ballistics are the closest thing to magic that this universe offers. It’s hard to predict all of the ways that discharging a bullet in an uncontrolled environment can go wrong. In this case an officer was trying to perform a routine dog execution that resulted in a child being hit. And what response did the family receive?

An officer later told the family that “it could have been worse,” she said.

I’m not sure if that was meant to be a thinly veiled threat or just the typical hand waving towards violence individuals detached from anything most would recognize as a conscience exhibit. Either way, this story isn’t an isolated incident. Officers perform executions on dogs so frequently that there is now a database of collected reports.

What compounds this incident is that the officer wasn’t even responding to a violent situation. A family member was suffering from a mental crisis. There is no reason that the officer should have been so tooled up. But this incident does serve to illustrate an important lesson. Never call 911 if somebody is suffering a mental crisis. If you do, law enforcers will likely be dispatched and when they show up they may decide to “help” by shooting somebody (maybe even the person suffering the mental crisis).

Continuing the War Against the Homeless

Greg Schille had a plan to help the homeless individuals of Elgin, Illinois during this especially brutal winter. He invited them into his home for a “slumber party.” However, the City of Elgin wasn’t pleased with his actions. Elgin already had a solution to its homeless problem, exposure, so it threatened to condemn his home if he didn’t cease giving the homeless shelter from the cold:

A suburban Chicago resident who was offering up “slumber parties” in his basement for homeless people in his neighborhood during dangerously cold weather says city officials have given him an ultimatum.

Stop the “slumber parties” or the house will be condemned.

Greg Schiller, of Elgin, said he began letting a group of homeless people sleep in his unfinished basement last month during brutally cold nights, offering them food, warm beverages and a cot to sleep on while watching movies.

Yet again we see the fact that you don’t own your home. If you did own your home, you could do with it as you pleased. If you wanted to shelter homeless people in your basement on especially cold nights, you could. But you don’t own your home, the government does. You’re merely allowed to lease it so long as you pay your ~~rent~~ property taxes and abide by the ever increasing number of rules.

We also see yet again that city governments don’t want the homeless helped, they wants them gone. In the eyes of a city government the homeless are a problem and the only solution is to make them go away. To that end city governments try to pass ordinances that make the lives of homeless individuals as miserable as possible in the hopes that such ordinances will encourage them to move elsewhere. Not only do these ordinances criminal homelessness but they also criminalize helping the homeless. If these ordinances result in homeless individuals freezing to death, all the better as far as the city governments are concerned.

I’m Altering the Deal

Jeff Sessions who, even for a government goon, is a particularly loathsome piece of shit announced that the federal government will again pursue states that have legalized cannabis:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions on Thursday rescinded a trio of memos from the Obama administration that had adopted a policy of non-interference with marijuana-friendly state laws.

The move essentially shifts federal policy from the hands-off approach adopted under the previous administration to unleashing federal prosecutors across the country to decide individually how to prioritize resources to crack down on pot possession, distribution and cultivation of the drug in states where it is legal.

“We have to stop people from smoking the jazz cabbage less they begin listening to the music of the negro!” –Jeff Sessions (Probably)

At least I assume that’s Session’s motivation for this announcement because the drug can’t be too dangerous since the states that have legalized it haven’t gone up in flames. But I guess the federal government feels the need to fulfill its prophesy that cannabis kills by siccing its murderous thugs on cannabis users.